OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #138, JULY 31, 2023
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RESISTANCE Brett Wilkins. “'July Should Be a Wake-Up Call': Senator Says Biden Must Stop Approving New
Fossil Fuel Projects.” Common Dreams (7-30-23). |
CLIMATE CHANGE, COMMENTARY, HUMAN RIGHTS, INDIGENOUS PEOPLE, LEGAL, U.S.
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OMNI WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS,
#136, JULY 26, 2023.
Abel Tomlinson. Stop Ukraine War, No Nuclear War
Stop Ukraine War & No Nuclear War Protest #5
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Dear Friends,
Please join us this Saturday for our 5th monthly protest calling
for a Stop to the Ukraine War & a Stop the Threats of Nuclear War. We need
Peace in Ukraine, and Peace with Russia and China, and peace with every nation.
We will also have a special message this month to oppose the U.S. shipment of
internationally-condemned cluster bombs to Ukraine, which will harm Ukrainian
civilians for decades to come, as they did in Vietnam, Laos, etc. These arms
shipments further demonstrate that the U.S. government doesn't really care
about Ukrainians, and is just using them to bleed &
"weaken Russia."
As usual, the protest is on the last Saturday of the month, July
29th this month, at 11 A.M. at Washington County Courthouse in Fayetteville.
Please share our Facebook event page if
you can.
As far too many have forgotten, war with Russia and China could
quickly become a nuclear war that could cause extinction of our species,
according to the science of nuclear winter. To avoid this, we must call for an
immediate ceasefire in Ukraine and peace negotiations with Russia, and an end
to all forms of warfare with Russia and China.
As you may know, our politicians and mainstream media are not
telling us the truth about the causes of the Ukraine war, which makes it harder
to understand that peace negotiations are the logical answer. Here are some
powerful, credible references by experts like Professor Sachs, Professor Mearsheimer, peace seeking military officials, award-winning journalist Robert
Parry, and award-winning filmmaker Oliver
Stone's documentary Ukraine on Fire. Here, here, and
here are
some good books on the subject as well. These sources help tell the story of
how the war really started, not just with the 2014 U.S.-sponsored coup, which
was well recorded in this leaked phone call, but
also how the coup started a 9 year old civil war between ultranationalist
Ukrainians in West Ukraine and ethnic Russian Ukrainians in East Ukraine. It
was this 9 year old civil war that became the bigger proxy war between the USA
and Russia.
Additionally, these sources tell the hidden story of how USA
promised not to expand NATO military forces eastward to Russian borders, but
has broken that promise repeatedly, despite numerous warnings not to from
Western experts and the Russian government. At issue is not just NATO military
bases and war games on Russian borders, but the movement of NATO's nuclear
weapons closer and closer to Moscow. The situation is very similar to the Cuban
Missile Crisis, when the Soviets put missiles near our borders; Americans were
not having it and we nearly entered nuclear war over it. Peace negotiations
solved that crisis and peace negotiations are the only way to solve the Ukraine
crisis.
Thank You & Hope to See You Saturday!
Abel Tomlinson
Arkansas Antiwar Alliance, Founder
(479)283-5762
OMNI
UKRAINE WAR ANTHOLOGY #30B
July 24, 2023
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture, of Peace, Justice, and
Ecology
https://omnicenter.org/donate/
What's at Stake: Countering the harms done by the US Warfare State with its Pentagon-Corporate-Congressional-Presidential-Propaganda Machine
CONTENTS
Chris Hedges Prophetic
Indignation
2014 When, Why, Who.
Faina Savenkova. Why the War Started
and Who Started It.
Four Summary Essays
Joe Lauria. “Ukraine Timeline Tells the Story.”
Chris Hedges.
“. . . And They Are Lying About
Ukraine.”
Matthew Hoh. “A War Long
Wanted: Diplomatic Malpractice in Ukraine.”
Eve Ottenberg. Summary of US Provocation of Ukraine
War, Calamitous War, Worse Possibilities.
Special Issues
Cluster Bombs
Abel Tomlinson.
Prohibited by International and US Laws.
Jake Johnson.
Opponents Appalled by Biden’s Decision.
Al Mayadeen. Cambodian Premier Objects.
Wolf GÖhring.
Complaint against German President Steinmeier.
Failure of Counteroffensive
B, Moon of Alabama.
“Failure of Ukraine Counterattack.”
Dimitri Kovalevich. “Failed
Counteroffensive.”
Peace
Arnold Schölzel. A Peace Manifesto in Germany
Jeremy Kuzmarov. 2-19-23 “Left and Right…Rage against the
Ukraine War.”
Medea Benjamin and Nicolas
Davies. “The High Stakes”—WWIII.”
TEXTS
Chris Hedges’ Prophetic Indignation
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ANTIWAR RALLY FEB
19, 2023, LINCOLN MEMORIAL, WASHINGTON DC
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https://countercurrents.org/2023/02/march-against-the-war-machine-hundreds-join-anti-war-rally-in-washington-dc/?swcfpc=1
[Forwarded to me by Sonny San Juan]. |
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Narrated by Eunice
Wong [Text originally
published 02/19/2023: “The architects of imperialism, the masters of war”
(possible title for the speech-- Dick).]
Idolatry is the primal sin from which all
other sins derive. Idols tempt us to become God. They demand the sacrifice
of others in the mad quest for wealth, fame or power. But the idol always ends
by requiring self-sacrifice, leaving us to perish on the blood-soaked altars we
erected for others.
For empires are not murdered, they commit
suicide at the feet of the idols that entrance them.
We are here today to denounce the unelected, unaccountable
high priests of Empire, who funnel the bodies of millions of victims, along
with trillions of our national wealth, into the bowels of our own version of
the Canaanite idol, Moloch.
The political class, the media, the
entertainment industry, the financiers and even religious institutions bay like
wolves for the blood of Muslims or Russians or Chinese, or whoever the idol has
demonized as unworthy of life. There were no rational objectives in the wars in
Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Somalia. There are none in Ukraine.
Permanent war and industrial slaughter are their own justification. Lockheed
Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman earn billions
of dollars in profits. The vast expenditures demanded by the Pentagon are
sacrosanct. The cabal of warmongering pundits, diplomats and technocrats, who
smugly dodge responsibility for the array of military disasters they
orchestrate, are protean, shifting adroitly with the political tides, moving
from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party and then back again, mutating
from cold warriors to neocons to liberal interventionists. Julien Benda called
these courtiers to power “the self-made barbarians of the intelligentsia.”
These pimps of war do not see the corpses of their victims. I did. Including
children. Every lifeless body I stood over as a reporter in Guatemala, El
Salvador, Nicaragua, Palestine, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen, Bosnia, or Kosovo, month
after month, year after year, exposed their moral bankruptcy, intellectual
dishonesty, sick bloodlust and delusional fantasies. They are puppets of the
Pentagon, a state within a state, and the weapons manufacturers who lavishly
fund their think tanks: Project for the New American
Century, Foreign Policy Initiative, American Enterprise Institute, Center for a New American Security, Institute for the Study of War, Atlantic Council and Brookings Institute.
Like some mutant strain of an antibiotic-resistant bacteria, they cannot be
vanquished. It does not matter how wrong they are, how absurd their theories of
global dominance, how many times they lie or denigrate other cultures and
societies as uncivilized or how many they condemn to death. They are immovable
props, parasites vomited up in the dying days of all empires, ready to sell us
the next virtuous war against whoever they have decided is the new Hitler. The
map changes. The game is the same.
Pity our prophets, those who wander the
desolate landscape crying out in the darkness. Pity Julian Assange, undergoing
a slow-motion execution in a high-security prison in London. He committed
Empire’s fatal sin. He exposed its crimes, its machinery of death, its moral
depravity.
A society that prohibits the capacity to speak
in truth extinguishes the capacity to live in justice.
Some here today might like to think of
themselves as radicals, maybe even revolutionaries. But what we are demanding
on the political spectrum is, in fact, conservative: the restoration of the
rule of law. It is simple and basic. It should not, in a functioning republic,
be incendiary. But living in truth in a despotic system, one the political
philosopher Sheldon Wolin called
“inverted totalitarianism,” is subversive.
The architects of imperialism, the masters of
war, the corporate-controlled legislative, judicial and executive branches of
government and their obsequious mouth pieces in the media and academia, are
illegitimate. Say this simple truth and you are banished, as many of us have
been, to the margins. Prove this truth, as Julian did, and you are crucified.
“Red Rosa now has vanished too…” Bertolt
Brecht wrote of the
murdered socialist Rosa Luxemburg. “She
told the poor what life is about, And so the rich have rubbed her out.”
We have undergone a corporate coup d'état, where the poor and working men and women,
half of whom lack $400 to cover an emergency expense, are reduced to chronic
instability. Joblessness and food insecurity are endemic. Our communities and
cities are desolate. War, financial speculation, constant surveillance and
militarized police that function as internal armies of occupation are the only
real concerns of the state. Even habeas corpus no longer exists. We, as
citizens, are commodities to corporate systems of power, used and discarded.
And the endless wars we fight overseas have spawned the wars we fight at home,
as the students I teach in the New Jersey prison system are acutely aware. All
empires die in the same act of self-immolation. The tyranny the Athenian empire
imposed on others, Thucydides noted in his history of the Peloponnesian war, it
finally imposed on itself.
To fight back, to reach out and help the weak,
the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet from ecocide, to decry the
domestic and international crimes of the ruling class, to demand justice, to
live in truth, to smash the graven images, is to bear the mark of Cain.
Those in power must feel our wrath, which means constant acts of
non-violent civil disobedience, social and political disruption. Organized
power from below is the only power that can save us. Politics is a game of
fear. It is our duty to make those in power very, very afraid.
The ruling oligarchy has us locked in its
death grip. It cannot be reformed. It obscures and falsifies the truth.
It is on a maniacal quest to increase its obscene wealth and unchecked power.
It forces us to kneel before its false gods. And so, to quote the Queen of Hearts,
metaphorically, of course, I say, “Off with their heads!”
The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To
receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid
subscriber.
Why and When Did the War Start, and Who Started It? A Testimony
from 2014.
“Faina Savenkova: Too much pain.” Editor. Mronline.org (6-14-23).
Faina:
"I have said many times that the war for me began on June 2, 2014, with
the bombing of the Lugansk Regional State Administration by Ukrainian aircraft.
And now comes another anniversary, already the ninth."
Originally published: Faina Savenkova: Too much pain on June 2, 2023 (more
by Faina
Savenkova: Too much pain) (Posted Jun 13, 2023).
WarAmericas, Europe, Russia, Ukraine, United StatesNewswireRussia-Ukraine War
I have said many times that the war
for me began on June 2, 2014, with the bombing of the Lugansk Regional State
Administration by Ukrainian aircraft. And now comes another anniversary,
already the ninth.
Strangely enough, that
day is one of the few that I remember, albeit in fragments. Maybe because it
was the first time we had so much noise, or maybe because I was worried about
my grandmother, who was in the area of the shelling that day. I still don’t
like it when someone doesn’t return my calls or messages for a long time, even
though I know there can be plenty of harmless reasons for that. But it’s still
scary. Really scary.
