COUP IN KYIV?

WASHINGTON: Russia would be unable to disrupt the US military's withdrawal from Afghanistan even if it cut off access to supply routes across its territory, a top US commander has said.

Amid rising tensions between Washington and Moscow over the crisis in Ukraine, the head of NATO-led forces in Afghanistan reassured lawmakers that Russia could not hold up a planned troop drawdown there.

"I'm absolutely confident we'll be able to" remove all US equipment on schedule, General Joseph Dunford told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"Even if the Russians cut off one of the avenues?" Senator John McCain asked.

"Yes, senator," Dunford said. The general said that "we've got resilience in the system and I'm not concerned at all about a loss of the Russian northern distribution network, the Russian piece of that."

Dunford was referring to a network of road and rail routes that pass through Central Asia, the Caucasus and, in some cases, Russia. The primary supply routes for US forces in Afghanistan still run through Pakistan but the Pentagon set up the alternative channels through Central Asia after friction with Islamabad triggered border closures.

With the bulk of US and NATO forces due to withdraw by the end of the year, a major drawdown is under way and vast amounts of military hardware are being ferried out across the Pakistan border.

Roughly 40 percent of supplies are moving through the Pakistan roads at the moment, defense officials said.

President Barack Obama and lawmakers in Congress are threatening sanctions against Russia over its military intervention in Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, and European Union governments are also weighing possible punitive measures.

(Reuters) - Russia shipped more troops and armor into Crimea on Friday and repeated its threat to invade other parts of Ukraine, showing no sign of listening to Western pleas to back off from the worst confrontation since the Cold War.

Russia's stock markets tumbled and the cost of insuring its debt soared on the last day of trading before pro-Moscow authorities in Crimea hold a vote to join Russia, a move all but certain to lead to U.S. and EU sanctions on Monday.

The Russian Foreign Ministry, responding to the death of at least one protester in Ukraine's eastern city of Donetsk, repeated President Vladimir Putin's declaration of the right to invade to protect Russian citizens and "compatriots".

"Russia is aware of its responsibility for the lives of compatriots and fellow citizens in Ukraine and reserves the right to take people under its protection," it said.

Ukrainian health authorities say one 22-year-old man was stabbed to death and at least 15 others were being treated in hospital after clashes in Donetsk, the mainly Russian-speaking home city of Ukraine's ousted President Viktor Yanukovich.

Organizers of the anti-Moscow demonstration said the dead man was from their group.

Moscow denies that its forces are intervening in Crimea, an assertion Washington ridicules as "Putin's fiction". Journalists have seen Russian forces operating openly in their thousands over the past two weeks, driving in armored columns of vehicles with Russian license plates and identifying themselves to besieged Ukrainian troops as members of Russia's armed forces.

A Reuters reporting team watched a Russian warship unload trucks, troops and at least one armored personnel carrier at Kazachaya bay near Sevastopol on Friday morning. Trucks drove off a ramp from the Yamal 156, a large landing ship that can carry than 300 troops and up to a dozen APCs.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was due to meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in London later on Friday in a last-ditch effort to head off the referendum in Crimea, now seen as all but inevitable.

Foofie wrote:

In my opinion, many of the European countries, regardless of the EU propaganda about being "Europeans," have a collective hubris about their respective country that is almost comical. The French, the Germans, the British, the Italians, the Spanish - ask one and you'd think their respective culture was God's gift to the world, in my opinion.

People who live in glass house shouldn't throw stones ...

I get a tingly feeling when a Jew discusses Scientific Racism.

You might not know Foof that GazProm is the main sponsor of the Champions League.

You might not also know that while our football teams are second rate in world football our Premier League broadcasts are the most watched around the world.

If a Chinese player is in one of the games it puts 50,000,000. or thereabouts, on the Chinese TV audience. An English player playing in China would do nothing here.

And you post in English. As more and more do. It's our style you see.

You're the one who's fallen, and doesn't really understand what's going on. You don't seem to have learned the lessons of the 1930s.

America, Britain and Russia are all signatories of a treaty guaranteeing the territorial integrity of Ukraine.

Wasn't that Ukranian President, that is now in Russia, democratically elected? So, if enough citizens make a civil disturbance, ousting an elected President is acceptable?

"For the United States Ukraine is far from a vital interest.
For Europe and for Germany it is much more of one due to proximity, due to gas pipelines and due to just a much closer economic relationship with Russia.
For the United States it's a matter of principle and certainly Europe as a whole is a vital interest of the United States."