Donetsk and Luhansk militia to continue offensive against Kiev troops

The two breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk reserve the right to continue the offensive to the borders of neighboring Ukrainian regions in the event the peace talks fail and Kiev continues shelling the territories of the DPR and LPR, authorized representative of the DPR, Denis Pushilin, stated at the meeting of the contact group for the solution of the Ukrainian crisis. 

"It depends on the Ukrainian side, and their negotiability. Furthermore, if in the future the peace process fails, and the shelling is resumed, we, LPR and DPR, reserve the right to reach the line of former Donetsk and Luhansk regions," said Pushilin.

Meanwhile, the commander of Ukrainian battalion "Aidar" Sergei Melnychuk said on a Ukrainian television channel that the General Staff of the country was going to hand over the town of Schastye (Happiness) to militia for quite an amount of money. Melnychuk did not provide any evidence or further details to substantiate his statement. 

"There is information that the General Staff has received a lot of money to deliver the town of Schastye. They have no interest in the town itself, but in the local heating and power plant. If we surrender this station, it will mean that Luhansk will be left without electricity," Melnychuk said.  

Reporters asked the military man where he received the information from, but he only said that he had contacted an employee at the Ukrainian Security Bureau. The official did not specify either the amount of the deal, nor did he unveil any names. 

Source: English Pravda 31-01-2015

How to destroy Europe, in five easy steps

By Hans Vogel

First, you wait for an opportunity to take part in a European war. That is what US president Woodrow Wilson did in 1917: although the majority of the US people was vehemently against entering the Great War, despite his solemn promises, Wilson took the US to war. Thus the US helped delay the end of a war that most belligerents were yearning to conclude. Subsequently, the conditions forced upon Germany were unnecessarily harsh and cruel and instead of ensuring peace, the Versailles Treaty laid the groundwork for a new war.

Second, you make sure the European nations get themselves into another nasty war by giving support to an irresponsible little dictator. That is what US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt did in 1939, when he gave Polish dictator Smigly-Rydz a blank check in the conflict with Germany. Bone of contention was the harrassment of the sizeable German minority by the Polish authorities. Since FDR was also lending support to the British and French governments (which in turn had promised to support Poland), the US president could then lean back in his wheelchair and watch as events unfolded. Sure enough, events escalated when the little Polish dictator decided not to yield to the demands of the German dictator, Germany invaded Poland on 1 September, 1939. World War II began when France and Britain declared war on Germany two days later, convinced the US would soon join them.

Third, you enter the war only when he enemy is sufficiently worn out. While you throw as many bombs on the heads of innocent civilians as you can, razing the beautiful cities and towns in which they live, you only send in ground troops when the enemy has effectively been beaten by an ally. That is what FDR did: in the summer of 1943 he landed troops in Sicily. At that moment, the German army had been defeated by the Red Army at the Battle of Stalingrad and was being defeated again by the Red Army at the Battle of Kursk. Fighting in Italy, US troops were no match for the Germans. Practically every serious advance in the Italian campaign was made by US allies: South Africans, New Zealanders, Poles, Brazilians, and French, including troops from North Africa.

As you go along, you deprive words of their meaning by using them to indicate their very opposite. Essentially, you are destroying the language: whenever you invade, destroy and occupy a country, killing uncounted numbers of civilians and maltreating or executing prisoners of war, you call it "liberation."

Fourth, after the war has ended, you do not sign peace treaties, but instead install puppet regimes in the occupied nations. Sure enough, since you purportedly are the defender of "democracy," you must allow elections in the occupied nations, but you make sure that any party that does not suit your taste is either forbidden and excluded from participating, or if succesful, is excluded from government participation. Thus, the Communists, forbidden in West Germany,  were kept at bay in France, Italy, Greece, Belgium and the Netherlands. In order to keep your new client states in check, you keep them militarily occupied. Then you create a framework to keep your clients in check  and demand heavy "defense" outlays, pressuring them to buy the mediocre weapons that you produce. At very high prices, needless to say. Meanwhile, you keep up the war spirit by instilling constant fear in your clients. Thus NATO was created in 1949. Another instrument to keep the client states in check was found in the various local social democratic parties (Labour in Britain), whose younger members were given lavish scholarships to the US, and whose parties and affiliated institutions and organizations were subsidized in various ways. Thus the US created their own party in each and every European country. (Support for Christian Democrats, Liberals and Conservatives was not needed, since these parties were anticommunist anyway and enjoyed wide support among the voters).

