USA & UK vs Russia in Ukraine: Bait, Bleed and Profit from the chaos they created, with no shame

The term ‘bait and bleed’ was defined by International Relations theorist John Mearsheimer in 2001 as a military strategy that “involves causing two rivals to engage in a protracted war, so that they bleed each other white, while the baiter remains on the sideline, its military strength intact.”

The current National Defence Strategy (NDS) of the USA explicitly endorses such a strategy, and it makes no bones about who it is aimed at. The NDS, authored by then-Secretary of Defence James Mattis in 2018, describes itself as “a clear road map for the Department of Defense to meet the challenges posed by a re-emergence of long-term strategic competition with China and Russia,” adding that “interstate strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in US national security.” On p.5 of the summary document, under the heading “strategic approach,” the NDS vows that “with our allies and partners, we will challenge competitors by maneuvering them into unfavorable positions, frustrating their efforts, precluding their options while expanding our own, and forcing them to confront conflict under adverse conditions.” There it is, in black and white: it is official US policy to bait Russia into conflict.

The US certainly has form in this regard. Until 1998, the mainstream view of US support for the anti-communist insurgency in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s was that it had been a response to the Russian invasion of December 1979. But in an interview in 1998, Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to US President Jimmy Carter, admitted that the truth was the exact opposite. In fact “it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention…The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.’ Indeed, for almost 8 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime,but the Russians left behind all of Afganistan’s infrastructure. Contrary to the USA that occupied the country for 20 years and bled it to death.

Asked whether he regretted the move, which plunged Afghanistan into a conflict which is now into its fifth decade, he replied “Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?” Plunging the Afghan people into a half-century of devastating war was of no consequence for the likes of Brzizinski. His successors clearly have the same attitude towards Ukraine.

In a widely viewed 2015 lecture on Ukraine, Mearsheimer noted that “If you really want to wreck Russia, what you really want to do is encourage Russia to conquer Ukraine.” The US, through NATO – appear to have been taking this advice very seriously.

NATO’s expansion into the former Soviet ‘sphere of influence,’ beginning with Bill Clinton in 1997, has always been recklessly provocative, as widely noted even way back then. A widely circulated letter by fifty leading academics, diplomats and retired military officers called the move a “policy error of historic proportions” which will “unsettle European stability” and “ultimately diminish the sense of security of those countries which are not included.” Even George Kennan, whose ‘long telegram’ in 1946 is viewed as a founding document of the post-WW2 strategy of Soviet containment, warned that NATO expansion eastwards would result in “a new Cold War, probably ending in a hot one.” Each round of NATO enlargement deepened Russia’s suspicions, but it was the Bucharest agreement of 2008 that really ratcheted up the tension. The US and UK had been pushing for Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO as soon as possible, but France and Germany resisted the move, viewing it as gratuitously provocative. Russia had, after all, been invaded three times via its western border during the previous century, the most recent, well within living memory, costing it an unfathomable 27 million lives. The prospect of Ukraine joining NATO – that is, becoming a giant military base for Britain, Germany and the US, the very countries that had built up and unleashed the fascist war machine in the 1930s – was understandably considered a red line, given Ukraine’s 2000km land border with Russia, penetrating deep into its territory. The compromise, if you can call it that, was an agreement that Ukraine (along with Georgia) would not join NATO immediately but definitely would do so in the future. Georgia’s government took this as a green light to make moves against Russian interests there, and got a shock when NATO support was not, after all, forthcoming against Putin’s predictable response. Following that episode, wrote Richard Sakwa, “British foreign secretary David Miliband visited Kiev and pledged Britain’s support, dooming the country to become the next epicentre of the artificially constructed struggle for mastery in Europe.”

Russia’s concerns were allayed for a time during the period 2010-14, during the presidency of Yanokovych, whose mandate was to keep Ukraine neutral – militarily allied to neither Russia nor the west, but with good diplomatic and trade relations with both. Unfortunately, this policy was thrown into reverse following the 2014 coup, egged on (and immediately recognised) by the US and UK, and carried out with neo-Nazi paramilitaries as the vanguard force. Following an unsuccessful attempt to impose the writ of the coup regime on the Russian ethnic-speaking east of the country, those paramilitaries were, under US prodding, integrated into a new ‘National Guard’ which has been the spearhead of the war effort ever since, at the cost of 14,000 lives. Following the coup, noted Professor Sakwa, and “as if to rub salt into the wounds, NATO staged the Rapid Trident military exercise on Ukrainian territory on 15-16 September” of that year, a war gaming exercise involving fifteen countries “designed to enhance interoperability with allied and partner nations.” Since then, plans for NATO incorporation have proceeded apace. A British government document listing British support for the Ukrainian military outlines these plans in detail. In 2016, NATO outlined its Comprehensive Assistance Package of 16 “capacity building programmes and several trust funds” for military modernisation, whilst “NATO allies also participate in a wide range of military exercises with Ukrainian armed forces through the Military Committee with Ukraine Work Plan.”

But it was in June 2020 that this process was really ramped up, when NATO was offered “Enhanced Opportunity Partner status” with NATO. Notes the British document, “this status provides Ukraine with preferential access to NATO’s exercises, training and exchange of information and situational awareness, in order to increase interoperability. In September 2020 Ukraine hosted Exercise Joint Endeavour, with British, US and Canadian troops.” This was “the first exercise conducted under Ukraine’s new enhanced status,” but far from the last, with another ten planned, involving tens of thousands of NATO troops, for 2022 alone.

If Russia was going to enforce its red line, time was fast running out. From spring 2021, it began a counter-provocation of its own, building up a huge armed presence on the Ukrainian border, in what was widely interpreted as a show of strength to scare Ukraine into backing down from this suicidal course. Mearsheimer’s warning in 2015 that “the West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path and Ukraine is going to get wrecked” looked ever more ominous.

