Maidan Blowback: North Korea's ICBMs

UPDATE: In a post today, "Hyping North Korea To Relaunch Reagan's Star Wars?," Moon of Alabama denies the veracity of the entire NYT story:

One missile defense marketing pundit claimed today that the North Korean missile engines used in the recent tests were bought from factories in Ukraine or Russia. The usual propagandist at the New York Times picked up on that to further their anti-Russian theme:

"Mr. Elleman was unable to rule out the possibility that a large Russian missile enterprise, Energomash, which has strong ties to the Ukrainian complex, had a role in the transfer of the RD-250 engine technology to North Korea. He said leftover RD-250 engines might also be stored in Russian warehouses."

But the engines in question are of different size and thrust than the alleged R-250 engines and the claimed time-frame does not fit at all. The Ukrainian government denied any transfer of missiles or designs. The story was debunked with in hours by two prominent experts. But implicating Russia, however farfetched, is always good if one wants to sell more weapons.

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The New York Times is one of the chief purveyors of Russophobia. Usually the newspaper's anti-Russia propaganda, at first glance at least, appears plausible. But that's not the case with this morning's offering by William Broad and David Sanger, "North Korea’s Missile Success Is Linked to Ukrainian Plant, Investigators Say."

The story, based on a new study by an International Institute for Strategic Studies missile expert, is that North Korea's recent ICBM success is due to the acquisition of Russian-designed engines, RD-250s, from a plant, Yuzhmash, in Dnipro, Ukraine. As Broad and Sanger explain:

Analysts who studied photographs of the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, inspecting the new rocket motors concluded that they derive from designs that once powered the Soviet Union’s missile fleet. The engines were so powerful that a single missile could hurl 10 thermonuclear warheads between continents.

Those engines were linked to only a few former Soviet sites. Government investigators and experts have focused their inquiries on a missile factory in Dnipro, Ukraine, on the edge of the territory where Russia is fighting a low-level war to break off part of Ukraine. During the Cold War, the factory made the deadliest missiles in the Soviet arsenal, including the giant SS-18. It remained one of Russia’s primary producers of missiles even after Ukraine gained independence.

But since Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, was removed from power in 2014, the state-owned factory, known as Yuzhmash, has fallen on hard times. The Russians canceled upgrades of their nuclear fleet. The factory is underused, awash in unpaid bills and low morale. Experts believe it is the most likely source of the engines that in July powered the two ICBM tests, which were the first to suggest that North Korea has the range, if not necessarily the accuracy or warhead technology, to threaten American cities.

“It’s likely that these engines came from Ukraine — probably illicitly,” Mr. Elleman said in an interview. “The big question is how many they have and whether the Ukrainians are helping them now. I’m very worried.”

Throughout the story, Broad and Sanger repeatedly try to link the engine transfer, at least rhetorically, to Russia. There is no stronger tell than the highlighted passage above where Dnipro is painted a city on the front lines of the civil war. It is unclear from the sentence which side of the Novorossiya border Dnipro is located.

This is nothing more than crass propaganda. Dnipro has always remained loyal to the coup government in Kiev. It removed its Lenin statues and even changed the name of the city, Dnipropetrovsk, to comply with the 2015 decommunization law. (The city had been named after the Communist leader of Ukraine Grigory Petrovsky.)

If anything this story is your standard tale of CIA blowback. The United States instigated a coup in 2014 and, subsequently, one of its designated rogue nations has a powerful ICBM arsenal to go with its small stockpile of nuclear bombs.

Contradictions From the Gray Lady's Foreign Correspondents

At times I feel sympathy for the Gray Lady's foreign correspondents. They are, as I am, factotums. Their job is to produce copy that toes the paper's line, a line designed to mirror that of the USG. This requires reportage filled with contradictions. Take for instance today's Ukraine installment by Andrew Higgins and David Herszenhorn, "U.S. and NATO Warn Russia Against Further Intervention in Ukraine." The story begins with that prodigious liar Secretary of State John Kerry ominously claiming to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the pro-Russian protests and government building occupations in eastern Ukraine are the work of Russian saboteurs. Herszenhorn and Higgins then proceed to make a compelling case, complete with quotes from a Ukrainian Interior Ministry official, for the opposite. The uprising in the East is a bickering, not broadly representative movement led by pensioners whose goals are myriad and contradictory -- independence, accession to the Russian Federation, autonomous status within Ukraine:

Ukrainian security experts said the pro-Russia camp in Donetsk was bitterly divided over its goals and scoffed at its attempt to seize power. “They have no clear idea of what they want,” said Nikolai Yakubovich, an adviser to the Interior Ministry in Kiev. “It is a nonsense, a dangerous nonsense.” He said negotiations had started between protest leaders in Donetsk and the authorities but had been hampered by infighting between rival pro-Russia factions over their aims. 

