High Cost of Bad Journalism on Ukraine

[Karmadillo]

http://consortiumnews.com/2014/09/22/high-cost-of-bad-journalism-on-ukraine/

High Cost of Bad Journalism on Ukraine
September 22, 2014

Exclusive: By driving a wedge between President Obama and President Putin over Ukraine, America’s neocons and the mainstream media can hope for more “shock and awe” in the Mideast, but the U.S. taxpayers are footing the bill, including $1 trillion more on nuclear weapons, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

The costs of the mainstream U.S. media’s wildly anti-Moscow bias in the Ukraine crisis are adding up, as the Obama administration has decided to react to alleged “Russian aggression” by investing as much as $1 trillion in modernizing the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal.

On Monday, a typically slanted New York Times article justified these modernization plans by describing “Russia on the warpath” and adding: “Congress has expressed less interest in atomic reductions than looking tough in Washington’s escalating confrontation with Moscow.”


Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who pushed for the Ukraine coup and helped pick the post-coup leaders.

But the Ukraine crisis has been a textbook case of the U.S. mainstream media misreporting the facts of a foreign confrontation and then misinterpreting the meaning of the events, a classic case of “garbage in, garbage out.” The core of the false mainstream narrative is that Russian President Vladimir Putin instigated the crisis as an excuse to reclaim territory for the Russian Empire.

While that interpretation of events has been the cornerstone of Official Washington’s “group think,” the reality always was that Putin favored maintaining the status quo in Ukraine. He had no plans to “invade” Ukraine and was satisfied with the elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych. Indeed, when the crisis heated up last February, Putin was distracted by the Sochi Winter Olympics.

Rather than Putin’s “warmongering” – as the Times said in the lead-in to another Monday article – the evidence is clear that it was the United States and the European Union that initiated this confrontation in a bid to pull Ukraine out of Russia’s sphere of influence and into the West’s orbit.

more...

[Nye Bevan]

1. Putin: "I can take Kiev in two weeks"

The Kremlin has confirmed president Vladimir Putin said he could "take Kiev in two weeks”, in remarks made to the outgoing president of the European commission.

However, a Russian official this morning complained Mr Barroso had breached confidentiality when he quoted Mr Putin, saying the statement was "quoted out of context and carried a completely different meaning".

Mr Putin said to Jose Manuel Barroso, who then passed the Russian leader’s remarks on to European leaders at the Nato summit over the weekend, “If I want, I take Kiev in two weeks".

Mr Barroso allegedly revealed Mr Putin’s threat after Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, who yesterday accused Russia of “direct and undisguised aggression”, had left the summit table.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/ukraine-crisis-russian-president-vladimir-putin-claims-he-can-take-kiev-in-two-weeks-9705449.html

[MattSh]

2. Let me guess...

You don't do subtilty, do you?

Any one who following politics in any serious manner can easily figure out that he meant "if he wanted to" he could take Kiev in two weeks. Even if the paper that reported it deliberately decided to sensationalize what he said. But why the hell would Putin want to take Kiev? So he could pay to fix a totally broke country? Broken infrastructure, broken finances, broken government, and a government that declared war on it's own people, both financially as required by the IMF and militarily. Hey, the USA and the EU broke it; why shouldn't Putin leave it in their hands so they are responsible for fixing it?

A lot of people are already speculating that Ukraine will be a bigger IMF failure than Greece, and may well rank up there with it's biggest failures ever.

Jesus Christ on a polo stick. What's so difficult to understand about that?

[davidpdx]

3. Then there was the comment about not messing with Russia because they are a nuclear power

He certainly likes to make threats, doesn't he?

[enough]

4. k&r (nt)