West unwilling to facilitate peace in Ukraine: Russian FM

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says the threats by Western countries to impose new sanctions on Moscow over the Ukrainian crisis are indicative of their reluctance to facilitate peace in east Ukraine.

“Behind these calls [for sanctions] lies the unwillingness of these figures, these relevant countries, the United States, the European Union, to seek the implementation of what was agreed in Minsk on February 12,” Lavrov said on Thursday in reference to a peace deal reached earlier in the Belarusian capital.
Ukraine’s warring sides reached a deal, dubbed Minsk II, at a summit attended by the leaders of Russia, France, and Germany in Minsk on February 11 and 12. The agreement introduced measures such as a ceasefire, which commenced on February 15, the pullout of heavy weapons, and constitutional reform in Ukraine by the end of the year.
Lavrov also said that the Western countries are trying “to whip up hysterical sentiment, to deflect attention from the need to follow the Minsk agreement.”
He further called the West’s demands regarding the enforcement of the truce “laughable,” saying, “Everyone understands perfectly well that there are no ideal truces and ideal ceasefires.”
The top Russian diplomat also said that the fighting in eastern Ukraine has decreased. “After all, the truce is producing results.”

Ukrainian serviceman check documents of a local resident at a checkpoiny near Slavyanoserbsk, in the region of Lugansk

Lavrov’s comments came a day after the European Council’s President Donald Tusk told the EU legislature that additional bans remain on the table, adding, “We should be ready for any development — good or bad.”
The EU has so far imposed visa bans and asset freezes on 151 individuals and 37 entities, and has imposed economic sanctions on Moscow.
Donetsk and Lugansk are two mainly Russian-speaking regions in eastern Ukraine that have witnessed deadly clashes between pro-Russia forces and the Ukrainian army since Kiev launched military operations in April last year to crush protests there.
Nearly 5,700 people have been killed and close to a million have been displaced since the armed conflict began in eastern Ukraine in April 2014.

Ukraine's defence minister celebrates birthday with Putin mugshot cake

Ukrainian Defence Minister Stepan Poltorak, who turned 50 on Wednesday, received and posed with some unusual gifts: a mugshot cake of Vladimir Putin, as well as a framed picture of himself spanking the Russian president.

The photos were posted on the Facebook page of Assistant Defence Minister and presidential adviser Yuri Biryukov, and received several thousand likes.

He also poses with a picture of the Russian president getting a spanking.

VIDEO - HUNGARY - "No to Putin, Yes to Europe", thousands protest Russian president's visit

Investor: Putin could be world’s richest man with stolen $200B fortune

Vladimir Putin might be the richest man on earth.

The Russian president stole billions from his country’s war chest and stashed it away in secret accounts, according to a man who was once that country’s largest foreign investor.

Bill Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, estimates Putin’s net worth at $200 billion. That would make Putin more than twice as wealthy as Bill Gates, who, with a fortune of $79.2 billion, is the world’s richest person.

“The amount of money that hasn’t been spent on [Russian] schools and roads and hospitals and so on, all that money is in property, Swiss bank accounts, shares, hedge funds,” Browder said.

#‎StopFake‬ Top Fake of the Week about Ukraine

FAKE: Ukrainian Volunteer Battalion Pravyy Sektor Conducts Further Offensive Despite the Ceasefire.

On February 15, after a ceasefire was established in eastern Ukraine, a cyber attack was committed against the official site of the National Guard of Ukraine.

As a result of the hacking, false information about alleged plans of the Ukrainian Volunteer Battalion Pravyy Sektor to conduct a further offensive despite the ceasefire appeared on the site. This information was immediately spread through Russian news channels and Internet resources.

This information is plainly untruthful.

There is clear evidence of the cyber attack: the date of this report was changed from February 14 to February 15.

Moreover, the sham information contained simple linguistic mistakes in Ukrainian, suggesting it may have been written using “Google Translate”.

Such provocations are aimed at discrediting the Ukrainian Armed Forces and Volunteer Battalions. Ukraine is fulfilling all its obligations according to the Minsk agreements. The Ukrainian military strictly abide by the ceasefire.

Original links:

http://mediarnbo.org/…/zvedeni-dani-iats-rnbo-na-12-30-15-…/
http://www.stopfake.org

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Washington's Pocket Since 2006

It turns out that Ukraine's president, Petro Poroshenko, has been working for the U.S. government since at least 2006 and they knew he was corrupt

There's not much point in staging a coup if you don't influence who is placed in power in the aftermath. Of course in order for a puppet government to be effective, they can't be perceived as such. You wouldn't want the natives to get restless would you?

The evidence that the U.S. was behind the toppling of the Ukrainian government early this year is so overwhelming at this point that the subject really isn't up for debate, however initially it was unclear how the election of Petro Poroshenko fit in. The ecstatic response by Washington when he was declared the winner, and their unbending support in spite of his ongoing military assault against civilians in the east,made it clear that he was the chosen one, but the paper trail wasn't immediately obvious.

As it turns out, the evidence that Poroshenko is in the pocket of the U.S. State Department has been available all this time, you just had to know where to find it. In a classified diplomatic cable from 2006 released by Wikileaks.org, U.S. officials refer to Poroshenko as "Our Ukraine (OU) insider Petro Poroshenko".

