Global Research

In an under-reported incident in which Russian Crimea’s power lines were severed from Ukraine, leaving the peninsula and over 2 million residents in darkness for over a week, it has become clear to the world the tenuous grip Kiev and its NATO backers actually have over the “Ukraine” they claim they preside over.

It would be Russia through an underwater cable that would begin restoring power to Crimea. While rhetoric regarding Crimea is still strong on both sides, it is the actions of both Ukraine and its NATO backers versus Russia that appear to finally be answering the “Crimea question” if there even was such a question.

Russia Restores Power, Asserts Sovereignty 

In the first week of December, the International Business Times would report in their article, “Vladimir Putin inaugurates Crimea energy bridge during surprise visit,” that:

President Vladimir Putin has inaugurated the first leg of a power line between the Russian mainland and Crimea in a surprise visit to the peninsula. His visit to the strategically important territory comes after the region plunged into darkness over widespread power outage. 

Crimea, which Moscow claims to have been hit by Ukraine’s energy blockade, will start receiving power supply from Russia once the “electricity bridge” is completed. The undersea cable project was scheduled to have been completed by the end of December but it has been brought forward after Crimean power supply was knocked off.

While Crimea’s dependency on Ukraine for power and other necessities could have been used as a means of proving that the peninsula exists as an integral part of Ukrainian territory, by cutting power and being unable to rein in the terrorists who for over a week blocked repairs from the Ukrainian side, Kiev has all but proved it has no interest or ability to administer the region.

That the terrorists in fact are backed by not only special interests now occupying Kiev, but by NATO and the United States in particular, illustrates the punitive measures Ukrainians and their neighbors face for falling on the wrong side of NATO and its proxies in Kiev. It also illustrates once again the impetus that drove the people of Crimea to wisely choose ascension into the Russian Federation rather than to remain a part of Ukraine in the first place.

US Insists on the “Return” of Crimea

In a pattern that is becoming all too familiar, the United States continues to make statements contrary to reality. US Vice President Joseph Biden was reported to have called on Russia to return Crimea to Ukraine – despite the obvious act of terrorism carried out against the people of Crimea and Kiev’s clear role behind the terrorism.

Bloomberg in its article, “Biden Says ‘Illegal’ Russian Occupation of Crimea Must End,” would report that:

Vice President Joe Biden called Russia’s annexation of Crimea “illegal” in a demonstration of solidarity with Ukraine’s government that signaled the U.S. won’t bargain away its support for the country to win Russian cooperation in the fight against Islamic State in Syria. 

“The United States stands firmly with the people of Ukraine in the face of continued — and I emphasize continued — aggression from Russia and Russian-backed separatists,” Biden said in Kiev on Monday, following a meeting with Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko.

Papers like the Moscow Times with deceptive headlines like, “Activists Block Crimea Power Line Relaunch,” would reveal in the bodies of their articles that these “activists” were in fact the heavily armed, Neo-Nazi paramilitary organization Right Sector, notorious for its front line role in NATO’s proxy war on eastern Ukraine.

Image: The heavily armed fanatics of the Neo-Nazi Right Sector, when not intimidating political adversaries in western Ukraine, or killing them in eastern Ukraine, have more recently been implicated in cutting power to some 2 million civilians residing in Russian Crimea.

The Moscow Times would report:

Activists have prevented Ukrainian repair crews from relaunching one of the four power lines supplying Crimea with electricity from the mainland, despite Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko stating earlier that Kiev would allow power flows to resume, Russian and Ukrainian media reported Monday.

Members of the far-right paramilitary Right Sector group blocked the first attempt at re-activating the Kakhovskaya-Titan line on Sunday night, the RIA Ukraine news agency and depo.ua news site wrote the following morning.

Either Kiev has no control over what takes place in its own territory or it has ordered Right Sector and other groups to initiate the blockade of Crimea. Either way, Vice President Biden’s calls for Russia to return Crimea to Ukrainian control appear irresponsible at best. With literal Neo-Nazis cutting power to 2 million civilians – a blatant war crime – seems only to further vindicate Russia’s actions regarding Crimea and the decision of the people of Crimea themselves to seek a place within the Russian Federation.

Sovereignty Games  

The illegitimacy of not only the regime in Kiev, but of NATO who created it and to this day perpetuates its existence, has helped erode the very principles both are now trying to appeal to in order to maintain the territorial integrity of Ukraine. Beyond Ukraine, similar scenarios are developing across all of Eastern Europe, where as NATO attempts to expand closer and closer to Russia’s borders, it is finding it increasingly difficult to find allies who are not extremists with ties to fascism and/or Nazism.

By allying itself with these radical elements, those populations subjected to their NATO-backed domination of politics, economics, and security are more likely to turn toward Russia either as Crimea did, or as the break-away republics of Donetsk and Lugansk have.

Beyond Eastern Europe, the continual violation of Syria and Iraq’s sovereignty by NATO is making it exponentially more difficult to appeal to sovereignty and territorial integrity in regards to Ukraine. The West has repeatedly called for the “Balkanization” of Syria into several weaker regions. As the balance of power turns in the region, and even globally, the West may find this contempt it has shown toward national sovereignty and the territorial integrity of existing nations backfire on it when its own allies face the same prospect of being carved up.

Some may argue that Crimea’s ascension into the Russian Federation itself  was only possible because the NATO-driven lawlessness that it occurred in the midst of. As this lawlessness continues, it is all but guaranteed that Crimea will only be driven deeper within the Russian Federation.

Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine“New Eastern Outlook”.