US, NATO Powder Keg in Europe 100 Years Since WWI ! Laying the Foundation for WW3!

• US, NATO powder keg in Europe 100 years since WWI! 
  by Finian Cunningham, http://www.presstv.com/ 
  One hundred years ago today, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo was the fatal spark that ignited a geopolitical powder keg in Europe.
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  Within a month, all the major powers of Europe would be embroiled in the First World War, which also dragged in Russia and the US. The war would last for nearly five years and resulted in at least 20 million deaths.
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  That catastrophe has perplexing resonances with today. A single incident set off a conflagration back then because it came amid simmering rivalries among imperial powers. Another resonance is how historians recount that in the run-up to the First World War few believed that a war in “modern, civilized” Europe was likely because of the belief that diplomacy would prevail.
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  Today, we see similar reckless goading by imperial powers across Europe. The US and its European NATO allies have embarked on a 25-year expansion towards Russia’s heartland. The dynamic of encroachment has only sped up, not lessened. This expansion is provocative, aggressive and duplicitous because it not only presents a military threat to Russia it also flies in the face of past commitments by the US-led NATO alliance not to do so, such as in the 1997 Founding Act, signed with Moscow.
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  Russia has every right to feel threatened by ever-encroaching ballistic missile systems on its borders that could be used in a pre-emptive nuclear strike by the US and its allies. That concern is heightened ever since Washington invoked a “first strike doctrine” under President George W Bush, which Obama still retains.
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  Yet, provocatively, Washington dismisses Russian President Vladimir Putin’s concerns about NATO expansion as if they the deliriums of a Soviet revanchist.
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  The complacency of the present time towards the dangers of war has disturbing echoes of the past – on the eve of World War I. A major factor in the present complacency is that the Western mainstream media are failing, woefully, to properly report on the gravity of the situation in Ukraine, and just how provocative that parlous situation is to Russia’s vital interests.This week saw the signing of a trade pact between the European Union and Petro Poroshenko, the declared president of Ukraine. The Western media have hailed it in glowing terms as “a landmark event” and a positive outcome of democracy in the former Soviet Republic. That blithe assessment invites dangerous ignorance and complacency.
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  The truth is that the signing of the EU trade pact is the outcome of an illegal regime-change operation in Ukraine fomented by Washington and its NATO allies. That regime change involved CIA-backed mass murder of civilians (the February 20 sniper shootings in Kiev’s Maidan Square) and the overthrow of an elected government.
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  Since the illegal coup against President Viktor Yanukovych, the Western-backed Kiev regime has been waging war on the ethnic Russian populations in the east and south of the country, who refuse to recognize the regime as legitimate. Poroshenko, the billionaire oligarch who is now signing over sovereign affairs of Ukraine to the US, NATO and the EU, was elected as president in a farce vote last month, where only 45 percent of the electorate turned out and large sections of the east and south did not even cast a ballot amid a murderous “anti-terror” crackdown by Kiev troops and paramilitaries.
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