As part of its efforts to regain control, the government in Kiev flew antiterrorism forces to the Donetsk airport on Tuesday and vowed to prevent eastern Ukraine from going the way of Crimea, where pro-Russia demonstrations paved the way for a formal annexation by Moscow.

If this was a Russian operation like Crimea, as Kerry claims, there would be nothing but precision and efficiency. That is what Crimea showed, prompting a love letter of sorts to the new Russian military from C.J. Chivers, an unlikely source. But the Gray Lady must stick to the script, which is that the pro-Russian protests are not a spontaneous vox populi; rather, they are the work of the evil Putin. This allows the U.S. State Department to call for a brutal crackdown on protesters when they inveighed against any such moves on the Maidan. Nonetheless the reporting shows the strain of the contradiction.

The same can be said for Andrew Higgins' "Among Ukraine’s Jews, the Bigger Worry Is Putin, Not Pogroms," which seems to be written in belated response to the widespread acceptance that neo-Nazis were an essential part of the putsch coalition that brought down Yanukovych in February. Call it damage control. But, once again, if one takes the time to read the story, the headline rings hollow. Higgins, in making the case that Jews have nothing to worry about from Right Sector and Svoboda, actually creates the impression that they should be very worried:

When protests against Mr. Yanukovych started in November, [Rabbi Kaminezki said], many Jews shared the pro-European aspirations of the demonstrators who gathered in Kiev’s Independence Square, though some worried about the role played by far-right groups. One such group, Svoboda, stirred particular unease because of anti-Semitic remarks by its leaders in the past and its lionization of Ukrainian nationalist heroes who, in some cases, helped the Nazis and shared their ethnicity-based concept of nationhood. 

But Rabbi Kaminezki [chief rabbi of Dnipropetrovsk] said fears of a fascist revival had faded, “as there is a difference between what these people say to their own crowd and what they do when they become legitimate political leaders.” Anti-Semitism, he added, “exists in Ukraine, like everywhere,” but it has shown no sign of increasing since Mr. Yanukovych lost power. 

After a series of unsolved anti-Semitic attacks since his ouster, including an assault on a rabbi and his wife in Kiev, the new head of Ukraine’s state security service told Jewish leaders that he would reopen a special unit to fight xenophobia and anti-Semitism that had been shut down under Mr. Yanukovych. 

Even Right Sector, a coalition of ultranationalist and in some cases neo-Nazi organizations, has made an effort to distance itself from anti-Semitism. In late February, its leader, Dmytro Yarosh, pledged during a meeting with Israel’s ambassador in Kiev to fight all forms of racism.

See, it is all good. Dmytro Yarosh is going to lead the struggle for tolerance.

One of the most bow-backed of the Gray Lady's scribes is Anne Barnard; she has had to shoulder untold column inches of manure fertilizing the canard that the war in Syria is result of a bloodthirsty dictator's lust to obliterate skyping pro-democracy activists in skinny jeans, rather than a region-wide war pitting Shiite-aligned states against the West and their Gulf sheikhdom clients. But at this point in the war, with any Syrian opposition swallowed up by jihadis, and the jihadis at war among themselves and regularly defeated on the battlefield by the Syrian Arab Army and its allies in Hezbollah, Barnard, while never missing an opportunity to denigrate or downplay the Assad government, lets it be known that Syria is winning the war. Her story today, "Muslim Shrine Stands as a Crossroads in Syria’s Unrest," is worth reading:

Hezbollah has long said that protecting the shrine [the tomb of Zeinab, a granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad, outside Damascus] was a major rationale for sending fighters to Syria, a move that upended regional alliances, deepened Lebanon’s political and sectarian divisions and turned crucial battles in the Syrian government’s favor. 

Hezbollah and Syrian officials long played down the party’s role, saying the Syrian Army led the fight. But with recent victories, their calculus appears to be shifting. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, recently declared that the Syrian government was safe from collapse and that his group’s only mistake was entering the battle “late.” 

Some in Syria are newly eager to catalog, as a show of strength, the added muscle from abroad, and not just from Hezbollah.

A Syrian who coordinates between government forces and Hezbollah around the shrine said that Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards are not simply advising Damascus, but fighting near the northern city of Aleppo. Hezbollah and Iran, he said, have trained more than 100,000 Syrians, in Syria, Lebanon and Tehran, to form the National Defense Forces militias. On Tuesday, Iran delivered 30,000 tons of food supplies to Syria, The Associated Press reported. 

“The game is changed,” the coordinator said, asking not to be identified for his safety. He confirmed much of what Western officials assert about the government’s foreign support, calling it a trump card that Damascus saved for the right moment. 

