The blurb for Peter Scholl-Latour’s book „The Curse of the Evil Deed“ says: „In detail, he illuminates the increasingly uncontrollable conflict in eastern Ukraine, the causes of which he sees not least in the West’s questionable policy toward Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.“
And the back cover of the book reads, „With his characteristic perspicacity, Peter Scholl-Latour illuminates a region over which, after decades of political and military intervention by the West, a curse seems to lie – the curse of the evil deed of hopeless interference.“
„Prisoners of Their Own Lies.“
The book begins with the chapter „Prisoners of their own lies“ and the subchapters „Sarajevo in the Donbass“ and „Fuck the EU“.
It reads:
„A year ago, the world could look with serenity at the upcoming year 2014. A warlike confrontation on European soil no longer seemed conceivable. People thought they had learned from the terrible lessons of the First World War. Today, these illusions have been shattered, and we are confronted with a whole series of global conflicts that bear shameful witness to those in power. Old wounds that were thought to have healed long ago are reopening.“
„The most absurd territorial conflict is playing out in Ukraine, and the bloodshed is reaching its climax precisely in a region that was among the bloodiest battlefields in World War II. Hopefully, it is still too early to speak of ‚Sarajevo in the Donbass‘. The desire of the eastern Ukrainian provinces of Lugansk and Donetsk to break away from Kiev’s tutelage, to achieve at least some degree of autonomy, might have been settled diplomatically. But that’s when the tragic crash of Malaysian Airways plane MH 17 happened, throwing the previously controllable antagonism completely off course.“
„It was certainly not in Vladimir Putin’s interest to evoke such a tragedy. The dramatic event, which immediately exposed Russia to universal condemnation, was a major setback for the Russian leader. If any government had an interest in avoiding such an escalation, it was the one in the Kremlin. But the guilty verdict had already been reached.“
„Fuck the EU“
In the second subchapter, „Fuck the EU,“ Scholl-Latour picks up on a wiretapped and then published statement by Victoria Nuland, the head of the European Affairs Division in the U.S. State Department, from early February 2014. Ms. Nuland had spoken on the phone with the U.S. ambassador in Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt, and passed on U.S. plans for the future Ukraine – which did not coincide with those of the EU. Peter Scholl-Latour wrote about this:
„According to this, the State Department issued instructions to its representative in Ukraine to ensure that when a transitional government was formed in Kiev after the Maidan revolt and the inglorious flight of incumbent President Yanukovych, the post of prime minister fell to opposition politician Arseniy Yatsenyuk. The latter apparently enjoyed the goodwill of the U.S. and had the indispensable CIA connection.“
Scholl-Latour calls this a „blatant interference in the distribution of power of a sovereign state, which, after all, had been prefigured by Washington in a multitude of other cases around the world before Ukraine,“ and at the same time a „servile attitude of the European nations toward their American hegemon.“
„I am aware,“ Scholl-Latour writes, „that with this introduction I expose myself to the accusation of anti-Americanism. But we have succumbed, at the latest since the second Iraq campaign, to a comprehensive disinformation […] operated by perfectly organized institutions […].“ And:
„The stupidest expression that German commentators have come up with in recent months to defame those voices that called for a minimum of objectivity in assessing Russian diplomacy is ‚Putin-Versteher‘.“
„What was the justification for the American-directed push to the East of the Atlantic Alliance, which, as early as the Orange Revolt of 2004, with the help of subversive NGOs and obscure financial powers, sought to expand the American military presence in Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, and even Central Asian Kyrgyzstan?“ At the same time, Helmut Kohl [who was still alive in 2014] could confirm „that when the GDR was abandoned, the Western alliance made a solemn promise to Mikhail Gorbachev, the general secretary of the CPSU, that accession of the states of the former Warsaw Pact to NATO would remain out of the question, although this was not documented in writing.“
Germany’s breach of promise
„Germany, we reach out to you, we return to the Fatherland,“ a Red Army chorus had sung, at the big troop farewell event in Berlin. The Kremlin, which withdrew half a million soldiers from the former GDR for a financial lentil and without the slightest incident, had presumably expected the reunified Germany to react with gratitude, or at least with recognition.
But not the slightest objection sounded from Berlin when President George W. Bush’s ultraconservative team – after the Orange Revolution had failed to achieve its goal – integrated the former Eastern Bloc states from Estonia to Bulgaria into the Atlantic Alliance, thus pushing the United States right up against the borders of Russia’s remaining sphere of power in Europe.
When Boris Yeltsin left the Kremlin and handed over the reins of government to Vladimir Putin, it was hoped in Washington that Putin would submit to Western ideas. However, as soon as it became clear that Putin wanted to use authoritarian methods to lead his fatherland out of the appalling misery in which he had found it, people showed disappointment and indignation.
„But Russia’s new leadership,“ Scholl-Latour continued, „could point to the fact that in the post-Soviet phase of transition, the Russian people had already had an extremely sobering, negative experience with the so-called liberal values of the West that Washington wanted to impose on them. Only those who were on the ground at the time of perestroika and glasnost, at the time of the squandering of state assets on insatiable oligarchs, can get an idea of the mass misery, the rampant criminality that swept Russia at that time.“
Russia’s self-confidence
„Vladimir Putin has faced these upheavals not as a ‚flawless democrat,‘ but as an autocrat. Perhaps it took an insider from the Soviet intelligence services to restore order step by step, to rein in the power of the ’new boyars,‘ the oligarchs, and to plant in the rubble of the crumbling Soviet Union the kernel of a new Russian self-confidence.“
„One does not have to be a ‚Putin-understanding‘ to sense that the offer of an economic association of Ukraine with the European Union is perceived in the Kremlin as a precursor to an expansion of NATO eastward beyond the Dniester and Dnieper rivers. […] The expectation that Barack Obama would take into account the imperatives of the new world political multipolarity proved to be an illusion.“
„During the 2014 Maidan riots, militarized shock troops broke out of the Lviv area, invoking the national hero Stephan Bandera in their fight for a Westward-oriented regime, even though he had hunted Poles, Russians and Jews during the Nazi-established Generalgouvernement. But no one in the West apparently dares to touch on this dark past.“
Title-Image by
a-bigger-bang 
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