USA & NATO vs Russia in Ukraine: Likely to become Syria or Yugoslavia?

 

“War is too serious a matter to be left to the soldiers,” said the French First World War prime minister Georges Clemenceau. But the evidence of most wars in history is that they are also too serious to be left to the politicians. This failing is not yet evident in Ukraine only because fighting is still raging on the battlefields of the Donbas and is likely to escalate.

But it should already be clear that the end of the war, if it comes at all, is more likely to be brought about by politicians – as difficult as that might be – and not by soldiers because the chances of either Russia or Ukraine winning a decisive victory is nil.

The key question now is how and when the fighting will cease – or have the chances of a compromise peace already been overwhelmed by the sheer momentum of military conflict and the hatred it inspires?

Bizarrely, the main points in dispute have probably been decided. Russia is never going to conquer Ukraine because it never meant to go beyond Donbass and Mariupol; perhaps Odessa, if possible, but not with Ukrainian “resistance” supplied with arms by the Nato states. This was evident to President Vladimir Putin long before he launched his unavoidable invasion on 24 February.

But it is equally unlikely that Ukraine will defeat Russia and drive its forces out of Ukrainian territory, as some American and English politicians are now recommending as a war aim, however many weapons systems it receives from the US&Nato and Israel.

Russia is unlikely to repeat the same mistakes it made in the first two months of the war when it fragmented its inadequate forces so none of their attacks were strong enough to succeed.

Putin claimed then that he had only invaded because Russia faced an existential threat and it turned out to be a reality, enabling Putin to persuade Russians that they now have no choice but to fight. Western sanctions are a double-edged sword because, though they do great economic damage, they are a collective punishment inflicted on all 145 million Russians who feel that they are left with no choice but to rally to the flag.

Russia’s enemies show a childish reluctance to let Putin off the hook by relaxing the pressure on him or giving him an escape route out of the quagmire into which he has plunged his country. “There is an unfortunate dilemma,” a senior European diplomat is quoted as saying by the Washington Post. “The problem is that if it [the war] ends now, there is a kind of time for Russia to regroup and it will restart, under this or another pretext. Putin is not going to give up his goals.” As if he knew what Putin goals were, are.

A military stalemate is even considered not to be in the interests of East European states near the conflict zone. “This is a major issue for us,” says a senior diplomat from one of the countries bordering Ukraine. “A divided, frozen, fragmented conflict in Ukraine is a very bad deal for us. An active Ukraine-Nato relationship is crucial for the Black Sea region.” Without Nato backing, he argued that there was every prospect of unchecked Russian aggression in the future.

It is clear that those who want to fight Russia to a finish now feel that their moment has come, even though their policies are full of risks because they contain a number of contradictions. They assume that Russia is powerful enough to pose a serious threat to its neighbours, but at the same time so weak that it can be permanently defeated on the battlefield. They portray Russia as being under the total control of an “autocrat in the Kremlin cut off from reality and spoon-fed only good news by his servile advisers”. But this same “half-crazed and ill-advised dictator” is expected to behave with sensible restraint when it comes to widening the war or using nuclear weapons.

This hawkish stance is easy enough for powers outside Ukraine because it is the Ukrainians who will be doing the fighting. Those who glibly call for total victory over Russia are being as unrealistic as Putin was two months ago when he ordered the invasion of Ukraine in expectation of a walkover.

This lack of realism is masked for the moment because Russia is still trying to make the aimed territorial gains by taking Mariupol and the Donbas, and the opportunity for a counter-attack has not yet arrived. But there are clear signs that the Ukrainians and their Nato & Israeli allies are taking their own triumphalist propaganda too literally and acting as if it were all true.

The Russian army is likely to fight more skilfully in the next few months under the command of the experienced general Alexander Dvornikov.  Russia has been accused of pursuing the same tactics as those used by the Syrian government backed by Russian airpower against USA “rebels” armed opposition after the 2011 uprising. These were to blockade rebel-held urban areas, bombard but not assault them, allow the civilian population to flee and seal off hostile areas. This approach worked well against ISIS, cutting down on Syrian army casualties and confining enemy fighters to small islands of territory where they were effectively incarcerated with little hope of escape.

At the beginning, the Russians did not use these successful tactics in their invasion of northern Ukraine, probably because they were not  to be as well-trained and armed by Nato and Israel as they turned out to be. But as the second phase of the war opens in Donbas, Russian forces reportedly outnumber the Ukrainians by three to one, allowing Putin to order the blockade of the vast Mariupol steel works.

Overall, the war in Ukraine is beginning to look more and more like Syria: a military and political stalemate with limited chances of breaking the deadlock. Too many players with too many different interests are involved to bring the conflict to an end unless the United States are determined to do so – and there is little sign so far of that happening.

Look at Joe Biden’s posture, feebly trying to get a grip on events, or Boris Johnson, endlessly seeking to divert public attention from his latest domestic scandal, look like the sort of people you want to see in charge of defusing the worst crisis in Europe since the Yugoslavian civil war that ended in division; just as Ukraine will certainly end better sooner than later.

In the Middle East these half-frozen wars can go on for decades because dark skinned people don’t count for Nato States, but I doubt if this could happen in Ukraine because the crisis is no longer solely or even mainly about that country but has transmuted into a general confrontation between Russia and Nato.

When I read about Boris Johnson’s attack on Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, for criticising the government’s plan to deport to Rwanda asylum seekers crossing the Channel, the reason why Johnson’s self-serving attempt to divert attention from the latest scandal to engulf him make me think of the church that is closely associated with two of the greatest religious martyrs in English history, who were both killed for opposing the secular power. In a crypt in St Dunstan’s is the head of Sir Thomas More, executed in 1535 for refusing to accept Henry VIII as Supreme Head of the Church of England and other acts of opposition to the Reformation. Presumably a 16th century Johnson would have been cheering on the executioner who beheaded the author of Utopia on Tower Hill for putting a proper end to a man who believed that religious faith could not be separated from political allegiance.

