Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology
CONTENTS
WIDENING WAR
Jacques Baud. Operation Z. (book)Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne. “Why Are We In Ukraine?” Harper’s
Magazine (June 2023).
Daniel Kovalik. “Russia, Donbass, and the Reality of the Conflict in Ukraine.”
Evan Reif. “Lord of the Underworld: Meet the Paratrooper from North
Carolina who Helped Orchestrate the War in Ukraine.”
Scott Ritter. “Agent Zelensky – Part 2. “
Sweeny
Bhadrakumar
B (Moon of Alabama)
Klarenberg
Bhadrakumar
Nesterenko
PEACE PLANS
Kagarlitsky
Slager
List of Sources
TEXTS
Book
Jacques Baud. Operation Z. 2022. Bottom of Form
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Overview
Why did Putin launch Operation Z in Ukraine? Are Ukrainian forces using neo-Nazi volunteers? What is the reality of the military conflict over the past six months? What do we know about war crimes like Bucha? Have Western economic sanctions actually worked? Has the massive shipment of weapons by the West had an effect on the conflict?
After the best-seller, Putin, Master of the Game? which was praised worldwide, Jacques Baud returns in this book to the root causes of the war in Ukraine and reveals the real and hidden reasons that pushed Vladimir Putin to intervene on February 24, 2022. Using information from intelligence services and official reports, Baud analyzes the course of the military actions and the way they were interpreted in the West. He explains the political and economic disruption of the world order, as well as the long-term consequences on our daily lives caused by Western sanctions against Russia. Baud then explains how the conflict could have been avoided and which options were purposely avoided by the United States and Europe. This is a tell-all book that must be read by everyone-because, whether we realize it or not, we are all being affected by the war in Ukraine.
We are so very pleased to bring to our readers a sample from Jacques Baud’s book on the conflict in the Ukraine, which has just been translated into English. It is called Operation Z (which is the code-name of the Special Military Operation launched by Russia on February 24, 2022). We have been waiting eagerly for this translation to come out, so we can get the truth about this conflict.
Please support Jacques Baud’s great work and purchase a copy of his book, and also please spread the word about this translation.
Without further ado, here is an excerpt from Operation Z. [I shortened this sample for publication in Ukraine War #31.—Dick]
THE UKRAINIAN QUESTION
EU defenders claim that Russian foreign policy is guided by the fact that “Putin hates the European Union” and “supranational constructs,” and that he aims to “humiliate the European Union,” as it is his “public enemy number one.”
This myth stems from a simplification of the sequence of events that led to the Maidan crisis in 2013-2014. Vladimir Putin was accused of refusing to allow Ukraine to sign an agreement with the European Union.
However, Russia and its leaders have always been aware of their economic weaknesses. As a result, they have never tried to compete with Europe or the United States. Since the Tsarist era, Russia has never managed to develop an industrial base equivalent to that of Europe or Asia; and it knows it. In the post-Cold War era, Russia has seen itself as complementary to Europe, not its equal.
This is why the barrage of sanctions it has suffered since February 2022 only partially affects it—Europe is dependent on Russia for its raw materials, while Asia supplies Europe its consumer products.
Secondly, it is important to remember that the Ukrainian population was not unanimously in favor of an agreement with the European Union. In November 2013, a poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) showed that it was then split 50/50 between an agreement with the European Union and a customs union with Russia.
Like President Yanukovych, many believe that the Ukrainian economy is structurally adapted to the Russian market. With an industrial base that complements that of the former USSR countries, it is not ready to face the very competitive European market. A too rapid rupture of commercial links with Russia would weaken its own economy. This would be confirmed by what happened next.
For its part, Russia was not opposed to an agreement between Ukraine and the European Union, but sought to maintain its economic relations with its main historical partner. This is why it proposed a tripartite working group, the aim of which was to reconcile Ukraine’s desire to join the European Union while preserving its ties with Russia. According to Mykola Azarov, the Ukrainian Prime Minister, studies showed that this proposal did not conflict with the European proposal and that it was therefore possible to have a solution that satisfied Ukrainian interests.
However, José Manuel Barroso, then President of the European Commission, refused and asked Ukraine to choose. The Ukrainian government therefore asked the European Union to delay the signing of the agreement in order to better study the implications of the agreement with the European Union on its relations with Russia and to better prepare its economy for this situation. It stated:
There is no alternative to reforms in Ukraine and no alternative to European integration…. We are going down this road and not changing direction.