A heap of some
scattered, jumbled memories that can not be gathered into a single chain… I
remember having to go to the library to get a book for my brother from the
summer reading list, but I was too lazy to go, so I told my mom that I was too
tired. A little white lie. So we didn’t go. It’s quite possible that’s why we
didn’t end up on the playground with my mom a little later, during the shelling
in the park near the Regional State Administration building.
A couple of days later
we went to the polyclinic, and mom talked to the pediatrician, including on this
topic. At that time no one could believe that it was an air strike by Ukraine.
Later, of course, all doubts dissipated, but back then many still had hope.
Like the saleswoman at the newspaper kiosk. Her most vivid recollection of that
day:
We’re looking up into
the sky, and we don’t understand how this is possible, or where to fly, or
where to run. We just stand there and look at the sky. And we see where this
shell will land. So it hits us. We don’t have time to hide anyway.
What has changed since that day? A lot. And nothing. All of us
have changed, the situation in Donbass has changed. But
what has remained the same is the West’s approval of the fascist regime in
Kiev. I think that was the main reason for the start of the Special Military
Operation. The loss of hope for a peaceful solution and the provocation of an
open war by the West. Did the Ukrainian people need this? No, of course not.
Neither did we. Who needs war? But there is no other way. Children grow up when
they begin to understand this simple truth.
What can we do? Try to
understand cause and effect, try to learn a lesson. Even if too little time has
passed for the present to be covered by the dust of time and become the past to
which one can try to look dispassionately, there is no other way. The sooner
the world realizes its mistakes, the better its chances for life. And the
non-repetition of another June 2. Such mistakes, turning into crimes against
humanity, bring too much pain to people.
Faina Savenkova
English translation: D.
Armstrong
Interview of Oleg Nesterenko.
Oleg Nesterenko: "When we talk about the
reasons that led the Russians to intervene militarily in Ukraine, root causes
and triggers are often confused, especially in the Western press. The triggers
are mistaken for the causes. As for the causes, we don’t even talk about them,
or we just talk nonsense. It’s important to distinguish one from the
other." Editor.
mronline.org (7-13-23).
Originally published: Donbass
Insider on June 29, 2023 by L’Éclaireur des Alpes (more by Donbass Insider) | (Posted Jul 12,
2023)
Inequality, Movements, State Repression,
WarAmericas, Europe,
Russia,
Ukraine,
United StatesInterview, NewswireL’Éclaireur des Alpes,
Oleg Nesterenko
This is the first of
three parts of an interview that Oleg Nesterenko, President of the CCIE, gave
to the publication “L’Éclaireur des Alpes”. This part discusses the
responsibility of the 2014 Maidan coup for the tragic events that plunged
Ukraine into war.
L’Éclaireur:
Over and above Vladimir Putin’s responsibility for starting the war, what are
the reasons that led the Russians to intervene militarily in Ukraine, and what
are the underlying causes?
Oleg
Nesterenko: When we talk about
the reasons that led the Russians to intervene militarily in Ukraine, root
causes and triggers are often confused, especially in the Western press. The
triggers are mistaken for the causes. As for the causes, we don’t even talk
about them, or we just talk nonsense. It’s important to distinguish one from
the other.
There are two main
interrelated triggers. The first is the coup in Kiev in 2014. Without this
unconstitutional overthrow of power, Ukraine would be living in peace today.
Without this coup, for which there is tangible evidence that the United States
of America was behind with the help of its European surrogates, there would not
be the war we are currently experiencing. It is important to stress that before
this event in 2014, neither Crimea, nor the Donetsk region, nor the Lugansk
region had the slightest intention of separating from Ukraine. In Crimea, I
never heard anyone, either among the ordinary people or among senior officials
in closed circles, talk about the possibility or necessity of separating from
Ukraine and rejoining Russia. There was no reason to do so.
And even later, within
the framework of the Minsk agreements, the idea of the separation of Ukraine
from the regions of Lugansk and Donetsk was by no means foreseen, or even
raised. It was the supplement of autonomy from the central power in Kiev that
was the subject of the agreement, starting with linguistic autonomy: the right
of the inhabitants of Eastern Ukraine to speak and use their native language,
the language they want and not the one imposed by the new power bearing a more
than questionable legitimacy.
The second trigger for
the war in Ukraine was the Odessa massacre in 2014, about which not much is
said in France. Local propaganda seeks to conceal this major event. It is far
too embarrassing.
When the coup took
place in Kiev and the ultra-nationalists, supported directly by the United
States, came to power, the Russian-speaking and traditionally pro-Russian parts
of Ukraine—the Russian-speaking regions of Donbass, Crimea, Odessa, Nikolayev
and Kharkov—rose up.
And when the
extremists came to Odessa to put down the perfectly peaceful demonstrations by
the inhabitants, they came armed to kill. Officially, 48 people were killed. In
reality—certainly more. And these were not abstract deaths, the victims of some
accident. It was the people of Odessa who were massacred by ultranationalists
and neo-Nazis from the traditionally Russophobic west of Ukraine. And these
inhabitants were massacred with enormous savagery (raped and then strangled,
burnt alive, etc.) for their refusal to accept the new power that had never
been elected by anyone. The inhabitants of the pro-Russian regions were deeply
traumatised by this massacre, even more so than by the events in Kiev, because
this time it happened in their region and could happen again at any time. I was
in Crimea in 2014 and I remember the locals saying “there’s no way these
degenerates are coming here”.
Although almost all
the perpetrators of the Odessa massacre are well known—there is a wealth of
eyewitness accounts, photos and videos showing the unmasked faces of those who
took part in the massacre—not a single one of them has been arrested or even
investigated by the new Ukrainian government. This is the beginning, the
foundation of the new Ukrainian “democracy” so much admired by the gullible and
manipulated masses in the West.
So, after the proclamations
of independence of the Crimea and Donbass regions from Ukraine—which were easy
to achieve, given that at least three-quarters of the populations concerned
were vehemently opposed to the new power installed in Kiev—the events in Odessa
merely reconfirmed the validity of the separation.
L’Éclaireur: How do
you explain the interference of the United States and the European Union in
matters that could have remained regional?
MORE https://mronline.org/2023/07/12/without-the-2014-coup-ukraine-would-be-living-in-peace/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=without-the-2014-coup-ukraine-would-be-living-in-peace&mc_cid=ef06d1b1fe&mc_eid=ab2f7bf95e
FOUR OVERVIEWS OF THE WAR
Joe Lauria. Special to Consortium News. “ Ukraine Timeline Tells the Story. “ June 30/July 6, 2023.
Without historical
context, buried by corporate media, it's impossible to understand Ukraine. (Forwarded by E. San Juan, Jr.)
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/06/30/ukraine-timeline-tells-the-story/
AMERICAN EMPIRE, ANALYSIS, HISTORY, INTELLIGENCE, RUSSIA, RUSSIAGATE, UKRAINE, WIKILEAKS
Without historical context, buried by corporate
media, it’s impossible to understand Ukraine. Historians will tell the story.
But the Establishment hits back at journalists, like at CN,
who try to tell it now.
The way to prevent understanding of the
Ukraine war is to suppress its history.
A cartoon version says the conflict
began in February 2022 when Vladimir Putin woke up one morning and decided to
invade Ukraine.
There was no other cause, according to
this version, other than unprovoked, Russian aggression against an innocent
country.
Please use this short, historical guide
to share with people who still flip through the funny pages trying to figure
out what’s going on in Ukraine.
The mainstream account is like opening a
novel in the middle of the book to read a random chapter as though
it’s the beginning of the story.
Thirty years from now historians will
write of the context of the Ukraine war: the coup, the attack on Donbass, NATO
expansion, rejection of Russian treaty proposals — without being called Putin
puppets. It will be the same way historians write of the Versailles Treaty as a
cause of Nazism and WWII, but aren’t called Nazi-sympathizers.
Providing context is taboo while the war
continues in Ukraine, as it would have been during WWII. Journalists have
to get with the program of war propaganda while the war continues. Long
after the war, historians are free to sift through the facts.
Journalists are clearly not afforded the
same liberties as historians.
For our efforts to provide real-time
context in Ukraine, which you can find encapsulated below, we’ve had
PropOrNot, PayPal and NewsGuard try to hinder us, and Hamilton 68 put CN‘s
editor on its disinformation “dashboard.” Consortium News has been undeterred, thanks to its
readers’ generous support.
So please consider a donation during our Spring Fund Drive to help us keep
delivering.
THE UKRAINE TIMELINE
World War II— Ukrainian national fascists, led by Stepan Bandera, at first
allied with the German Nazis, massacre more than a hundred thousands Jews and
Poles.
1950s to 1990 – C.I.A. brought Ukrainian fascists to the U.S.
and worked with them to undermine the Soviet Union in Ukraine, running sabotage
and propaganda operations. Ukrainian fascist leader Mykola Lebed was taken to
New York where he worked with the C.I.A. through at least the 1960s and was
still useful to the C.I.A. until 1991, the year of Ukraine’s independence. The
evidence is in a U.S. government report starting from page 82. Ukraine
has thus been a staging ground for the U.S. to weaken and threaten Moscow for
nearly 80 years.
November 1990: A year after the fall of the Berlin Wall,
the Charter of Paris for a New Europe (also known as the Paris
Charter) is adopted by the U.S., Europe and the Soviet Union. The charter
is based on the Helsinki Accords and is updated in the
1999 Charter for European Security. These
documents are the foundation of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
The OSCE charter says no country or bloc can preserve its own security at
another country’s expense.
Dec. 25, 1991: Soviet Union collapses. Wall Street and
Washington carpetbaggers move in during ensuing decade to asset-strip the
country of formerly state-owned properties, enrich themselves, help give
rise to oligarchs, and impoverish the Russian, Ukrainian and other former
Soviet peoples.
1990s: U.S. reneges on promise to last Soviet leader Gorbachev not
to expand NATO to Eastern Europe in exchange for a unified Germany. George
Kennan, the leading U.S. government expert on the U.S.S.R., opposes
expansion. Sen. Joe Biden, who supports NATO enlargement, predicts Russia will react hostilely to
it.
1997: Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. national security adviser,
in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its
Geostrategic Imperatives, writes:
“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is
a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps
to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.
Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then
become a predominantly Asian imperial state.”
New Year’s Eve 1999: After eight years of U.S. and Wall Street dominance, Vladimir
Putin becomes president of Russia. Bill Clinton rebuffs him in 2000 when he
asks to join NATO.
Putin begins closing the door on Western interlopers, restoring
Russian sovereignty, ultimately angering Washington and Wall Street. This
process does not occur in Ukraine, which remains subject to Western
exploitation and impoverishment of Ukrainian people.
Feb. 10, 2007: Putin gives his Munich Security Conference
speech in which he condemns U.S. aggressive unilateralism, including its
illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq and its NATO expansion eastward.
He said: “We have the right to ask: against whom is this [NATO]
expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners
made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations
today? No one even remembers them.”