This cycle of provocation continued throughout the year. In June 2021, Britain sent HMS Defender, part of its Carrier Strike Group’s Indo-Pacific mission, into the Black Sea “in a show of solidarity with Ukraine and regional NATO allies.” This sabre-rattling agitprop was presumably intended to fool Ukraine into thinking this equipment might actually be used in the event of a showdown with Russia, and that they should therefore press on with NATO membership safe in the knowledge that Britain would bring its full force to bear should it trigger a reaction. It was an intentionally misleading and irresponsible message; but, for years now, and as Mearsheimer had noted, “What we’re doing is encouraging the Ukrainians to play tough with the Russians.”

Even the EU, which, notes the British document, has traditionally left “military reform” as an issue for “NATO and bilateral cooperation,” joined in the Russia-baiting. In December 2021 it announced a new militarist turn, with “a package of measures to help strengthen the capacity of the Ukrainian armed forces,” worth €31million. US, UK and the EU were united, it seemed, in sending a clear message to the Russians: ‘we’re gonna build up a massive military force on your doorstep, you losers, and there’s nothing you can do about it’. Such wilful humiliation can only be aimed at one thing: triggering a response.

But the militarisation of Ukraine was only one part of the ‘bait and bleed’ strategy. Alongside the goading to invade came, in November 2021, a more or less open invitation to do so. In a sharp reversal of the message sent by the HMS Defender visit in June – that Britain would ‘have Ukraine’s back’ in the event of war – came the opposite signal – that NATO would not defend their plucky new partner should Russia choose to invade. Reported Bloomberg on the 30th November 2021, “President Vladimir Putin warned the West not to cross the Kremlin’s security “red line” as the U.S. and the U.K. said any Russian incursion into Ukraine would trigger serious diplomatic and economic responses.” Serious diplomatic and economic responses means, of course, zero military consequences. Moscow was being told openly that, should they choose to settle the issue by force, the only response from the west would be “diplomatic and economic,” that is to say – not military. At a stroke, US and UK statements had undermined NATO chief Jans Stolzenberg’s attempts to leave a military option on the table. Whilst NATO had no Article Five obligation to militarily defend Ukraine, Stolzenberg had been attempting to deter a Russian invasion by leaving its potential response ambiguous; when asked by reporters whether he ruled out a military intervention by NATO in the event of Russian incursions, his reply was “We have different options,” referring to “the fact that we have increased our presence here, in the region, both in the Black Sea region and in the Baltic region, in the air, on land and at sea.” That ambiguity was ended by the USUK guarantee that they would not militarily oppose a Russian invasion. Russia was being simultaneously goaded into conducting an invasion and openly invited to do so. The trap was set.

From the moment that invitation was issued, the character of the Russian troop buildup began to change. What started off in spring as a show of strength, designed to coerce Ukraine into respecting its security needs, began to look like something very different.

Nevertheless, noted strategic analyst and former Ukrainian Defence Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk, “The fact that they’re getting ready [for an invasion] does not mean that they will start it.” Rather, he suggested, the objective might still have been to apply pressure for a negotiated settlement that meets Russia’s security needs. Indeed, concurrent with its buildup, Russia continued to push hard on the diplomatic front.

Vladimir Putin began by reminding the world that, as far as the expansion of western military infrastructure into Ukraine goes, “This creation of such threats for us is the red line,” before on 17th December, laying his demands for de-escalating tensions with NATO: the ruling out of NATO membership for Ukraine, NATO forces to return to their 1997 positions, no new NATO members and an end to NATO drills in countries bordering Russia. These were simply dismissed and derided by the US. Putin’s basic error was to attempt to use as leverage the threat of the very thing US planners were attempting to goad him to do in the first place – invading Ukraine.

From that point on, it was a simple matter of calling his bluff. USUK ‘intelligence’ and media playing up of the co-called ‘planned invasion’ only added to the pressure on Putin to follow through, ensuring the world’s attention would be entirely focused on the humiliation of any ‘climbdown.’

Right up to the last minute, despite the west’s ‘warnings’, many were convinced that such a climbdown was on the cards. The danger it held, of course, was that USUK and the Ukrainian National Guard would take full advantage of this moment of Russian ‘weakness’ to launch a major military escalation in the Donbass, attempting to finally impose the military solution they had been denied for the past eight years, before moving to finalise Ukraine’s integration into NATO in short order. Literally hours before Putin’s announcement of a ‘special military operation’ on February 21st, I posted the following message on a political discussion forum, in a response to a question about whether Russia would invade: “Putin is not gonna do it. He blinked and now NATO and their fascist mercenaries are taking full advantage. This is the beginning of the end for Putin and the start of a devastating war to retake the Donbass.”

However, that was simply never an option Putin was willing to accept. He would risk everything – and everybody – rather than accept humiliation and defeat. For Putin, having gone as far as he had, the choice was starkly posed between escalation and capitulation. It was at this point that method turned into madness, and the murderous, strategically disastrous Russian land invasion of Ukraine began. And madness it was, Putin was well aware that the US had lured the Soviet Union into the Afghan quagmire, precipitating its collapse and was well aware of the dangers of being sucked into a war over Ukraine, which would be unwinnable and disastrous. The US and UK had achieved what once had seemed impossible – goading Russia into a battlefield on which they could be crucified. They had been baited. Now they would be bled.

