The Ukrainian Parliament has voted to abandon their non-aligned status:

In a sign of Ukraine’s hardening attitude toward Russia, Ukrainian lawmakers on Tuesday voted to remove a legal barrier to joining the NATO defense alliance.

The move provoked an angry response from Russia, even though NATO shows few signs of accepting Ukraine as a member anytime soon. But this year’s bloody conflict in Ukraine’s east has altered the country’s feelings about the Western alliance. A plurality of Ukrainians now favor joining NATO, a stark change from recent years when just a small fraction did.

Ukraine’s decision comes as Russia struggles with a weakened ruble and growing concerns about economic instability.

The vote in Ukraine’s parliament had no immediate practical effect on the country’s relationship with NATO. But it ended Ukraine’s nonaligned status, which was adopted as a way of reassuring Russia that its neighbor would not join NATO. Russian President Vladimir Putin cited his fear of Ukraine’s joining NATO as a reason Russia annexed Crimea in March.

This is a very stupid step to take when the cease fire finally appears to be holding in the east of the Ukraine.

It is a deliberate provocation, and I believe that the US government was involved in this move.

We already know that Victoria Nuland, the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, was intimately involved in funding the revolt that overthrew Viktor Yanukovych, and the fact that senior positions in the current government, most notably the American born Natalie Jaresko at finance minister, indicates that there had to be at least tacit approval.

In fact, Jaresko, appears to still be in the US payroll, albeit through the back door.

There are a whole bunch of people in the State Department, Pentagon, and intelligence services who are still intent on imposing something like the Morgenthau Plan, which was intended  intended to reduce Germany to a pastoral following WWII on Russia.

Putin is very much aware of these attitudes, it’s hard to miss when folks like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham have made no bones about supporting this strategy.

Paranoid Putin may be, but it is a justified paranoia, and the recent vote in the Ukraine will only serve to reinforce that attitude, and so escalate the conflict.

It looks like we are into a cycle of doomed imperial hubris on and around the Black Sea.