Nervous Baltics On War Footing As NATO Tries To Deter Russia

[Purveyor]

By Robin Emmott and Andrius Sytas

VILNIUS (Reuters) - Leaders in the Baltic countries and Poland fear the force NATO plans to deploy on their territory is too small and symbolic to deter an attack by Russia, whose 2014 annexation of Crimea is fresh in the memories of the former Soviet-bloc states.

They will this week press other ministers of the western military alliance to help them build an air defense system against Russian aircraft and missiles. But that would be a highly sensitive step, likely to be condemned by Moscow as yet more evidence of a NATO strategy threatening its borders.

Asked about the likelihood of Russian aggression in the Baltics, Lithuania's Defense Minister Juozas Olekas told Reuters: "We cannot exclude it ... They might exercise on the borders and then switch to invasion in hours."

Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia see themselves on the front line in any potential conflict with Moscow and say they are putting their armies on a war footing, meaning they can be mobilized almost immediately.

NATO defense ministers are set to agree this week on a new multinational force of 4,000 troops for the Baltics and Poland.

MORE...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/nervous-baltics-war-footing-nato-tries-deter-russia-070308435.html?ref=gs

[newthinking]

1. JOHN PILGER - A WORLD WAR HAS BEGUN: BREAK THE SILENCE

This is pretty easy to see through if one does any outside (the narrative) research at all. We have entered an age of information manipulation that makes previous propaganda look primitive by comparison.

[newthinking]

2. Silencing America as It Prepares for War

John Pilger for CounterPunch


Orlok | Shutterstock.com

Returning to the United States in an election year, I am struck by the silence. I have covered four presidential campaigns, starting with 1968; I was with Robert Kennedy when he was shot and I saw his assassin, preparing to kill him. It was a baptism in the American way, along with the salivating violence of the Chicago police at the Democratic Party’s rigged convention. The great counter revolution had begun.

The first to be assassinated that year, Martin Luther King, had dared link the suffering of African-Americans and the people of Vietnam. When Janis Joplin sang, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”, she spoke perhaps unconsciously for millions of America’s victims in faraway places.

“We lost 58,000 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died defending your freedom. Now don’t you forget it.” So said a National Parks Service guide as I filmed last week at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. He was addressing a school party of young teenagers in bright orange T-shirts. As if by rote, he inverted the truth about Vietnam into an unchallenged lie.

The millions of Vietnamese who died and were maimed and poisoned and dispossessed by the American invasion have no historical place in young minds, not to mention the estimated 60,000 veterans who took their own lives. A friend of mine, a marine who became a paraplegic in Vietnam, was often asked, “Which side did you fight on?”

A few years ago, I attended a popular exhibition called “The Price of Freedom” at the venerable Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The lines of ordinary people, mostly children shuffling through a Santa’s grotto of revisionism, were dispensed a variety of lies: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved “a million lives”; Iraq was “liberated [by] air strikes of unprecedented precision”. The theme was unerringly heroic: only Americans pay the price of freedom.

The 2016 election campaign is remarkable not only for the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders but also for the resilience of an enduring silence about a murderous self-bestowed divinity. A third of the members of the United Nations have felt Washington’s boot, overturning governments, subverting democracy, imposing blockades and boycotts. Most of the presidents responsible have been liberal – Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/27/silencing-america-as-it-prepares-for-war/

[JayhawkSD]

3. Annexation? Crimea held a perfectly legal popular vote.

Crimea's population is largely ethnic Russian and, after the democratically elected government of Ukraine was overthrown, those people held a popular vote to leave Ukraine and become part of Russia. Russia agreed to serve as a protectorate for the separatist state of Crimea, but did not make it part of Russia.

So it was not an annexation in any sense of the word. Crimea did not become part of Russia, and the change of its status was not a Russian act but was a result of a Crimean popular vote.

[hack89]

4. After the government was overthrown by Russia. nt

[JayhawkSD]

5. Why would Russia have done that?

The government that was overthrown had made a trade deal with Russia, a deal to buy Russian power and fuel at favorable prices, and had rejected a deal offered by the European Union. The parties seeking to overthrow the government wanted to cancel the deal and accept the deal with the EU, which they did.

So Russia overthrew a government which was pro-Russia?

Somebody has been drinking American Kool-Aid.

[hack89]

6. Somebody did.

who do you think did it?

[JayhawkSD]

7. I don't have to THINK who did it. It is well known.

Western Ukraine anti-Russia nativists, mostly descendants of Nazis who had fought with Germany against Russia in WW2, and current members of the Nazi Party.

Although it would be overstatement to say that the US was part of the overthrow, there was a murky American influence headed by Victoria Nuland, with evidence provided by taped recorded conversations of her backing the rebels. The American government held the Ukraine/Russian trade pact in disfavor and wanted it broken up and the deal between the EU and Ukraine to be put in its place.