The UK, in particular, had been preparing for this war for years. Even whilst Obama momentarily banned lethal military aid to Ukraine,(just for show in the end of his administration, knowing that the ban would be immediately overturned by Trump; in 2018) Britain was running a military training programme for Ukraine called “Operation Orbital.” Beginning in 2015 with 75 UK military trainers focussed on “medical, logistics, general infantry skills and intelligence capacity building,” since then it has “been expanded and extended several times.” By 2018, it also involved “training for defensive operations in an urban environment, operational planning, engineering [and] countering attacks from snipers, armoured vehicles and mortars,” and had been expanded to cover “all branches of Ukraine’s armed forces,” including the Ukrainian navy. In October 2020, the UK and Ukraine agreed to proceed with a new Naval Capabilities Enhancement Programme, which would involve, amongst other things, “Ukraine’s purchase of two refurbished Royal Navy Sandown-class minehunters…the sale and integration of missiles on new and in-service Ukrainian Navy patrol and airborne platforms, including a training and engineering support package, assistance in building new naval bases in the Black Sea and Azov Sea, the development and joint production of eight fast missile warships, and participation in the Ukrainian project to deliver a modern frigate capability.” In November 2021, the UK released £1.7billion of financing for the project, and had, according to a Downing Street press release, trained a total of 22,000 Ukrainian military personnel by January 2022. The Naval initiative already seems to be paying dividends, with evidence emerging that a Russian warship was destroyed by the Ukrainian navy in early March.

The trick for the US and UK now is to make sure the war lasts as long as possible, to maximise Russian casualties and trigger economic collapse. In other words, having goaded the Russians into starting the war, the aim is now to goad the Ukrainians to keep it going, resisting the temptation to come to terms with the Russians and make peace. This part of the operation was termed by Mearsheimer ‘bloodletting,’ in which “the aim is to make sure that any war between one’s rivals turns into a long and costly conflict that saps their strength.” Senator, later President, Harry Truman had this strategy in mind, Mearsheimer noted, in his infamous reaction to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941: “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.”

Countering a perceived wobble from Ukrainian President Zelensky, who seemed to imply he would, now he finally understood the Russians were serious, consider returning Ukraine to a non-aligned position, the British government made clear there was to be no such compromise. On the first day of the invasion, February 24th, Foreign Office minister Lord Ahmed told parliament that “we remain committed to the 2008 Bucharest Summit Declaration in which all NATO allies agreed that Ukraine will become a member of the alliance.” A negotiated settlement is, it seems, unacceptable to the UK, who are willing to fight Russia, as the saying goes, down to the last Ukrainian; their vision was spelled out by Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, who told Sky News that the conflict could last ‘years’ and the UK needs to be ‘prepared for a very long haul’. Western media, meanwhile, have clearly been instructed to play up the supposed successes of the “Ukrainian resistance” and the chance, therefore, of a total military victory against Russia, to stave off the chances of serious negotiations.

The Ukraine trap is being modeled on the Afghan trap right down to the weapons being sent. Stinger surface-to-air missiles played a crucial role in the CIA-MI6 backed anti-Soviet insurgency in the 1980s; the Times reported on 9th March that Ukraine has now received 17,000 anti-tank and 2000 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, most from Germany, Belgium and Britain, with huge US and British cargo planes full of them being sent every 90 minutes, day and night, from an undisclosed airfield. The US Department of Defence has, since September 2021, provided Ukraine with “Stinger missiles, Javelin missiles, anti-tank rocket systems, grenade launchers, more than 2,000 tons of ammunition, including mortar and artillery rounds, small arms, machine guns,” according to the assistant secretary of Defence, Mara Karlin, with a total of $1billion in military equipment provided over the past year and $2billion over the previous seven. “Taken together, the variety, volume and potency of firepower being rushed into the war zone illustrate the extent to which the United States [and the UK] sought to prepare the Ukrainian military to wage a hybrid war against Russia,” suggests the Washington Post article. An additional $13.6 billion of supplies was approved by Congress, on March 9th, with Britain announcing it will send state-of-the-art laser-guided “Starstreak” anti-missile systems to Ukraine on the same day.

On top of the weapons deliveries, Buzzfeed has reported that a small group of NATO special operations forces have been sent into Ukraine: “The group, composed of six US citizens, three Brits, and a German, are NATO-trained and experienced in close combat and counterterrorism. Two former American infantry officers are also making plans to come to Ukraine to provide “leadership” for the group.” They are hoped to be the first of many volunteers who will arrive in the country to fight the Russians, in a replay of the ‘international jihad’ that was fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Indeed, NATO member Turkey is already thought to be sending Syrian militants, with combat experience against Russia, to the frontlines in Syria, whilst “groups like the Georgian National Legion,” through whose ranks which “more than 300 Western foreigners have passed” since its formation in 2014, many “from NATO countries and with prior military experience… help pave the way for people to sign official contracts with the Ukrainian military.” The Ukraine war thus already appears to be becoming a magnet for both far right and ‘radical Islamist’ fighters to join the war against Russia, providing the double benefit for US and Britain of bleeding Russia and removing potentially destabilising elements from their territory.

Should the Zelensky government collapse, and be replaced by a pro-Russian administration – presumably propped up by the Russian military – the plan is for a long NATO sponsored « insurgency », again modelled on 1980s Afghanistan. UK Armed Forces Minister James Heappey told Forces News that the MoD had been asked by Boris Johnson to “look at and plan for” British assistance to any future resistance movement if Ukraine was captured, whilst according to the Washington Post, “Ukraine’s allies are planning how to help establish and support a government-in-exile, which could direct guerrilla operations against Russian occupiers, according to several U.S. and European officials… As early as last December, some U.S. officials saw signs that the Ukrainian military was preparing for an eventual resistance, even as Zelensky downplayed the threat of invasion. During an official visit, a Ukrainian special operations commander told Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) and other lawmakers that they were shifting training and planning to focus on maintaining an armed opposition, relying on insurgent-like tactics.” But key to this outcome is scuppering any moves towards a peaceful settlement: “The number one thing you have to have is people on the ground who want to fight,” said Jack Devine, a retired senior CIA officer who ran the agency’s successful covert campaign to arm Afghan fighters who drove out the Soviet military in the 1980s…. If Russian and Ukrainian negotiators who have been meeting near the border in Belarus reach some settlement, that will likely diminish the momentum for an insurgency and support for it, Devine predicted.”

