Putin is trying to muddy the waters. Never forget the induced Stalin famine as of the 1930s which killed up to 40% of Ukraine's population!

To put it mildly this is as phony as a 3 dollar bill.

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On stage at the Kremlin: Putin and Lavrov’s de-escalation dance – POLITICO

On stage at the Kremlin: Putin and Lavrov’s de-escalation dance

On camera, Russian president and foreign minister tell each other that diplomatic talks should continue.

Neither Putin nor Lavrov stand to win any acting awards —?they have been playing their respective roles far too long to deliver much creativity or inspiration | Alexei Nikolsky/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images

BY?DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

February 14, 2022?8:51 pm

Voiced by?Amazon Polly

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his trusty foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, on Monday signaled that there would be no imminent military strike on Ukraine and that they were prepared to continue diplomatic dialogue with the West, led by the United States.

Coming after the U.S. warned that a major invasion could begin as soon as Wednesday, the geopolitical dance moves were so exquisitely choreographed that a meeting between Putin and Lavrov might have been better held on stage at the Bolshoi Theater, rather than around a huge rectangular conference table at the Kremlin.?

“Sergey Viktorovich,” Putin formally addressed Lavrov in a publicly released video clip of their encounter. “In your opinion, is there a chance,” he asked, giving a dramatic shrug of his shoulders, “to agree, to reach an agreement with our partners on key issues that cause our concern, or is it just an attempt to drag us into an endless negotiation process that has no logical conclusion?”

“Vladimir Vladimirovich,” Lavrov replied. “You have already said more than once — you, and other representatives of the Russian Federation — that we warn against endless discussions on issues that need to be resolved today.”

“But still,” Lavrov said, coming to his punchline, “I must say that there is always a chance.”

Citing the planned visit to Moscow on Tuesday by German Chancellor?Olaf Scholz? and an array of other meetings, Lavrov added: “It seems to me that our possibilities are far from being exhausted. Of course, they should not continue indefinitely, but at this stage I would suggest that they be continued and increased.”

“OK,” Putin said, and quickly moved on to ask if Lavrov had prepared a written reply to the responses by NATO and the U.S. to Russia’s demands in December for new security guarantees. Lavrov said that indeed, a 10-page answer was ready to go.

Neither Putin nor Lavrov stand to win any acting awards —?they have been playing their respective roles far too long to deliver much creativity or inspiration. But the global audience breathed a hefty sigh of relief nonetheless — particularly given the U.S. having warned ominously on Friday of cyberattacks, a ground invasion and missile strikes.

But there was further assurance from a separate meeting between Putin and his defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, who reported that some of the Russian military exercises that had raised alarm in the West had already drawn to a close.

“Large-scale exercises are taking place in the Western Military District, in almost all fleets — in the Barents Sea, the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Pacific Fleet,” Shoigu said, according to a Kremlin transcript: “Troops from almost all military districts take part in them, including the Eastern Military District, the Central Military District, and the Northern Fleet. Some of these exercises are coming to an end, some will be completed in the near future.”

Russian officials, in fact, for weeks had derided the warnings by the West as hysterical, even as Moscow continued a massive military build-up along Ukraine’s borders, both on its own territory and in neighboring Belarus.

Lavrov’s repeated reminders that discussions should not go on forever —?and the announcement that the U.S. and NATO would soon receive his 10-page reply —?served as a warning that a threat of future conflict remains.

But there were other indications on Monday that everyone was looking to find ways out of the standoff.

At a meeting in Kyiv, Scholz and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy sent signals that Ukraine’s interest in joining NATO might end up on the back burner,?potentially answering one of the Kremlin’s key demands, which was for a guarantee that Ukraine would not join the alliance.

Standing with Zelenskiy, Scholz also said he had received assurances that Ukraine would move forward with “the relevant draft laws that we need for the continuation of the Minsk process” —?the implementation of the long-stuck peace accords intended to resolve the nearly eight-year-long war in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbass.

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Putin and Lavrov and others are doing the salami slicing routine. i.e. the obvious objective is to have Dombass declared "independent" and then graciously admitted to the Russian Federation by unanimous decree as through the Duma, which is how Crimea was annexed in 2014 or so

Why this is important. This sort of deception is akin to the monstrous activity of the 1930s induced famine as of

https://www.history.com/news/ukrainian-famine-stalin

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How Joseph Stalin Starved Millions in the Ukrainian Famine

Cruel efforts under Stalin to impose collectivism and tamp down Ukrainian nationalism left an estimated 3.9 million dead.

• PATRICK J. KIGER APR 16, 2019

Children collect frozen potatoes in a collective farm's field during the Ukrainian famine. (Credit: Sovfoto/UIG/Getty Images)

At the height of the 1932-33 Ukrainian famine under Joseph Stalin, starving people roamed the countryside, desperate for something, anything to eat. In the village of Stavyshche, a young peasant boy watched as the wanderers dug into empty gardens with their bare hands. Many were so emaciated, he recalled, that their bodies began to swell and stink from the extreme lack of nutrients.