Putin speaks three years after the Baltic States, former Soviet
republics bordering on Russia, joined the Western Alliance. The West
humiliates Putin and Russia by ignoring its legitimate concerns. A year after
his speech, NATO says Ukraine and Georgia will become members. Four other
former Warsaw Pact states join in 2009.
2004-5: Orange Revolution. Election results are overturned giving
the presidency in a run-off to U.S.-aligned Viktor Yuschenko over Viktor
Yanukovich. Yuschenko makes fascist leader Bandera a “hero of Ukraine.”
April 3, 2008: At a NATO conference in Bucharest, a
summit declaration “welcomes Ukraine’s and
Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today
that these countries will become members of NATO”. Russia harshly objects.
William Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Russia, and presently C.I.A. director,
warns in a cable to Washington, revealed by WikiLeaks,
that,
“Foreign Minister Lavrov and
other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia
would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat. NATO
enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains ‘an emotional and neuralgic’
issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong
opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In Ukraine, these
include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two,
leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to
decide whether to intervene. … Lavrov stressed that Russia had to view continued
eastward expansion of NATO, particularly to Ukraine and Georgia, as a potential
military threat.”
A crisis in Georgia erupts four months later leading to a brief
war with Russia, which the European Union blames on provocation from Georgia.
November 2009: Russia seeks new security arrangement in
Europe. Moscow releases a draft of a proposal for a new European security
architecture that the Kremlin says should replace outdated institutions such as
NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
The text, posted on the Kremlin’s website on Nov. 29, comes
more than a year after President Dmitry Medvedev first formally raised the
issue. Speaking in Berlin in June 2008, Medvedev said the new pact was
necessary to finally update Cold War-era arrangements.
“I’m convinced that Europe’s problems won’t be solved until its
unity is established, an organic wholeness of all its integral parts, including
Russia,” Medvedev said.
2010: Viktor Yanukovich
is elected president of Ukraine in a free and fair election, according to the
OSCE.
2013: Yanukovich chooses an economic package from
Russia rather than an association agreement with the EU. This threatens Western
exploiters in Ukraine and Ukrainian comprador political leaders and oligarchs.
February 2014: Yanukovich
is overthrown in a violent, U.S.-backed coup (presaged by the Nuland-Pyatt
intercept), with Ukrainian fascist groups, like Right Sector, playing a lead
role. Ukrainian fascists parade through cities in torch-lit parades with
portraits of Bandera.
Protesters clash with police in Kiev, Ukraine, February
2014. (Wikimedia Commons)(photo deleted—D)
March 16, 2014: In a rejection of the coup and the unconstitutional
installation of an anti-Russian government in Kiev, Crimeans vote by 97 percent
to join Russia in a referendum with 89 percent turn out. The Wagner private
military organization is created to support Crimea. Virtually no shots are
fired and no one was killed in what Western media wrongly portrays as a
“Russian invasion of Crimea.”
April 12, 2014: Coup government in Kiev launches war against anti-coup,
pro-democracy separatists in Donbass. Openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion plays a
key role in the fighting for Kiev. Wagner forces arrive to support Donbass
militias. U.S. again exaggerates this as a Russian “invasion” of Ukraine. “You
just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading
another country on completely trumped up pre-text,” says U.S. Secretary of State John
Kerry, who voted as a senator in favor of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 on
a completely trumped up pre-text.
May 2, 2014: Dozens
of ethnic Russian protestors are burnt alive in a building in Odessa by
neo-Nazi thugs. Five days later, Luhansk and Donetsk declare independence and
vote to leave Ukraine.
Sept. 5, 2014: First
Minsk agreement is signed in Minsk, Belarus by Russia, Ukraine, the OSCE, and
the leaders of the breakaway Donbass republics, with mediation by Germany and
France in a Normandy Format. It fails to resolve the conflict.
Feb. 12, 2015: Minsk II is signed in Belarus, which would end the fighting and
grant the republics autonomy while they remain part of Ukraine. The accord was
unanimously endorsed by the U.N. Security Council
on Feb. 15. In December 2022 former German Chancellor Angela Merkel admits West never had intention of
pushing for Minsk implementation and essentially used it as a ruse to give time
for NATO to arm and train the Ukraine armed forces.
2016: The
hoax known as Russiagate grips the Democratic Party and its allied media in the
United States, in which it is falsely alleged that Russia interfered in the
2016 U.S. presidential election to get Donald Trump elected. The phony scandal
serves to further demonize Russia in the U.S. and raise tensions between the
nuclear-armed powers, conditioning the public for war against Russia.
May 12, 2016: U.S. activates missile system in Romania, angering
Russia. U.S. claims it is purely defensive, but Moscow says the system could also be used offensively
and would cut the time to deliver a strike on the Russian capital to within 10
to 12 minutes.
June 6, 2016: Symbolically on the anniversary of the Normandy
invasion, NATO launches aggressive exercises against Russia. It
begins war games with 31,000 troops near
Russia’s borders, the largest exercise in Eastern Europe since the Cold War
ended. For the first time in 75 years, German troops retrace the steps of
the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union across Poland.
German Foreign Minister Frank Walter-Steinmeier
objects. “What we shouldn’t do now is inflame the situation further
through saber-rattling and warmongering,” Steinmeier stunningly tells Bild
am Sontag newspaper. “Whoever believes that a symbolic tank parade on
the alliance’s eastern border will bring security is mistaken.”
Instead Steinmeier calls for dialogue with Moscow. “We are
well-advised to not create pretexts to renew an old confrontation,” he warns,
adding it would be “fatal to search only for military solutions and a policy of
deterrence.”
December 2021: Russia offers draft treaty proposals to the
United States and NATO proposing a new security architecture in Europe,
reviving the failed Russian attempt to do so in 2009. The treaties propose the
removal of the Romanian missile system and the withdrawal of NATO troop
deployments from Eastern Europe. Russia says there will be a
“technical-military” response if there are not serious negotiations on the
treaties. The U.S. and NATO reject them essentially out of hand.
February 2022: Russia begins its military intervention into
Donbass in the still ongoing Ukrainian civil war after first recognizing the independence
of Luhansk and Donetsk.
Before the intervention, OSCE maps show a significant uptick of
shelling from Ukraine into the separatist republics, where more than 10,000
people have been killed since 2014.
Ukrainian troops in the Donbass region, March 2015. (OSCE
Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons) (photo
deleted, D)
March-April 2022: Russia and Ukraine agree on a framework
agreement that would end the war, including Ukraine pledging not to join NATO.
The U.S. and U.K. object. Prime Minister Boris Johnson flies to Kiev to tell Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelensky to stop negotiating with Russia. The war
continues with Russia seizing much of the Donbass.
March 26, 2022: Biden admits in a speech in Warsaw that the
U.S. is seeking through its proxy war against Russia to overthrow the Putin
government.
September 2022: Donbass republics vote to join Russian Federation, as well as two
other regions: Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
May 2023: Ukraine begins counter-offensive to try to take
back territory controlled by Russia. As seen in leaked documents earlier in the
year, U.S. intelligence concludes the offensive will fail before it begins.
June 2023: A 36-hour rebellion by the Wagner group fails, when its
leader Yevegny Prigoshzin takes a deal to go into exile in Belarus. The Wagner
private army, which was funded and armed by the Russian Ministry of Defense, is
absorbed into the Russian army.
The timeline clearly shows the aggressive
Western intent towards Russia, and how the tragedy could have been avoided if
NATO would not allow Ukraine to join; if the Minsk accords had been
implemented; and if the U.S. and NATO negotiated a new security arrangement in
Europe, taking Russian security concerns into account.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N.
correspondent for The Wall
Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers,
including The Montreal Gazette and The Star of
Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday
Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and
began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the
author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel,
foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton,
foreword by Julian Assange. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and
followed on Twitter @unjoe
Chris Hedges
Report. “They Lied About Afghanistan. They
Lied About Iraq. And They Are Lying About Ukraine. “ The U.S. public has been conned, once again, into pouring billions
into another endless war. July 2,
2023.
The playbook the pimps of war use to lure us
into one military fiasco after another, including Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq,
Libya, Syria and now Ukraine, does not change. Freedom and democracy are
threatened. Evil must be vanquished. Human rights must be protected. The fate
of Europe and NATO, along with a “rules based international order” is at stake.
Victory is assured.
The results are also the same. The
justifications and narratives are exposed as lies. The cheery prognosis is
false. Those on whose behalf we are supposedly fighting are as venal as those
we are fighting against.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine was a war
crime, although one that was provoked by NATO expansion and by the United
States backing of the 2014 “Maidan” coup which ousted the democratically elected Ukrainian
President Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych wanted economic
integration with the European Union, but not at the expense of economic and
political ties with Russia. The war will only be solved through negotiations
that allow ethnic Russians in Ukraine to have autonomy and Moscow’s protection,
as well as Ukrainian neutrality, which
means the country cannot join NATO. The longer these negotiations are delayed
the more Ukrainians will suffer and die. Their cities and infrastructure will
continue to be pounded into rubble.
But this proxy war in Ukraine is designed to
serve U.S. interests. It enriches the weapons manufacturers, weakens the
Russian military and isolates Russia from Europe. What happens to Ukraine is
irrelevant.
“First, equipping our friends on the front
lines to defend themselves is a far cheaper way — in both dollars and American
lives — to degrade Russia’s ability to threaten the United States,” admitted Senate
Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.
“Second, Ukraine’s effective defense of its
territory is teaching us lessons about how to improve the defenses of partners
who are threatened by China. It is no surprise that senior officials from
Taiwan are so supportive of efforts to help Ukraine defeat Russia. Third, most
of the money that’s been appropriated for Ukraine security assistance doesn’t
actually go to Ukraine. It gets invested in American defense manufacturing. It
funds new weapons and munitions for the U.S. armed forces to replace the older
material we have provided to Ukraine. Let me be clear: this assistance means
more jobs for American workers and newer weapons for American servicemembers.”
Once the truth about these endless wars seeps into
public consciousness, the media, which slavishly promotes these conflicts,
drastically reduces coverage. The military debacles, as in Iraq and
Afghanistan, continue largely out of view. By the time the U.S. concedes
defeat, most barely remember that these wars are being fought.
The pimps of war who orchestrate these
military fiascos migrate from administration to administration. Between posts
they are ensconced in think tanks — Project for the New American Century,
American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, Institute for the
Study of War, The Atlantic Council and The Brookings Institution — funded by
corporations and the war industry. Once the Ukraine war comes to its inevitable
conclusion, these Dr. Strangeloves will seek to ignite a war with China.
The U.S. Navy and military are already menacing and encircling China.
God help us if we don’t stop them.
These pimps of war con
us into one conflict after another with flattering narratives that paint us as
the world’s saviors. They don’t even have to be innovative. The rhetoric is
lifted from the old playbook. We naively swallow the bait and embrace the flag
— this time blue and yellow — to become unwitting agents in our
self-immolation.
Since the end of the Second World War, the
government has spent between
45 to 90 percent of the federal budget
on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest sustained
activity of the U.S. government. It has stopped mattering — at least to the
pimps of war — whether these wars are rational or prudent. The war industry
metastasizes within the bowels of the American empire to hollow it out from the
inside. The U.S. is reviled abroad, drowning in debt, has an impoverished
working class and is burdened with a decayed infrastructure as well as shoddy
social services.
