The Nuland-Pyatt leak: BBC

Stephen F. Cohen, Democracy Now

Where do you want me to begin? I mean, we are watching history being made, but history of the worst kind. That’s what I’m telling my grandchildren: Watch this. What’s happening there, let’s take the big picture, then we can go to the small picture. The big picture is, people are dying in the streets every day. The number 50 is certainly too few. They’re still finding bodies. Ukraine is splitting apart down the middle, because Ukraine is not one country, contrary to what the American media, which speaks about the Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. Historically, ethnically, religiously, culturally, politically, economically, it’s two countries. One half wants to stay close to Russia; the other wants to go West. We now have reliable reports that the anti-government forces in the streets—and there are some very nasty people among them—are seizing weapons in western Ukrainian military bases. So we have clearly the possibility of a civil war.

Patrick Smith, FPIP

Every time we overhear U.S. diplomats talking when we are not supposed to, the conduct of American foreign policy sounds less imaginative, more reckless, and astonishing in its fidelity to eras many of us thought would never come again. Who would have thought Obama’s conduct abroad would recall so closely Eisenhower’s — the years when the Dulles Brothers, Allen at the CIA and John Foster at State, made sheer havoc in the name of American security — and thus reproduce an eternal state of insecurity?

The Guardian 2004

But while the gains of the orange-bedecked "chestnut revolution" are Ukraine's, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.

repeats 2008

It would have been far wiser for the US to encourage a continued "Eastern Bloc," even if it wouldn't have been immediately as democratic as reformers would wish. Eastern European countries who wanted to join NATO should have been told instead to work with one another. The expansion of NATO has always read like a victory lap, and the reaction of an isolated Russia was predictable. It's logical to think that a less threatened Russia would have become a less threatening one.