Again, Washington has form here. The Bosnian war could have been prevented altogether, saving tens of thousands of lives, had the Carrington–Cutileiro peace plan ever been implemented. The plan had been signed by the leaders of all three sides in the conflict, but fell apart after Bosnian leader Izetbegovic withdrew his signature immediately after a meeting with US ambassador Warren Zimmerman. It is thought Zimmerman had pushed him to fight for a better deal with the promise of lavish US military support. We are likely to see much of this in the months and years to come; watch in particular for announcements of increased military or economic escalations around the time of peace talks taking place. Already, the announcement of $13.6billion additional US aid and UK delivery of the “Starstreak” anti-aircraft system on the very day of the first talks between the Ukrainian and Russian foreign ministers was unlikely to be a coincidence.

The benefits of this prolonged war to the US&UK establishment are clear. But this is not only about the ‘bleeding’ of a strategic competitor, whose hampering of regime change in Syria and alliances with Iran and China had made it an increasing thorn in the side of western hegemony. It is aimed not only at Russia, but at Europe, at China, and at Ukraine itself.

The driving of a wedge between Russia and Europe, in order to weaken both, and heighten European dependence on the US, has long been a goal of US foreign policy. Yet Germany and France, in particular, have, for obvious reasons, been unwilling to play ball. That is why, throughout the Russian troop buildup, those countries consistently advocated talks and compromise in direct contrast to the belligerent sabre-rattling of their Atlantic partners. Germany has always had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the economic war against Russia, for the simple reason that that war constitutes an act of serious self-harm for Germany, which, unlike the US, is deeply dependent on Russian energy and markets. It took the downing of the MH17 aircraft to arm-twist them into joining the first round of USUK-led sanctions following the 2014 coup, and it took the Russian invasion of Ukraine for Germany to finally accede to US demands to cancel the NordStream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, which had been completed and ready to begin operations since September 2021. As Immanuel Wallerstein wrote back in 2014, “What haunts the Nulands of this world [a reference to the then US ambassador to Ukraine, Victoria Nuland] is not a putative “absorption” of Ukraine by Russia – an eventuality with which she could live. What haunts her and those who share her views is a geopolitical alliance of Germany/France and Russia.” The Ukraine trap has certainly put paid to that prospect – and the collateral damage to Europe from the economic war on Russia is only a benefit to US hegemony. NATO’s raison d’etre in Europe, as described by its first Secretary General Lord Ismay, was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down,” and the war in Ukraine is already well on the way to achieving all three.

Then, of course, there is China. China has condemned the sanctions on Russia as economic warfare against the population, but as the bloodshed mounts, so too will the pressure on China to join in with them, or risk being treated in the same way itself; this war is increasingly being portrayed as a Manichean struggle of good versus evil in which bystanders are not allowed. Of course, the US economy is far more entangled with that of China than it is with that of Russia, making an all out boycott a trickier prospect – but there is little to stop the US simply freezing Chinese dollar assets in the same way as they have done with Russian. The Russian central bank’s $630billion in foreign reserves were frozen almost immediately after the invasion, eliminating at a stroke Russia’s painstakingly built up insurance policy to protect the ruble. Its value has fallen continuously since then and is now worth barely half of what it was a month ago. What is to stop the US doing the same to China, eliminating a quarter of its foreign debt, and greatly pumping up the value of the dollar, into the bargain? This will be the real worry for Beijing right now, and there is every reason to believe that this is the direction in which we are headed. The Ukraine trap has been designed ultimately to ensnare China as well; we may very well be witnessing the start of the ‘final showdown’ aimed at extending US dominance for another fifty years by ending the Russia-China challenge once and for all.

As for Ukraine itself, its ruined economy and infrastructure will leave it utterly dependent on foreign support for reconstruction. If this does turn out to be Russia, the costs to the Russian economy will be crippling, and ongoing with an insurgency to deal with; if the West, Ukrainian policy will be completely under their control, with reparations likely to be forced out of Russia to pay for reconstruction anyway. Either way, the Russian economy and Ukrainian sovereignty are both finished.

Finally, quite apart from all the geopolitical machinations, are the straightforward capitalist economic interests. In times of economic crisis and stagnation, war becomes an ever more tempting prospect for capitalist powers, providing opportunities to capture state markets (eg for weapons), rather than having to rely on stagnating private consumer markets, organise political boycotts of rival producers in areas where you cannot compete economically, and gain from inflated commodity prices affected by the war (eg oil and gas, of which the USA is a net exporter). Michael Hudson has analysed how the three key economic sectors in the USA – that is, the military-industrial complex; the oil, gas and mining industry and the banking and real estate, which between them control the purse strings of virtually every member of Congress – have all had their strategic goals served very well by this war.

If anything, then, the Ukraine trap looks set to be even more beneficial for the US than the Afghan trap – and even more devastating, not only to Ukraine and Russia, but to China and even the EU as well.

But, as Marx told us long ago, when history repeats itself it does so “first time as tragedy, second time as farce. In Afghanistan, Soviet forces were fighting to defend a genuine popular socialist revolution, which had liberated women and ended feudal oppression, against a vicious sectarian obscurantism that was utterly dependent on MI6, CIA, Pakistani and Saudi largesse. The popularity of Najibullah’s communist government was revealed by the fact that it hung on against this combined terror operation for a further three years after being abandoned by the Soviet withdrawal in 1989.

This time around, there is no such emancipatory project to defend, except for the ‘denazification’ programme. Which will be hard to achieve, considering US & UK support to them.