"You could see them walking about, just walking and walking, and one would drop, and then another, and so on it went," he? said many years later, in a?case history ?collected in the late 1980s by a Congressional commission. In the cemetery outside the village hospital, overwhelmed doctors carried the bodies on stretchers and tossed them into an enormous pit.

The Holodomor's Death Toll

The Ukrainian famine—known as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for “starvation” and “to inflict death”—by?one estimate ?claimed the lives of 3.9 million people, about?13 percent ?of the population. And, unlike other famines in history caused by blight or drought, this was caused when a dictator wanted both to replace Ukraine’s small farms with state-run collectives and punish independence-minded Ukrainians who posed a threat to his totalitarian authority.

“The Ukrainian famine was a clear case of a man-made famine,” explains?Alex de Waal , executive director of the?World Peace Foundation ?at Tufts University and author of the 2018 book,?Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine . He describes it as “a hybrid…of a famine caused by calamitous social-economic policies and one aimed at a particular population for repression or punishment.”

In those days,?Ukraine —a Texas-sized nation along the Black Sea to the west of Russia—was a part of the Soviet Union, then ruled by?Stalin . In 1929, as part of his plan to rapidly create a totally communist economy, Stalin had imposed?collectivization , which replaced individually owned and operated farms with big state-run collectives. Ukraine’s small, mostly subsistence farmers?resisted ?giving up their land and livelihoods.

Grain confiscated from a family derided as "kulaks" in the village of Udachoye in Ukraine.?

Sovfoto/UIG/Getty Images

Resistant Farmers Labeled as 'Kulaks'

In response, the Soviet regime derided the resisters as?kulaks —well-to-do peasants, who in Soviet ideology were considered enemies of the state. Soviet officials drove these peasants off their farms by force and Stalin’s secret police further made plans to deport 50,000 Ukrainian farm families to Siberia, historian Anne Applebaum writes in her 2017 book,?Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine .

“Stalin appears to have been motivated by the goal of transforming the Ukrainian nation into his idea of a modern, proletarian, socialist nation, even if this entailed the physical destruction of broad sections of its population,” says Trevor Erlacher, an historian and author specializing in modern Ukraine and an academic advisor at the University of Pittsburgh’s?Center for Russian, East European, & Eurasian Studies.

Collectivization in Ukraine didn’t go very well. By the fall of 1932—around the time that Stalin’s wife,?Nadezhda Sergeevna Alliluyeva , who reportedly objected to his collectivization policy, committed suicide—it became apparent that Ukraine’s grain harvest was going to miss Soviet planners’ target by 60 percent. There still might have been enough food for Ukrainian peasants to get by, but, as Applebaum writes, Stalin then ordered what little they had be confiscated as punishment for not meeting quotas.

“The famine of 1932-33 stemmed from later decisions made by the Stalinist government, after it became clear that the 1929 plan had not gone as well as hoped for, causing a food crisis and hunger,” explains?Stephen Norris , a professor of Russian history at Miami University in Ohio. Norris says a December?1932 document ?called, “On the Procurement of Grain in Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and the Western Oblast,” directed party cadres to extract more grain from regions that had not met their quotas. It further called for the arrest of collective farm chiefs who resisted and of party members who did not fulfill the new quotas.?

An armed man guards emergency supply grain during the Ukrainian famine of early 1930s.?

Sovfoto/UIG/Getty Images

Decrees Targeted Ukrainian 'Saboteurs'

Meanwhile, Stalin, according to Applebaum, already had arrested tens of thousands of Ukrainian teachers and intellectuals and removed Ukrainian-language books from schools and libraries. She writes that the Soviet leader used the grain shortfall as an excuse for even more intense anti-Ukrainian repression. As Norris notes, the 1932 decree “targeted Ukrainian ‘saboteurs,’ ordered local officials to stop using the Ukrainian language in their correspondence, and cracked down on Ukrainian cultural policies that had been developed in the 1920s.”

When Stalin’s crop collectors went out into the countryside, according to a 1988 U.S. Congressional commission?report , they used long wooden poles with metal points to poke the dirt floors of peasants’ homes and probe the ground around them, in case they’d buried stores of grain to avoid detection. Peasants accused of being food hoarders typically were sent off to prison, though sometimes the collectors didn’t wait to inflict punishment. Two boys who were caught hiding fish and frogs they’d caught, for example, were taken to the village soviet, where they were beaten, and then dragged into a field with their hands tied and mouths and noses gagged, where they were left to suffocate.