The reason why More’s severed head is in there is that his daughter Margaret Roper rescued it from a stake on London Bridge and put it in the crypt of the Roper Chapel which was close to the house where she lived.

But St Dunstan’s has an early link to English prelates who criticised and opposed the political powers-that-be. It was from there that Henry II, barefoot and wearing a hair shirt, began his walk to Canterbury Cathedral on 12 July 1174 in penitence for his role in the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, three and a half years earlier. It was never entirely clear how sorry Henry really was for having precipitated, probably accidentally, the killing of his former friend turned enemy by four of his knights, but he certainly knew how to say sorry.

He confessed that “his incautious words” had led to the killing, asked to be punished, was whipped by the monks and spent the night praying in the cathedral. This was so successful as a bit of royal theatre that he kept returning to Canterbury in later years to repeat his ritual penitence.

A message here, perhaps, for Johnson the next time he has to make his incoherent apologies for some piece of mendacity or chicanery. As well as for Biden’s manipulation of the truth about the real purpose of putting Ukraine in this terrible situation.

 

By the way, a UK court has formally approved the extradition of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, to the US to face espionage charges. What Assange did was no different from what any investigative journalist does. But once again there has scarcely been a cheep out of the British corporate and public media, both liberal and conservative.

Compare the treatment of Assange with that of Katherine Gunn, the GCHQ translator who leaked a classified memo to a newspaper in 2003 exposing a US plot to spy on the UN shortly before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 in the excellent film Official Secrets with Keira Knightley playing Gunn.

You shall see that independent journalism is not admitted in the so called “Free World” either. Only the official narrative and corporate media. 

USA&NATO vs Russia in Ukraine: Sanctions might Unite, not Divide

While Russian military is fighting in Ukraine and Western sanctions hardenhurt the country, Western brands are on the exodus from Russia.

The closure of over 800 McDonald’s restaurants particularly stands out: McDonald’s was the first American restaurant to open in Russia, in 1990 (before the creation of Ukraine). Its arrival symbolized Russia’s new pro-Western era.

That era is rapidly ending, giving way to a quickly spreading revival of Russian nationalism. Such nationalism is a direct outcome of the country’s economic suffocation through sanctions and the West’s broad rejection of Russia and its war with Ukraine.

The West is collective punishing Russians, hoping that the dire economic crisis provoked by sanctions will put an end to the war in Ukraine, that was once an integral part of the Soviet Union.

Those who think that sanctions will turn Russia and Russians around and end the war know very little about the country, its history and its people.

Russians are used to turmoil and instability. They endured social experiments during the 20th century, and the early 21st, performed upon them by their own political leadership. Except for the rare example of Mikhail Gorbachev, Russian leadership during that period was never totally democratic as it is understood in the West.

The country, whose participation in World War I was led by a weak czar, emerged impoverished from that conflict. The czar’s rule was overturned by a Bolshevik uprising that ushered in Soviet rule for decades.

Private property was abolished in 1929, and political leaders commanded absolute, selfless obedience to the Soviet state.

World War II required painful sacrifice from every citizen, including children, but they fought hard until the Red Army liberated the concentration camps and marched over Germany to Berlin.

After the war was over, the depleted USSR constructed the metaphorical Iron Curtain, preventing its citizens from traveling to and communicating with the West. Then came the Cold War, and later t he painful disintegration of the USSR in 1990, which brought economic turmoil to the newly formed Russia, along with unemployment and high suicide rates.

What does this catalog of woes teach us?

It suggests the Russians cannot be scared by a sanctions-induced absence of goods. High-end fashion labels, iPhones, fancy coffee and foreign cars became a part of Russian life over the past 20 years – but the Russians have had them for far too short a time to be unable to imagine life without them. In any case, most of the luxury businesses – McDonald’s is considered a luxury business in Russia – operated in Moscow and its neighboring regions, whereas the overwhelming majority of the Russians did not get to see them in their towns.

Historically, any political and economic struggle united Russia and its people, especially in the face of a common enemy. The enemy was traditionally represented by the West.

World War II and the Cold War united the nation around the idea of self-sacrifice as central to the Soviet identity. The identity – a kind of Soviet exceptionalism – consisted of a morally superior nation that values the ephemeral Soul – the mysterious Russian “душа” – more than the perishable Western flesh.

Soviet identity encompassed a great variety of ethnicities, including but not limited to only Russia. Although the capital of the USSR was Moscow, and the official language of the Soviet Union was Russian, the USSR consisted of 14 additional republics, and united more than 100 nationalities. So “Soviet” refers to anyone who lived in the USSR, including Ukrainians, Russians, Georgians, Belorussians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis and Estonians.

The USSR used discourse that glorified Soviet sameness and the moral sacrifice of its people as a trigger for patriotism and loyalty to the motherland, whose core was Russia. Among popular slogans and sayings were: “Раньше думай о Родине а потом о себе”/“First, think about your motherland, and only then, think about yourself”; “Я – последняя буква алфавита”/“‘I’ is the last letter of the alphabet,” which it is in Cyrillic; and “Я русский бы выучил только за то, что им разговаривал Ленин!”/“I would learn Russian alone because Lenin spoke it!”

Eventually, “Russia” and “the USSR” were understood and used interchangeably, at home and abroad. Therefore, for majority of Russians, especially those born and raised in the USSR, watching Ukraine embrace the West means letting part of Russia’s history go with it.

