Reflections on Conference, Russia & Ukraine

US Marine flag found in Debaltsevo, Ukraine. It appears that "trainers" from the Marines left the flag as they fled from the battlefield along with portions of Kiev's Army when recently surrounded by the eastern self-defense forces

• I am on the train heading back to Maine after the Helen Caldicott nuclear weapons conference in New York City.  I'll write more about it once home but for now I can say that my talk was well received by most people there.  I made sure to connect the dots between US-NATO "missile defense" deployments, now being used to encircle Russia, and the growing likelihood that successful "arms control" negotiations with Russia and China are out the door.  How can Russia and China seriously consider reducing their nuclear strategic forces at the very time that Pentagon first-strike attack systems are being set up near their borders?  Sadly I did not hear any other speaker during the two-day event ever mention the words "missile defense".  Instead much of the talks during the conference were about the moral, ethical, environmental, and cost consequences of making, deploying, or using nuclear weapons.  All very well and good - but how can anyone expect to get rid of nukes when the US-NATO are sticking the 'shield' upon the doorway of Russia?

• With that said I was glad that a few speakers did mention Ukraine and the US-backed coup in Kiev that has instigated the deadly civil war along the Russian border.  Particularly it was journalist Robert Parry who made strong arguments about the US being highly responsible for the growing instability in the region.

• I was approached by a woman from Ithaca, New York who told me that recently at Cornell University they had a lecture on Ukraine and all four speakers represented the US government position that everything happening there is Russia's fault and they continued the customary Putin-bashing now popular throughout the west.

• I'm trying to catch up with reading about the assassination of Boris Nemtsov in Moscow in recent days.  My first reaction was this is a Gladio-style false flag event.  Putin would not benefit from killing someone who was in no way a threat to his government.  The true beneficary of this killing is the US-NATO program of demonization of Putin and the successful creation of the mindset across the west that direct US-NATO military intervention in Ukraine, and even inside Russia, is necessary and justifiable.  Just a quick glance at the various front pages of mainstream newspapers this morning inside Penn Station in NYC verified this reality.

• Nemtsov’s support for western neo-liberal (corporate) policies made him one of those responsible (even if he wasn’t, by a long shot, the main one responsible) for the detestable economic policy that drove Russia to ruin and its population to misery following the collapse of the former Soviet Union. (He served as a high government functionary during the Yeltsin regime.) His opposition to Putin led him to frequent the oligarchic circles, and similar people in Ukraine, and he was a frequent visitor to the US Embassy in Moscow - most recently just last January. Right on schedule he took up the “Maidan” cause in Kiev and criticized the position of the Russian government on the Ukraine crisis.

• Nemtsov's political party got 1% of the vote in the last Russian election.  Today Putin is supported by 86% of the Russian people.  (The Communist Party in Russia is the real opposition to Putin at about 20% in the polls.) Obviously Nemtsov was not a threat to Putin while alive, but in death he has become a valuable asset to those who are working so hard to create regime change in Moscow.  And just who would that be?  Who is now benefiting most from his death?