Time for Obama to act - Ukraine needs lethal weapons

The latest from Ukraine:

Russia-backed separatists say they have gained control of a key rail hub in eastern Ukraine.

The Donetsk News Agency, a rebel mouthpiece, quoted the rebel's so-called defense ministry as saying on Tuesday that their forces have pushed government troops out of Debaltseve and are now controlling a large part of it.

Fierce fighting on Tuesday, two days after a cease-fire was announced for eastern Ukraine, appeared to be focused on Debaltseve, which both sides claim is on their side of the cease-fire line.

Government troops and the separatists were expected to begin withdrawing heavy weaponry from the front line on Tuesday but Associated Press reporters saw no sign of that on the ground.

Putin's and Merkel´s "cease-fire" was of course never going to work. Time for Obama to act! Ukraine needs lethal weapons in order to stop dictator Putin´s aggression.

Russia continues its aggression against Ukraine - EU is waging war against global warming

A European country, Ukraine, is being invaded by the the forces of an evil dictator, Vladimir Putin.

What is the the European Union - the self-proclaimed "soft superpower" - doing?

Answer:

The EU foreign ministers are wasting their time - and taxpayers´ money - on a huge "preventive diplomacy" campaign, "aimed at preventing future violent conflicts through cooperation and dialogue":

Europe is launching a major diplomatic push for an ambitious deal on global warming, mobilising A-list celebrities and tens of thousands of diplomats to exert “maximum pressure” on key countries in international climate negotiations.
The EU plan, endorsed by ministers on Monday in Brussels, will see 90,000 diplomats in over 3,000 missions lobbying to win new pledges on carbon cuts from countries ahead of a crunch UN climate summit in Paris this December.
European stars, of a calibre of US public figures such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Al Gore, will front a push to make climate action a “strategic priority” at G7, G20 and Major Economies Forum summits.
The action plan, seen by the Guardian, calls for a ‘Climate Action Day’ in June and a ‘100 days to Paris countdown’ event later in the year.
The aim is to raise the EU’s profile and cement alliances by winning new pledges for greenhouse gas cuts – intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs) in UN jargon, the backbone of any deal in Paris – before June at the latest.
“The EU has enormous soft power and we must use that to push for an ambitious agenda in Paris,” the Danish foreign minister Martin Lidegaard told the Guardian. “I have urged my colleagues to commit to including climate diplomacy in their activities in the run up to COP21 [the Paris summit] – and the EU’s foreign service to work more on this. We should focus our efforts on the major growth economies and climate financing.”
A UK government spokesman described the diplomatic blitz as “a welcome step to ramp up European climate diplomacy globally”.
The action plan cites climate change as “a key element of preventive diplomacy,” aimed at preventing future violent conflicts through cooperation and dialogue. It also goes further than past EU communications, describing climate change as “a strategic threat affecting natural resource availability, economic stability and hence overall national and regional security”.

Of course the EU foreign ministers and their bosses are also going to adopt some new meaningless statements, and possibly even soft sanctions due to the continuing Russian aggression, but the clear priority of this "enormous soft power" will be to conduct a (senseless) propaganda war against irrelevant "climate change".

Germany, France and the UK are unwilling NATO allies in the fight against Putin's aggression

In spite of some tough words, Germany, France and the UK are unwilling to do very much against dictator Vladimir Putin's aggression. Business interests dictate their lame response:

Yet the bigger surprise of March's Crimea crisis came from the west with Berlin's muted response to Russian aggression, and its rejection of Warsaw's calls for a stronger NATO response.

The German language has a new phrase for the political and business establishment's attitude: Russlandversteher, or "understanding Russia." Over half of Germans claim to "understand" Vladimir Putin's annexation of Crimea and the bloody conflict it is fomenting in Ukraine—in part blaming America's support for Kiev's democrats for provoking the Kremlin. A similar number oppose further sanctions on Russia. Chancellor Angela Merkel's rhetorically harder anti-Putin line finds little support in Germany.

For the past 25 years, the Poles were told that the new Germany would have their back. After German unification and the eastward expansion of the EU and NATO, as the reassuring slogan went, "When Germans now look East, they see the West"—namely Poland. Germany trades and invests more with Poland than with Russia. Yet Berlin's present approach evokes the memory of a Germany that once carved up Central Europe with Russia. No one's talking of another partition of Poland, but it's sobering to hear Polish officials grumble more about Berlin than about Moscow.

Further west, the continent's divisions get amplified. The French are moving ahead with the $1.6 billion sale of two Mistral naval assault vessels to Russia later this year over the objections of Washington and the newer NATO allies in Poland and the Baltic states. Britain has sold the City of London along with its soul for a pot of dirty Russian money.

 

Thus, the US remains Poland's only real ally, even under a weak president. One must hope that the next US president is somebody closer to the Reagan legacy than Barack Obama and somebody who would put real pressure on the main European NATO allies.