US steps to increase military cooperation with Ukraine, providing its National Guard arms and training amid Kiev’s military operation, can be considered complicity in war crimes, Russian MP Irina Yarovaya believes.
“In a situation, when the National Guard of Ukraine is leading punitive operations in the Donbass, the US promises to allocate $19 million for training and equipping this military structure – which also includes militants of the ultra-nationalist organization Right Sector – can be considered a direct financial and organizational complicity of the US in the genocide of civilians in south-east of Ukraine, as well as war crimes,” the head of Russia’s Lower House committee for security and countering corruption, Irina Yarovaya, told the press.
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The Obama administration officially informed Congress on Friday of its plans to train and equip the Ukrainian National Guard.
“The Defense Department and State Department have notified Congress of our intent to use $19 million in global security contingency fund authority to train and equip four companies and one tactical headquarters of the Ukrainian National Guard as part of their efforts to build their capacity for internal defense,” Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby said.
In the meantime, Moscow is concerned that the European Union has “quietly” agreed to lift restrictions on supplying Kiev with military technology and equipment which can be used in the “repressions” in the east of the country.
“During a recent meeting of the Council of Europe in Brussels, leaders of EU member states agreed 'on the quiet' to remove restrictions on exports to Kiev of equipment that could be used for internal repression,” Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on its website.
It seems that the arm-twisting from Washington has finally succeeded and the European Union has ceased to be an autonomous or even semi-autonomous “foreign policy actor” in its own right, at least in terms of the Ukrainian crisis, foreign affairs analyst Srdja Trifkovic told RT.
“The US is effectively dictating the terms of the EU foreign policy, and is in fact present on the European continent as a key architect of the security situation, to a greater extent than at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962,” Trifkovic said.
The United States also pledged about $8 million in new aid to bolster the Ukrainian Border Guard Service, apparently to cut what western officials often refer to in their public comments as a flow of Russian weapons. However, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said this week that the United Nations did not possess any “firm evidence” that Russia supplied anti-Kiev forces with weapons, Itar-Tass reported. And this remark was ignored by the western media as “not fitting the “purposeful campaign of disinformation, which aims at trying to shuffle off the responsibility for the events in Ukraine onto Russia,” Russian Foreign Ministry pointed out.
Although the US plan requires Congressional approval, this is expected to be forthcoming judging by the level of anti-Russian rhetoric coming from US legislators. Moscow has already highlighted the apparent efforts by the US to spin and distort facts to provide the media with anti-Russian “propaganda brew,” with Foreign Ministry slamming the US over its double standards on Friday.