MPRI

21st Century Wire says…
It was a major scandal that broke out in 2009. Academi, formerly known as Blackwater, was accused of murdering civilians and smuggling weapons in Middle East ops.
Further to the prosecution of four Blackwater employees five years later, guilty of killing 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad during one spate of violence, there has been a historical boom of private contractors occurring since Iraq and Afghanistan incursions began.

In Part 1 of this series – ‘The West Marches East’ – I examined the circumstance that while Russia has received the majority of the blame for the more than six-month-crisis in Ukraine, these events did not take place in a vacuum, and, in fact, the Western powers and institutions – notably the United States, NATO and the European Union – have broke promises made at the end of the Cold War to expand NATO – a Western military alliance that was created in opposition to the Soviet Union – to Russia’s