The then Ukrainian Prime Minister confirmed this:
I can say with full knowledge that the process of negotiating the Association Agreement is continuing and that the work of bringing our country closer to European standards is not stopping for a single day.
This suspension was clearly only temporary, but it was presented by the Western press and the Ukrainian opposition as a refusal to move closer to Europe under Russian pressure. Ukrainian public opinion, which had been promised visas or salary increases, was quickly polarized and its discontent instrumentalized—this was the beginning of the Maidan events.
It was therefore the European Union which created the tensions between Ukraine and Russia, as Arnaud Dubien notes in Le Monde:
Ukraine is a very fragmented country with multiple identities and cannot make a clear-cut choice, either in favor of the West or Russia. One of Brussels’ mistakes was to ask it to do so and to turn its back on Russia, a suicidal option for the country.
The Europeans deliberately pushed Ukraine towards suicide. In the Washington Post, Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor under Ronald Reagan, noted that the European Union “helped turn a negotiation into a crisis.” Ironically, the new government that emerged from Euromaidan was forced to take the same time for reflection that Yanukovych had hoped for, and was only able to sign the agreement with the European Union in 2017.
As researcher Frederico Santopinto of the Group for Research and Information on Peace and Security (GRIP) in Brussels put it, Russia was not opposed to an agreement with the EU, but not at the expense of its relationship with Ukraine. It was the EU that refused the coexistence of two agreements: European diplomacy saw Ukraine as a border between East and West, while Russia saw it as a bridge. As in 2022, European diplomacy has failed to take into account three factors that are of key concern to Ukraine:
· Eastern European countries have—whether they like it or not—cultural, economic and historical links with Russia. This is particularly true of the former USSR republics (such as the Baltic States, Belarus and Ukraine), which have large Russian-speaking minorities and whose industries were largely complementary to Russia’s.
· The EU has not succeeded in integrating the Eastern countries into a common European spirit. These countries have been brutally plunged into a European culture of tolerance and cooperation, slowly forged since the Second World War. However, not only do these countries of the “new Europe” not have a democratic tradition, but they do not have the same values as the western part of the EU. In the Baltic States and Ukraine, hatred of the Soviets has turned into hatred of the Russians, which is conveniently exploited by the US. Unlike the rest of Europe, they still see the Third Reich as a liberator. The use of torture, social issues (abortion, LGBT, etc.), their unconditional alignment with American foreign policy, do not show a deep attachment to European values.
· The EU struggles to bring together the individual interests of its members into a coherent approach and a genuine common foreign policy. As a result, Germany, France and sometimes Italy often have to represent Europe’s voice informally. The Ukrainian crisis and the economic crisis resulting from its decisions show that Europe comes together more around a common hatred than around common interests.
EUROMAIDAN AND THE MILITARIZATION THE CONFLICT
The Maidan revolution was a series of sequences, with different actors. Today, those who are driven by hatred of Russia are trying to merge these different sequences into a single “democratic momentum”—a way to validate the crimes committed by Ukraine and its neo-Nazis.
At first, the population of Kiev, disappointed by the government’s decision to postpone the signing of the treaty, gathered in the streets. There was no mention of revolution or change of power, but a simple expression of discontent. Contrary to what the West claims, Ukraine was deeply divided on the question of rapprochement with Europe. A poll conducted in November 2013 by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) showed that it was split exactly 50/50 between an agreement with the European Union and a customs union with Russia. In the south and east of the country, industry is strongly linked to Russia. People feared that an agreement that excluded Russia would kill their jobs. This is what did happen.
At this stage, it did not appear that Ukrainians were generally hostile to Russia. But the situation was quickly co-opted by the US, which was working behind the scenes to exploit the popular momentum and instrumentalize it to tighten the noose on Russia.
In 2014, I was at NATO and I observed the Ukrainian crisis from the inside, so to speak. From the outset, it was clear that the situation was being fueled by the West. Videos show that the coup plotters were supported by armed men speaking English with an American accent. The German magazine Der Spiegel mentioned the presence of mercenaries from the firm Academi (formerly Blackwater, of sinister memory in Iraq and Afghanistan). The German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) apparently informed the German government. I informed my diplomatic contacts at the OSCE—but this was soon forgotten.
