With US Special Forces filmed taking part in the war against the Ukraine, Ukrainian freedom fighters hearing English, French, Polish and Flemish being spoken by mercenaries, many of whom have been killed, US arms and NATO uniforms being found in Donetsk, and US General Ben Hodges, Commander of the US Army in Europe, seen handing out medals to wounded Kiev junta soldiers, the Obama regime is already de facto at war with the Ukraine and therefore with Russia.

According to press reports, during his five-hour meeting with President Hollande and Chancellor Merkel last Friday, President Putin warned his European counterparts that he would not allow the Obama regime to arm the terrorist regime in Kiev any further against the Ukrainian people. He stated that should the US do so, ‘total war’ would be the result within a matter of weeks.

Chancellor Merkel has also warned her Western counterparts against starting such a total war. She was alarmed by a German intelligence document, provided to President Putin by her at Friday’s meeting, estimating the true total number of deaths in the war so far at 50,000. This is ten times the officially announced figure which has repeatedly been cited in the mindless, US-run, propaganda-filled Western media.

According to the former Italian Prime Minister, Mario Monti, speaking on Italian television on Monday 9 February, the USA is manipulating NATO and certain Eastern European countries into starting total war.

During a visit to Sochi, the Russian President publicly warned the Obama regime against its reckless actions, stating: ‘There is an attempt to upset the existing world order with one undisputed leader who wants to remain such, thinking that he is allowed everything, while others are only allowed what he allows and only in his interests’.

However, while the current Putin-Merkel-Hollande peace bid now being discussed in Minsk is the last chance to avoid total war, the Obama regime is intent on exactly that. The pro-sodomy US Vice President Biden has vowed to arm the Kiev junta. But if the use of US weapons in the killing of ethnic Russians and Ukrainians continues, Russia will support a large-scale military offensive to free the peoples of the Ukraine in a campaign which would involve liberating Kiev itself.

The Kiev junta currently has only around 41,000 regular troops plus about 20,000 irregulars who joined volunteer battalions to fight against the 100,000 Ukrainians and has lost 220 tanks and more than 480 armoured vehicles since August of last year through combat, breakdown, capture and above all mass surrender to the Ukrainian freedom fighters, whom they have joined. The fact is that at the outbreak of the war in March 2014, Kiev had only 6,000 combat troops, only a sixth of its aircraft and anti-aircraft systems were functional and only four of the Ukrainian Navy’s vessels were combat-ready.

To make matters worse, over 16,000 former Ukrainian military personnel defected to Russia when the Crimea decided to return to Russia in March. The rest of Kiev’s ill-equipped 100,000 troops are not combat-ready. Young men are fleeing the Ukraine in their thousands, often for freedom in Russia, in order to avoid being conscripted for a US-decided civil war which they and their parents oppose and which in any case is unwinnable. In its desperation Kiev has established what are called ‘barrier squads’ and sent them to the front lines to shoot any soldier who attempts to retreat.

The oligarch-puppet President Poroshenko, who ironically made most of his money by selling off the arms of the Ukraine’s armed forces to Third World countries, has lost control of the military situation. His nation’s currency has collapsed, his administration is bankrupt, workers are not being paid, flats are not being heated and demonstrations against him are mounting. In the east of the Ukraine, where there are 1,000,000 refugees, the popular uprising against the US-installed Fascist junta in Kiev has already raised nearly 100,000 troops, many of them defectors from Kiev’s army. All are now massing for what could become the final battle against what is left of the ragtag army sent by Kiev to massacre the Ukrainian people.

In the eastern Ukraine today banners proclaim in English ‘Yankees Go Home’ and ‘No to US Terrorism in the Donbass’. As for the European Union, it has a far greater problem to resolve. If it wants to survive, it has to decide not just if it wants total war, but also about its own future. As Cyprus offers its territory for a Russian base and Greece, Hungary and Czechia support Russia, the EU countries (not the US-appointed EU elite) have to decide if they want to be an EU/United States of Europe/US and NATO vassal colony, or a Free and Sovereign Europe of the Nations, a model put forward both by Russia and by the increasingly popular European parties of both left and right. What is happening in the Ukraine will decide the future of the whole of Europe, its life or its death.