Fifth, when the "threat" (to protect against which NATO was created) has disappeared, you invent new enemies to justify your continued military presence in Europe. Thus, when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, NATO continued to exist. All over Europe, US client states, often not even aware of the fact they were client states, began to drastically cut down on military sending, dismantle their armies and sell off excess weapons. After some searching, the US then "discovered" a new threat: "International Terrorism." After 11 September, 2001 this "International Terrorism" was given a Muslim identity and face. Since meanwhile every European nation has acquired a sizeable Muslim minority, you thus also lay the foundation for widespread distrust among Europeans. True to the age-old principle of "divide and rule", you try to increase suspicion and distrust in your client states by having your Social Democrat lackeys everywhere adopt a secret policy of pampering te Muslim minority. Thus, mosques are to be built wherever possible; Muslims are made to receive inordinate subsidies and privileges and young Muslim street toughs and criminals receive only minor punishment and plush treatment. Whenever anyone (non-Muslim) raises a protest, he is quickly branded a racist and thus silenced. The stubborn are severely punished after elaborate show trials.

All the while, you bombard the Europeans with silly Hollywood productions that will destroy their brains, you have McDonald's, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken flood the market with glorified cattle feed with lots of sugar, fat and salt and thus destroy the health and physical resistance of the Europeans.

Whenever you can, you try to increase your territory by installing puppet regimes in other nations (Ukraine, Georgia) or you simply create new nations out of the blue, like Bosnia-Hercegovina and Kosovo.

Ah, and finally, you need to keep your clients under constant surveillance, listen to all their telephone conversations, read all their emails, all their tweets, and register everything they do on Facebook and every comment they leave on forums.

Hans Vogel

Source: English Pravda 30-01-2015

Russia must overcome outside pressure by strengthening economic sovereignty — Putin

Russia has no intention of isolating itself from the other countries and it is prepared for further cooperation

ANOSINO /Moscow region/, January 29. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that 
 Russia’s strategic objectives remain unchanged. He said that Russia "must overcome the pressure of external factors by means of strengthening its economic and financial sovereignty."

"Our strategic objectives certainly remain unchanged. We must ensure high economy growth rates, efficiency and an increase in labour productivity," the president said.

According to Putin, overcoming the external factors’ pressure by strengthening the national financial sovereignty "is an extremely important task of which we have kind of forgotten, believing that finances and the economy will always stay outside politics, as we’ve often heard from the outside." "However we’ve found out that this is quite the contrary - because this is used as a very powerful political pressure tool," Putin said.

According to him, "The Russian economy certainly should and will remain an inseparable, natural part of the world economy." "But we must, without doubt, change much in its certain key aspects, ensuring sovereignty," the Russian leader said.

"I mean, certainly, not isolation, but that our economy should acquire additional stability against external shocks as a result of its diversification, the growth of non-energy, high-technology sector, agriculture and the national financial and banking sector," the president said.

The president noted that Russia has expected the current crisis developments in the country’s economy.
"The current period is not easy, but nothing unexpected has happened. The crisis developments were expected," the Russian president told a seminar for regional leaders.

Putin reminded that Russia's government has approved an anti-crisis plan to ensure the sustainable development of the country’s economy and social stability.

The president said the plan’s implementation will require funds that are to be allocated for the recapitalization of banks, which are called the "blood circulatory system of the economy."

The plan also envisages the support of the agricultural and industrial complex and the stabilization of the labor market, he said.

Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said on Tuesday the Russian government’s anti-crisis fund equals 170 billion rubles ($2.5 billion). The anti-crisis plan is intended for one year and stipulates the preparation of new structural reforms to avoid wasting reserves in just a year or two, he said.

Source: ITAR-TASS 29-01-2015

East Ukraine’s Luhansk shelled from Kiev-controlled area — emergencies minister

"The Smerch rockets can be fired only from the distance of at least 30 kilometers," LPR emergencies minister Sergey Ivanushkin said

MOSCOW, January 28. /TASS/. Ukraine’s forces shelled Luhansk from the Kiev-controlled territory near Schastye town in the Luhansk region using Smerch multiple rocket launchers, the emergencies minister of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic (LPR) said on Wednesday.

