While it has gotten to the point where the propaganda is so bad on both sides of the Ukraine crisis, that any numbers thrown about are ridiculous, made up gibberish more fabricated than anything the Chinese Department of Truth or US Bureau of Labor can possibly goalseek, it is worth pointing out that according to AP [7], Ukraine's ambassador to the UN said 16,000 Russian troops are now deployed in the Ukraine. This was "revealed" at the third emergency Security Council session meeting in the last four days, shortly after Ukraine's fugitive president requested Russian soldiers in the strategic Crimea region "to establish legitimacy, peace, law and order," Russia's U.N. ambassador said Monday, contradicting the president's own comments last week.
However, while Russian hypocrisy is to be expected - after all they are the "Evil Empire" to quote a famous actor and president - it is the humor from the self-appointed moral watchdog of all the world's evils, the US, that was the highlight of today's UN session:
U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power dismissed Moscow's contention that it intervened militarily in Crimea to protect the human rights of Russian civilians there as "baseless," insisting there is no evidence of any threats against ethnic Russians in Ukraine.
"One might think that Moscow has just become the rapid response arm of the High Commissioner for Human Rights," she told the council. "Russian military action is not a human rights protection mission."
Speaking of high commissioners for human rights, at least Russia never invaded a country using made up WMDs as pretext, and did not almost launch World War III to satisfy a nat gas-rich ally over a fabricated YouTube clip. Oh, and all that "innocent civilian casualty" drone stuff too.
So what does the world's most irrelevant organization do? They send in monitors:
- OSCE MONITORS TO BE DEPLOYED TO CRIMEA TONIGHT, POWER SAYS
- POWER CALLS ON RUSSIA TO ENSURE OSCE NOT BLOCKED IN CRIMEA
- CHURKIN SAYS RUSSIA SUPPORTS UN OFFICIAL'S VISIT TO UKRAINE
- CHURKIN DECLINES TO COMMENT IF RUSSIA SUPPORTS OSCE MISSION
Well, monitors did miracles during the Yugoslav war, maybe they will "work" this time too.
But the piece de resistance, regardless if the real number of Russian troops in the Ukraine is 1,000 or 100,000, was the following:
- DOD CALLS ON RUSSIAN FORCES IN CRIMEA TO RETURN TO THEIR BASES
Wait, so the US Department of Defense, that of the United States if it was somehow unclear, suddenly has authority to control the troops... of Russia?
One wonders: did the US Department of Education tell Gazprom to maintain gas supplies to Germany no matter how many CIA agents are operating in Kiev?
Or did ACORN tell whoever is the current pre-countercoup Ukraine president to hike minimum wages?
Or maybe the Department of Justice is quietly trying to collect its Fedex guns sent "erroneously" to Ukraine mercenaries, having confused them with Mexican drug lords?
Whatever the confusion, we are confident that following this latest "escalation" in the US response narrative, that Russia will promptly CTRL-Z everything it has done in the Ukraine in the past two weeks, and say it was only kidding.
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Tangentially, while it has been made abundantly clear just how terrified Russia is of NATO, of Europe and of the US, for an indication of what China thinks of the latter, the WSJ reports the following [8]:
The departing U.S. ambassador to China, Gary Locke inspired mixed reactions during his two-and-a-half-year tenure. Though his unpretentious manner was widely praised, as the first American of Chinese descent to hold the job, criticism of him had a special bite... The state-run China News Service... published a derisive editorial late last week (in Chinese) that described Mr. Locke as “a banana, with yellow skin and a white heart.”
Because when America respects itself and its symbolic headpiece, the president, so very much how can the rest of the world not follow?