Wasn’t the Russian military — because of poor morale, poor generalship, outdated weapons, desertions, a lack
of ammunition that supposedly forced soldiers
to fight with
shovels, and severe supply shortages —
supposed to collapse months ago? Wasn’t
Putin supposed to be driven from
power? Weren’t the sanctions supposed
to plunge the
ruble into a death spiral? Wasn’t the severing of the Russian banking system
from SWIFT, the
international money transfer system, supposed to cripple the Russian economy?
How is it that inflation rates in Europe and
the United States are
higher than in Russia despite
these attacks on the Russian economy?
Wasn’t the nearly over $150 billion in
sophisticated military hardware, financial and humanitarian assistance pledged by the
U.S., EU and 11 other countries supposed to have turned the tide of the war?
How is that perhaps a third of the tanks Germany and the U.S. provided, were
swiftly turned by Russian mines, artillery, anti-tank weapons, air strikes and
missiles into charred hunks of metal at the start of the vaunted counter-offensive?
Wasn’t this latest Ukrainian counter-offensive, which was originally known as
the “spring offensive,” supposed to punch through Russia’s heavily fortified
front lines and regain huge swathes of territory? How can we explain the tens
of thousands of Ukrainian military casualties and the forced conscription
by Ukraine’s military? Even our retired generals and former CIA, FBI, NSA and
Homeland Security officials, who serve as analysts on networks such as CNN and
MSNBC, can’t say the
offensive has succeeded.
And what of the Ukrainian democracy we are
fighting to protect? Why did the Ukrainian parliament revoke the
official use of minority languages, including Russian, three days after the
2014 coup? How do we rationalize the eight years of warfare against ethnic
Russians in the Donbass region before the Russian invasion in Feb. 2022? How do
we explain the killing of over
14,200 people and the 1.5 million people who were displaced, before
Russia's invasion took place last year?
How do we defend the decision by
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to ban eleven
opposition parties, including The Opposition Platform for Life, which had 10
percent of the seats in the Supreme Council, Ukraine’s unicameral parliament,
along with the Shariy Party, Nashi, Opposition Bloc, Left Opposition, Union of
Left Forces, State, Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, Socialist Party of
Ukraine, Socialists Party and Volodymyr Saldo Bloc? How can we accept the
banning of these opposition parties — many of which are on the left — while
Zelenskyy allows fascists from
the Svoboda and Right Sector parties,
as well as the Banderite Azov Battalion and other extremist militias,
to flourish?
How do we deal with the anti-Russian purges
and arrests of supposed “fifth columnists” sweeping through Ukraine,
given that 30 percent of
Ukraine’s inhabitants are Russian speakers? How do we respond to the neo-Nazi
groups supported by Zelenskyy’s government that harass and attack the LGBT
community, the Roma population, anti-fascist protests and threaten city council
members, media outlets, artists and foreign students? How can we countenance
the decision by the
U.S and its Western allies to block negotiations
with Russia to end the war, despite Kyiv and Moscow apparently being
on the verge of negotiating a peace treaty?
I reported from Eastern and Central Europe in
1989 during the breakup of the Soviet Union. NATO, we assumed, had become
obsolete. President Mikhail Gorbachev proposed security and economic agreements
with Washington and Europe. Secretary of State James Baker in Ronald Reagan’s
administration, along with the West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich
Genscher, assured Gorbachev
that NATO would not be extended beyond the borders of a unified Germany. We
naively thought the end of the Cold War meant that Russia, Europe and the U.S.,
would no longer have to divert massive resources to their militaries.
The so-called “peace dividend,” however, was a
chimera.
If Russia did not want to be the enemy, Russia
would be forced to become the enemy. The pimps of war recruited former Soviet
republics into NATO by painting Russia as a threat. Countries that joined NATO,
which now include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro,
and North Macedonia, reconfigured their militaries, often through tens of
millions in western loans, to become compatible with NATO military hardware.
This made the weapons manufacturers billions in profits.
It was universally understood in Eastern and
Central Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Union that NATO expansion was unnecessary and a
dangerous provocation. It made no geopolitical sense. But it made commercial
sense. War is a business.
In a classified diplomatic cable — obtained
and released by WikiLeaks — dated Feb. 1, 2008, written from Moscow, and addressed to
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, NATO-European Union Cooperative, National Security
Council, Russia Moscow Political Collective, Secretary of Defense, and
Secretary of State, there was an unequivocal understanding that expanding NATO risked conflict with
Russia, especially over Ukraine.
“Not only does Russia perceive encirclement
[by NATO], and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it
also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously
affect Russian security interests,” the cable reads. “Experts tell us that
Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO
membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could
lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that
eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision
Russia does not want to have to face. . . .”
“Dmitri Trenin, Deputy Director of the
Carnegie Moscow Center, expressed concern that Ukraine was, in the long-term,
the most potentially destabilizing factor in U.S.-Russian relations, given the
level of emotion and neuralgia triggered by its quest for NATO membership . .
.” the cable read. “Because membership remained divisive in Ukrainian
domestic politics, it created an opening for Russian intervention. Trenin
expressed concern that elements within the Russian establishment would be
encouraged to meddle, stimulating U.S. overt encouragement of opposing
political forces, and leaving the U.S. and Russia in a classic confrontational
posture.”
The Russian invasion of Ukraine would not have
happened if the western alliance had honored its promises not to expand NATO
beyond Germany’s borders and Ukraine had remained neutral. The pimps of war knew the potential
consequences of NATO expansion. War,
however, is their single minded vocation, even if it leads to a nuclear holocaust with Russia or
China.
The war
industry, not Putin, is our most dangerous enemy.
MATTHEW
HOH. “A War Long
Wanted: Diplomatic Malpractice in Ukraine. JUNE 9, 2023.”
[How the Ukraine War functions as an economic system.]
Author’s Note: This is the original draft of the letter to President
Biden and the US Congress published in The New York Times on May 16 by
the Eisenhower
Media Network. This version, which is substantially longer than
the published letter, is published here amended from its original formatting as
a group letter. This version goes into much greater depth on the background of Russia’s invasion, the role of the military-industrial complex
and the fossil fuel industry in US policy-making, and speaks to the toxic
and dangerous diplomatic malpractice that has dominated
US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War.
The essay is not exhaustive, for example, I don’t write of events after
February 2022 or offer predictions as to what will come if ceasefire and negotiations
are not begun, other than stating a general fear of unending stalemated
war, a la WWI, or expressing concern for an escalation towards a
nuclear WWIII. It also does not address the substantial complaints that can be
made about the Russians. Repeating what
is found abundantly in US media was not my intent, but rather what is omitted,
particularly examining deliberate US decision-making over three decades and
noting the absence of strategic empathy from the US/NATO side, hence the charge
of diplomatic malpractice.
These are my views and don’t necessarily represent the views of my
fellow co-signers on The New York Times letter.
Nothing written excuses or condones Russia’s actions. The Russian invasion is a
war of aggression and a violation of international law. An attempt at
understanding the Russian perspective on their war does not endorse the
invasion, occupation and war crimes committed, and it certainly does not imply
the Russians had no other option but this war. Rather, this essay seeks to communicate
that this war was not unprovoked and that the actions of the US and NATO over
decades led to a war of choice between the US, NATO, Ukraine and Russia. A war
long wanted by megalomaniacs and war profiteers in DC, London, Brussels, Kyv
and Moscow became realized in February 2022.
The US Provoked
Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
The direct cause of
the current inter-state war in Ukraine is Russia’s invasion, but America’s
relentless expansion of NATO up to Russia’s borders provoked the attack. Since
at least 2007, Russia repeatedly warned NATO’s armed forces on Russian borders,
especially Ukraine, were intolerable – just as Russian forces in Mexico or
Canada would be intolerable to the US now or as Russian missiles in Cuba were
in 1962. Coupled with these provocations has been an American militarized
foreign policy characterized by unilateralism, regime change and preemptive
war. This has ensured a reality since the end of the Cold War of confrontation
and slaughter throughout the world. Thus, the famed predictions of the 1990s of
a clash of civilizations became a reality of our own making.
The Broken Promises of
Post-Cold War Peace
In the wake of the
Cold War, US and Western European leaders made assurances to Soviet and then Russian leaders that NATO would not expand toward Russia’s borders. “…there would be no extension of…NATO one inch to the
east” was what US
Secretary of State James Baker promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on
February 9, 1990. Similar assurances from other US leaders, as well as from
British, German and French leaders, throughout the 1990s form the foundation for the Russian argument of
being double-crossed by NATO’s eastward expansion.
This resentment is not
the only grievance expressed by the Russians over the actions of the US in the
decade following the end of the Cold War. The economic shock doctrine forced upon the Russians, and the looting of Russian finances and industry, led by US bankers and consultants, saw an incredible drop in living standards, including a severe decline in life expectancy. The post-Soviet economic collapse saw GDP cut in half and millions die.
This coincided with the US influencing and possibly rigging the 1996 elections for the corrupt and drunken Boris Yeltsin. Put all that together and you have a decade
of humiliation and harm that still aggrieves Russian leaders and their public
and informs a nationalist desire to stand up to the US, the West and NATO.
US and NATO bombings of Russia’s ally Serbia in 1999 occurred not just in the same year as the
first expansion of NATO membership into Eastern Europe but the same month.
This attack on their Serb allies is a continued theme in Russian messaging and
talking points. Mostly now forgotten here in the US, NATO’s 78-day air war on
Serbia is often the starting justification for Russia’s defense of its own war on
Ukraine. Seen by the Russians as unjustified and illegal, as the first instance
of NATO’s kinetic bullying, the 1999 war against Serbia leads Russian arguments
about the Ukraine War being a necessary war of defense.
The Russians saw
George W. Bush’s unilateral exit from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty
in 2001 in the context of NATO expansion and the US’ Global War on Terror. To
the Russians, NATO expansion meant the US moving its bases and missile launch
sites closer to Russia while US leaders announced policies of “with us or against us”. At the same time, the US withdrew from the
decades-old ABM Treaty, enacted to ensure nuclear deterrence by limiting one
side’s ability to launch a first strike and then be protected from a
retaliatory strike by defensive missiles (defensive missiles that the Russians
understood would be made more effective by being moved closer to their
borders). The withdrawal from the ABM Treaty announced monthsbefore the 9/11 attacks, was an early element of what would come
to be known as the Bush Doctrine. The Bush Doctrine had three core components:
unilateralism, preemptive military action and regime change. The Bush Doctrine
peaked with the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.
NATO-Backed Regime
Changes Stoked Russia’s Fears
A year to the month
after the US waged an unprovoked preemptive war against Iraq, NATO conducted
its second post-Cold War enlargement. In March 2004, seven more Eastern
European nations were admitted into NATO, including Russia’s three Baltic
neighbors, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. NATO troops were now on Russia’s
direct border.