I believe the West’s sanction strategy might backfire. Russians are the bravest and proudest people I know. They take pride in their culture, their erudition, and seeing their musicians, artists, sportpeople being harassed and mistreated pains them more then one can imagine in the US.

Not all Russians support the war in Ukraine and the government that dragged them into it. But all Russians are suffering from the sanctions and the crisis. Their common suffering is a dangerous thing: It is all too familiar; it makes them angry, and some are eager to strike back.

The possibility of this stems from the Russian national mindset, crafted in Soviet times and now affecting even generations that grew up in post-Soviet Russia. Western freedoms are only partially appealing, since historically, Russians never had them – not freedom of speech, self-determination, religion nor unrestricted travel.

Instead, the Russian people are patient, stoic and devoted to their motherland no matter what. The resistance in Leningrad and Stalingrad during World War II is unique in General History.

Where does that leave the Russians?

From my perspective, in a deep limbo: The country-that is currently bombing and destroying Ukraine is also their beloved homeland, and by now the only place in the world that accepts them as they are.

Having their country be an international pariah is not new for Russians, from its climate policies to its sports and its foreign affairs, including its widely condemned annexation of Crimea.

But today’s situation is extreme. I believe the chances that Russians will turn toward their government – as they feel rejected by the global community – are high.

That will likely lead to the intensifying of Putin’s autocratic regime under the guise of restoring the country’s industry and economy in the face of Western rejection.

Russia will have a common enemy again, and because thinking – and acting – disobediently in Russia typically has drastic consequences, dissent will not be heard.

Encouraging Russians to protest their government and their leader, as the West has done, while cutting ties with them, thus becomes an ideological oxymoron. It is collective punishing while suffocating them economically.

In Siberia, safety rules are a matter of life and death. One of them is about always leaving the bear a route to escape. The bear is particularly aggressive when wounded, cornered and protective of its cubs. The wounded bear, representing the Russian nation, is not an exception.

USA & NATO vs Russia in Ukraine: Civil War or Secession I

Since Russia's military campaign in Ukraine began on February 24, most western media accounts have assumed that his goal is to conquer the entire country, overthrow the elected government, and replace it with a pro-Russian regime. These reports, and the maps that accompany them, often fail to take into account the different regions of Ukraine, and how Russia may covet some more than others.

This is the same fundamental error that accompanied early reports on the USA attacks and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, which often overlooked internal ethnic and religious territoriality in those countries, and used top-down political and military analysis that treated them only as unitary states. It wasn’t until later in those wars that maps of ethnic and sectarian divisions began to explain the patterns of resistance to U.S. occupation. Like those two countries, Ukraine is not just a piece on a geopolitical chess board, but a place, with its own rich diversity and relationships among peoples.

Moreover, western media tends to treat the Ukraine conflict only in the light of the 20^th-century Cold War, assuming that the former KGB agent Putin wants to recreate the Soviet Union. Yet Putin has said the exact opposite, in a flourish of anti-Communist rhetoric that preceded the invasion. His vision is clearly of a renewed Russian Empire, but analysts from recent settler-colonial states have difficulty understanding that memories can extend many centuries earlier than the mere 74-year life of the Soviet Union.

All things considered, Ancient and past History plus Vladimir Putin’s vision it is clear to me that Putin’s ultimate goal is to carve off a distinct Russian-speaking region from Ukraine. Because he would rather bite off a large chunk of Ukraine rather than swallow it whole, the partition of Ukraine is very much on the table.

Maps matter. In the case of Ukraine, the first map that shows the predominance of Russian-speakers across eastern and southern Ukraine (represented in red) matters very much to Vladimir Putin. In his unhinged February 21 address to the nation, he reminded Russians that “in the 18th century, the lands of the Black Sea littoral, incorporated in Russia as a result of wars with the Ottoman Empire, were given the name of Novorossiya” (or New Russia).

It was not the first time that Putin referred to the swath of Russian-speakers in southern and southeastern Ukraine as “Novorossiya,” and treated that region as distinct from the western Ukrainian-speaking region (in yellow) and the mixed Ukrainian-Russian region (in orange). Russians also refer to central Ukraine as “Malorossiya” (Little Russia), and the northeastern borderland around Kharkiv and Sumy as “Sloboda Ukraine.”

In the same speech, Putin excoriated Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin for giving away a portion of Russia to the new Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1922, the lands that today form eastern and southern Ukraine (as shown in the second map). Putin claimed that “modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia. This process started practically right after the 1917 revolution, and Lenin and his associates did it in a way that was extremely harsh on Russia — by separating, severing what is historically Russian land. Nobody asked the millions of people living there what they thought.”

Putin continued with his denunciation of Lenin, whose “ideas of what amounted in essence to a confederative state arrangement and a slogan about the right of nations to self-determination, up to secession, were laid in the foundation of Soviet statehood…. What was the point of transferring to the newly, often arbitrarily formed administrative units — the union republics — vast territories that had nothing to do with them? ….When it comes to the historical destiny of Russia and its peoples, Lenin’s principles of state development… were worse than a mistake, as the saying goes. This became patently clear after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991…. Soviet Ukraine is the result of the Bolsheviks’ policy and can be rightfully called ‘Vladimir Lenin’s Ukraine’.”

So in his speech laying out his reasons for invading Ukraine three days later, Putin did not necessarily question the existence of a Ukrainian Soviet republic, but focused primarily on how Lenin detached Russian-speaking regions (including the Donbass) to join with that republic. Lenin had attached those lands to Ukraine, in order to weaken the “Great Russian Chauvinism” that he identified as the ideological underpinning of the Czarist Russian Empire, and to some extent to make the new Ukraine more multiethnic and less interested in independence.