"The Smerch rockets can be fired only from the distance of at least 30 kilometers," Sergey Ivanushkin was quoted by the LuhanskInformCenter as saying, adding that preliminary data shows this is Schastye town.

At least 16 people were killed and another 114 were wounded over the past 24 hours as Kiev troops shelled the towns of the self-proclaimed Luhansk republic, the LPR health minister, Larisa Ayrapetyan said.

Thirteen people were killed in Stakhanov, some 50 kilometers west of Luhansk, while two died in Krasny Luch and one person in Luhansk. A total of 76 victims have been taken to medical facilities in Lugansk, she said.

The LPR’s emergencies minister said the representatives of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) mission in Ukraine have not yet sent any requests on the consequences of the shellings.

Source: ITAR-TASS 28-01-2015

Chief Nazi-Hunter: Russia President Should Have Been the First Name to Be Invited to Auschwitz

If anyone should be present at the liberation anniversary ceremony, it is the head of state that can best represent the troops that liberated it

Efraim Zuroff is the chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and director of its Israel Office.

This article originally appeared at i24News

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It didn't take long for the uplifting feelings so many people all over the world felt, in the wake of Sunday's million plus solidarity march in Paris, to dissipate. All one had to do was to take a close look at the first two rows of the marchers to understand that with all due respect and appreciation for the average Parisian, who came out to show respect and solidarity for Paris attacks' victims, among the heads of state and dignitaries in attendance were several whose country's human rights' records should have automatically disqualified them from participating, let alone being among those leading the march. Mahmoud Abbas, Jordan's King Abdullah II, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov are the most blatant examples that come to mind.

Ironically, just as I was pondering this issue, I was contacted by a journalist who wanted my reaction to the breaking news that Vladimir Putin had not received "a full diplomatic invitation" from Poland to attend the ceremony marking the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp on January 27, which would include many world leaders, and consequently had decided not to participate.

Unlike the unworthy foreign leaders at the Paris protest march on Sunday, who have no credentials to speak of when it comes to freedom of speech and religion, the Russian president is an especially important guest at the upcoming events to mark the liberation of the largest of the Nazis' six death camps, where approximately 1.3 million people were murdered, of whom approximately 1.1 million were Jews.

After all, it was the Red Army which liberated Auschwitz and effectively put an end to the mass murder at the camp that has become one of symbols of the tragedy of the Holocaust.

It were the Soviet forces which played such an important role in the final defeat of the Third Reich, and without whose enormous contribution and sacrifices, who knows how much longer and with obviously terrible consequences World War II would have lasted. In other words, if anyone deserves to be present at the liberation anniversary ceremony, it is Vladimir Putin.

The rationale for not inviting him is ostensibly the current tension between the European Union and Russia over the annexation of Crimea and the ongoing Russian support for the insurgency in eastern Ukraine, which is indeed a serious problem.

In the background of this decision, however, there might also be an ideological reason that relates directly to the ongoing bitter debate between Russia and post-Communist Eastern Europe over the history of World War II and the Holocaust.

Ever since the admission of the Baltics and many other East European countries to the EU and NATO, we have witnessed a systematic campaign being waged to undermine the uniqueness of the Holocaust and promote the canard of equivalency between Nazi and Communist crimes.

The motivation for this campaign is obvious, since in most Eastern European countries collaboration with the Nazis meant active participation in mass murder, and if given a choice between being branded as countries of perpetrators or of victims, it is clear what the new democracies prefer.

So instead of honestly confronting their bloody Holocaust past, they opt to emphasize their own suffering under the Soviets and Communists and proceed to glorify freedom fighters against Communism, even if they mass murdered Jews during the Holocaust.

Putin's presence at the Auschwitz ceremony will be a stark reminder of the identity of the liberators of the camp, a fact which the EU members of Eastern Europe would prefer to forget, but that would not be the proper manner to mark the commemoration of the seventieth anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation.

On that day, the message should be that the only way in which the Third Reich could have been defeated was through the cooperation of all the anti-Nazi forces, which temporarily put aside political and ideological differences to overcome the existential threat posed to the world by Nazi Germany. And that should be a lesson that we would also do well to apply to the current threat to the Western world posed by jihadist Islam.

Source: Russia Insider 27-01-2015