Later in 2004, Ukraine
underwent its Orange Revolution. Seen in the West as affirmations of democracy,
the Orange Revolution and its sister color revolutions in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet
republics from 2000–2010 threatened, often successfully, the rule of
pro-Russian leaders. Russia’s ally in Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, was removed
in Serbia’s Bulldozer Revolution of 2000. Three of these revolutions, all
successful, occurred within 18 months of one another: Georgia in 2003, Ukraine
in 2004 and Kyrgyzstan in 2005. All three Moscow- friendly leaders were
deposed. Less successful color revolutions occurred in the former Soviet
Republics of Belarus in 2006 and Moldova in 2009.
In Kyrgyzstan in 2010,
a second color revolution occurred. This time, Kurmanbek Bakiyev was chased out of office after closing
an American air base in his country. To the Russians, these were not
revolutions but coups, all part of a grand strategy by Washington to weaken Russia by
removing its allies.
Historical evidence
for Russia’s paranoia exists. Since the end of World War II, the US has
conducted dozens of coups across the globe. With the Bush Doctrine openly
enshrining preemptive warfare and regime change, the color revolutions, the
enlargement of NATO and the abrogation of the ABM Treaty, the Russians saw a
clear danger in the West’s actions. The idea of Russia joining NATO seems to have been broached with and by NATO and Russia on multiple occasions, but by
several years into Vladimir Putin’s reign, distrust and animosity between
Russia and NATO were in control.
Dramatic Escalation:
NATO’s Role in Ukraine and Georgia
In 2008, NATO leaders,
including President Bush, announced plans to bring Ukraine and
Georgia, also on Russia’s borders, into NATO. That summer would see a five-day
war between Georgia and Russia, with Russia invading after Georgia fired first. Washington and Brussels failed to understand
that the Russians would not hesitate to use force if provoked, demonstrating
Russia’s determination to enforce red lines. Rather, in 2009, the US announced plans to put missile systems in Poland and Romania.
Announced as missile defense, the launchers could fire defensive weapons or
launch offensive cruise missiles into Russia, only 100 miles away from the missile bases in eastern
Poland.
In 2009, the Russians
witnessed the US dramatically escalate the war in Afghanistan, and then in
2011, NATO carried out regime change in Libya. In both Afghanistan and Libya, the wars were sustained by lies. In both countries, military
victory by the US and Western Europe was paramount and any efforts at
negotiation were not only dismissed but denied.
By 2012, the US’ goal
of regime change in Syria was clear. Like Serbia more than a decade earlier, the Syrian government
was a Russian ally now under threat. As in Afghanistan and Libya, negotiations
would not be possible, as the Americans set a precondition that required Syrian
President Bashar Assad to step down as an outcome of the talks. That was unacceptable to Assad and to the Russians. To the
Russians, these three wars of the Obama administration displayed an American
determination to wage war without regard for consequence and to never
negotiate.
By the end of 2013,
political tensions in Ukraine, a country with a long and deep historical split between its eastern and western halves,
had developed into a crisis. Protests occurred across the country and in Kyiv
protestors occupied the central square. By January 2014, violence was underway
and by the end of February the legally
elected, if corrupt, Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, had fled to Moscow.
The US presence in the overthrow of Yanukovych’s government was readily observable. Senior US State Department officials and members of Congress, led by Senator John McCain and Victoria
Nuland, attended anti-government rallies, boasted of spending over $5 billion to promote democracy in Ukraine, and
infamously discussed
plans for a post-coup
government in Kyiv. Much more happened covertly and quietly, and if
known, reported only by US journalists outside the mainstream.
The Russians believed
what happened in Ukraine to be a coup. A repeat of the color revolutions that
had replaced Russian-friendly governments with US/NATO-friendly ones. The
Russians saw a determined US and NATO willing to overthrow governments and
engage in war. From their perspective, they were being besieged by NATO enlargement and threatened by
American missiles. Warnings against not just NATO enlargement but interference
in Ukraine had gone unheeded. The Russian parliament had formally denounced
NATO expansion in 2004 and the Kremlin started issuing regular warnings in 2007. In 2008, following NATO’s announcement to eventually bring Ukraine and
Georgia in as members, Vladimir Putin warned George W. Bush: “if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so
without Crimea and the eastern regions. It will simply fall apart.” [Andrew
Cockburn points out that US recognition of an independent Kosovo in February
2008 further incensed Russia and that even Mikheil Saakashvili complained to
Secretary Rice that this would provoke a dangerous reaction from Russia.]
In response to what they saw as a coup in neighboring Ukraine, Russia
seized Crimea, home to their centuries-old warm-water naval base, and invested
significant military support into Eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region by backing
Russian- speaking separatists in a steadily worsening civil war. The following year, in a similar manner, the Russians heavily
intervened with their military in Syria, something they had warned they would
do to ensure the survival of the Syrian government. Russia’s actions in Ukraine
and Syria were predictable and should have been expected.
A Desperate Push for
Peace: Minsk II Accords
The civil war in
Ukraine worsened through 2014 until negotiations delivered the Minsk II Accords
in 2015. This agreement between Ukraine and Russia dramatically
diminished the devastation and set a pathway to autonomy within a federalized
eastern Ukraine for the Donbas. By and large, the violence remained low until
2021, until tensions renewed fighting, although both Moscow and Kyiv were failing to honor aspects of the agreement. The Russians argued the
Ukrainian government was failing to implement the Accord’s framework for Donbas
autonomy, while the Ukrainians argued Moscow was refusing to withdraw military support
from the region.
Late in 2022, the
former leaders of Germany, France and Ukraine attested that the West had no
intentions of ever seeing through or honoring the Minsk II Accords. Per Angela
Merkel, Francois Hollande and Petro Poroshenko, the West’s purpose was to use the time to arm Ukraine and prepare for eventual war with Russia and not to prevent such a war
(it appears the Russians did the same, preparing their economy to protect it
from the inevitable US sanctions, to include enhancing relationships with other
nations, and building out their military-industrial base to support a
high-intensity conventional war – the Russians seem to have been much better
prepared for this war than the West). The Russians accepted these admissions as
a validation of the bad faith they alleged of the West, another betrayal, and
more reason to see force as having been the correct
option for securing their needs.
During the Obama
administration, the US provided only nonlethal support to Ukraine, but it did
begin a troop buildup in Europe, including conducting more exercises in the new
NATO nations on Russia’s borders. The Trump administration escalated the US role in Ukraine’s
civil war by sending Ukraine hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons. This was interpreted by the Russians as an indication of a US preference for
conflict and possibly a preparation for war.
That interpretation
was reinforced when President Trump unilaterally ended the Intermediate Nuclear
Forces (INF) and Open Skies treaties. The INF Treaty prohibited exactly the type
of medium-range missile that the US could now place in the NATO countries
of the former Soviet bloc, allowing Moscow to be hit by first-strike nuclear missiles in a manner of minutes. For decades, the
Open Skies Treaty had allowed each nation to conduct surveillance missions as a
key element of trust. These overflights verified adherence to nuclear weapons
treaties and ensured each side could see the other side’s actions. This limited
the real peril of mistaken assumptions and misinterpretations that could lead
to nuclear war. To its discredit, the Biden administration has refused to reenter either treaty.
As fighting in the
Donbas increased in late 2021, the Russians put forward negotiation proposals while sending more forces to the border with Ukraine. US and NATO officials rejected Russia’s proposals immediately. In the first months of
2022, violence dramatically increased in eastern Ukraine. Stated attempts at dialogue, viewed in hindsight, belie a sincere desire by either
side to avoid conflict. By mid-February, observers of the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe counted thousands of explosions weekly. On February 24, Russia invaded Ukraine.
Understanding the War
Through Russia’s Eyes or, inversely, How to Commit Diplomatic Malpractice
For years, the
Russians made clear their red lines and demonstrated in Georgia and Syria that
they would use force to defend those lines. In 2014, their immediate seizure of
Crimea and their direct and major support to Donbas separatists again showed
they were serious about protecting their interests. Why US and NATO leadership
did not understand this can only be explained by incompetence, arrogance, cynicism
or a treacherous mixture of all three. This mixture illuminates the pathway to
war in Ukraine and helps clarify the over 250 wars, military operations, interventions and
occupations the US has conducted since the end of the Cold War.
What is written here
is and was not unknown. Almost as soon as the Cold War ended American
diplomats, generals and politicians warned of the danger of expanding NATO to Russia’s borders and
maliciously interfering in Russia’s sphere of influence. Former Cabinet officials Madeleine Albright, Robert Gates and William Perry made
these warnings, as did venerated diplomats Strobe Talbott, George Kennan, Jack
Matlock and Henry Kissinger. At one point in 1997, 50 senior American
foreign policy experts wrote an open letter to President Clinton advising him
not to expand NATO. They called NATO expansion “a policy error of historic proportions.” President Clinton ignored these warnings
and called for NATO expansion, in part to pander to American voting blocks of Eastern European descent.
Perhaps most important
to our understanding of the hubris and Machiavellian calculation in US
decision-making is the disregard for the warnings issued by Williams Burns, the
current director of the CIA. First in an official cable in 1995 while serving
in Moscow, Burns wrote: “Hostility to early NATO expansion…is almost universally felt
across the domestic political spectrum here.”
Then in 2008 Burns, as
US Ambassador to Moscow, wrote these warnings on multiple occasions in stark language:
“I fully understand how difficult a decision
to hold off on [Ukranianin NATO membership] will be. But it’s equally hard to
overstate the strategic consequences of a premature [membership] offer,
especially to Ukraine. Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all
redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half
years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the
dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to
find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge
to Russian interests. At this stage, a [NATO membership] offer would be seen
not as a technical step along a long road toward membership, but as throwing
down the strategic gauntlet. Today’s Russia will respond. Russian-Ukrainian
relations will go into a deep freeze. … It will create fertile soil for Russian
meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.”
and again, in another cable to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
titled Nyet Means Nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement Redlines:
“Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not
only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the
consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive
encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it
also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences, which would seriously
affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly
worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of
the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split,
involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would
have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to
have to face.”
To reiterate these
were the words of the current US Director of Central Intelligence.
Who Profits from War? [The Economics of NATO Expansion.]
Underwriting this
wanton diplomatic malpractice and its attendant megalomania is the
American military-industrial complex. More than 60 years ago, President
Dwight Eisenhower warned of “the potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power” in his farewell address. He was famously describing the
ever-increasing influence, if not control, of the military-industrial complex.
At the end of the Cold
War, the military-industrial complex faced an existential crisis. Without an adversary like the Soviet Union,
justifying massive arms spending by the United States would be difficult. NATO
expansion allowed for new markets. Countries coming into NATO would be required
to upgrade their armed forces, replacing their Soviet-era stocks with Western
weapons, ammunition, machines, hardware and software compatible with NATO’s
armies. Entire armies, navies and air forces had to be remade. NATO expansion
was a cash bonanza for a weapons industry that originally saw destitution as
the fruit of the Cold War’s end. From 1996–1998, US arms companies spent $51 million ($94 million today) lobbying Congress. Millions more were
spent on campaign donations. Beating swords into plowshares would have to wait
for another epoch once the weapons industry realized the promise of Eastern
European markets.