When the Soviet Union inherited the Russian Empire’s domains after the 1917 Revolution, Lenin’s vision was as of a country in which ethnic republics were in free association with each other, and he granted independence to Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states (though not Ukraine). As Putin approvingly pointed out, Josef Stalin quickly reversed that self-determination policy after Lenin’s 1924 death, by making the ethnic republics autonomous in name alone, as regions ruled solely from Moscow.

As Putin angrily recalled, Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 gifted majority ethnic Russian Crimea to Ukraine (also shown in the second map). And to Putin’s great disapproval, Mikhail Gorbachev restored Lenin’s vision in the late 1980s, by granting the ethnic republics greater autonomy, an act which Putin blamed for the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union. Putin viewed 1991 in a wider historical lens as the collapse of the Russian Empire, stranding 25 million Russians (or 17 percent of all Russians) outside Russian Federation borders. In Ukraine, annexing Crimea in 2014 and recognizing the eastern Donbass republics in 2022 were his first steps toward taking back the lands that Russia “lost” in 1922.

As Putin launched his invasion, his forces pushed into eastern Ukraine from Russia and the eastern Donbass, into southern Russia from Crimea, and toward Kyiv from Belarus. His missile and air attacks have hit military and civilian sites all over the country. So if we view Ukraine solely as a unitary state, it looks like Putin is heading for “regime change,” in order to topple Volodymyr Zelensky’s government, and occupy and rule the entire country.

Finland’s President Sauli Niinistö confirms that Putin personally denied to him that “regime change” was his goal in Ukraine. The facts on the ground are consistent with a takeover of only part of Ukraine, not the entire country.

If you superimpose Russian ground advances (in the third map) over the red Russian-speaking area in the first map, you can see that nearly the entirety of the advances are in the Russian-speaking regions, which tended to vote for pro-Russian politicians in most elections before Zelensky’s 2019 victory. Other than air attacks, there have been no ground advances or paratrooper landings into the Ukrainian-speaking western region or most of the mixed Ukrainian-Russian central region.

The only major exception is the mixed capital of Kyiv itself, which Russian forces are attempting to encircle or capture to avoid further losses on both sides. Attacking and besieging Kyiv keeps Ukrainian forces pinned down in the north, and capturing it would force Zelensky to capitulate and meet Russian terms.

That does not mean that Kyiv would be occupied in the long term. Even after the refugee exodus of the past few weeks, at least two million Ukrainians remain in Kyiv. If the capital falls, many of them would continue to resist Russian occupiers as vengeful and well-organized urban insurgents.

The invasion has been enough of a slog for Russia, and Putin understands that a Ukrainian insurgency would be turn the country into a quagmire, recalling Moscow’s 1989 defeat by mujahedin rebels in Afghanistan armed by the United States. As the American experience showed in Baghdad and Kabul, or the Israeli experience in Beirut, holding a major metropolitan area in the face of insurgent resistance is a formidable challenge. It may be relatively easy to seize a capital, but that does not make the whole country fall into an occupier’s hand.

If Russia was truly set on taking control of all of Ukraine, it would also have to deal with strong Ukrainian resistance in the far western region of Galicia, around Lviv. Galicia was part of interwar Poland, and during World War II was the stronghold of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which fought the Soviets and welcomed the Nazi invaders, until they found the German Reich wanted farmland for settlers more than they wanted allies as puppets. The UPA resistance, in contact with the CIA, continued fighting the Soviets for seven years after the war’s end, until 1952.

The far west is still the center of Ukrainian neo-nazi groups, who have welcomed USA & UK’s training. The proximity of the Polish border would enable the delivery of NATO weapons, much as the Afghan mujahedin-Taliban were sustained with U.S. weapons supply lines from Pakistan. (And also like the mujahedin, the West may later regret blowback from arming far-right militants who do not share democratic values.)

Resistance to a Russian occupation would also come from the mixed region of central Ukraine (in orange on the first map), where not only are Ukrainian-speakers and Russian-speakers mixed together, but many speak a hybrid tongue known as Surzhyk, which is understandable for both Russians and Ukrainians. Like in Bosnia or Iraq, it is impossible to turn such a messy ethnic map of mixed communities, families, and individuals into “clean” political borders without massive violence.

“Ukraine” actually means “borderland,” and it is instructive to read Gloria Anzaldúa’s classic Borderlands / La Frontera to understand the similar rich hybridization of languages in the U.S. Southwest (formerly northern Mexico). She might as well have been describing the complex borderland of Ukraine. My own family roots in Hungary have made me aware of how history is full of both conflict and cooperation among peoples.

Ukraine’s language map gets even more complex because many self-defined ethnic Ukrainians actually speak Russian as their first language, just as many Mexican Americans speak English at home. In the same way, a majority of Irish, Scots, and Welsh speak the language of the English colonizer at home, rather than their own Celtic tongues, but many of them are still strong nationalists. Totally self-identified ethnic Russians form only about 20% of Ukraine’s population, and form a strong majority only in the secessionist eastern Donbass.

In the rest of Ukraine, however, a number of Russian-Ukrainians-speakers have not entirely welcomed Russian invasion. Although unlike the Americans in Iraq, Putin never expected his troops to be welcomed with flowers and red-white-and-blue flags, and they werent. In some places they are being greeted with grenades and anti-tank weapons. In the 2019 election, Zelensky received a higher percentage of votes from Russian-speakers than from Ukrainian-speakers, in a rebuke to ultranationalists on both sides.

In fact, most of the civilians killed in the war so far have been Russian speakers. Mainly because of the neo-nazi militias, but also because they are more vulnerable than the Ukrainians, who are farther in the west.

If Putin Doesn’t wrap up his military campaign as soon as possible, he might lose his own people hearts and minds as well.

