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Simferopol (Undefined) (AFP) - Several dozen Russian planes including what appeared to be strategic bombers and fighter jets have been spotted in the sky above the Moscow-controlled peninsula of Crimea, witnesses and experts said. According to Russian media, President Vladimir Putin is poised to visit Crimea on Friday after overseeing the main military parade on Red Square when Russia celebrates its victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. A local aviation expert told AFP on Sunday that he had sighted a number of planes over the peninsula's main city of Simferopol on Saturday, including supersonic heavy strategic bombers and...

ODESSA, Ukraine (AP) — Hundreds of pro-Russian demonstrators stormed police headquarters in Odessa on Sunday and won the release of 67 people detained after deadly clashes in the Ukrainian port city. More than 40 people died in the riots two days earlier, some from gunshot wounds, but most in a horrific fire that tore through a trade union building. Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who hinted strongly that he saw Moscow's hand in the unrest spreading through southeastern Ukraine, visited Odessa on Sunday to try to defuse the mounting tensions. Odessa is the major city between the Crimean Peninsula, which...

Putin has become a Great-Russian nationalist, a bigoted throwback to the days before the Bolsheviks arrived. His intent is to regain all the lands that once belonged to the czars. When President Obama declared in March that Putin “has no ideology,” he betrayed his ignorance of both history and Putin. Who’s briefing this guy? Putin’s ideology is nationalism, the only belief system that may have killed as many human beings as Marxism. And when a “post-modern” talk-talk America president faces a Russian leader who’s a man of action and whose concept of nationhood refers to the late 19th century, our...

Western policymakers have long been in denial. One needed only to read his own pronouncements to understand Mr Putin’s intentions. A decade ago he spoke of the collapse of the USSR as “the biggest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. Stalin is rehabilitated in schools. Dissidents are punished. Journalists go missing. Television stations, newspapers and the Internet regurgitate Kremlin propaganda. Mr Putin has played a double game with the West, with considerable success. He encouraged oligarchs to buy up blue chip investments abroad and as many properties as they wanted. He promised to leave them alone to make and spend...

Former United States congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul has called on the US to stay out of the intensifying Ukraine conflict, saying it was Western powers that initially stirred unrest there and which continue to incite the tense situation

http://live.wsj.com/video/sen-ted-cruz-putin-attempting-to-reassemble-ussr/60F884E5-A709-4B39-AEF2-F9EBF51422A1.html

MOSCOW — Russian President Vladi­mir Putin demanded Thursday that the Ukrainian government withdraw its troops from the troubled eastern part of the country, where pro-Russian separatists have been gaining ground. Putin made the demand in a conversation with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who called the Russian leader Thursday about the deteriorating security situation in eastern Ukraine. She reached out to Putin a day after Ukraine’s acting president said he had lost control of that portion of his country. Merkel, who will meet with President Obama on Friday in Washington, pressed Putin to help secure the release of seven international observers...

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia staged a huge May Day parade on Moscow's Red Square for the first time since the Soviet era on Thursday, with workers holding banners proclaiming support for President Vladimir Putin after the seizure of territory from neighboring Ukraine. Thousands of trade unionists marched with Russian flags and flags of Putin's ruling United Russia party onto the giant square beneath the Kremlin walls, past the red granite mausoleum of Soviet state founder Vladimir Lenin. Many banners displayed traditional slogans for the annual workers' holiday, like: "Peace, Labour, May". But others were more directly political, alluding to the...

May Day celebrations in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, have turned violent as pro-autonomy activists seized the local Prosecutor’s Office. Police responded with tear gas and stun grenades but later relinquished their weapons. The storming of the Donetsk Region Prosecutor’s Office began as several dozen shield-holding protesters pelted rocks and petrol bombs at the building while chanting “Fascists!,” as they tried to break in. There were no immediate reports about those injured, but as was seen on a live stream, at least one person was carried from the scene, with someone shouting: “Call an ambulance!” According to the Ukrainian UNIAN agency, several...

US Communists Shill for Russia Over Ukraine Submitted by Trevor on April 18, 2014 – 3:08 am EST Brian Becker Two groups have been most actively supporting “there is no such thing as an ex-Chekist,” Vladimir Putin’s naked aggression in the Ukraine. They are Western communists, who hate the West and still see Russia as a force for socialism and anti-Americanism, and some naive Western “conservatives” like commentator Pat Buchanan and actor Steven Segal, who seem to believe that Comrade Putin is a closet Christian bent on defending Western values and saving Europe from the Islamic hordes. These naifs seem...