A telephone conversation between Victoria Nuland, then Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the US ambassador to Kiev, revealed by the BBC, shows that the Americans themselves selected the members of the future Ukrainian government, in defiance of the Ukrainians and Europeans. This conversation, which became famous thanks to Nuland’s famous “F*** the EU!” testifies to the fact that the European Union was only a doormat in this affair.
In order to present this revolution as democratic, the real “hand of the West” was cleverly concealed by the imaginary hand of Russia. By claiming that the rebellions in Donbass and Crimea were the result of Russian intervention, it was hidden that a large part of the population did not approve of the overthrow of the government, which was both illegal and illegitimate. For the same reason, the ultra-nationalism of the coup plotters was systematically downplayed, as was the legitimacy of the claims of the Russian speakers who were accused of being agents of Moscow.
The beginning of the Euromaidan events was popular and good-natured. But just after an agreement was reached with the demonstrators to hold elections at the end of 2014 and have a democratic transition, the players changed. Ultra-nationalists and other neo-Nazis supported by the West took over. The signed agreement was not respected and violence broke out. Far from being the expression of a democratic revolution, it was the work of radical groups from the west of Ukraine (Galicia), who were not representative of all Ukrainians. They were the ones who overthrew President Yanukovych.
So Euromaidan was popular but not democratic. In May 2022, during a conference in Switzerland, a far-right journalist called out to me: “What is popular is democratic!” In fact, he was stating the principle of populism which is at the origin of the fascism that inspired the Ukrainian neo-Nazis, as we will see later. Indeed, a former participant in the Maidan events warned that “this revolution reflects the rise of fascism.”
As L’Obs reminds us, the 2014 Maidan revolution was nothing more than a coup d’état, led by the United States with the support of the European Union. In December 2014, George Friedman, president of the US geopolitical intelligence platform STRATFOR, said in an interview with the Russian magazine Kommersant:
Russia defines the event that took place at the beginning of this year [in February 2014] as a coup organized by the US. And in truth, it was the most blatant [coup] in history.
Unlike European observers, the Atlantic Council, which is very supportive of NATO, was quick to note that the Maidan revolution was hijacked by certain oligarchs and ultra-nationalists. It notes that the reforms promised by Ukraine were not been carried out and that the Western media adhered solely to a “black-and-white” narrative, without any critical insight.
Thus, what Raphaël Glucksmann called a “democratic revolution” was nothing more than a coup de force, carried out without any legal basis, against a government whose election had been qualified by the OSCE as “transparent and honest” and one which “offered an impressive demonstration of democracy.” Subsequently, the democratically elected President Yanukovych was convicted of “high treason” for having defended the constitutional order.
Far from being democratic, the coup d’état that concluded the events of Maidan was not unanimous among the Ukrainian people, either in its content or in its form. The nationalists were taking over the regional governments in the north of the country, while in the south the loyalists sought to maintain constitutional order.
THE RISE OF RIGHT-WING EXTREMISM IN UKRAINE
Since 2014, in order to legitimize their support for the new regime in Kiev and the fight against Russia, the West has been at pains to minimize the importance of the far right in Ukraine. They cover up the crimes committed since 2014 against the population of Donbass in order to challenge Vladimir Putin’s objective of “denazification.”
The mention of “neo-Nazis” in the Ukrainian regime is systematically dismissed as Russian propaganda by media, journalists and politicians who promote neo-Nazi and Russophobic ideas. As the American media outlet The Hill notes, this is not simply Russian propaganda.
It is important to understand the terms used. Indeed, the term “ultra-nationalist,” often used to describe Ukrainian extremists, is only partially relevant. It refers to Ukrainians in the west of the country who seek to create a “pure” Ukraine, i.e., free of all non-Ukrainian minorities.
The foreign volunteers were probably not “nationalists” or “ultra-nationalists.” Their motives were obviously very diverse, but there was the constant of a fight for a white Europe. The Europe envisaged here has nothing to do with the EU, which most Ukrainian paramilitaries reject. It is a “racially pure” Europe, united by a natiocratic ideal.
The term “Nazi” refers to National Socialism (Nazism), a doctrine that takes us back to the 1930s in Germany. Without going into detail, it combines nationalism and socialism into a “compact” ideology, postulating that the main obstacle to the application of both is the presence of Jews in German society. It is a coherent doctrinal system.