With the conquest of all Ukraine off the table, Putin may still push for the secession of “Novorossiya” from the rest of Ukraine. He had suggested partitioning Ukraine as far back as 2014 (what should have be done), when he suggested  to Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk that Poland should take back Galicia. Putin would take the southeast of the country, and the ethnic Russians would gravitate there. The rest of the nation, overwhelmingly Ukrainian, would continue as a sovereign state.”

Russian military advances (in the third map) are clearly attempting to create a corridor from the eastern Donbass to Crimea, including the bombardment of the port city of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov, the key point of connection between Donbass and Crimea.

Going west along the Black Sea coast, Russia has occupied the Dnieper River city of Kherson, and is said to be attempting to set up a “Kherson People’s Republic,” similar to the Donetsk and Lugansk “people’s republics” it has recognized in the eastern Donbass. The city’s residents are bravely protesting the occupation and the secessionist scheme. The Russian plans for Kherson’s “independence” begs the question: if Putin’s goal is really to soon conquer and govern all of Ukraine, why would that game plan include breaking away more pieces from Ukraine? The Kherson gambit may be further proof that partition is his real end game.

As the Russian offensive advances farther west, it is now encircling Mykolaiv. If that major city falls, the next to be targeted will be Odesa, the headquarters of the Ukrainian navy. The conquest of that key port city would complete the corridor westward to Transnistria, an ethnic Russian enclave that declared independence from Romanian-speaking Moldova in 1992, and has hosted Russian “peacekeepers” ever since. At that point, Putin’s dreamt-of “Novorossiya” connecting Russian-speaking eastern and southern Ukraine (as shown on the fourth map) would be realized.

The entity could be a loose collection of “people’s republics” along the Black Sea coast (which not coincidentally is rich in offshore natural gas deposits), the far-east Donbass, and perhaps even “Svoboda Ukraine” along the northeastern border. The swath could also be coalesced into a single Russian-occupied state that declares so-called “independence” and is recognized by Moscow. Or the entire region could be annexed outright to Russia as Crimea was in 2014, perhaps after a “referendum.”

Or Putin might even have another plan in mind, one that has a precedent, which includes securing NATO approval for partition. That precedent is in the 1992-95 war in Bosnia, which pit Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) against both Serbs and Croats. Just as the break-up of the Soviet Union left many Russians outside Russia, the subsequent break-up of Yugoslavia left many Serbs outside Serbia, including in Croatia and Bosnia. The U.S. opposed ethnic cleansing by the Russian-aligned Orthodox Serbs, but facilitated ethnic cleansing by its Catholic Croat allies. And the Bosnians did their part of horrors as welle, let’s not fool ourselves.

The 1995 Dayton Accords brought an end to the Bosnian war, by partitioning the country into a Serb-ruled Republika Srpska, and a Muslim-Croat Federation. “Dayton” referred to the Ohio city near the Wright-Patterson Air Base where the talks were held, hosted by President Bill Clinton. In effect, Clinton and NATO rubberstamped the wartime ethnic cleansing on both sides, by recognizing the “clean” political border between the two new ethnic republics.

While Bosnia-Herzegovina is nominally still an independent state, the real power is exercised by the two de facto ethnic statlets within it. The shaky arrangement threatens to collapse every time an irredentist Serb leader threatens to secede and join Serbia.

Putin may be tempted to put a Dayton-style partition of Ukraine on the table, since the U.S. and NATO has already backed that settlement model in Bosnia. The U.S. similarly oversaw a similar de facto internal partition of occupied Iraq into Kurdish, Arab Sunni, and Arab Shi’a regions.

If “Novorossiya” emerges from the maelstrom as a nominally Russian-ruled region, what would happen to the rest of Ukraine, the mostly ethnic Ukrainian western and central regions?

In some ways, this so called « Putin’s war » manufactured in Washington has unmasked the very far-right pro-NATO Ukrainian bogeyman that Western Europe is bound to deal with in its own.

Whether or not Zelensky remains in office, this “rump Ukraine” shall be much further to the right, and heavily armed by the US through Turkey, with a high level of « resistance » of neo-nazi militants, such as the Azov Battalion. (A counter-more optimist view could be that the far-right militias no longer have a monopoly on militancy, so they’ve been eclipsed by other Ukrainian “heroes.”) The reduced-size Ukraine would almost certainly support joining NATO, though a sustainable peace deal must include Ukraine’s neutrality.

Putin would not tolerate creating a rump Ukraine that is even more dead-set against Russia.

A geostrategic answer is that his Novorossiya would form at least a small “buffer” between NATO and Russia.

If I wanted to be cynical, I would say that a sustained Ukrainian enemy is exactly what Putin wants and needs for the next two years.

Putin is no devil. No saint either. Like all western leaders, one of Putin’s goals is to stay in power, especially in the face of economic crises at home, and a good way to always is stoke fear and xenophobia abroad. An independent Ukraine simmering with anger would enable him to continue to rally his people behind him for fear of NATO and Nazis, Russia’s historical traumas associated with threats from the west. However, his main goal is still to protect Russia. That should be clear for the USA and NATO countries. The "problem" with him is that he is Russian to the core. Not a even bit Americanized like Russian and World social media generation. And that bothers Washington. 

Prokofiev: Dance of the Knightts, by the Bolshoi

USA vs Russia in Ukraine: The Propaganda Mill

The Listening Post 

At risk to repeat myself, as the gruesome death toll mounts from Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine we stand on the brink of the unthinkable – a nuclear confrontation which could literally spell the end of life on earth.

