Thank you Graham for this accurate presentation.

This should be a reminder for those of us in Australia who believe that America will come to rescue us if necessary. They won't, so we should rather have our own nuclear and biological weapons in order to prevent us from being in a similar situation as Ukraine and (later) the Baltic states.

Oh dear. What nonsense.
To re-cap: The "West" did overthrow an elected government in Kiev about six months ago. The neo-cons in the US admitted as much when they boasted of spending 5 billion dollars destabilising that country over the previous few years.
Then it acquiesced in the formation of neo-nazi battalions who promptly burned some separatists alive in the city of Odessa before moving on to the Donbas whose Russian-speaking residents had been targeted for removal since the coup that overthrew the government in Kiev.
Next, in a black flag operation gone horribly wrong, a Malaysian airliner was brought down, and that was blamed on Russia. Not one shred of evidence backing this spurious claim has ever been presented.
Meanwhile, the citizens of Crimea voted overwhelmingly to rejoin Russia rather than become part of a Nazified Ukraine. No doubt they were encouraged to do this by Russia who had historical claims on the area going back to the 1700's when they took it from the Ottoman Empire. And let's not forget Russia's one warm-water port and access to the Mediterranean is in Sevastopol. Did we really think they would allow NATO to supplant them there?
And now the blow-back from ill-considered sanctions are beginning to bite hard European farmers and fishermen. And where will the gas needed to heat their homes this coming winter be coming from?
And Australia? We are only in it because Abbott and his Bishop have decided to play the Yankee bitch. Foolish doesn't even begin to describe that call.
This entire exercise remains an attempt to block the emergence of a Beijing-Moscow-Berlin trading block that - surprise/surprise - would not answer to Washington nor the IMF nor the World Bank. No wonder they're packing it inside the Beltway. The world is calling time on the Empire of Chaos.

No he's not!
There is no way the west can back down from or appease a virtual dictator!
What we need to do, is call the bluff and roll out the now seriously overdue, missile shield, and with as much urgency alacrity as possible!
All while changing our energy options over, where possible, to endlessly sustainable, and quite massively cheaper ones.
Putin's grip on power is only as strong as his energy market, and he knows it, and indeed, that the west has recently discovered huge new reserves, and even larger endlessly sustainable, vastly cheaper alternatives; and he could quite stupidly, force them to change over to them!
Putin may well be strong, but he's not stupid, and knows a doomsday scenario/economic death rattle, even as he puts one.
This is a time for fearless resolve, and for ignoring sabre rattling ultimatums.
Rather than giving Putin more time to build up his war machine/border hugging military forces, we have no other choice than to call his bluff.
We made this not calling a bluff mistake, the last time we confronted a power hungry land grabbing dictator, who also claimed he was just righting past wrongs!
Lets just not go there again!
Rhrosty.

@Halduell. We'll said. I am afraid that Mr Cooke has learnt very little in his 40 years of journalism. The pap served up here is all too reminiscent of the nonsense currently appearing in the msm. He seems to be swallowing wholesale the propaganda pouring out of Washington.

Putin as dictator wanting to swallow up what used to be the Soviet Empire is such a tired and discredited meme that I am profoundly disappointed OLO trots it out.

I doubt that Mr Cooke is even interested in the truth but he might one day actually look at the evidence rather than the hyperbole. One has to ask the question: why have the Australian media gone quiet on MH17? Is it because the facts are emerging that don't fit the Abbott narrative? Why did Australia sign a secret deal not to release the results of the investigation, and why was that fact not even reported in the Oz media?

The US is again running amok in Europe for their own geopolitical aims, discussion of which is again conspicuously absent from our media, in all it's forms. This time there is a very real danger of escalation to nuclear war, and it won't be Mr Putin's fault.

Graham Cook is part of the Corporate establishment and will not tell the truth.
The reason why the West wants war is that their Central bankster masters are losing their power. The BRICS nations now have their development bank free of the debt creation money system of the West. China and Russia don't need war as they can win the peace with real productivity.

The only way out for our criminal oligarchs is war. They need war to escape their own people and to keep their ponzy scams going.

‘He is winning this game of bluff and counter-bluff because right from the start European leaders and United States President Barak Obama ruled out direct military intervention in support of the beleaguered Government in Kiev.’

Oh, please. This is the macho equivalent of a Cinderella story.

Putin is winning this game of ‘so-called bluff and counter-bluff’ because European leaders and the US president are clearly the aggressors here, and most of the NON-Western-MSM-brainwashed world population can see it.

Putin is winning because he knows full-well that the EU and US regimes haven’t an ounce of concrete evidence to back up the fight they’re aggressively spoiling for. Also, he knows full-well that, among other things, the longer the EU and US regimes refuse to release the MH17 black box evidence they are sitting on, the deeper the hole they dig for themselves.

And about that Cuban missile crisis. What we never hear to this day is that there were two parts to the deal – the USSR would remove its missiles from Cuba AND NATO would remove its missiles from Turkey (you know … the ones pointed directly at Moscow). Funny that it’s never referred to as the Cuban-Turkish Missile Crisis.