What is described as ‘neo-Nazism’ is not a compact, constructed doctrine. It is more of a social phenomenon than a political doctrine. It is a heterogeneous collection of ideologies that combine hatred of everything and everyone in a kind of theatrical representation of violence, associating Nazi symbolism. There are individuals who see in the hatred of the other a glorification of their conception of the nation.
It is paradoxical that essentially nationalist movements have such international collaboration. The answer lies in the approach itself. The foreign fighters who engage with the Ukrainian far-right movements are not fighting for Ukraine but for the “Idea of Nation.” In other words, they are fighting for the principle of power given to the nation. This is why, alongside Nazi symbols, one finds white supremacist symbols, such as the Celtic cross.
The term “neo-Nazi” is therefore somewhat misleading. Despite appearances, “neo-Nazis” are not the descendants of “Nazis.” Rather, they are the second cousins of consanguineous marriages, who share the same brutality. The link of kinship appears clearly through the “Idea of Nation,” described in four principles by Andriy Biletsky, founder of the AZOV movement:
· The nation has an ethnic basis, defined by blood.
· The interest of the nation is superior to that of the individual.
· Society is structured around an ethnic hierarchy and power is held by members of the ethnic elite.
· The members of this nation constitute an elite group of full citizens, while the others are “second class citizens.”
In fact, the Idea of Nation is a common theme in many extreme right-wing movements. It is symbolized by an ‘N’ crossed by a capital “I,” which is nothing but the inverted representation of the Wolfsangel rune found in Nazi symbolism.
| Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne. “Why Are We in Ukraine? On the Dangers of American Hubris.” Harper’s Magazine (June 2023). From Murmansk in the Arctic to Varna on the Black Sea, the armed camps of NATO and the Russian Federation menace each other across a new Iron Curtain. Unlike the long twilight struggle that characterized the Cold War, the current confrontation is running decidedly hot. As former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and former secretary of defense Robert Gates acknowledge approvingly, the United States is fighting a proxy war with Russia. Thanks to Washington’s efforts to arm and train the Ukrainian military and to integrate it into NATO systems, we are now witnessing the most intense and sustained military entanglement in the near-eighty-year history of global competition between the United States and Russia. Washington’s rocket launchers, missile systems, and drones are destroying Russia’s forces in the field; indirectly and otherwise, Washington and NATO are probably responsible for the preponderance of Russian casualties in Ukraine. The United States has reportedly provided real-time battlefield intelligence to Kyiv, enabling Ukraine to sink a Russian cruiser, fire on soldiers in their barracks, and kill as many as a dozen of Moscow’s generals. The United States may have already committed covert acts of war against Russia, but even if the report that blames the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines on a U.S. naval operation authorized by the Biden Administration is mistaken, Washington is edging close to direct conflict with Moscow. Assuredly, the nuclear forces of the United States and Russia, ever at the ready, are at a heightened state of vigilance. Save for the Cuban Missile Crisis, the risks of a swift and catastrophic escalation in the nuclear face-off between these superpowers is greater than at any point in history.To most American policymakers, politicians, and pundits—liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans—the reasons for this perilous situation are clear. Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, an aging and bloodthirsty authoritarian, launched an unprovoked attack on a fragile democracy. To the extent that we can ascribe coherent motives for this action, they lie in Putin’s paranoid psychology, his misguided attempt to raise his domestic political standing, and his refusal to accept that Russia lost the Cold War. Putin is frequently described as mercurial, deluded, and irrational—someone who cannot be bargained with on the basis of national or political self-interest. Although the Russian leader speaks often of the security threat posed by potential NATO expansion, this is little more than a fig leaf for his naked and unaccountable will to power. To try to negotiate with Putin on Ukraine would therefore be an error on the order of attempts to “appease” Hitler at Munich, especially since, to quote President Biden, the invasion came after “every good-faith effort” by America and its allies to engage Putin in dialogue.This conventional story is, in our view, both simplistic and self-serving. It fails to account for the well-documented—and perfectly comprehensible—objections that Russians have expressed toward NATO expansion over the past three decades, and obscures the central responsibility that the architects of U.S. foreign policy bear for the impasse. Both the global role that Washington has assigned itself generally, and America’s specific policies toward NATO and Russia, have led inexorably to war—as many foreign policy critics, ourselves among them, have long warned that they would.As the Soviets quit Eastern and Central Europe at the end of the Cold War, they imagined that NATO might be dissolved alongside the Warsaw Pact. Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev insisted that Russia would “never agree to assign [NATO] a leading role in building a new Europe.” Recognizing that Moscow would view the continued existence of America’s primary mechanism for exercising hegemony as a threat, France’s president Francois Mitterrand and Germany’s foreign minister Hans Dietrich Genscher aimed to build a new European security system that would transcend the U.S.- and Soviet-led alliances that had defined a divided continent.Washington would have none of it, insisting, rather predictably, that NATO remain “the dominant security organization beyond the Cold War,” as the historian Mary Elise Sarotte has described American policy aims of the time. Indeed, a bipartisan foreign policy consensus within the United States soon embraced the idea that NATO, rather than going “out of business,” would instead go “out of area.” Although Washington had initially assured Moscow that NATO would advance “not one inch” east of a unified Germany, Sarotte explains, the slogan soon acquired “a new meaning”: “not one inch” of territory need be “off limits” to the alliance. In 1999, the Alliance added three former Warsaw Pact nations; in 2004, three more, in addition to three former Soviet republics and Slovenia. Since then, five more countries—the latest being Finland, which joined as this article was being prepared for publication—have been pulled beneath NATO’s military, political, and nuclear umbrella.Initiated by the Clinton Administration while Boris Yeltsin was serving as the first democratically elected leader in Russia’s history, NATO expansion has been pursued by every subsequent U.S. administration, regardless of the tenor of Russian leadership at any given moment. Justifying this radical expansion of NATO, the former senator Richard Lugar, once a leading Republican foreign policy spokesman, explained in 1994 that “there can be no lasting security at the center without security at the periphery.” From the very beginning, then, the policy of NATO expansion was dangerously open-ended. Not only did the United States cavalierly enlarge its nuclear and security commitments while creating ever-expanding frontiers of insecurity, but it did so knowing that Russia—a great power with a nuclear arsenal of its own and an understandable resistance to being absorbed into a global order on America’s terms—lay at that “periphery.” Thus did the United States recklessly embark on a policy that would “restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations,” as the venerable American foreign policy expert, diplomat, and historian George F. Kennan had warned. Writing in 1997, Kennan predicted that this move would be “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.”Russia repeatedly and unambiguously characterized NATO expansion as a perilous and provocative encirclement. Opposition to NATO expansion was “the one constant in what we have heard from all Russian interlocutors,” the U.S. ambassador to Moscow Thomas R. Pickering reported to Washington thirty years ago. Every leader in the Kremlin since Gorbachev and every Russian foreign policy official since the end of the Cold War has strenuously objected—publicly as well as in private to Western diplomats—to NATO expansion, first into the former Soviet satellite states, and then into former Soviet republics. The entire Russian political class—including liberal Westernizers and democratic reformers—has steadily echoed the same. After Putin insisted at the 2007 Munich Security Conference that NATO’s expansion plans were unrelated to “ensuring security in Europe,” but rather represented “a serious provocation,” Gorbachev reminded the West that “for us Russians, by the way, Putin wasn’t saying anything new.” MORE https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/ Benjamin Schwarz was formerly the national and literary editor of The Atlantic and the executive editor of World Policy Journal. Christopher Layne is the University Distinguished Professor of International Affairs and the Robert M. Gates Chair in National Security at Texas A&M University. Webinar: Why Are We in Ukraine? with Benjamin Schwarz. World Beyond War. July 24 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDTWhy are we in Ukraine? Over 16 months after the February 22nd invasion of Ukraine it’s one of the questions we’re all asking ourselves. That’s the question that author and editor Benjamin Schwarz and his colleague Christopher Layne sought to answer with their article in Harper’s Magazine. In it they lay out the conveniently forgotten history of American post Cold War triumphalism that set the stage for the current war in Ukraine. This hubris of the 1990s and 2000’s that culminated in a 2008 invitation at Bucharest for Ukraine, and Georgia, to join NATO, a longstanding red line for Russia. America amnesia, along with the simplistic good vs. evil framing of the current struggle, has led us all into an intractable situation. The end of the war is difficult to see and the risk of all out conflict between nuclear armed states is growing. By examining the history we hope to find clues that lead to a way out, and a peaceful resolution. |
Daniel Kovalik. “Russia, Donbass, and the Reality of the Conflict in Ukraine.” Editor. mronline.org (7-30-23). The people of the West need to come to grips that the government of Ukraine has done great violence against its own people in the Donbass and that the people of the Donbass had every right to choose to leave Ukraine and join Russia.