The tragedy of Putin’s Russia has been its crippling desperation to be accepted by ‘the west’. Why are you and Israel allowed to shit on international law, to invade sovereign states, to starve and besiege, to use thermobarbaric weapons, to bomb hospitals, and we are not? What is this Russophobia? Am I not a white man and a white brother?

No, you are a foe. You don't serve us as you should and don't let our coorporations take over your resources nor our oligarchs replace yours.

Farce indeed. And utterly sickening to watch.

USA vs Russia: What is Ukraine, actually?

Who hasn’t thought in terms of national identities, stereotypical and misleading as they are?

The question is whether a national identity can contain all of its sub-identities, and keep from flying apart. What then can be said about Ukrainian identity?

The following historical sketch may provide some clues.

The earliest accounts of the people called Russians–the Rus–feature stories of Nordic (Varangian or Swedish) princes and Slavic cities, particularly Novgorod and Kiev. Prince Rurik established a dynasty ruling Novgorod, and his successor Oleg captured Kiev in the late 9th century. The Rurik princes made Kiev their capital and accepted conversion to Orthodox Christianity headed by the Patriarch in Constantinople. The Rus people came to be distinguished as Eastern Slavic speakers, in contrast to the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Coatian, Serbs, Bulgarians, and others, who spoke Western and Southern Slavic languages.

Medieval Kievan Rus lasted for 400 years, until it was overthrown and occupied by Mongol invaders in the 13th century. 200 years later, in 1480, Ivan, the Grand Prince of Moscow, finally defeated the last of the Mongols, with the help of the Lithuanians. But it was the Lithuanians, not Ivan, who swept on to conquer the remaining lands of the Eastern Slavs, including what is now Belorussia and Ukraine down to the Black Sea. They choose to solidify their conquests by a dynastic union in 1385, not with the lands of Novgorod and Moscow newly liberated from the Mongols, but with the Kingdom of Poland, a move sealed by their conversion to the Catholic, not the Orthodox, faith.

Ukraine became a pawn in the slow-motion merger of Lithuania and Poland. As part of their complete union under the Treaty of Lublin in 1569, all of Ukraine was transferred to the Kingdom of Poland. Eastern Ukraine was later wrested from Poland by Russia after rebelling cossacks in the mid-17th century turned to Moscow for help. But Western Ukraine remained a part of Poland until the country was partitioned at the end of the 18th century, at which point a large part of West Ukraine passed not to Russia, but to what became Austria-Hungary. The remainder of Ukraine was brought under Russian rule, which continued throughout most of the Tsarist and Soviet years, until 1991, when all of Ukraine found itself granted its independence, more or less by default, in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union. A Ukrainian Peoples’ Republic had briefly emerged in the confusion following 1917 Russian revolutions but was quickly swallowed back into the Soviet Union, while the Austrian part of Western Ukraine had been incorporated into the reborn Polish state in the 1920s and 30s.

The intervention by the Lithuanians in the 14th century, which put most of Ukraine under Polish-Lithuanian rule for about 500 years, had an impact that 200 subsequent years of Russian rule has been unable to erase. A largely Catholic Polish-Lithuanian aristocracy ruled over a largely Orthodox Ukrainian peasantry. Ukrainian leaders, however, sought parity with Poles and Lithuanians, in part to gain the democratic liberties and privileges enjoyed by the Polish and Lithuanian nobility. All this stood in stark contrast to the bleak offerings of tyrannical Tsars like Ivan the Terrible in Muscovy. The political and cultural drift to the West among even Orthodox Ukrainians became evident in the establishment of the Uniate Church in 1596, by which many Orthodox groups, especially in Western Ukraine, accepted the authority of the Pope but otherwise kept Orthodox rituals and practices.

The reluctance of the Poles and Lithuanians to share their privileges and freedoms and make the Ukrainians equal partners in the Commonwealth proved to be the undoing of the Commonwealth. The massive cossack rebellion in Ukraine in 1648, led by Bogdan Hmelnytsky, turned to Russia only after failing to reach an accommodation with the Poles and Lithuanians over their grievances. The result was the loss of East Ukraine to Russia, confirmed by the Treaty of Andrusovo in 1667.

West Ukraine remained in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth until the end of the 18th century, but the core of it (including what Polish speakers call the city of Lwow, which Germans call Lemburg, and Ukrainians call Lviv) continued as part of Austria-Hungary, before becoming part of a newly reestablished Polish State between the world wars. It was finally included, for the first time as a whole, into one of the republics of the Russian Soviet Union after 1945. Only to harshly become an independent country in 1991 as a united antagonistic nation, without previous consultation of the Eastern Russian speaking population, just like Crimea, 

Today West and Southern Ukrainians are predominantly Ukrainian speaking and largely Western-oriented. Their history and geography have given them more experience of the relatively open societies of the West than people in East Ukraine. They are more likely to feel nationalists and anti-Russian, with more than a tinge of fascism, as exhibited by the continued popularity of the WW II pro-Nazi collaborator, Stepan Bandera. And today by the neonazis militias such as Azov.

East Ukraine–the lands east of the Dnieper River and along the Black Sea coast, including Odessa – is by contrast culturally close to Russia for around 400 hundred years, largely Russian speaking, profoundly anti-fascist, more firmly Orthodox and more fearful of European invasion than it is of Moscow. It was here, after all, in the Donbass region, that pro-Russian resistance to the 2014 coup which overthrew the pro-Russian Ukrainian government hardened into open rebellion and secession, which led to the current Ukrainian War.

If the differences between West and East Ukraine are as deep as this history suggests, then two Ukraines seem the likely outcome to the story: an independent nation of West Ukraine, and a Russian province of East Ukraine, roughly divided along the Dnieper river and splitting the current country in half.