A separate cable also released by Wikileaks makes it clear that the U.S. government was considered Poroshenko corrupt.
"Poroshenko was tainted by credible corruption allegations, but wielded significant influence within OU; Poroshenko's price had to be paid."

The U.S. government knew Poroshenko was dirty, but he was influential, and arguably their most dependable mole.

Perhaps the most interesting revelation comes from a 2009 cable where Poroshenko told then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton he supported "the opening of a U.S. diplomatic presence in Crimea" and "He emphasized the importance of Crimea, and said that having U.S. representation there would be useful for Ukraine." Poroshenko's role as an informant for the U.S. government continued in cables in 2010 as well.

Reading through the cables, I have to wonder if Poroshenko was actually breaking Ukrainian law by sharing the kind of strategic information that he did. Considering that this information was certainly used when planning the coup against Yanukovich, one could argue that he committed treason.

Poroshenko, however, isn't the only Ukrainian politician mentioned. For example, the cables mention the scandal surrounding Oleksandr Turchynov's destruction of SBU documents tying Julia Tymoshenko to organized crime, and note that the accusation that Tymoshenko wanted Turchynov get the Interior Minister position so that she could gather damaging information on her enemies. The cablerefers to this accusation as "not farfetched". Turchynov went on to be installed as the acting president of Ukraine in the provisional government.

In order to grasp the extent of the U.S. government's tinkering in Ukraine it is worth reading the documents for yourself.

Putin claims Russian forces 'could conquer Ukraine capital in two weeks'

Vladimir Putin has said Russian forces could conquer the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, in two weeks if he so ordered, the Kremlin has confirmed.

Moscow declined to deny that the president had spoken of taking Kiev in a phone conversation on Friday with José Manuel Barroso, the outgoing president of the European commission.

Yuri Ushakov, a Kremlin foreign policy adviser, said on Tuesday that the Barroso leak had taken Putin's remarks out of context.

"This is incorrect, and is outside all the normal framework of diplomatic practice, if he did say it. This is simply not appropriate for a serious political figure," he said of the Barroso leak, according to the Russian Interfax news agency.

EU leaders held a summit on Saturday to decide who should run the union for the next five years, but the session was quickly preoccupied by Putin's invasion of Ukraine and how to respond.

Barroso told the closed meeting that Putin had told him Kiev would be an easy conquest for Russia, according to the Italian newspaper, La Repubblica. According to the account, Barroso asked Putin about the presence of Russian troops in eastern Ukraine. Nato says there are at least 1,000 Russian forces on the wrong side of the border. The Ukrainians put the figure at 1,600.

"The problem is not this, but that if I want I'll take Kiev in two weeks," Putin said, according to La Repubblica.

The Kremlin did not deny Putin had spoken of taking Kiev, but instead complained about the leak of the Barroso remarks.

Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president, attended the EU summit and painted an apocalyptic picture of the conflict, with EU leaders dropping their usual public poise in a heated debate.

Dalia Grybauskaite, the Lithuanian president, declared Russia was "at war with Europe". The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, the main mediator with Putin, was said to be furious with the Russian leader, warning that he was "irrational and unpredictable", while David Cameron was said to have raised the issue of Britain discussing policy options regarding Putin.

Cameron likened the west's dilemma with Putin to relations between the then British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, with Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1938, when Anglo-French appeasement encouraged the Nazi leader to launch the second world war the following year.

"We run the risk of repeating the mistakes made in Munich in 1938. We cannot know what will happen next," Cameron was reported as saying. "This time we cannot meet Putin's demands. He has already taken Crimea and we cannot allow him to take the whole country."

Merkel pointed to the dangers for the Baltic states on Russia's western borders, home to large ethnic Russian minorities. She said Estonia and Latvia could be Putin's next targets, according to La Repubblica.

Defence of the two countries – both of which are Nato and EU members and part of the euro single currency zone – is the centrepiece of this week's NATO summit in Wales and the alliance is said to view that defence as a red line which Putin dare not cross. The US president, Barack Obama, is to deliver a speech in Estonia on Wednesday repeating that message.

The main decisions facing the Nato summit in Newport include deploying rapid response Nato spearhead units to the Baltic and Poland if necessary, stockpiling arms and equipment in the region, and strengthening the NATO presence in the east.

The plans call for units of up to 5,000 forces to be deployed within two to five days, according to a senior military official at NATO.

To try to avoid a bigger legal dispute with Russia, the NATO presence in the east will not be called permanent – proscribed under a NATO-Russia pact from 1997 – but back-to-back rotation of alliance forces will mean there is a persistent presence, according to a senior Nato diplomat.

If the Baltics and Polish are reassured by NATO, there will be little short-term comfort for Ukraine at the summit, which Poroshenko will also attend.

"It's not actually NATO's job to be the police officer of Europe. Nato is not the first responder on this," the diplomat said. "Nato's planning is all about how to defend allies, not partners like Ukraine."

At the weekend, Grybauskaite demanded that the west arm Ukraine. That is unlikely. "Nato is not going to launch a defence capacity-building mission in Ukraine," said the diplomat.

The summit is also expected to take NATO membership bids by four former Soviet states off the table in order to not antagonize Putin.

Russia is certain to respond to the Nato moves in eastern Europe, though it is not yet clear how.

"Nato's planned action … is evidence of the desire of US and Nato leaders to continue their policy of aggravating tensions with Russia," said Mikhail Popov, a Kremlin military official. Russia's military posture would be adapted appropriately.