Originally published:Al Mayadeen on July 27, 2023 by (more by Al Mayadeen) | (Posted Jul 30, 2023)
Human Rights, State Repression, Strategy, WarAmericas, Europe, Russia, Ukraine, United StatesNewswire
I just returned from my third trip to Russia and my second trip to Donbass (now standing for the republics of Donetsk and Lugansk collectively) in about 8 months. This time, I flew into lovely Tallinn, Estonia, and took what should be about a 6-hour bus ride to St. Petersburg. In the end, the bus trip took me about 12 hours due to a long wait in customs on the Russian side of the border.
Having a U.S. passport and trying to pass the frontier from a hostile, NATO country into Russia during wartime got me immediately flagged for questioning. And then, it turned out that I didn’t have all my papers in order as I was still without my journalist credential from the Russian Foreign Ministry, which was necessary, given that I told the border patrol that I was traveling to do reporting. I was treated very nicely, though the long layover forced me to lose my bus, which understandably went on without me.
However, sometimes we find opportunity in seemingly inconvenient detours, and that was true in this case. Thus, I became a witness to a number of Ukrainians, some of them entire families, trying to cross the border and immigrate to Russia. Indeed, the only other type of passport (besides my U.S. passport) I saw among those held over for questioning and processing was the blue Ukrainian passport. This is evidence of an inconvenient fact to the Western narrative of the war which portrays Russia as an invader of Ukraine. In fact, many Ukrainians have an affinity for Russia and have voluntarily chosen to live there over the years.
Between 2014—the real start of the war when the Ukrainian government began attacking its own people in the Donbass—and the beginning of Russia’s intervention in February of 2022, around 1 million Ukrainians had already immigrated to Russia. This was reported in the mainstream press back then, with the BBC writing about these 1 million refugees and also explaining, “[s]eparatists in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Lugansk declared independence after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine. Since the violence erupted, some 2,600 people have been killed and thousands more wounded. The city of Luhansk has been under siege by government forces for the past month and is without proper supplies of food and water.” The number of dead in this war would grow to 14,000 by February of 2022, again before Russia’s Special Military Operations (SMO) had even begun.
Around 1.3 million additional Ukrainians have immigrated to Russia since February of 2022, making Russia the largest recipient of Ukrainian refugees in the world since the beginning of the SMO. MORE https://mronline.org/2023/07/30/russia-donbass-and-the-reality-of-the-conflict-in-ukraine/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=russia-donbass-and-the-reality-of-the-conflict-in-ukraine&mc_cid=9b870af6c2&mc_eid=ab2f7bf95e
One of the first individuals I interviewed in Donetsk was 36-year-old Vitaly, a big guy with a chubby, boyish face who wore a baseball hat with the red Soviet flag with the hammer and sickle. Vitaly, the father of three children, is from Donetsk and has been fighting there for four years, including in the very tough battle for the steel plant in Mariupol in the summer of 2022. He decided to take up arms after friends of his were killed by Ukrainian forces, including some who were killed by being burned alive by fascist forces–the same forces, we are told, don’t exist. Vitaly, referring to the mainstream Western media, laughed when saying,
They’ve been saying we’ve been shelling ourselves for 9 years.
Vitaly has personally fought against soldiers wearing Nazi insignia, and he is very clear that he is fighting fascism. Indeed, when I asked him what the Soviet flag on his hat meant to him, he said it signified the defeat of Nazism, and he hopes he will contribute to this again. When I asked him about claims that Russia had intervened with soldiers in the war prior to February of 2022 as some allege, he adamantly denied this, as did everyone else I interviewed in Donetsk. However, he has witnessed the fact that Polish and UK soldiers have been fighting with the Ukrainian military since the beginning. Vitaly opined that, given what has transpired over the past 9 years, he does not believe that the Donbass will ever return to Ukraine, and he certainly hopes it will not. Vitaly told me quite stoically that he believes he will not see peace in his lifetime.
