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NATO Ramps Up
Ukraine War After Defeat in Syria
By Finian
Cunningham
December 21,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Sputnik"
- A
surge in military attacks this week by NATO-backed Kiev
regime forces on the breakaway eastern Ukraine regions
is no mere coincidence.
It is the
reaction to events in Syria by the US-led military
alliance in its
hybrid warfare against Russia.
Hundreds
of ceasefire breaches by troops belonging to the
Ukraine Armed Forces (UAF) are being
reported in the separatist self-declared republics
of Donetsk and Luhansk. Over the past few days, several
towns and villages have come under intense
shelling from artillery, rockets and mortars
in stark violation of the Minsk agreement.
That
agreement was brokered by Russia, Germany and France
during 2014 and 2015, and was meant to facilitate a
political settlement between the Western-backed Kiev
regime, which came to power in a coup d’état in February
2014, and the breakaway provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk,
which refused to recognize the legitimacy of the usurper
Kiev cabal.
Houses, schools
and water treatment plants have been hit as the UAF and
associated
Neo-Nazi militias move heavy weaponry close to the
so-called contact lines. All indications suggest that
the NATO-backed Kiev regime is mobilizing for a renewed
offensive on the mainly ethnic Russian Donbas region
comprising the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics.
So far, the
militia of the DPR and LPR have repelled the offensive,
with dozens of casualties reportedly suffered by the
Kiev regime’s military.
The timing
of the large-scale attacks on Donbas comes just as the
US and its NATO allies incur a strategic setback
in their covert war for regime change in Syria. The
liberation of the battleground city of
Aleppo last week by the Syrian army, supported
by Russian, Iranian and Lebanese allies, portends the
end of the nearly six-year conflict in Syria.
The routing of jihadist
militants from Aleppo, who had been backed covertly
by the US and certain NATO powers, including Britain and
France, has signaled the end of the regime-change
project in Syria to oust the government of President
Bashar al-Assad.
NATO member Turkey
had played a key role in the US-led dirty war on Syria,
serving as a conduit for fighters and arms to the proxy
jihadist militants trying to overthrow Assad – a
longtime ally of both Russia and Iran.
But now Turkey
seems to be aligning with Russia and Iran to bring an
end to the war in neighboring Syria.
This week,
foreign and defense ministers from Russia, Iran and
Turkey met in Moscow to declare their commitment to end
the Syrian conflict.
The New York
Times
reported: “Russia, Iran and Turkey meet for Syria
talks, excluding the US”. Pointedly, it added: “The new
alignment and absence of any Western powers at the table
all but guarantee that President Bashar al-Assad will
continue to rule Syria under any resulting agreement.”
In other words,
it’s “game over” for Washington and its criminal
enterprise to subvert Syria.
The setback
for American imperialist scheming in the Middle East
cannot be overstated. For decades, US rulers have seen
it as their God-given
exceptional right to roll over any foreign
government deemed unfit for their geopolitical
interests. Syria was among target countries on the
American hit-list, which came into action back in March
2011 when the US and its NATO partners and regional
client regime unleashed hell with terror proxies.
US ambitions
of conquest in the oil-rich region have now been dealt a
stunning blow after Russian President Vladimir Putin
ordered military operation at the end of 2015 to support
the Syrian state, along with Iran and the Lebanese
resistance movement Hezbollah.
Despite a massive
propaganda campaign orchestrated by the Western
media and Washington puppets at the United Nations, the
Syrian army and its allies have won a historic victory
in retaking Aleppo from NATO-backed jihadists.
Not only is
this a bitter military defeat for Washington. It is a
political and moral triumph over
Western lies as told through major media
corporations. The latter were saturated with claims
of atrocities and crimes against humanity committed
by Syrian and Russian forces. Those reckless claims have
now been exposed as blatant fabrications, as the people
of Aleppo openly celebrate liberation
from Western-backed jihadists who had imposed a reign
of terror on large parts of the city for nearly four
years.
It seems
significant that only days after the liberation
of Aleppo, Russian ambassador Andrey Karlov was brutally
assassinated
in Turkey’s
capital Ankara, when a
gunman shot him in the back as he addressed a
cultural event. The murder was evidently aimed
at derailing the political talks underway
between Turkey, Russia and Iran.
Who would benefit
from such an atrocity? Obviously, the US-led NATO
powers.
If NATO military
intelligence did not specifically order the
assassination of Karlov, we can at least say that
Washington and its Western allies certainly created the
climate of hatred and demonization that made the Russian
diplomat a “legitimate target”.
A further
significant development is the renewed offensive by the
NATO-backed Kiev regime against the ethnic Russian
people of east Ukraine. Again, this provocative move
comes only days after the spectacular military victory
by Russia and its allies against NATO’s jihadist proxies
in Aleppo, and possibly now for the whole of Syria.
Make no
mistake, the reactionary junta that seized power in Kiev
is a surrogate for NATO’s long-held offensive designs
on Russia. Citing unsubstantiated “fears” of Russian
aggression, NATO has given itself a license to escalate
troops and missiles on Russia’s border. Washington and
its European lackeys have financed, armed and trained
the Kiev regime. This week, British defense minister
Michael Fallon
announced more British army training for Kiev’s
forces, claiming that it was to counter Russian
aggression. Fallon had the cheek to spout this nonsense
in the same week that the assaults on eastern Ukraine
have surged.
At a
NATO-Russia summit in Brussels earlier this week, the
US-led military alliance
had the gall to call on Moscow to influence "Russian
separatists" in Donbas to "honor the Minsk ceasefire".
Russian delegate
to NATO Alexander Grushko
reportedly introduced some reality to the meeting
by pointing out the hundreds of violations being
committed in recent days by the Kiev regime. Such
violations are par for the course, since the NATO-backed
junta first launched its offensive on the region back
in 2014, and which has resulted in up to 10,000 deaths.
As with the
Syrian war, Washington and its NATO allies, aided and
abetted by the Western news (sic) media, play
with semantics and illusions, and insult common
intelligence. In Ukraine, NATO is waging a covert war
every bit as it was in Syria, where as many as 400,000
people have been killed and from which Europe is
struggling with its greatest refugee crisis since the
Second World War, including the threat of terror attacks
as seen in France and Germany this week.
Shamelessly,
Washington and its Western subordinates accuse Russia
of hybrid warfare and aggression. The reaction to defeat
in Syria through ramping up conflict in Ukraine shows
that it is the US-led NATO alliance that is the real
culprit of hybrid war and aggression.
The views
expressed in this article are the author's own and do
not necessarily reflect Information Clearing House
editorial policy. |
