A True Flag

Steve passes on speculation:

Almost every Ukrainian I spoke with speculated that Moscow is secretly supporting Right Sector in an attempt to both destabilize the weak government in Kiev and provide a pretext for further meddling – the tried and true tactic of provokatsiya, or provocation, which Moscow has been using since the early Bolshevik period to deceive its adversaries and earn sympathy among credulous Westerners.

Maybe. But I see couple of problems:

First, the evidence he presents amounts to so much grassy knollism. The official history of origins of Right Sector is that it is a coalition of groups with long-standing nationalist pedigree. And without commenting on Steve's recent efforts to rehabilitate conspiracy theories in general, it's difficult to believe that with as much skullduggery as the State Department and CIA put into Ukraine, up to and possibly including the overthrow of its elected government, nobody discovered out its "real" patrons, if real they be. (Alternatively, if the CIA knows it's a false flag operation, it would be in the administrations interest to tell the world.)

But more to the point, if Right Sector really were Russian agents provocteur, wouldn't they be more . . . obviously bad? On the contrary, their propaganda videos are far more inspiring to me personally than either the Russian or EU oligarchs vying for control of Ukraine's economy. Yes, I get that their aesthetic is as garlic to our globalized vampiric elites -- hell, the Tea Party is garlic to our vampiric elites -- but wouldn't they want to be more openly anti-semitic or anti-Russian rather than disavowing racism?

I suppose you could argue that this is all part of the plan: dog whistles to New York banksters paralyze more substantial support to Ukraine while making Obama look weak and vacillating to everybody else. But if Russia was that smart, they wouldn't have lost Ukraine to begin with.