In a circular and
mutually reinforcing loop, Congress appropriates money to the Pentagon. The Pentagon funds the arms industry, which, in turn, funds think tanks and lobbyists to direct Congress on further
Pentagon spending. Campaign contributions from the weapons industry accompany that
lobbying. The Pentagon, CIA, National Security Council, State Department and
other limbs of the national security state directly fund the think tanks and ensure that any policies promoted
are the policies the government institutions themselves want.
It is not just Congress that is under the sway of the military-industrial complex.
These same weapons companies that
bribe members of Congress and fund think tanks often employ, directly and indirectly, the cadre of experts that litter cable news programs and fill space in news
reporting. Rarely is this conflict of interest identified by American
media. Thus, men and women who owe their paychecks to the likes of Lockheed,
Raytheon or General Dynamics appear in the media and advocate for more war and
more weapons. These commentators and
pundits seldom acknowledge that their benefactors immensely profit from the
policies of more war and more weapons.
[Revolving Door] The corruption
extends into the executive branch as
the military-industrial complex employs scores of administration officials whose political party is no
longer in the White House. Out of government, Republican and Democratic
officials head from the Pentagon, the CIA and the State Department to arms
companies, think tanks and consultancies. When their party retakes the White
House, they return to the government. In exchange for bringing their rolodexes,
they receive lavish salaries and benefits. Similarly, US generals and
admirals retire from the Pentagon and go straightto arms companies. This revolving door reaches the highest level. Before becoming Secretary of Defense, Secretary of
State and Director of National Intelligence, Lloyd Austin, Antony Blinken and
Avril Haines were employed by the military-industrial complex. In Secretary Blinken’s
case, he founded a firm, WestExec Advisors, devoted to trading and peddling
influence for weapons contracts.
There is a broader
level of commercial greed in the context of the Ukraine War that cannot be
dismissed or ignored. The US fuels and
arms the world. US fossil fuel and weapons exports now exceed its agricultural and industrial exports. Competition for the European fuel market,
particularly liquid natural gas, has been a primary concern over the last decade
for both Democratic and Republican administrations. Removing Russia as the key
energy supplier to Europe and limiting overall Russian fossil fuel exports
worldwide has greatly benefited American oil and gas companies. In addition to wider
commercial trade interests, the sheer amounts of money the American fossil fuel
business makes as a result of denying Europeans the option of buying Russian fossil fuels cannot
be disregarded.
The Cost of War
Hundreds of thousands
may have been killed and wounded in the fighting. The harrowing psychological
wounding of both combatants and civilians will likely be greater. Millions have been made homeless and live now as
refugees. The damage to the environment is incalculable and the economic
destruction has not been solely confined to the war zone but has spread
throughout the world, fueling inflation, destabilizing energy supplies and
increasing food insecurity. The rise in energy and food costs has undoubtedly led to excess deaths far
from the geographical boundaries of the war.
The war will likely
continue to develop as a protracted stalemate of purposeless killing and
destruction. Horrifically, the next likely outcome is for the war to escalate,
perhaps uncontrollably, to a world war and possible nuclear conflict. Despite
what the crackpot realists in Washington, London, Brussels, Kyiv and Moscow may
say, nuclear war is not manageable and certainly not winnable. A limited
nuclear war, perhaps each side firing 10 percent of their arsenals, will result
in a nuclear winter during which we get to watch our children starve to death.
All our efforts should be devoted to avoiding such an apocalypse.
The Potential for
Peace
The intent of this
essay has been to delineate how deliberate US and NATO provocations toward
Russia have been perceived from the Russian perspective. Russia is a nation
whose current geopolitical anxiety is defined by memories of invasions by
Charles XII, Napoleon, the Earl of Aberdeen, the Kaiser and Hitler. US troops
were among an Allied invasion force that intervened unsuccessfully against the
winning side in Russia’s post-WWI civil war. Possessing historical context,
understanding an enemy and having strategic empathy toward your adversary is
not deceitful or weak but prudent and wise. We are taught this at all levels in
the US military. Nor is dissent from continuing this war and a refusal to take
sides unpatriotic or insincere.
President Biden’s
promise to back Ukraine “as long as it takes” must not be a license to pursue
ill-defined or unachievable goals. It may prove as catastrophic as
President Putin’s decision last year to launch his criminal invasion and
occupation. It is morally not possible to endorse the strategy of fighting
Russia to the last Ukrainian nor is it moral to be silent as our nation pursues
strategies and policies that cannot achieve its stated goals. It is not only an
affront to our moral and humane senses, but this senseless pursuit of an
unattainable defeat of Russia in the spirit of some form of 19th-century
imperial victory or grand geopolitical chess move is vainglorious,
counterproductive and self-destructive.
Only a meaningful and
genuine commitment to diplomacy, specifically an immediate ceasefire and
negotiations without disqualifying or prohibitive preconditions will end this
war and its suffering, bring stability to Europe and prevent a nuclear
third-world war.
Deliberate
provocations delivered this war. In the same manner, deliberate diplomacy can
end it.
Matthew Hoh is a member of the advisory boards of
Expose Facts, Veterans For Peace and World Beyond War. In 2009 he resigned his
position with the State Department in Afghanistan in protest of the escalation
of the Afghan War by the Obama Administration.
Summary of US Provocation of Ukraine
War, Calamitous War, Worse Possibilities
EVE OTTENBERG.
“Annals of the
Ukraine War: Year Two.” JUNE 9, 2023.
From
the human-caused climate catastrophe to a nuclear showdown between Washington
and Moscow or Beijing, to fascism ascendant, three terrifying disasters loom
over humanity like the shadow of death. These threats have lurked for some years, but the Ukraine war,
facilitated by Joe Biden’s arrival
in the white house in 2021 and his pronounced aggressiveness toward Moscow,
shifted nuclear Armageddon to center
stage and pushed the doomsday clock close to midnight.
[Russian Perceptions and Biden’s
Prevarications]
Trust between the Kremlin and western governments vanished long ago, so it’s
hard to see how this calamity ever gets resolved. Russian officials watched the
U.S. fork over more than $30 billion in armament to Ukraine with billions more
in the pipeline, arm neo-Nazis, whitewash them and cover Kiev’s government
payroll. They’ve seen (and often destroyed) the weapons Washington sent. Those
weapons would never include long-range missiles that could strike inside
Russia, Biden promised. Well, that oath wasn’t worth the toilet paper it was
written on. The U.S. would never provide Ukraine with tanks, Biden swore up and
down – until he changed his mind. American fighter jets, he gave his word,
would not fly in Ukraine. Well, now we see what his word is worth. What next?
NATO troops in Ukraine? Because then the bombing of U.S., European and Russian
cities will commence. It’s called World
War III. Biden knows this. So do the Russians. And despite their loud
protests in the face of this nonstop U.S. escalation, they have become
ominously quiet about their red lines.
Once upon a time in
Bucharest back in 2008, Moscow
basically told the west that if its neighbor Kiev joined NATO, that would be
the end of Ukraine. Feckless Eurocrats and birdbrain American presidents did not
listen. Years passed. Washington sponsored a coup against the duly, legally
elected leader of Ukraine in 2014, then installed a west friendly, Russophobic
regime, or perhaps more accurately a puppet, whose idiotic economic policies
led to a population outflow of millions of Ukrainians, as Washington proceeded
massively to arm and train far-right fanatics.
Through all of this, until December 2021, Moscow only
protested about its red lines in general terms. It also periodically indicated
it might snap. Then, in late 2021, the Kremlin sent detailed letters to
Washington, listing Russian security
concerns, chiefly that Ukraine
should not join NATO. Moscow also was alarmed at the fate of Donbas Russians, 12,000 of whom Ukraine
had slaughtered since 2014 and on whose borders Kiev had massed troops and, in
early 2022, dramatically stepped up assaults, as noted by the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe. Such a deadly uptick signaled assault and
possibly ethnic-cleansing for Russian-speaking Ukrainians. But the U.S.
blithely responded with hokum about NATO being a defensive organization. Hokum
any half-wit can see right through by looking at U.S. missiles in Poland and
Romania, two countries that border Russia.
Washington also
insisted on every country’s sacred right to join NATO, though decades ago when
Moscow mentioned joining, it got the cold shoulder; apparently Russia did not
have that right. So the Kremlin could be excused for regarding NATO as a
hostile military axis. Indeed, as our leading public intellectual Noam Chomsky
said, “Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was clearly provoked, while the U.S.
invasion of Iraq was clearly unprovoked.” (He also said whataboutism is
“otherwise known as elementary honesty.”) Both invaders wrecked the target country,
Russia more slowly, but make no mistake, that will be the outcome if this war
doesn’t end soon.
The moral of the story is that if you can avoid war, that is a
very good idea. If someone says “I will attack, if you don’t stop threatening
me,” well, listen. The peacemakers are blessed, but sadly they were absent from
the world’s imperial capital, Washington, in December of 2021. Currently they
are absent everywhere they are needed, period.
So now, thanks to
Biden, we stare down the barrel of nuclear war. The alternative in 2024 will
likely be Trump, who promises
accessories like martial law, a presidency for life, show trials of his
political enemies and possibly nuclear war with China, in short, fascism. For
this lousy choice we can blame our corrupt plutocracy and its media parasites.
Put another way, those who rise to the
top in Washington are not the cream of the crop, but the cream that curdled,
years ago. Obama, Bush, Clinton – slick hustlers all, who slaughtered
innocents across the globe, and all very short-sighted about anything other
than looking out for the main chance, even if it meant bombing helpless
residents of impoverished nations.
Meanwhile in the U.S.
imperial capital, blood-soaked neocons run the show. This led to events May 26,
when Russia’s foreign ministry summoned U.S. diplomats “over what it called
‘provocative statements’ by National
Security Advisor Jake Sullivan,” according to RT. “The American official
was de facto supporting Ukrainian strikes against Russian territory.” Given
that Sullivan’s up to his elbows in blood for his responsibility in this
Ukrainian debacle, the blood of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and
tens of thousands of Russian ones, I’m not surprised he was, de facto or
otherwise, basically advocating World War III. Moscow called his endorsement of
Ukrainian attacks on Russia “hypocritical and untruthful.” That’s called
understatement.
Sullivan, secretary of state Antony Blinken and his undersecretary
Victoria Nuland are in charge in Washington, instead of the unfocussed, forgetful figurehead, Joe Biden,
and they want war, for decades, if they so choose. Inauspiciously, sane,
non-neocons now resign from the Biden regime en masse, a development covered in
depth by Moon of Alabama May 25. Rick
Waters, head of the state department’s “China House” leaves his post. After
the ridiculous spy balloon hysteria,
with its wild delusions of assault and evil designs by a mortal enemy, Waters
was one of the more rational actors, trying to limit the damage, reportedly
emailing state department staff to postpone some sanctions and export controls
on China, you know, moves that could have been viewed as, um, hostile.
Also dispiriting to
those hoping to restrain imperial war schemes, deputy secretary of state Wendy Sherman announced her retirement.