“It is no longer a secret,” he added. “It is on the table.”

The government could not have advanced on the Lebanese border and east of Damascus without Hezbollah’s expert fighters, he said. But the bulk of Shiite volunteers, he added, are Iraqi Shiites, lightly trained in Iraq and sent to front lines in Damascus suburbs like Qaboun and Jobar because “we need numbers.” 

But now, after new training as the Abu Fadl al-Abbas brigades, the Iraqis are “able to do something, not just coming to be killed,” the coordinator said.

This is a huge achievement for Hezbollah, Iraq and Syria. I assume a lot of the turmoil in Ukraine, Turkey and of course Iraq is connected to the bad fortune of the jihadis in Syria.

Sudden Paranoid Thoughts Common During Cold War Return

It was a normal weekend for late winter, one that would probably be forgotten quickly if not for the fact that both Saturday and Sunday were spent glued to the personal computer checking the latest news coming out of Ukraine. The Cold War is back, and it is back in a big way.

The last post on this page having to do with events in Ukraine was on Friday. Then, Russian President Vladimir Putin had finally produced a statement, brief and broad, after nearly a week of silence since the putsch in Kiev had taken place. Masked gunmen in unmarked uniforms appeared in front of the two main Crimean airports. This set off a wail of panic from the putschists.

On Saturday Russian troops took full control of the Crimea and pro-Russian protesters took to the streets of the eastern Ukrainian cities of Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk. The Russian Duma voted to authorize Putin's use of military force to protect Russians in Ukraine.

At this point, I thought that the West would ratchet back its tough talk and seek to quiet things down. I was wrong. The putsch government called for a full mobilization of its armed forces, saying that the situation in the Crimea amounted to a Russian invasion. And they received support from the West. Obama made a statement saying that Russia was in violation of international law. William Hague of Britain and John Kerry made similar disparaging sounds. (Hague is in Kiev today bucking up the putschists; Kerry arrives tomorrow). The G-8 meeting scheduled in Sochi is apparently off, and talk of sanctions can be heard.

That's basically where we are now. It was a teeth-grinding, unpleasant weekend. My anxiety and stress are due to the coverage in the Western media, which, after a few decent stories on Saturday questioning the legality of the putsch and the politics of the putschists, has returned to its biased, blinkered, anti-Russian norm.

For a good, brief statement of why the Russians are highly motivated to be pro-active in Ukraine read Jeffrey Sommers' "Dr. Strangelove Over Ukraine" that appeared on the Couterpunch web site this past weekend:

The scene for the original plot was set in the closing stages of the Cold War. George Bush (the elder) promised Gorbachev that if the Soviets let the Warsaw Pact go, Russia would never have to worry about the expansion of NATO. The US responded to this deal by immediately taking the former Warsaw Pact into NATO and then moving into the former USSR territory itself by taking in the Baltics. Nobody could blame the new entrants for wishing NATO entry, given their Soviet occupation past. But, neither could anyone blame the Russians for feeling utterly betrayed by the US and NATO for breaking their word. 

Thereafter, Eurasionists in the US State Department wanted more. For them, the goal was the further break-up of Russia and its ‘near abroad’ and remaking it in the image of a neoliberal periphery. For Russia, the ‘game’ has had an existential character. Russia was imploding (whether by their own actions, pressure from the West, or a combination of the two are all points for debate). For Russia, NATO’s moves into Georgia cut too close to the bone and Russia responded, yet the threat of NATO taking Ukraine represented taking Russia’s ‘heart’: the very ancestral home where ‘Russia’ was founded. 

Meanwhile, the EU has thought it could reprise its earlier eastward expansion into the former Warsaw Pact that delivered a consumer goods export windfall. This alleviated West European unemployment resulting from the Maastricht Treaty’s punishing fiscal and monetary requirements to create its currency union. Ukraine’s purchasing potential, however, is less than the countries that bordered Germany who were integrated into West European markets. An export boom is unlikely to occur with the proposed Association Agreement. Indeed, the possible damage to Ukrainian markets from poorly executed trade liberalization and non-visa regimes could flood the EU with cheap labor. This outcome would work to further erode Europe’s historically unique (and largely successful) ‘Social Market.’

What amazes me is that despite the biased, anti-Russian Western press, people aren't buying the U.S./EU position. If you read the comments section on the New York Times, readers are skeptical of the putschists' legitimacy and sensitive to Russian vital interests.

Power went out this morning at 2 AM. Now that the Cold War is back I thought, I wondered, Is this an electromagnetic pulse to shut down the power grid prior to a nuclear missile attack? These sudden paranoid thoughts were common back during the days of the Cold War. I hope they are not here to stay.