During my stay in Donetsk, I twice had dinner with Anastasia, my interpreter during my first trip to the Donbass in November. Anastasia teaches at the University of Donetsk. She has been traveling around Russia, including to the far east, telling of what has been happening in the Donbass since 2014 because many in Russia themselves do not fully understand what has been going on. She told me that when she was recounting her story, she found herself reliving her trauma from 9 years of war and feeling overwhelmed. Anastasia’s parents and 13-year-old brother live near the frontlines in the Donetsk Republic, and she worries greatly about them. Olga is glad that Russia has intervened in the conflict, and she indeed corrected me when I once referred to the Russian SMO as an “invasion”, telling me that Russia did not invade. Rather, they were invited and welcomed in. That does seem to be the prevailing view in Donetsk as far as I can tell.
During my 5-day trip to Donetsk, I was taken to two cities within the conflict zone—Yasinovataya and Gorlovka. I was required to wear body armor and a helmet during this journey, though wearing a seatbelt was optional, if not frowned upon. While Donetsk City, which certainly sees its share of shelling, is largely intact and with teeming traffic and a brisk restaurant and café scene, once we got out of the city, this changed pretty quickly. Yasinovataya showed signs of great destruction, and I was told that a lot of this dated back to 2014. The destruction going back that far included a machine factory which is now being used as a base of operations for Donetsk forces and the adjacent administrative building which looks like it could have been an opera house before its being shelled. For its part, the city center of Gorlovka looked largely unmolested with signs of street life and even had an old trolley, clearly from the Soviet era, running through the center of town. But the outskirts of Gorlovka certainly showed signs of war. In both cities, one could hear the sound of shelling in the distance quite frequently.
In Gorlovka, we met with Nikoli, nicknamed “Heavy”. Nikoli looks like a Greek god, standing at probably 6 feet, 5 inches, and all muscle. I joked with him while I was standing next to him that I felt like I was appearing next to Ivan Drago in Rocky IV. He got the joke and laughed. While a giant of a man seemed very nice and with a strong moral compass, he led us over to a makeshift Orthodox chapel in the cafeteria of what was a school, but which is now the base of operations for his Donetsk militia forces. He told us that, even now after the SMO began, about 90 percent of the forces in Gorlovka are still local Donetsk soldiers, and the other 10 percent are Russian. Again, this is something we rarely get a sense of from the mainstream press. . . . MORE https://mronline.org/2023/07/30/russia-donbass-and-the-reality-of-the-conflict-in-ukraine/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=russia-donbass-and-the-reality-of-the-conflict-in-ukraine&mc_cid=9b870af6c2&mc_eid=ab2f7bf95e
When I asked Olga whether she agreed with some Western peace groups, such as the Stop the War Coalition in the UK, that Russia should pull its troops out of the Donbass, she disagreed, saying she hates to think what would happen to the people of the Donbass if they did. I think that this is something the people of the West need to come to grips with—that the government of Ukraine has done great violence against its own people in the Donbass, and that the people of the Donbass had every right to choose to leave Ukraine and join Russia. If Westerners understood this reality, they would think twice about “standing with” and continuing to arm Ukraine.
Daniel Kovalik is an Author and International Human Rights Professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.
Evan Reif. “Lord of the Underworld: Meet the Paratrooper from North Carolina who Helped Orchestrate the War in Ukraine.” CovertAction Magazine (8-2-23).
One of the great mysteries surrounding the Maidan coup and the civil war which followed is how the rabble of soccer hooligans and neo-Nazis who orchestrated the coup were able to become an army capable of subjugating the nation so quickly…
| A Scott Ritter Investigation: Agent Zelensky – Part 2. July 17, 2023. |
In the intelligence business, every agent is assigned tasks by his or her handlers. In the case of Agent Zelensky, I’ve identified ten obligations that define his relationship with his foreign intelligence masters. Once you’ve examined each of these, it becomes clear why Zelensky the comedian said one thing, and Zelensky the President did another. What are the true reasons behind the current situation in Ukraine today? What kind of operation has the CIA been running in Ukraine over the course of many years? You will find the answers to these and other questions in Part 2 of my investigative documentary film, “Agent Zelensky.” Click here to watch Part 1.
