Robert Parry
Western Ukraine’s “anti-terrorist operation” against rebels in Eastern Ukraine has the makings of what could degenerate from scattered atrocities to ethnic cleansing to genocide. It already is a nasty war to suppress an ethnic minority through the use of military force, complete with references to the targeted population as insects and animals.
Traditionally, the U.S. government protests such violence and even intervenes militarily to stop it, such as the cases of Kosovo in the 1990s and Libya in 2011. In the Kosovo case, the U.S. government supported the arrest and trial of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic on war crimes charges and later backed Kosovo’s outright secession from Serbia. In the Libyan case, a U.S.-directed bombing campaign helped overthrow Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi who was then captured and murdered.
But the Obama administration, especially the U.S. State Department, is gung-ho in favor of Western Ukraine’s military assault on Eastern Ukraine where many ethnic Russians objected to the overthrow of elected President Viktor Yanukovych in a violent Feb. 22 coup. Yanukovych came from the East, which was also his political base.
Despite the disturbing circumstances surrounding the coup, including the role of neo-Nazi militias in forcing Yanukovych and his officials to flee for their lives, the U.S. State Department immediately embraced the new authorities as “legitimate.” The mainstream U.S. news media also clambered onboard the pro-coup bandwagon.
Over the ensuing months, both the State Department and the U.S. press corps have consistently presented a one-sided narrative that portrayed the coup makers as white-hatted “pro-democracy” protesters and denounced anyone opposed to the coup as black-hatted supporters of “Russian aggression.”