Unfortunately, the western media has largely reduced the complex causes behind this disaster to one simplistic meme: It’s all the fault of one man – Vladimir (“Mad Vlad”) Putin the evil autocrat, a modern-day Stalin, an unhinged Hitler with visions of global domination. Unless you adhere to this facile bogyman narrative that reduces a complex global conflict with deep historical roots to a binary contest between good and evil, you are siding with the enemy and won’t get a word in edgewise in any discussion about the real causes behind this horrific war.

To even suggest that the US and its NATO gang might share some responsibility by pushing Russia to the brink and encouraging the Ukraine to reject compromises that could have prevented the invasion, automatically makes you a Putin apologist, a Kremlin stooge or worse.

Of course, we’ve been here before. From Vietnam to the illegal invasions of Bosnia, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Somalia the US foreign policy establishment and a too often compliant media have made a fine art of crafting simplistic narratives. Not so long ago, the hallowed New York Times became the leading cheerleader for the Iraq invasion that was later proved to be based on the completely false claim that Saddam Hussein was building a terrifying arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. In the White House-media echo chamber, so called “evidence” was fed to the Times by Bush administration officials who then claimed the Times was one of the sources of their evidence. Only after the loss of over a million lives and trillions of dollars did the truth come out, but the paper of record never published a correction. Instead, a new reason was concocted for going to war – to topple the evil dictator Saddam Hussein. This is the same kind of simplistic narrative now being used to claim that Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine rests solely on the "wicked" persona of Vladimir Putin, but it’s dangerously misleading. By tying the problem of the Ukraine to one man, American policy makers are dealing with the wrong problem. Russia’s interests are greater than any single individual, no matter how long serving or powerful.

Today, as we are saturated with numbing images of bombs exploding, buildings turned to rubble and bloodied corpses, the media is MIA when it comes to reporting on how we got here in the first place. TV news anchors and flak-jacketed correspondents reporting from the frontlines provide almost no historical context to help viewers grasp the chain of events that precipitated the Russian invasion.

As I've already said in earlier articles, from the start, the war in eastern Ukraine that precipitated the wider conflict has been reduced to a war between the Ukrainian army and “pro-Russian separatists”, a purposely misleading label that obscures the fact that there are really two main cultural and linguistic groups in the Ukraine – one made up of 60% ethnic Ukrainians in the west and about 30% ethnic Russians in the east – with Ukrainians in the west identifying more with Europe, those in the east with Russia. Seldom if ever explained is that the current crisis began in late 2013 when the democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovych, viewed by many ethnic Ukrainians as pro-Russian, rejected an EU (IMF) loan deal that imposed harsh austerity measures in favour of a more favourable deal offered by Russia. Following this fateful decision there were mass anti-government protests and Yanukovych was overthrown in a US-engineered coup – a claim given credence by the billions of dollars that the US spent on regime change (in the name of democracy promotion) in the Ukraine and a smoking gun in the form of a secret recording of a phone conversation between then Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Newland and US ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt where they can be heard plotting to install Ukraine’s next leader weeks prior to the protests that led to Yanukovych’s ouster.

Although the toppling of Yanukovych is not acknowledged as a coup in the mainstream media, it is vital to understanding the current situation: his removal was the spark that ignited Russia’s reaction to everything that followed: the new government’s ban on the teaching of the Russian language, the demand for autonomy by ethnic Russians in the Donbass, and the attacks on ethnic Russians by the Ukrainian army and neo-Nazi militias with the loss of 14,000 civilian and military lives.

Russia’s perspective is almost completely absent from the media that has airbrushed out its most fundamental concern – namely being surrounded by NATO forces and nuclear warheads after the US promised Russia that it would not expand NATO “one inch eastward” (in the words of George HW Bush’s Secretary of State James Baker) following the collapse of the Soviet Union. We rarely if ever hear that, in blatant violation of Baker’s promise, NATO has expanded its forces 800 miles east to Russia’s border since 1996, or that when Ukraine’s NATO membership was first proposed back in 2008, Russia declared it to be an existential threat and a red line it would not allow to be crossed.

Instead, the official narrative coming from the US State Department and an overly credulously media is that a "malevolent" and possibly "unhinged" Putin has invaded the Ukraine with revanchist ambitions of redrawing Russia’s borders to recreate the Russian Empire. Well, they don't know Vladimir Putin.

Putin has made only one clear and unambiguous demand – that the Ukraine not join NATO and remain neutral. Of course, there are legitimate questions about how this demand impinges on Ukrainian sovereignty, but historical precedents matter. The most obvious is the Cuban missile crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon when US security trumped Cuban sovereignty and its right to become part of a Soviet deterrent near the US border. And why do our pundits never ask – what would happen to the sacrosanct notion of sovereignty if Mexico or Canada stationed Russian nuclear warheads and troops on US borders? As the Los Alamos Study Group reports: “Security for one state requires security for others. This is a core principle of European security which Russia rightly insists on.”

It’s also astounding that the press has completely ignored the decades the decades of dire warnings by USA’s most senior foreign policy officials about NATO expansion since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the early 1990s US diplomat George Kennan, an arch anti-communist and the architect of the US strategy of Soviet containment, sounded the alarm that “NATO expansion would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold war era…a strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions.” Subsequently, when NATO first considered Ukrainian and Georgian membership in 2008 CIA director and former US ambassador to Russia William Burns warned that this would “not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, (it would) engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. With much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership (this) could lead to a major split with violence or at worst civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision that Russia does not want to have to face.” And in the leadup to Russia’s invasion, the last U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock wrote: “…obviously there would have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the alliance following the end of the Cold War.” These alarms have been coming from the highest-ranking members of the US foreign policy establishment including Henry Kissinger since 1989 and the failure to report them is a serious omission from the historical record. Or, as I said in earlier articles, that was planned from the start. To force Russia to react and attack, no matter the life cost of this machiavelic plan to overturn Putin's government and take over Russia.

