Today in Cardiff, Wales, NATO agreed to provide $15 million to the Ukrainian government for “cyberdefense, logistics, rehabilitating soldiers injured by the rebels, and command, communications and control capabilities.”
The government in Kiev has waged war against several regions in eastern Ukraine that have sought to break away from the west after a US-backed coup in February.
Though NATO reportedly was unable to muster unanimous support among member states for direct, lethal military aid to Kiev, several NATO member countries are reported to have concluded bi-lateral agreements to provide high-precision rifles and other weapons to their western allies in Ukraine’s civil war.
Sounding increasingly hysterical today, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen Tweeted that
#Russia is now fighting against #Ukraine, IN Ukraine. Russian troops & tanks are attacking Ukrainian forces
— AndersFogh Rasmussen (@AndersFoghR) September 4, 2014
Again he provided no evidence to back up his claim, a claim he has repeated almost daily for weeks. Few mainstream western media outlets seem interested in challenging this enormously significant claim.
However, as David Swanson points out today in RPI:
[W]here are the 1,000 Russian troops invading Ukraine? Ukraine claims to have captured 10 of them, but the captured troops don’t seem to have agreed to the story. And what happened to the other 990? How did someone get close enough to capture 10 but not photograph the other 990?
As we reported yesterday, NATO has also scheduled war games including US troops on Ukraine’s soil later this month.
While one might consider the provision of weapons and financing to one side in a civil conflict an “escalation” of foreign involvement, US State Department spokesperson Marie Harf strongly disagreed with the suggestion today. AP reporter Matt Lee Tweeted Harf’s response to suggestions that US military exercises on Ukrainian soil might be taken as provocative:
US mil exercises in #Ukraine not provocative b/c “we aren’t the ones who have taken escalatory military action, #Russia has,” per marieharf.
— Matt Lee (@APDiploWriter) September 4, 2014
Any escalation of the situation was, according to Harf, all coming from the Russian side, despite today’s developments:
“Everything (#Russia) is doing w/ their military in that part of world now is escalatory & aggressive & interventionalist,” per @marieharf.
— Matt Lee (@APDiploWriter) September 4, 2014
It is difficult to decide what is more disturbing: that the Obama administration believes that arming one side in Ukraine is an escalation only if the “other guys” do it, or that they think we are so stupid as to not notice.
