STEPHEN COHEN, sfc1 at nyu.edu
Available for a limited number of interviews, Cohen is professor emeritus at New York University and Princeton University. His books include Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War.
He just wrote the piece “Distorting Russia How the American Media Misrepresent Putin, Sochi and Ukraine” for The Nation, which states: “The most crucial media omission is Moscow’s reasonable conviction that the struggle for Ukraine is yet another chapter in the West’s ongoing, U.S.-led march toward post-Soviet Russia, which began in the 1990s with NATO’s eastward expansion and continued with U.S.-funded NGO political activities inside Russia, a U.S.-NATO military outpost in Georgia and missile-defense installations near Russia. Whether this longstanding Washington-Brussels policy is wise or reckless, it — not Putin’s December financial offer to save Ukraine’s collapsing economy — is deceitful. The EU’s ‘civilizational’ proposal, for example, includes ‘security policy’ provisions, almost never reported, that would apparently subordinate Ukraine to NATO.
“Any doubts about the Obama administration’s real intentions in Ukraine should have been dispelled by the recently revealed taped conversation between a top State Department official, Victoria Nuland, and the U.S. ambassador in Kiev. The media predictably focused on the source of the ‘leak’ and on Nuland’s verbal ‘gaffe’ — ‘Fuck the EU.’ But the essential revelation was that high-level U.S. officials were plotting to ‘midwife’ a new, anti-Russian Ukrainian government by ousting or neutralizing its democratically elected president — that is, a coup.” [Audio of Nuland with Geoffrey R. Pyatt, U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, determining which Ukrainian politicians should and should not be in government and deciding to use the UN, rather than the EU, for their purposes.]
NICOLAI PETRO, [in Ukraine] nnpetro at gmail.com, Skype: nicolaipetro
Professor of politics at the University of Rhode Island, Petro is currently a Fulbright research scholar in Ukraine. He recently wrote the piece “Ukraine’s Culture War” for The National Interest, which states: “Rather than trying to pick a ‘winner’ out of the murky waters of Ukrainian politics, a better strategy would be to support the conciliation process itself. … Such a conciliation process could be further helped by unconditional, a priori international support for whatever it agrees to. This point is vital to convince average Ukrainians that the decisions resulting from such a gathering are indeed the independent choice of the entire Ukrainian people, and not just the victory of one faction, inevitably ‘backed by outside forces,’ over another. Only support offered jointly by the EU and Russia (or CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States]) cannot be so easily dismissed.”
Petro has also written a series of articles for OpEdnews.com, including “How the EU Can Bring Ukraine Into Europe.”
JOHN QUIGLEY, Quigley.2 at osu.edu
Professor emeritus of international law at Ohio State University,Quigley dealt with conflicts between Ukraine and Russia arising from the breakup of the USSR on behalf of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He said today: “The Department of State is trying to influence Ukraine to side with the West. It is trying to shape the form of a possible new government in Ukraine. While the State Department depicts these efforts as reconciliation, they constitute interference in internal affairs. These efforts provide justification to Russia for trying to turn events in Ukraine in the way it would prefer.”
