By Dave Gutknecht
Tragically, since my late 2023 article here, many more thousands of Ukrainian lives have been lost or ruined. Like President Biden’s decline, the direction of things on the battlefield has been evident for some time to those who believe their own lyin’ eyes rather than what approved voices tell us. A quick review:
As testified by high-level participants, the 2014 and 2015 Minsk Agreements were betrayed by Ukraine and its Western minders, in preparation for war—killing 14,000 eastern Ukrainians while making false promises about peace.
NATO head Jens Stoltenberg recently told a loyal audience that the Ukraine war began after the 2014 coup (U.S.-sponsored) and that Russia entered in 2022 to stop NATO expansion. This is what many critics of the West have said for years—but not in mainstream media, where we hear the big lie that Russian intervention was unprovoked. Repeated endlessly and uncontradicted in the mainstream, “unprovoked” is believed.
Russia’s 2022 military operation was far from “full-scale”—rather, the threat to Kiev was quickly pulled back after achieving its purpose of diversion from the key eastern front and driving the Ukraine government to negotiations. Those sessions began just three days later.
The March 2022 Istanbul agreements were recently published by the New York Times and demonstrate that Russia was committed to negotiations that would have minimized Ukraine’s loss of territory to the Russian Federation and would have saved over half a million Ukrainians from emigration, injury or death. The Times failed to describe the termination of those agreements, when U.S. errand boy Boris Johnson told Ukraine not to sign and that the West would back them through war: fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian.
The lie about Russia being unwilling to negotiate ignores its major diplomatic attempts to discuss European mutual security terms in 2008, in late 2021, March 2022 and now in 2024. Each time, these proposals have been rejected and the Ukrainian strategic position has worsened. The key issue throughout: recognition of Russian security interests through neutrality for Ukraine.
Ukraine is being destroyed, but the lies about the war are thick and impossible to summarize—except that the US keeps promising more effective weaponry. Realistically, the best Western military position was in fall 2022, argued Pentagon chief Gen. Milley, who said then that opportunity for a negotiated settlement would never be better—but he was overridden. Now, as I write in mid-July 2024, a group of international relations scholars and former British and U.S. ambassadors to the USSR and Russia have issued a statement declaring, “If a peace based on roughly the present division of forces in Ukraine is inevitable, it is immoral not to try for it.”
The US is not engaging in diplomacy and has proven itself “agreement incapable,” leading to the ongoing sacrifice of the Ukraine people and economy—and the loss of international trust. Again, the overall U.S. goal: weaken Russia through broad-spectrum attacks to achieve regime change and gain access to its immense resources.
Another big lie is the repeated descriptions of NATO as a “defensive alliance”—despite its wars of aggression in Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine and beyond. NATO is a prime cash cow for the military industrial complex, and Ukraine is a giant money-laundering operation for it and its government friends.
Our war machine is the world’s most expensive, but it is less effective in achieving strategic political goals. The Blob works to (1) designate an enemy country opposing our interests; (2) maintain fear of the designated enemy through propaganda and shameful ethnic hatred while lying about U.S. provocations; (3) successfully increase the military budget and suborn smaller regional powers (Europe and elsewhere) with alliances, debt and dependence. Ukraine is the latest such U.S. disaster. These ongoing campaigns typically destroy much of the enemy’s society. We are serially frustrated diplomatically and militarily, then we depart and encourage historical amnesia: in Korea, Vietnam, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria (where, despite funding ISIS, we were defeated after Syria invited help from Russia).
We’re told the US promotes democracy and the rule of law—yet we contradict that by proclaiming our exceptionalism and the right to impose illegal sanctions on other nations and to intervene militarily without local or UN approval. (See also Palestine, etc.) The US is failing the neo-liberal dream; its practiced “values” are not liberal, rather they are reflected in more censorship, little diplomacy and more war. The fundamental issue, in Cuba 1962 and now over sixty years later, is mutual respect for other nations’ sovereignty and security; imagine Russian or Chinese missiles and military exercises with Mexico near our border. The question is how and when will Western rulers be shocked into conceding that their deadly world dominance dreams are done.
Editor’s note:
I think we could legitimately disagree about what started the war. My analysis is that President Viktor Yanukovych agreed to the European Union-Ukraine Association Agreement but then refused to sign it on orders from Moscow. This sparked the Maidan Square protests in November of 2013. Yes, the protests were supported by the CIA and initiated by neo-Nazis, but they were soon joined by the Ukrainian left.
Russia invaded and occupied Crimea in 2014.
Russia invaded and occupied the Russian-speaking Eastern provinces of Ukraine in 2022.
I agree it’s muddled, but I blame Russia for firing the first shot.