As the famine worsened, many tried to flee in search of places with more food. Some died by the roadside, while others were thwarted by the?secret police and the regime’s system of internal passports . Ukrainian peasants resorted to desperate methods in an effort to stay alive, according to the Congressional commission’s report. They killed and ate pets and consumed flowers, leaves, tree bark and roots. One woman who found some dried beans was so hungry that she ate them on the spot without cooking them, and reportedly died when they expanded in her stomach.

“The policies adopted by Stalin and his deputies in response to the famine after it had begun to grip the Ukrainian countryside constitute the most significant evidence that the famine was intentional,” Erlacher says. “Local citizens and officials pleaded for relief from the state. Waves of refugees fled the villages in search of food in the cities and beyond the borders of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic.” The regime’s response, he says, was to take measures that worsened their plight.

By the summer of 1933, some of the collective farms had only a third of their households left, and prisons and labor camps were jammed to capacity. With hardly anyone left to raise crops, Stalin’s regime resettled Russian peasants from other parts of the Soviet Union in Ukraine to cope with the labor shortage. Faced with the prospect of an even wider food catastrophe, Stalin’s regime in the fall of 1933 started easing off collections.

A string of carts with bread confiscated from peasants, circa 1932.?

Sovfoto/UIG/Getty Images

Russian Government Denies Famine Was 'Genocide'

The Russian government that replaced the Soviet Union has acknowledged that famine took place in Ukraine, but denied it was genocide. Genocide is?defined ?in Article 2 of the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” In April 2008, Russia's lower house of Parliament passed a resolution?stating ?that “There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines.” Nevertheless, at least?16 countries ?have recognized the Holodomor, and most recently, the U.S. Senate, in a?2018 resolution , affirmed the findings of the 1988 commission that Stalin had committed genocide.

Ultimately, although Stalin’s policies resulted in the deaths of millions, it failed to crush Ukrainian aspirations for autonomy, and in the long run, they may actually have backfired. “Famine often achieves a socio-economic or military purpose, such as transferring land possession or clearing an area of population, since most flee rather than die,” famine historian de Waal says. “But politically and ideologically it is more often counterproductive for its perpetrators. As in the case of Ukraine it generated so much hatred and resentment that it solidified Ukrainian nationalism.”

Eventually, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Ukraine finally became an independent nation—and the Holodomor remains a painful part of Ukrainians’ common identity.?

BY?PATRICK J. KIGER

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If one has this sort of deception, it is akin to the 1930s horror, backed with one of the largest armies in the world today. In a word, do not fall for it. I.e. Putin only has a hope of deception if people fall for his spin and bluster

Reject the spin.

Andrew Beckwith, PhD

While serious obstacles remain regarding the Minsk peace accords, the changed tone about Ukraine’s potential NATO membership was particularly notable, with Zelenskiy insisting that his country had not given up its aspiration to join the alliance, but also acknowledging that all allies — they currently number 30 — would have to approve.

“There is no signal from us that NATO membership is not our goal,” Zelenskiy said, adding: “Unfortunately, not everything depends on Ukraine.”

Scholz, who took over the chancellery in December, is headed to Moscow for his first meeting with Putin on Tuesday. And the Kremlin’s demonstrative public effort to ease tensions suggested that perhaps Putin was angling for a positive start with his new German counterpart.

Among many other priorities, Russia is keen to win approval from German regulators for the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which runs from Russia to Germany, bypassing Ukraine.

The U.S. and its allies have loudly threatened Russia with a barrage of heavy sanctions in response to any attack on Ukraine, and President Joe Biden had specifically described preventing Nord Stream 2 from ever operating as a goal of such measures.

Meanwhile, as tensions ratcheted up in recent weeks, nearly all of the world’s major military powers weighed in. Chinese President Xi Jinping, who met Putin in Beijing, issued a statement joining Russia in calling for a halt to any expansion in NATO membership. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, meanwhile, visited Kyiv and announced plans to build a factory in Ukraine to manufacture armed drones. Erdo?an called for a peaceful resolution to the crisis, in compliance with international law, and offered to host a direct meeting between Putin and Zelenskiy.

Such a face-to-face encounter still seems unlikely for the time being, with Putin expressing continued disdain over the situation in Ukraine and demanding that Kyiv negotiate directly with the separatist authorities in Donetsk and Luhansk, whom Zelenskiy has branded as “terrorists.”

Meanwhile, senior U.S. officials reiterated on Monday that Russia’s military capabilities should not be underestimated.

“This is a military that continues to grow stronger, continues to grow more ready,” the Pentagon spokesman, John Kirby, said in a televised interview. Speaking of Putin, Kirby said: “We believe that he has a lot of capabilities and options available to him, should he want to use military force. And, as we have said, it could happen any day. In fact, I would go so far as to say that we could see him move with little to no warning.”

Hans von der Burchard and Quint Forgey contributed reporting.