Today, it would need a miracle to produce a commonality of Ukrainian culture that could  transcend this divisive historical material in order to create a Ukraine uniting West and East. Too much resentment and too strong division to believe it could be the logical outcome.

Whether Zelenski continues to support neonazi militias violent resistance to Russia, stages martydom, goes into exile, or adopts a non-violent pragmatic approach to the irreversible status quo, will largely determine the long-run course of events. All that remains to be seen.

In any event, however, in the light of the last eight years events, the divisions described here can hardly be resolved in a broader vision for a Ukrainian identity to stabilize and flourish within its present uneven borders. What seems clear is that nothing less is required to establish a coherent, Ukrainian nation than a division. A smaller Ukraine, but united, would be wiser.

It would be better to let the Russian provinces liberate themselves and decide if they want to join Russia or become independent republics whose only wish it to live in peace with their neighbours without being harassed by neonazis. 

USA vs Russia : Double Standards The Value of Life

Chaotic good sur Twitter : "Watch this. Ukrainian comedy show which Zelensky founded. I used to watch it. This video is from 2014. Like, you can’t make this shit up. As per Mikhalkov’s narration, “this happened when oppositional media was banned in Ukraine.” https://t.co/HVkSTzFJ8d" / Twitter. Censored by Google... 

Watch here: https://rattibha.com/thread/1501366998726545413

Western countries, which means, NATO, which means the United States of America, divide the world into worthy and unworthy victims, those we are allowed to pity shuch as Ukrainians enduring the hell of modern warfare, and those whose suffering is minimized, dismissed, or ignored.

The terror the USA and its conjuctural or accidental allies (let's not fool ourselves, the USA are nobody's friend) carried and are still carrying out against Iraqi, Palestian, Syrian, Lybian, Somali, Yemen civilians is part of the "regrettable cost of ar". NATO, with the USA in command, echoing promises from Moscow, claim they do not target civilians. Israel and NATO member states rulers always paint their militariies as "humane", there "to serve and prtotect" democracy or whatever. "Collateral damage happens, but it is regrettable".

This lie can only be sustained among those who are unfamiliar with the explosive ordinance and large kill zones of missiles, iron fragmentation bombs, mortar, artillery and tank shells, and belt-fed machine guns. This bifurcation into worthy and unworthy victims is a key component of propaganda, especially in war. 

Worthy victims allow citizens to see themselves as empathetic, compassionate, and just. Worthy victims are an effective tool to demonize the aggressor. They are used to obliterate nuance and ambiguity. Mention the provocation carried out by the western alliance with the expansion of NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany, a violation of promises made to Gorbatchev in 1986 in Heykyavik and reiterated to Moscow in 1990; the stationing of of NATO troops and missile batteries in Eastern Europe; the U.S. involvement in the ouster in 2014 of Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych, which led to the civil war in the east of Ukraine between Russian separatists in the Donbass and Ukraine’s neonazi militias under the command of AZOV, a conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives, and you are dismissed as a Putin apologist. 

It is to taint the sainthood of the worthy victims, and by extension ourselves. We are good. They are evil. Worthy victims are used not only to express sanctimonious outrage, but to stoke self-adulation and a poisonous nationalism. The cause becomes sacred, a crusade. Fact-based evidence is abandoned, as it was during the calls to invade Iraq. Charlatans, liars, con artists, fake defectors, and opportunists become experts, used to fuel the conflict. 

Celebrities, who, like the powerful, carefully orchestrate their public image, pour out their hearts to worthy victims. Hollywood stars such as George Clooney made trips to Darfur to denounce the war crimes being committed by Khartoum at the same time the US was killing scores of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel dozens and hundreds in Palestine. The war in Iraq was as savage as the slaughter in Darfur, but to express outrage at what was happening to unworthy victims was to become branded as the enemy, who of course, like Putin or Saddam Hussein, is always the new Hitler.  

Saddam Hussein’s attacks on the Kurds, considered worthy victims, saw an international outcry while Israeli persecution of the Palestinians, subjected to relentless ethnic cleansing and bombing campaigns by the Israeli air force and its artillery and tank units, with hundreds of dead and wounded, was, at best, an afterthought. At the height of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, worthy victims were the Republicans battling the fascists in the Spanish civil war. Soviet citizens were mobilized to send aid and assistance. Unworthy victims were the thousands of people Stalin executed, sometimes after tawdry show trials, and sent to the gulags - which are actually, Siberian towns.

In 1984, the Catholic priest Jerzy Popiełuszko was murdered by the regime in Poland. His death was used to excoriate the Polish communist government, a stark contrast to the response of the Reagan administration to the rape and murder of four Catholic missionaries in 1980 in El Salvador by the Salvadorean National Guard. President Ronald Reagan’s administration sought to blame the three nuns and a lay worker for their own deaths. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s Ambassador to the United Nations, said, “The nuns were not just nuns. The nuns were also political activists.” Secretary of State Alexander Haig speculated that “perhaps they ran a roadblock.”

For the Reagan administration, the murdered churchwomen were unworthy victims. The right-wing government in El Salvador, armed and backed by the United States, joked at the time, Haz patria, mata un cura (Be a patriot, kill a priest). Archbishop Óscar Romero had been assassinated in March of 1980. Nine years later it would gun down six Jesuits and two others at their residence on the campus of Central American University in San Salvador. Between 1977 and 1989, death squads and soldiers killed 13 priests in El Salvador and many more in South America’s military USA’s sponsored dictatorships. Including thewe

It is not that worthy victims do not suffer, nor that they are not deserving of our support and compassion, it is that worthy victims alone are rendered human, people like us, and unworthy victims are not. It helps, of course, when, as in Ukraine, they are white with blue eyes. But the missionaries murdered in El Salvador were also white and American and yet it was not enough to shake US support for the country’s military dictatorship. The same happened all over South America, victim of US Condor Operation that fabricated our dictators, like the CIA fabricated dissenssion in Ukraine in the last two decades. Which originated the Coup d’Etat in 2014 ahd culminated with what is happening now.  

