Ukraine is deja vu all over again

The artillery shells and missiles start falling when normal average people are going to bed; then come the tanks and armored personnel carriers followed by infantry. Planes and helicopters are shot out of the air with heat-seeking missiles by the attacking rebel troops. Civilians are killed by the shells, missiles and exploding tank shells and thousands of bullets fired by automatic weapons.

That occurred in February 1992 in the small town of Khojaly in Azerbaijan; it is occurring today in Ukraine. These tactics have not changed since the gigantic civilian massacre at Khojaly in 1992.

The 1992 medieval-style land grab was under Russian President Boris Yeltsin and he used surrogates — the Armenians. He was replaced by career KGB man Vladimir Putin in 2000, who is not as subtle as Yeltsin was. Putin uses Russian soldiers and missiles to wage war, while Yeltsin equipped Armenians and used his motorized infantry to back up them up with tanks and heavy weapons.

{mosads}It is not the first time the new Imperial Russia of Putin has invaded with their heavily armed troops a formerly Russian-dominated territory belonging to a former Soviet republic.

Today it is eastern Ukraine; last year it was the Ukrainian territory of Crimea and its large Russian naval base. In 2008, it was the former Soviet republic of Georgia while the United States was making its way through the final weeks of the 2008 presidential campaign.

That campaign elected Barack Obama as president. He has proven averse to standing up to the Russians vis a vis their current military adventures, just as the 1992 U.S. Congress was — dominated as it was by the majority Democrats in the House of Representatives. It shortsightedly passed a highly discriminatory Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act that banned U.S. aid to the newly independent Azerbaijan. It did so under heavy influence and campaign cash from the Armenian Lobby.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Carter, wrote in Foreign Policy magazine in 2006 that the Armenian Lobby was the “third most effective (ethnic) lobby” in the United States.

The invasion of Ukraine closely resembles the invasion of Azerbaijan’s territory by Armenia backed by Russian troops in 1992. Sometimes, despite change, things remain the same. In 1992, the Armenians and Russians denied they participated in the Khojaly massacre in which over 600 unarmed civilian men, women and children were killed by attackers on Feb. 25 and 26, 1992.

Armenian irregulars were accused of the massacre. A few years later, though, the then-Armenian defense minister (and current President Serzh Sarkisian) admitted the culpability for the massacre, shockingly stating that the purpose of Khojaly was to teach Azerbaijanis a lesson. Today, Putin denies that Russian troops are fighting in Ukraine or that the “irregular” rebels are supplied by the Russians.

Satellite intelligence photos and video prove conclusively that Russian troops are involved. In the case of the Malaysian Airlines civilian airliner shot down over Ukraine with almost 200 dead, the Russians outrageously claimed that the plane was shot down by Ukrainian forces. However, the United States has irrefutable evidence showing the plane-killing missile was fired by a Russian missile launcher and that we knew the exact time and place the missile was fired at and from. It was a Russian Army missile.

Again, the Russians deny the facts as they did in 1992. Nothing has changed. Then the excuse was protecting a minority population — Armenians — today it is to protect minority Russian-speakers in Georgia and Ukraine. The pattern is not just Russian; does anyone recall the annexation of Czechoslovakian territory of the Sudetenland in 1938 by Germany? The world stood by then, like today’s Germany and Obama, announcing reliance on diplomacy to solve the Ukrainian problem.

Whatever excuse they use, the world recognizes that the only reasons they are invading neighbors is to expand their territory and domination. They are reconstructing the old Russian Empire.

The Russians used Armenian surrogates in 1992. Russian troops are still in Armenia 23 years later with the largest Russian military base in the world; Russians subsidize the Armenian government and conduct all of the air defenses of Armenia as well as all border control with Turkey and Iran.

Certainly, the Russians disbanded the 366th Motorized Infantry Regiment of the Russian Army two weeks after they helped the Armenian forces massacre hundreds of unarmed men, women and children at Khojaly, as reported by Human Rights Watch in 1993 and 1994, but as noted, Russian troops are still in Armenia, Russian rubles support the Armenian government and Russian troops guard the Armenian skies and patrol its borders. Russian troops occupy parts of Georgia, Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

There are substantial Russian-speaking minorities in Latvia and Estonia. If not stopped, will Russia carry forth into those independent countries and NATO members like they have in Ukraine, today, and Khojaly in 1992?

Contreras formerly wrote for Creators Syndicate and the New America News Service of The New York Times Syndicate.