Senate Attacks Russian Civilians With Sanctions In Order To Effect Regime Change In Moscow

Caitlin Johnstone
3 min readJun 16, 2017

Reuters reports that the US Senate has voted 98–2 to impose new sanctions on Russia in order to “punish” the nation “for meddling in the 2016 U.S. election, its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region and support for Syria’s government in the six-year-long civil war.”

This new development should ring odd in everyone’s ears for a number of reasons, including the fact that Russia’s actions in Crimea and Syria have been wholly justified, the fact that America has admitted to having meddled far more extensively and efficaciously in Russia’s elections in 1996, and the fact that the people most significantly impacted by economic sanctions are not a nation’s politicians but its civilians. Perhaps the nastiest thing about these added sanctions, however, is the fact that these xenophobic, demagogic anti-Russia Capitol Hill politicians have already been admitting that the end goal of these punitive election-meddling sanctions is to effect regime change in Moscow.

In March, Tucker Carlson pressed one of the leading anti-Russia voices in congress about the way Democrats have been referring to the alleged (and still completely unproven) Russian exfiltration of Democratic party emails as an “act of war”. I linked the above video to the section I’m about to quote from, but it’s worth watching in full to see just how much pushing and cajoling it took from Carlson to get Rep. Eric Swalwell to admit that the end goal of the sanctions his anti-Russia coalition has been pushing for is to cut Russia off from the world and squeeze its economy in order to hurt Putin’s popularity.

The only reason these people could possibly want to hurt Putin’s popularity would be to ensure that Putin is eventually ousted from office. They are willing to “squeeze their economy”, in Swalwell’s own words, in order to effect regime change in Russia for an action that as far as publicly-available evidence goes can’t even be said to have happened at all, and which no one can prove impacted the outcome of the election by even a single vote.

In 1996, the same year America meddled in Russia’s elections to ensure Washington puppet Boris Yeltsin’s re-election, Secretary of State Madeline Albright was asked by 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl about U.S. sanctions against Iraq, “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”

“I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it,” Albright replied.

This is what we’re looking at here, folks. There it is, unveiled and unashamed. These evil people are willing to “squeeze” an economy that ordinary civilians rely upon to feed their families in order to oust an administration that dares to involve itself in key strategic geopolitical situations like Crimea and Syria that the west has no business involving itself in anyway.

This is evil. This is stone cold evil.

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