I insist, make no mistake, the war in the Ukraine is first and foremost a US-Russia proxy war over resources and hegemony that, cynically, the US is willing to fight to the last Ukrainian. “The US has led the Ukraine down the primrose path”, says international relations scholar John Mearsheimer. They have encouraged Ukraine’s leaders to “poke the Russian bear in the eye”, insist on their right to join NATO and ignore Russia’s warnings that they would never allow this to happen. Don’t worry, the US has told them, we have your backs, knowing full well that no American troops would ever come to their rescue. The media are complicit in this macabre charade as they cheerlead Ukrainian citizens fighting with Molotov cocktails against one of the biggest and most highly trained military forces in the world. Standing on the sidelines as these untrained fighters risk being blown to pieces, the US and its NATO allies are pouring billions of dollars of weapons into the Ukraine to prolong an unwinnable war.

Meanwhile, the propaganda machine on both sides are now in hyperdrive. In addition to  protesters against the war, Russia has banned Facebook and Twitter, and orstmore importantly, the TV independent channel Dozhd, and shut down all opposition to the war on state run media – just like the US did during the Iraq invasiona, and anyone who posts “fake news” could face 15 years in prison. In the west, Russian broadcasters RT and Sputnik have been banned in the US and Europe; Russian key culture and sport  musical, artistic  and Valery Gergiev, under unbearable pressure, was forced to resign his position in Scotland, not mentionning all the other great cultural and sports figures that have been fired or excluded for not agreeing to say something negative about their home country; film festivals have banned Russian films; and, absurdly, there’s even an embargo on the importation of Russian cats. And in Australia, Russophobia reached fevered pitch when a prominent talk show host ejected an audience member from the studio for asking why the media does not report Russia’s perspective about the war and Ukraine’s attacks on ethnic Russians in the Donbass.

None of my criticisms of western media are meant to justify Russia’s devasting invasion of the Ukraine and media and public censorship. But I must tell what I saw and see. And it was Putin doing his best to establish a dialogue with the European Union, and to make the USA & OTAN keep their word instead of wreaking havoc. He did all he could to avoid war. The Russians hate war more than any other country I know, but they cannot bear the thought of being exposed to another invasion. Napoleon and Hitler were enough. And each time through Ukraine.

So one has to ask: 

Wouldn' this war have been avoided if NATO leaders were less selfrighteously intransigent and egotistical focused on their will to impose their own rules and the public was more informed about its complex causes and the USA's role in precipitating the crisis?

If there was a better understanding of Russia’s security concerns?

If the media had conveyed the warnings of insiders sounding the alarm?

If reporters had been less credulous about US State Department talking points and media group think and Western agenda to bring down Putin and Russian economy?

One can only wonder.

But what is done is done. The result is: Welcome back to USSR.

And given the cultural and ethnic differences in Ukraine, if there is no territorial division right now, when the Russians leave, there will be a civil war, worse than in Yugoslavia. With dreadful consequences for Europe and beyond.

The Listening Post

for the sake of impartiality and solidarity with our Russian colleagues

USA vs Russia in Ukraine : Washington's dangerous Endgame

Viewing the Ukraine war as starting with the current Russian invasion leads to very different conclusions than if you consider that the starting point of this war was the 2014 US orchestrated coup in Ukraine. The coup, which had elements of an authentic popular revolt, has been used by outside powers to pursue geopolitical ends.

The conception that the war started on February 24 of this year is like viewing the “invasion” by the US and its allies of Normandy in June 1944 against the “sovereign” and “democratic” Vichy French as the start of World War II. Never mind that the Vichy government was a puppet of the Nazis; that the opportunities to negotiate had long been rejected; that the war had been raging for years; and that the only option for stopping the Nazis was militarily.

NATO is an army in the service of the US interests. Viewing it simply as an alliance of nominally sovereign entities obscures that it is commanded as a tool of US foreign policy in its stated quest of world dominion; that is, “full spectrum dominance.” The “alliance” members must fully integrate their militaries under that command along with purchasing US war equipment and offering up their own citizens as troops.

After the implosion of the Soviet Union and the supposed end of the first cold war, instead of NATO being disbanded and Russia being integrated in the European Union as Mosco wished, the opposite occurred. There was no “peace dividend” and no honoring of the promise that NATO would not expand any further. Instead, NATO antagonized Moscow and stampeded east towards the borders of the Russian Federation adding fourteen new members of former USSR republics and allies.

Even before the 2014 coup, the US’s fateful decision in 2006 to draw Ukraine into NATO posed an existential threat to Russia. By December 2021, a US-armed Ukraine had become a de facto member of NATO, crossing a redline for Russia. Mearsheimer concludes, “the west bears primary responsibility for what is happening today.”

After the 2014 coup in Ukraine, the Minsk Protocols were an attempt at a peaceful settlement through “a ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons from the front line, release of prisoners of war, constitutional reform in Ukraine granting self-government to certain areas of Donbas, and restoring control of the state border to the Ukrainian government.” Moscow, Kyiv, and the eastern separatists were all parties to the agreements.

Following the latest round of “sweeping” US-imposed sanctions on Russia, their Foreign Ministry announced, “we have reached the line where the point of no return begins.” Such sanctions are a form of warfare as deadly as bombs.

War is a great diversion for Joe Biden, whose popularity has been slipping due to a lackluster domestic performance. The US empire has much to gain: further unifying NATO under US domination, reducing Russian economic competition in the European energy market, justifying increasing the US war budget, and facilitating sales of war material to NATO vassals.

