As the Obama administration publicly warned Russia against further provocative acts relating to the ongoing tensions in Ukraine on Tuesday, it also announced that U.S. paratroopers from the 173rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team (Airborne) based in Italy are heading to Poland and the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia this week to bolster NATO forces.
Pentagon spokesperson Rear Adm. John Kirby made the announcement Tuesday, characterizing the deployment of approximately 600 troops as “exercises” that would last about a month.
The soldiers, said Kirby, should be seen as “a very tangible representation of our commitment to our security obligations in Europe” against what he described as “Russian aggression.”
Regarding the upcoming rotation of U.S. troops, he added, “We encourage our NATO partners to likewise look for opportunities of their own to do this same kind of thing for one another.”
On Wednesday morning, Russia announced “snap” naval exercises for members of its fleet in the Caspian Sea.
With U.S. Vice President Joe Biden in Ukraine on Tuesday, high-level promises of new aid from the U.S. government were promised to the interim government in Kiev as new violence in the eastern regions of the country called into question the ability of a fragile truce to maintain itself.
According to agency reporting and the Guardian:
Speaking with radio host John Batchelor, Stephen F. Cohen, professor of history at New York University and Princeton, says the most recent events have more or less proven that a new ‘Cold War’ is now underway with the Obama administration executing what appears to be a policy of “containment” against the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Meanwhile, independent journalist and editor of Consortium News Robert Parry is warning that the continued propaganda emanating from Washington over the conflict is designed to prepare the American people “to accept and perhaps even cheer a massacre of eastern Ukrainians who have risen up against the coup regime in Kiev.”
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In “Official Washington,” Parry argues:
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