Sherman backed the original Iran nuclear pact and pushed hard to get an inept
Biden administration to return to it, something, contrary to campaign promises,
Biden couldn’t manage to do. As a result, the Middle East teeters constantly on
the edge of regional war, which the pact would have helped prevent. Colin Kahl, a defense undersecretary
departs this summer. He opposed escalating the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine. Nor
was he popular with lunatic Sinophobes. To make the loss of these realists even
worse, Biden tapped a ferocious China hawk to head the joint chiefs of staff,
thus replacing the less rabid though rather ineffectual Mark Milley. All these
moves spell trouble. They mean ?
[NOAM CHOMSKY’S
ANALYSIS]So the situation has deteriorated dangerously, and this is what Chomsky predicted if Washington didn’t
face the “ugly” post-invasion choice of rewarding Moscow by enforcing Kiev’s
neutrality and the Minsk Accords for the Donbas. No one has documented the U.S.
empire’s depravity as long and relentlessly as Chomsky. His new book, Illegitimate
Authority, continues this effort, singling out the triad of cataclysms –
climate collapse, nuclear war and fascism – thundering in humanity’s front yard
like the crack of doom. These interviews, collected from Truthout, at first
zero in on how rich countries burning oil, gas and coal have crushed anything
resembling a normal climate, with a few that focus on rising fascism.
But when the book
reaches early 2022, it shifts its emphasis to Ukraine. Chomsky is well aware of
Washington’s provocations, while regarding Moscow’s response to them as
criminal. He quotes Eastern Europe specialist Richard Sakwa: “NATO’s existence
became justified by the need to manage threats provoked by its enlargement.”
Well, now NATO has provoked a threat that, according to one whose hands are red
with blood from this war, Nuland, could last “16 years.”
Chomsky also addresses
the imbecilic fantasy of regime change, noting that historically this has led
to worse, more extreme leaders, for which he cites a convincing discussion by
Andrew Cockburn. Chomsky called NATO dreams of overthrowing Vladimir Putin
“foolish,” because someone far more menacing would very likely take over. Among
Kremlin leaders, Putin is, in fact, a moderate, with far less of an appetite
for war than the others who advocated invading Ukraine for years, while he
demurred.
In March 2022, when neutral countries
sponsored talks between Moscow and Kiev,
Chomsky warned, “negotiations will get nowhere if the U.S. persists in its
adamant refusal to join…and if the press continues to insist that the public
remain in the dark by refusing even to report Zelensky’s proposals.” Well,
nowhere is exactly where they went, thanks to the then U.K. prime minister, the
buffoonish Boris Johnson, who jetted into Kiev, allegedly at Biden’s behest,
and clarified to Zelensky that while the Ukrainian president might be ready for
peace, the west was not. That scuttled the talks.
That’s where we are
now. Washington just extracted itself from losing a 20-year military quagmire
in Afghanistan. Now it’s up to its neck in a proxy war its boosters say could
last decades. Unfortunately for the imperial team, its opponent in this latest
bloodletting is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. This is not some
helpless undeveloped country that Washington can bully and then prevaricate
about pusillanimous American behavior not amounting to a military defeat. Russia is a great power and a nuclear
one. In 16 years of confrontation with it, a lot could go very, very wrong.
Eve Ottenberg is a
novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Roman Summer. She can be reached at her website. https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/06/09/ukraine-war-only-gets-worse/
SPECIFIC ISSUES
Thomas Palley. “Ukraine destroyed the Kakhovka dam: a
forensic assessment.” Editor.
Mronline.org (7-7-23). In multiple ways, the dam’s
destruction echoes the 2022 destruction of the Russian-owned Nord Stream 2
pipeline. Originally published: Thomas Palley Blog on July 4, 2023 (more
by Thomas Palley Blog)
(Posted Jul 06, 2023); Inequality, Strategy, WarEurope,
Russia,
UkraineNewswireKakhovka
dam.
The Kakhovka dam was a massive
two-mile-long structure that dammed the Dnieper River which bisects Ukraine. It
was built by the Soviet Union in 1956 and raised the Dnieper by 16 meters (52
feet), creating the Kakhovka Reservoir. The dam was destroyed on 6 June 2023,
resulting in massive flooding downstream on both sides of the river which
created a social and environmental disaster. The city of Kherson, located near
the river’s mouth with the Black Sea, was also
flooded.
Both Ukraine and Russia deny blowing up the dam and blame the other. At this stage, all
the evidence is circumstantial and conjectural, but a forensic assessment of
that evidence overwhelmingly suggests Ukraine destroyed the dam. Despite that,
U.S. and Western European politicians and media have uniformly sought to
implicate Russia as the perpetrator.
In multiple ways, the dam’s destruction echoes the 2022
destruction of the Russian-owned Nord Stream 2 pipeline. That pipeline was a piece of civilian
infrastructure; was destroyed by an explosion; its destruction caused a massive
environmental disaster; Ukraine denies any role; many European governments claimed Russia had blown up its own
pipeline; and Western media
either explicitly claimed Russia had done it (Time) or tendentiously sought to implicate Russia (New York Times, Guardian).
The evidence: a
forensic assessment MORE https://mronline.org/2023/07/06/ukraine-destroyed-the-kakhovka-dam-a-forensic-assessment/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ukraine-destroyed-the-kakhovka-dam- a-forensic-assessment&mc_cid=b50a0bbf6c&mc_eid=ab2f7bf95e
CLUSTER BOMBS
USA Cluster Bombs
& Depleted Uranium Prove USA doesn’t care about Ukrainians. USA cares Soooo much
about Ukrainians that "we" will cover their lands in cluster
bomblet mines that will kill & maim ukrainians for decades as
"we" did in Laos & Vietnam. (Not to mention poisoning
their croplands with toxic depleted uranium weapons) Glenn Greenwald: "Cluster bombs are banned by a
convention signed by more than 100 countries, including many NATO allies.
Because of their huge civilian toll, their use has long been seen as a war crime (including by the US when
used by Bad Countries™), " Washington Post: "President Biden is prepared to waive
U.S. law prohibiting the
production, use or transfer of cluster munitions with a failure rate of more
than 1 percent to send them to Ukraine, amid concerns about Kyiv’s lagging
counteroffensive against Russian troops." Jake Johnson. “Cluster bomb opponents ‘appalled’ by Biden decision to
send banned weapons to Ukraine.” Editor. Mronline.org (7-9-23). Originally published: Common
Dreams on July 7, 2023 (more by Common Dreams) | (Posted Jul
08, 2023) WarAmericas, Europe, Russia,
Ukraine,
United StatesNewswireNorth Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO), Russia-Ukraine War President
Joe Biden has reportedly given final approval for the transfer of U.S. cluster
munitions to Ukraine, ignoring warnings from human rights groups and
progressive lawmakers who underscored the indiscriminate weapons’ devastating
impacts on civilians immediately upon use and far into the future. According to The
Washington Post, a drawdown of the globally deplored weapons from Pentagon stocks is set to be formally
announced on Friday. The U.S., which has used the weapons around the world,
is believed to possess more than 3 million cluster munitions containing over
400 million submunitions. More than 120 countries have signed the United Nations Convention on
Cluster Munitions, which prohibits the use or stockpiling of the weapons. But
the U.S., Russia, and Ukraine have opposed global efforts to ban the weapons,
which are notorious for failing to explode on impact and littering landscapes
with what are effectively landmines. Human Rights Watch
(HRW), which urged the Biden administration not to transfer the weapons to
Ukraine, has documented the
use of cluster munitions by both Russian and Ukrainian forces since the start
of the war last year. MORE https://mronline.org/2023/07/08/cluster-bomb-opponents-appalled-by-biden-becision-to-send-banned-weapons-to-ukraine/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=cluster-bomb-opponents-appalled-by-biden-becision-to-send-banned-weapons-to-ukraine&mc_cid=992c589f34&mc_eid=ab2f7bf95e Agencies. Al
Mayadeen. “Cambodian Premier reminds Ukraine of the horrors of
cluster bombs.” Editor. Mronline.org
(7-12-23). Cambodian Prime Minister
Hun Sen recalls Cambodia's "painful experience" with U.S.-dropped
cluster munitions in the 1970s, which continue to cause casualties to this
date. History, Human Rights, Inequality,
WarAmericas, Asia,
Cambodia,
Europe,
Russia,
Ukraine,
United StatesNewswireCambodian
Prime Minister Hun Sen, Cluster Bomb Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, drawing from his country’s
painful history with war remnants, has appealed to Ukraine not to utilize
cluster bombs after the United States, the country behind his nation’s sufferings to this day,
announced its intention to provide such weapons to Kiev. Hun Sen highlighted
Cambodia’s “painful experience” with U.S.-dropped cluster munitions in the
1970s, which continue to cause casualties to this date. Stressing the
potential long-term dangers and humanitarian repercussions, he urged both the
U.S. and Ukrainian presidents to refrain from employing these weapons,
expressing empathy for the people who would ultimately suffer the
consequences. MORE https://mronline.org/2023/07/11/cambodian-premier-reminds-ukraine-of-the-horrors-of-cluster-bombs/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=cambodian-premier-reminds-ukraine-of-the-horrors-of-cluster-bombs&mc_cid=1b711defd5&mc_eid=ab2f7bf95e
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
PEACE
Arnold Schölzel. “Germany: Reactions to peace manifesto.” February 18, 2023. Editor, mronline.org
(2-21-23). Intense policy struggle in
Germany over support of the war. What happened? Even Gregor Gysi has now
signed the “Manifesto for Peace” by Sahra Wagenknecht and Alice Schwarzer.
Originally published: Defend Democracy
Press on February 18, 2023 (more
by Defend Democracy
Press) | (Posted Feb
20, 2023)
Movements, State Repression, Strategy,
WarAmericas, Europe,
Germany,
Russia,
Ukraine,
United StatesNewswire“Manifesto for Peace”,
Gregor Gysi
CovertAction
Magazine, Countercurrents, The Chris Hedges Report
FEBRUARY 19, 2023 RAGE AGAINST THE WAR RALLY IN DC
Jeremy
Kuzmarov. “Left and Right Join Together to Rage Against Ukraine War on Its One Year
Anniversary.” CovertAction
Magazine (Feb
20, 2023) 11:45 am.
Several thousand people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in
Washington, D.C., on Sunday, February 19, to protest U.S. support for the war
in Ukraine around the time of its one-year anniversary.
The protest was organized by the People’s Party and Libertarian Party. It brought together groups on
the left and libertarian right which were unified in their demand that the U.S.
government should not spend one more penny on the war in Ukraine.
Nick Branna, the founder of the People’s Party and a main
organizer of the event, told CovertAction Magazine that the
rally was “the biggest anti-war demonstration since the Iraq War and it was
sorely needed.” Branna said that it was nice to see groups on the left and
right coming together, though “these labels are largely artificial” as “working
people are being screwed whether they are left and right and we need to
collectively fight back.”
Pat Ford, a member of the Libertarian Party national committee,
echoed Branna when he told CovertAction Magazine that the
“rally was a complete success as an exercise in coalition building.” According
to Ford, while the latter “can be challenging, fractious, and messy, it is the
best possible avenue for grassroots organizers to affect social change” and
“succeeded before when people of differing outlooks came together to end the
Vietnam War.” […]
THE WAR COULD HAVE BEEN
PREVENTED,
First Aim of Peace Movement:
PREVENTING WARS, Not Allowing Them to Start, Not PREPARING for WAR BUT FOR
PEACE , AND NOW IT MUST BE STOPPED.
