Sputnik Merkel Fears Split in EU Regarding Anti-Russian Sanctions – German Media

Some Europeans, especially business people, are starting to freak that they are losing Russian markets to the emerging countries that Russia has turned to owing to sanctions and is not likely to turn back toward Europe when sanctions end.

The emerging world has also pretty much nixed sanctions against Iran and Europe is losing out there, too.

This is not affecting either the US or UK much economically, and many Europeans resent that they are being asked to foot the bill for Anglo-American policy.

Angela Merkel has taken it on herself to both hold the coalition together and also blunt the US rush to war, which is unpopular in Europe and Merkel herself fears more than the coalition falling apart.

The loner this situation lasts the more issues will bubble up, and no one expects the crisis to be resolved anytime soon, putting pressure on the Atlantic alliance itself.

Sputnik

Merkel Fears Split in EU Regarding Anti-Russian Sanctions – German Media

William Pfaff — A Hot War Is Not Inconceivable

I find it very disquieting that so few among the West European and American commentators on the Ukraine crisis, private or public, seem concerned that the United States has started this affair, and that it is not inconceivable that it may end in a war.

Worse yet, Washington’s demonization of Vladimir Putin has been so successful in the American press and public, and its secrecy about the American role in Kiev, has left the public in the United States and in NATO Europe convinced that this has all been the result of a Russian strategy of aggressive expansion into Ukraine, and not a bungled and essentially American attempt to annex Ukraine to NATO and the European Union, and to undermine the domestic political position of President Putin—which all has gone badly and dangerously wrong.

It is the latest (and probably last) step in a foolish American and European betrayal of the promise given to Mikhail Gorbachev by President George H.W. Bush, at the time of the unification of Germany, that if the Soviet Union agreed to a newly united Germany’s assuming the Federal Republic’s existing place as a member of NATO, no NATO troops would be stationed in what formerly had been the Communist German Democratic Republic.…

Truthdig

A Hot War Is Not Inconceivable
William Pfaff

See also Noam Chomsky, Noam Chomsky: How the Bin Laden Raid Could Have Led to Nuclear Annihilation of Humanity

Flight MH17 - What You're Not Being Told is a good summary to date.