The mass media never explain why Andrei Sakharov is worthy and Jose Luis Massera. Herman and Chomsky write: “The attention and general dichotomization occur ‘naturally’ as a result of the working of the filters, but the result is the same as if a commissar had instructed the media: ‘Concentrate on the victims of enemy powers and forget about the victims of friends.’ Reports of the abuses of worthy victims not only pass through the filters; they may also become the basis of sustained propaganda campaigns. If the government or corporate community and the media feel that a story is useful as well as dramatic, they focus on it intensively and use it to enlighten the public. This was true, for example, of the shooting down by the Soviets of the Korean airliner KAL 007 in early September 1983, which permitted an extended campaign of denigration of an official enemy and greatly advanced Reagan administration arms plans,” Herman and Chomsky write. “As Bernard Gwertzman noted complacently in the New York Times of August 31, 1984, US officials ‘assert that worldwide criticism of the Soviet handling of the crisis has strengthened the United States in its relations with Moscow.’ In sharp contrast, the shooting down by Israel of a Libyan civilian airliner in February I973 led to no outcry in the West, no denunciations for ‘cold-blooded murder,’ and no boycott. This difference in treatment was explained by the New York Times precisely on the grounds of utility in a 1973 editorial: ‘No useful purpose is served by an acrimonious debate over the assignment of blame for the downing of a Libyan airliner in the Sinai Peninsula last week.’ There was a very ‘useful purpose’ served by focusing on the Soviet act, and a massive propaganda campaign ensued.”

It is impossible to hold those responsible for war crimes accountable if worthy victims are deserving of justice and unworthy victims are not. If Russia should be crippled with sanctions for invading Ukraine, the United States & England should have been crippled with sanctions for invading Iraq, a war launched on the basis of lies and fabricated evidence, France for Lybia, and Israel for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Imagine if USA’s largest banks, J.P Morgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America and Wells Fargo were cut off from the international banking system. Imagine if their oligarchs, Jeff Bezos, Jamie Diamond, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, or French Bernard Arnault, François Pinault, Bettencourt Meyers, as venal as Russian oligarchs, had their assets frozen and estates and luxury yachts seized. (Bezos’ yacht is the largest in the world, cost an estimated $500 million and is about 57 feet longer than a football field.) Imagine if leading political figures, such as Binymain Netanhyahu, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Barak Obama (who is responsible for Lybia and Syria's debacle and so many other crimes)  and US, France, Israel's “oligarchs” were blocked from traveling under visa restrictions. Imagine if the world’s biggest shipping lines suspended shipments to and from the United States and Israel. Imagine if US international media news outlets were forced off the air. Imagine if we were blocked from purchasing spare parts for our commercial airlines and our airliners were banned from European air space. Imagine if our athletes were barred from hosting or participating in international sporting events. Imagine if our symphony conductors and opera stars were forbidden from performing unless they denounced the Iraq war and, in a kind of perverted loyalty oath, condemned George W. Bush or any warlord American president. 

The rank hypocrisy is stunning.

Some of the same officials that orchestrated the invasion of Iraq, who under international law are war criminals for carrying out a preemptive war, are now chastising Russia for its violation of international law. The US bombing campaign of Iraqi urban centers, called “Shock and Awe,” saw the dropping of 3,000 bombs on civilian areas that killed over 7,000 noncombatants, omen and children in the first two months of the war (more than 200.000 in total). Russia has not yet gone to this extreme, yet? In fifteen days, the amount of civilians deaths, according to the United Nations, is up to 400. 

“I have argued that when you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime,” a FOX News host said (with a straight face) recently to Condoleezza Rice, who served as Bush’s National Security adviser during the Iraq War. “It is certainly against every principle of international law and international order and that is why throwing the book at them now in terms of economic sanctions and punishments is also a part of it,” Rice said. “And I think the world is there. Certainly, NATO is there. He’s managed to unite NATO in ways that I didn’t think I would ever see after the end of the Cold War.”

Rice inadvertently made a case for why she should be put on trial with the rest of Bush’s enablers. She famously justified the invasion of Iraq by stating: “The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” Her rationale for preemptive war, which under post-Nuremberg laws is a criminal war of aggression, is no different than that peddled by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who says the Russia invasion is being carried out to prevent Ukraine from obtaining nuclear weapons, besides the main goal ob denazification and demilitarisation of the country by which Russia has always been invaded.

And this brings me to RT News network. Now taken off the air in Europe and in the USA after being deplatformed and unable to disseminate its content. This was long the plan of the US government. The invasion of Ukraine gave Washington, Paris, London, etc. the opening to shut RT down. The network had a tiny media footprint. But it gave a platform to American and European dissident journalists who challenged corporate capitalism, imperialism, war, and American and European oligarchies. Most of them ere opposed to the invasion and said it in their shows ithout any retaliation from the network. Which didn’t happen during US invasion of Irak.

The New York Times issued a formal written reprimand in 2003 that forbade opposing journalists to speak about the war in Iraq. Even Pulitzer winner Chris Hedges who had been the newspaper’s Middle East Bureau Chief, had spent seven years in the Middle East and was an Arabic speaker was sidelined for doing his job.

This same censorship of anti-war sentiment is happening now in Russia, but we should remember it happened in the USA too during the inception and initial stages of the invasion of Iraq. 

Those of us in the United States or England who opposed the Iraq war, no matter how much experience we had in the region, were attacked and vilified. Ventura, who had a three-year contract with MSNBC, saw his show canceled. 