[The following article published by CAM in Nov. 2021 explained why a US/NATO
war over Ukraine should not happen and how to prevent it. It is even more important today.]
“The High Stakes of the U.S.-Russia
Confrontation Over Ukraine” by MEDEA BENJAMIN, NICOLAS J.S. DAVIES.
Americans should beware of romanticizing the
"old" Cold War as a time of peace, simply because we somehow managed
to dodge a world-ending nuclear holocaust.
November 22, 2021
A report in Covert Action Magazine from the self-declared Donetsk People’s
Republic in Eastern Ukraine describes grave fears of a new offensive by
Ukrainian government forces, after increased shelling, a drone strike by a
Turkish-built drone and an attack on Staromaryevka, a village inside the buffer
zone established by the 2014-15 Minsk Accords.
The People’s Republics
of Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR), which declared independence in response to
the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014, have once again become flashpoints in
the intensifying Cold War between the United States and Russia. The U.S. and
NATO appear to be fully supporting a new government offensive against these
Russian-backed enclaves, which could quickly escalate into a full-blown
international military conflict.
What we are
watching in Ukraine, Syria, Taiwan and the South China Sea are the opening salvos
of an age of more ideological wars that may well be just as futile, deadly and
self-defeating as the “war on terror,” and much more dangerous to the United
States.
The last time this
area became an international tinderbox was in April, when the anti-Russian
government of Ukraine threatened an offensive against Donetsk and Luhansk, and
Russia assembled thousands of
troops along Ukraine’s
eastern border.
On that occasion,
Ukraine and NATO blinked and called off the offensive. This time around, Russia has again assembled an
estimated 90,000 troops near its border with Ukraine. Will Russia once more deter
an escalation of the war, or are Ukraine, the United States and NATO seriously
preparing to press ahead at the risk of war with Russia?
Since April, the U.S.
and its allies have been stepping up their military support for Ukraine. After
a March announcement of $125 million in military aid, including armed coastal
patrol boats and radar equipment, the U.S. then gave Ukraine another $150 million package in June. This included radar,
communications, and electronic warfare equipment for the Ukrainian Air Force,
bringing total military aid to Ukraine since the U.S.-backed coup in 2014 to
$2.5 billion. This latest package appears to include deploying U.S. training
personnel to Ukrainian air bases.
Turkey is supplying
Ukraine with the same drones it provided to Azerbaijan for its war with Armenia
over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020. That war killed at
least 6,000 people and has recently flared up again, one year after a
Russian-brokered ceasefire. Turkish drones wreaked havoc on Armenian troops and civilians alike in
Nagorno-Karabakh, and their use in Ukraine would be a horrific escalation of
violence against the people of Donetsk and Luhansk.
The ratcheting up of
U.S. and NATO support for government forces in Ukraine’s civil war is having ever-worsening diplomatic
consequences. At the beginning of October, NATO expelled eight Russian liaison
officers from NATO Headquarters in Brussels, accusing them of spying. Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland,
the manager of the 2014 coup in Ukraine, was dispatched to Moscow in October, ostensibly to calm tensions. Nuland
failed so spectacularly that, only a week later, Russia ended 30 years of engagement with NATO, and ordered NATO’s office in Moscow closed.
Nuland reportedly
tried to reassure Moscow that the United States and NATO were still committed
to the 2014 and 2015 Minsk
Accords on Ukraine,
which include a ban on offensive military operations and a promise of greater
autonomy for Donetsk and Luhansk within Ukraine. But her assurances were belied
by Defense Secretary Austin when he met with Ukraine’s President Zelensky in
Kiev on October 18, reiterating U.S. support for Ukraine’s future membership in NATO, promising further
military support and blaming Russia for “perpetuating the war in Eastern
Ukraine.”
More extraordinary,
but hopefully more successful, was CIA Director William Burns’s visit to Moscow on November 2nd and 3rd, during which he met with senior
Russian military and intelligence officials and spoke by phone with President
Putin.
A mission like this is
not usually part of the CIA Director’s duties. But after Biden promised a new
era of American diplomacy, his foreign policy team is now widely acknowledged
to have instead brought U.S. relations with Russia and China to all-time
lows.
Judging from the
March meeting of
Secretary of State Blinken and National Security Advisor Sullivan with Chinese
officials in Alaska, Biden’s meeting with Putin in Vienna in June, and Under Secretary Nuland’s
recent visit to Moscow, U.S. officials have reduced their encounters with
Russian and Chinese officials to mutual recriminations designed for domestic
consumption instead of seriously trying to resolve policy differences. In
Nuland’s case, she also misled the Russians about the U.S. commitment, or lack
of it, to the Minsk Accords. So who could Biden send to Moscow for a serious
diplomatic dialogue with the Russians about Ukraine?
In 2002, as Under
Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, William Burns wrote a prescient
but unheeded 10-page memo to Secretary of State Powell, warning him of the many ways
that a U.S. invasion of Iraq could “unravel” and create a “perfect storm” for
American interests. Burns is a career diplomat and a former U.S. ambassador to
Moscow, and may be the only member of this administration with the diplomatic
skills and experience to actually listen to the Russians and engage seriously
with them.
The Russians
presumably told Burns what they have said in public: that U.S. policy is in
danger of crossing “red lines” that would trigger decisive and irrevocable Russian
responses. Russia has long warned that one red line would be NATO membership for Ukraine
and/or Georgia.
But there are clearly
other red lines in the creeping U.S. and NATO military presence in and around
Ukraine and in the increasing U.S. military support for the Ukrainian
government forces assaulting Donetsk and Luhansk. Putin has warned against
the build-up of NATO’s military infrastructure in Ukraine and has accused both
Ukraine and NATO of destabilizing actions, including in the Black Sea.
With Russian troops
amassed at Ukraine’s border for a second time this year, a new Ukrainian
offensive that threatens the existence of the DPR and LPR would surely cross
another red line, while increasing U.S. and NATO military support for Ukraine
may be dangerously close to crossing yet another one.
So did Burns come back
from Moscow with a clearer picture of exactly what Russia’s red lines are? We had better hope so. Even U.S. military websites acknowledge that U.S. policy in Ukraine is “backfiring.”
Russia expert Andrew Weiss, who worked under William Burns at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, acknowledged to Michael Crowley of The New York Times that Russia has
“escalation dominance” in Ukraine and that, if push comes to shove, Ukraine is
simply more important to Russia than to the United States. It therefore makes
no sense for the United States to risk triggering World War III over Ukraine,
unless it actually wants to trigger World War III.
During the Cold War,
both sides developed clear understandings of each other’s “red lines.” Along with a large helping of dumb luck, we can thank
those understandings for our continued existence. What makes today’s world even more dangerous than the world of the
1950s or the 1980s is that recent U.S. leaders have cavalierly jettisoned
the bilateral nuclear treaties and vital diplomatic relationships that their
grandparents forged to stop the Cold War from turning into a hot one.
Presidents Eisenhower
and Kennedy, with the help of Under Secretary of State Averell Harriman and
others, conducted negotiations that spanned two administrations, between 1958
and 1963, to achieve a partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that was the first of a series of
bilateral arms control treaties. By contrast, the only continuity between
Trump, Biden and Under Secretary Victoria Nuland seems to be a startling lack
of imagination that blinds them to any possible future beyond a zero-sum,
non-negotiable, and yet still unattainable “U.S. Uber Alles” global hegemony.
But Americans should
beware of romanticizing the “old” Cold War as a time of peace, simply because
we somehow managed to dodge a world-ending nuclear holocaust. U.S. Korean and
Vietnam War veterans know better, as do the people in countries across the
global South that became bloody battlefields in the ideological struggle between the United States and
the U.S.S.R.
Three decades after
declaring victory in the Cold War, and after the self-inflicted chaos of the
U.S. “Global War on Terror,” U.S. military planners have settled on a new Cold War as the most persuasive pretext to perpetuate their
trillion dollar war machine and their unattainable ambition to dominate the
entire planet. Instead of asking the U.S. military to adapt to more new
challenges it is clearly not up for, U.S. leaders decided to revert to their
old conflict with Russia and China to justify the existence and ridiculous
expense of their ineffective but profitable war
machine.
But the very nature of
a Cold War is that it involves the threat and use of force, overt and covert,
to contest the political allegiances and economic structures of countries
across the world. In our relief at the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which
both Trump and Biden have used to symbolize the “end of endless war,” we should
have no illusions that either of them is offering us a new age of peace.
Quite the contrary.
What we are watching in Ukraine, Syria, Taiwan and the South China Sea are the
opening salvos of an age of more ideological wars that may well be just as
futile, deadly and self-defeating as the “war on terror,” and much more
dangerous to the United States.
[NEW NUCLEAR WEAPONS,
WWIII]
A war with Russia or
China would risk escalating into World War III. As Andrew Weiss told the Times
on Ukraine, Russia and China would have conventional “escalation dominance,” as
well as simply more at stake in wars on their own borders than the United
States does.
So what would the
United States do if it were losing a major war with Russia or China? U.S.
nuclear weapons policy has always kept a “first strike” option open in case of precisely this scenario.
The current U.S. $1.7 trillion plan for a whole range of new nuclear weapons therefore seems
to be a response to the reality that the United States cannot expect to defeat
Russia and China in conventional wars on their own borders.
But the paradox of
nuclear weapons is that the most powerful weapons ever created have no
practical value as actual weapons of war, since there can be no winner in a war
that kills everybody. Any use of nuclear weapons would quickly trigger a
massive use of them by one side or the other, and the war would soon be over
for all of us. The only winners would be a few species of radiation-resistant insects and other very small
creatures.
Neither Obama, Trump
nor Biden has dared to present their reasons for risking World War III over
Ukraine or Taiwan to the American public, because there is no good reason.
Risking a nuclear holocaust to appease the military-industrial complex is as
insane as destroying the climate and the natural world to appease the fossil
fuel industry.
So we had better hope
that CIA DIrector Burns not only came back from Moscow with a clear picture of
Russia’s “red lines,” but that President
Biden and his colleagues understand what Burns told them and what is at
stake in Ukraine. They must step back
from the brink of a U.S.-Russia war, and then from the larger Cold War with
China and Russia that they have so blindly and foolishly stumbled into.
MEDEA BENJAMIN Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women for Peace, is the author of the 2018 book, "Inside Iran: The
Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran." Her previous books include: "Kingdom of the
Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection" (2016); "Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control" (2013); "Don’t Be Afraid
Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart" (1989), and (with Jodie Evans) "Stop the Next War Now (Inner Ocean Action Guide)" (2005).
Nicolas J. S.
Davies is an
independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American
Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
Current Published Russia
Ukraine Article Count
Survey of OMNI’s first 30 R/U Anthologies (#1-30A), 2014-2023.
Total number of entries: 528 as of 7/24/2023
Most of these entries were
necessarily from sources other than the corporate mainstream because those
newspapers support the nation in its wars.