A casual listener may have missed it, but many Ukraine-watchers raised their brow when Russian President Vladimir Putin used the weighty term "Novorossiya" or "New Russia" to refer to some regions in Ukraine on Thursday. "It's new Russia," Putin told the audience during his nearly four-hour long televised Q&A. "Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Odessa were not part of Ukraine in czarist times, they were transferred in 1920. Why? God knows."

A museum dedicated to the victims of U.S. and NATO military aggression has opened in the North Caucasus city of Vladikavkaz. The exhibition, which is housed at the National Scientific Library of North Ossetia, opened Thursday to visitors over the age of 16, and displays artifacts "attesting" to "the state terrorism" of Western nations, organizer Vyacheslav Lagkuyev said, Interfax reported. Among the themes of the exhibition are the conflicts in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan — each of which has its own display in the museum. The U.S. war in Vietnam and the NATO bombing of Serbia are also detailed in...

As Mein Kampf makes clear, Hitler sought to unite all the people of German speech and culture into one state, or Reich, preferably by peaceful negotiation, otherwise by war and conquest... Today’s drift toward war with Russia seems like a replay of the past. Putin is a Russian nationalist, who believes in a strong Stalinist state. His goal is to reverse the events of 1989–the end of the Soviet state and dissolution of its enormous empire... ...to wield against the various weak states that were part of the U.S.S.R... All have ethnic Russian minorities, who speak the language, boast of...

MOSCOW -- President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia emphasized on Thursday that the upper chamber of the Russian Parliament had authorized him to use military force if necessary in eastern Ukraine, and also stressed Russia's historical claim to the territory, repeatedly referring to it as "new Russia" and saying that only "God knows" why it became part of Ukraine. Speaking in a televised question-and-answer show, Mr. Putin also admitted for the first time that Russian armed forces had been deployed in Crimea, the disputed peninsula that Russia annexed last month immediately after a large majority of the population voted in...

Putin: Russia’s great propagandist Standing proudly against the entire world had revived the essence of the Soviet Union, she wrote. “It is not Crimea that has returned. We have returned. Home. To the USSR.” Since the Crimea annexation, there have been frequent moves that symbolize a Soviet revival... In March Mr. Putin announced the re-establishment of “Prepared for Labor and Defense”, a Soviet-era system under which students, officials and workers took part in nationwide sports competitions. The same week, the government said it would restore the Stalin-era All-Russian Exhibition Centre to its former glory... Even members of the Duma, Russia’s...

Here Are The Two Soviet Propaganda Posters Hanging In The White House Press Secretary's Home Washingtonian MOM magazine's spring issue has a profile of White House Press Secretary Jay Carney's wife, ABC News contributor Claire Shipman, that features a picture taken inside their home. In the background of the photo, you can see two framed Soviet-era propaganda posters. One of Carney's posters is a version of this iconic design by artist Dmitry Moor with a soldier pointing his finger alongside text that says "Have YOU Enlisted?" in Russian: The other poster features a female factory worker. According to this eBay...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Monday warned Russian President Vladimir Putin against moving "overtly or covertly" into eastern Ukraine and said there was strong evidence that pro-Russian demonstrators in the region were being paid.

After Crimea, what next? In an unauthenticated audio, Ambassadors Chubarov and Sergei Bakharev laugh about taking over areas in Alaska, Venice, Scotland, Catalonia and Miami. Watch out, the Russians are coming! ... The pair...joke that Russia will take control of Alaska, Venice, Scotland and Catalonia, a region of Spain which wants a vote on independence, reports The Guardian {link at URL]... The recording has been posted on Youtube, reports The Guardian [link at URL] ...

Following up on Putin’s phone call to Obama, Kerry is making a detour to Paris to negotiate with Lavrov over the fate of Ukraine. Lavrov has laid out Russia’s terms, and intimates that Obama and Kerry have accepted the principles underlying these terms. First, Russia demands that Ukraine adopt a new constitution that establishes a federal structure that gives each region considerable autonomy. Translate this to mean that these regions would be able to pull a Crimea. Or, more accurately, that Russia would be able to pull a Crimea, slicing off pieces of Ukraine and splicing them onto Russia. Crucially,...

The coexistence of "Palestinian" Arabs and Moscow started from a lie, which will be ever-present in the propaganda of so-called Palestinian cause. As former American intelligence service’s expert James Hansen emphasized in his book, Soviets advertised “cause of Palestinian guerilla groups” using untruths about “the battles between the Israelis and Palestians”. In late 1968, publicity was apparent in the Soviet press over the cause of the Palestinian guerrilla groups. This publicity was coupled with exaggerated numbers of Israeli casualties and nonexistent battles between the Israelis and Palestinians.