December 20, 2014 "ICH" - Global forecaster Gerald Celente said Russian President Vladimir Putin was right when he stated today that the West targeted Russia long before the current crisis with Ukraine. In fact, Celente reported almost a year ago that the U.S. had waged a propaganda and misinformation war against Russia.

Putin insisted today: “It’s not payback for Crimea. It’s the cost of our natural desire to preserve Russia as a nation, a civilization and a state.”

Celente agrees. He points to an extensive analysis in the Spring 2014 edition of his Trends Journal,”Stoking a war that can’t be won,” in which he wrote:

“Under the Obama Administration, U.S. conflict with Vladimir Putin’s Russia was part of a trend …”

Putin today also referenced the distorted, damaging way in which Western media covered the Olympic Games in Sochi last winter. Here, too, Celente agrees. Last spring, he wrote:

“Not willing to let an atrocity go to waste, on 29 December 2013, following a terrorist bombing in a train station in Volgograd, a Russian city several hundred miles from where the Sochi 2014 Olympics were to be hosted, headlines across America blared: ‘Terror Attacks Hit Russia Leading Into 2014 Winter Olympics.’ Week after week, leading up to the February games, government officials, ‘credible sources,’ and ‘intelligence experts’ warned Americans that travelling to Sochi was risky. From toothpaste bombs and shoe bombs to black widow bombers, the message was clear.”

And that message was fear. Never mind that none of those predictions came true, said Celente, because they were contrived as part of a larger campaign.

As he wrote in the Spring 2014 Trends Journal: “The fear campaign worked. Just days before the opening ceremony, a February 5 CNN poll showed that 57 percent of Americans believed terror would strike during the Sochi Games.”

Putin’s comments today are not empty, defensive remarks, said Celente. Taking a step back and looking at the larger picture, independent of the force-fed propaganda gushing out at the time, shows an orchestrated effort by the U.S. and its allies to diminish Russia’s standing in the world, he said. The Trends Research Institute concluded a year ago what Putin affirmed today: The crisis in Ukraine was created by the West. It was, indeed, a “virtual” Berlin Wall around Russia.

Gerald Celente is founder and director of The Trends Research Institute, author of Trends 2000 and Trend Tracking (Warner Books), and publisher of The Trends Journal. He has been forecasting trends since 1980, and recently called “The Collapse of ’09.”

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