Those who were cheerleaders for the war, called “Bush’s useful idiots,” dominated the media landscape. They painted the Iraqis as oppressed, worthy victims, who the US military would set free. The plight of women under the Taliban was a rallying cry to bomb and occupy the country too, in the USA and Europe. These courtiers to power served the interests of the power elite and the war industry. They differentiated between worthy and unworthy victims. It was a good career move. And they knew it. 

There was very little dispute about the folly of invading Iraq among reporters in the Middle East, but most did not want to jeopardize their positions by speaking publicly. They did not want Chris’s fate to become their own. He would walk through the NYT newsroom and reporters he had known for years looked down or turned their heads, as if he had leprosy. His career was finished. And not just at The New York Times but any major media organization.

I ndon't agree with what Russia is doing militarily in Ukraine, nevertheless, it was and is much more than matched by the USA’s own savagery in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Vietnam, Saudi Arabia’s in Yemen, and Israel’s in Palestine. This is an inconvenient fact the press, awash in hypocrit moral posturing, will not address.  

No one has mastered the art of technowar and wholesale slaugher like the US military. When atrocities leak out, such as the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians or the prisoners in Guantánamo or in Abu Ghraib, in Iraq, the press does its duty by branding them aberrations. The truth is that these killings and abuse are deliberate. They are orchestrated at the senior levels of the military. Infantry units, assisted by long ranger artillery, fighter jets, heavy bombers, missiles, drones, and helicopters level vast swaths of “enemy” territory killing most of the inhabitants. The US military during the invasion of Iraq from Kuwait created a six-mile-wide free-fire zone that killed hundreds if not thousands of Iraqis. The indiscriminate killing ignited the Iraqi insurgency. 

When the journalists were authorized to enter southern Iraq in the first Gulf War it was flattened. Villages and towns were smoldering ruins. Bodies, including women and children, lay scattered on the ground. Water purification systems had been bombed. Power stations had been bombed. Schools and hospitals had been bombed. Bridges had been bombed. The United States military always wages war by “overkill,” which is why it dropped the equivalent of 640 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs on Vietnam, most actually falling on the south where our purported Vietnamese allies resided. It unloaded in Vietnam more than 70 million tons of herbicidal agents, three million white phosphorus rockets — white phosphorus will burn its way entirely through a body — and an estimated 400,000 tons of jellied incendiary napalm. 

“Thirty-five percent of the victims,” Nick Turse writes of the war in Vietnam, “died within 15 to 20 minutes.” Death from the skies, like death on the ground, was often unleashed capriciously. “It was not out of the ordinary for US troops in Vietnam to blast a whole village or bombard a wide area in an effort to kill a single sniper.”

Vietnamese villagers, including women, children, and the elderly, were often herded into tiny, barbed wire enclosures known as “cow cages.” They were subjected to electric shocks, gang raped and tortured by being hung upside down and beaten, euphemistically called “the plane ride,” until unconscious. Fingernails were ripped out. Fingers were dismembered. Detainees were slashed with knives. They were beaten senseless with baseball bats and waterboarded.  Targeted assassinations, orchestrated by CIA death squads, were ubiquitous. 

Wholesale destruction, including of human beings, to the US military, perhaps any military, is orgiastic. The ability to unleash sheets of automatic rifle fire, hundreds of rounds of belt-fed machine-gun fire, 90 mm tank rounds, endless grenades, mortars, and artillery shells on a village, sometimes supplemented by gigantic 2,700-pound explosive projectiles fired from battleships along the coast, was a perverted form of entertainment in Vietnam, as it became later in the Middle East. US troops litter the countryside with claymore mines. Canisters of napalm, daisy-cutter bombs, anti-personnel rockets, high-explosive rockets, incendiary rockets, cluster bombs, high-explosive shells, and iron fragmentation bombs — including the 40,000-pound bomb loads dropped by giant B-52 Strarofortress bombers — along with chemical defoliants and chemical gases dropped from the sky are our calling cards. Vast areas are designated free fire zones — a term later changed by the military to the more neutral sounding “specified strike zone” — where everyone in those zones is considered the enemy, even the elderly, women, and children. 

Soldiers and marines who attempt to report the war crimes they witness can face a fate worse than being pressured, discredited, or ignored. On Sept. 12, 1969, Nick Turse writes in his book “Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam,” George Chunko sent a letter to his parents explaining how his unit had entered a home that had a young Vietnamese woman, four young children, an elderly man, and a military-age male. It appeared the younger man was AWOL from the South Vietnamese army. The young man was stripped naked and tied to a tree. His wife fell to her knees and begged the soldiers for mercy. The prisoner, Chunko wrote, was “ridiculed, slapped around and [had] mud rubbed into this face.” He was then executed.  Does it ring a bell ? Yes, Israel’s in its the barbaric occupation of Palestine.

A day after he wrote the letter, Chunko was killed. Chunko’s parents, Turse writes, “suspected that their son had been murdered to cover up the crime.”

All of this remains unspoken as we express our anguish for the people of Ukraine and revel in our moral superiority. The life of a Palestinian or an Iraqi child is as precious as the life of a Ukrainian child. No one should live in fear and terror. No one should be sacrificed on the altar of Mars. But until all victims are worthy, until all who wage war are held accountable and brought to justice, this hypocritical game of life and death will continue. Some human beings will be worthy of life. Others will not.

Drag Putin off to the International Criminal Court and put him on trial, if you have no shame, and if you dare.

But make sure George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Obama, Clinton, Sarkozy, Netanyahu, and so many more, are in the cells next to him.

No double standards, please.

If we can’t see ourselves, we can’t see anyone else.

And this blindness leads to catastrophe. To revolt. To suffering. To war. To chaos.

How Ukraine's Jewish president Zelensky made peace with neo-Nazi paramilitaries on front lines of war with Russia - The Grayzone

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?