NATO has dumped over a trillion dollars in arms and facilities into the border countries next to Russia and continues to this day to pour lethal weapons into Ukraine. The leader of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi C14 recently bragged on YouTube (while other voices are censored): “We are being given so much weaponry not because as some say ‘the west is helping us,’ not because it is best for us. But because we perform the tasks set by the west…because we have fun, we have fun killing.”

More than 14,000 people have been killed in the eastern Ukraine region of Donbas in warfare between ethnic Russians and Ukrainian regular military/right-wing paramilitaries in the eight years since the coup. The self-proclaimed People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, beleaguered enclaves in the Donbas of largely ethnic Russians, seceded from Ukraine and were recognized by Russia on February 21.

The semi-governmental (over 80% US government funded) Rand Corporation’s playbook for the US and its allies says it all: “pursue across economic, political, and military areas to stress – overextend and unbalance – Russia’s economy and armed forces and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad.”

Economical sanctions against Russia is a collective punishment against the Russian population. Just as it is for Iran. Howeever, it is difficult to think what other options Russia has to defend itself. There are some, but surely they are slim. The US has continually been the aggressor even if I do not agree with the Russian military response because I hate war.  But it was Washington that provoked this war. Not Moscow. 

The peaceful integration of Russia with the rest of Europe would be a great threat to the US control of the world. A unified or even a cordial Europe could truly herald the end of US hegemony. The long-game geopolitical goal of preventing the unification of Europe may well be the fundamental aim of US foreign policy in that continent.

What would become of “US strategic interests” if peace were to break out in Europe, and Russia would become partners with Germany, France, and Italy? A potentially more independent Europe, including Russia, would challenge the US-dominated Atlanticist project.

The extreme hostility that the US took to the Nord Stream 2 project, which would have piped Russian natural gas under the Baltic Sea directly to Germany, went beyond the narrow economism of favoring US liquefied natural gas (LNG) suppliers. Where Washington’s earlier efforts of imposing illegal unilateral economic sanctions on its NATO ally faltered, the current conflict will surely discourage any rational and cooperative economic association of Russia with its western neighbors.

The severing of Russia from the rest of Europe is a tremendous victory for the US. This is especially the case, when there were recent moves in the direction of economic, cultural, and political exchange, which have now been reversed.

Russia shares a 1,426-mile border with Ukraine and considers that region within its security perimeter, vital to its national security. The US, which is 5,705 miles from Ukraine, considers the world its sphere of influence. Clearly, there is a conflict of interest.

The contemporary geopolitical dynamic has evolved from the one Lenin described in 1916 in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which was then characterized as one of inter-imperialist rivalry. This theory is not entirely adequate to understand today’s world dominated by a single superpower (with its European Union, British, and Japanese junior partners). Surely, national centers of capital continue to compete. But over-arching this competition is a militantly imposed unipolar pax Americana.

There is just one superpower with hundreds of foreign military bases, possession of the world’s reserve currency, and control of the SWIFT worldwide payment and transaction system. Simply reducing the conflict to one of contesting powers obscures the whole picture.

The forces are asymmetrical in Ukraine as well as in the global contest.

Regionally, Ukraine cannot overpower the Russians. And globally, Russia and the US may have comparable nuclear arsenals, but Russia has no bases of any kind in North America compared to at least six nuclear and many more conventional bases for the US in Europe. The US military budget is 11.9 times the size of Russia’s, not to mention the war chests of Washington’s NATO allies. Similarly, the US economy is 12.5 times as large as Russia’s. Of the Fortune 500 top international corporations, only four are Russian compared to 122 from the US. Russia’s labor productivity is only 36% of the US’s. In terms of finance capital, the US has 11 of the world’s top 100 banks; Russia has one. Far from being a key exporter of capital, Russia is a leader in capital flight, in part owing to sanctions imposed by the US and its conjunctural allies.

Russia plays very little part in the quintessential imperialist activity: the export of capital to the periphery and the extraction of profit from developing countries’ labor and resources. Russia is a target of US-led supremacy; it's terrible that Ukraine is caught in the crossfire.

If only the outrage over the Russian invasion had some ethical grounding by what is misleadingly called the “international community,” but is in reality the US and its subalterns allies. Biden’s touted “rules based order” is one where the US makes the rules and the rest of the world follows its orders, in contradiction to the Charter of the UN and other recognized international law.

The fact is that the so-called “international community seems to have accepted egregious violations of Art. 2(4) [of the UN Charter] by the US against Cuba, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Haiti, Nicaragua, Panama, Venezuela; by NATO countries against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yugoslavia; by Israel against all its Arab neighbors, Syria and Lebanon, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians; by Saudi Arabia against Yemen; by Azerbaijan against Nagorno Karabakh, by Turkey against Cyprus, etc.”

Regardless of how one sides – or not – in the new cold war, it is instructive to understand the context of the conflict. This is especially so when views outside the dominant US narrative, such as those of Russian outlets Sputnik and RT that hosted US intellectuals like Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges, are being silenced.

We know how this unnecessary regrettable war began. How it will end or even if it will end is another story. Regionally, Russia might take over all the Ukrainian provinces with Russian predominancy, which means all its fronteir. Globally, the world is spiraling into a new Cold War in order to marginalize Russia. 

Washington is playing a dangerous game trying to overthrow Putin. Without him in Moscow, Russia is uncontrolable and weak. Europe and the world need a strong Russia for the balance of power and to keep extremists at bay. 

Expressing a view from the standpoint of the Global South, former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva commented: “we do not want to be anyone’s enemy. We are not interested, nor is the world, in a new cold war…which is for sure dragging the whole world into a conflict that could put humanity in danger.”

If there is a lesson to be learned, it is that the end of endless war will come with the end of the US supremacist project that provoked this terrible crisis and so many others before. But never on US soil. Always abroad. And the USA always, always, always, benefit from every single one. For how long?