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Don’t Forget the Civil War between Ukraine and Donbass
Steve Sweeney. “Kiev using banned mines, NATO munitions to bomb civilians in Donetsk.” Mronline.org (7-29-23). Ukraine has taken to using petal mines and cluster munitions in Donetsk, while also using missiles supplied by NATO to strike residential buildings. By (Posted Jul 27, 2023).
Originally published: Al Mayadeen on July 26, 2023 (more by Al Mayadeen) |
Strategy, WarAmericas, Europe, Russia, Ukraine, United StatesNewswireCluster Munition, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Russia-Ukraine War
Donetsk city center came under “a massive chaotic attack” on Tuesday with plumes of smoke seen for miles as Ukrainian shelling hit densely populated areas during peak hours.
Acting head of the Donetsk People’s Republic Denis Pushilin said that 169 munitions had been launched including rocket and canon artillery fire with NATO-supplied munitions.
The city was pounded for most of the day, with explosions heard from 11 am. Four people were wounded over the course of the day, although the state of their injuries is unknown at this stage.
Once again it was civilian areas that bore the brunt of the Ukrainian barrage with at least 17 residential buildings damaged in the Voroshilovsky, Kievsky, Petrovsky, and Kuibyshevsky districts. MORE Kiev using banned mines, NATO munitions to bomb civilians in Donetsk | MR Online
CONTROL OF THE BLACK SEA AND ODESSA
M.K. Bhadrakumar. “NATO & the Perilous Black Sea.” July 24, 2023. Consortium News (8-17-23). In an ominous development, Kiev is suggesting the continuation of the collapsed Black Sea Grain Deal without Russia’s participation and with apparent NATO protection, writes M.K. Bhadrakumar. Read here…
[This article reminds us of the larger geopolitical contexts of the Ukraine War; here the Black Sea and the port city of Odessa. I have copied the second half, primarily about Odessa. See link for excellent map and haul out your maps. –Dick]
From the Russian perspective, this becomes an existential moment. NATO has virtually encircled the Russian Navy in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea (with the induction of Sweden and Finland as members). The freedom of navigation of the Baltic Fleet and the dominance in the Black Sea, therefore, become all the more crucial for Russia to freely access the world market round the year.
Moscow has reacted strongly. On July 19, the Russian Ministry of Defense notified that “all vessels sailing in the waters of the Black Sea to Ukrainian ports will be regarded as potential carriers of military cargo. Accordingly, the countries of such vessels will be considered to be involved in the Ukrainian conflict on the side of the Kiev regime.”
Russia has further notified that “the north-western and south-eastern parts of the international waters of the Black Sea have been declared temporarily dangerous for navigation.” The latest reports suggest that the Black Sea Fleet of warships are rehearsing the procedure for boarding foreign ships sailing to Ukrainian waters. In effect, Russia is imposing a sea blockade of Ukraine. In an interview with Izvestia, Russian military expert Vasily Dandykin said he would now expect Russia to stop and inspect all ships sailing to Ukrainian ports:
“This practice is normal: There is a war zone there, and in the past two days it has been the scene of missile strikes. We’ll see how this will work in practice and whether there will be anyone willing to send vessels to these waters, because this is very serious.”
The White House has accused Russia of laying mines to block Ukrainian ports. Of course, Washington hopes that NATO moving in as the guarantor of the grain corridor, replacing Russia, would have resonance in the Global South.
Western propaganda caricatures Russia as creating food scarcity globally. Whereas, the fact of the matter is that the West didn’t keep its part of the bargain reciprocally to allow the export of Russian wheat and fertilizer, as has been acknowledged by the U.N. and Turkey. [Related: World Hunger & War in Ukraine]
What remains to be seen is whether beyond the raging information war, any NATO country would dare to challenge Russia’s sea blockade. The chances are slim, the daunting deployment of the 101st Airborne Division in next-door Romania notwithstanding.
M.K. Bhadrakumar is a former diplomat. He was India’s ambassador to Uzbekistan and Turkey. Views are personal.
This article originally appeared on Indian Punchline.
The Counteroffensive Stalls
B. “Weak propaganda talk.” Editor. mronline.org (7-23-23).
Originally published: Moon of Alabama on July 20, 2023 by B (more by Moon of Alabama) (Posted Jul 22, 2023)
Media, Strategy, WarEurope, Russia, UkraineNewswireNorth Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Russia-Ukraine War
From the Ukrainian Pravda, July 20, 2023 (machine translation):
The Ukrainian military in the south is advancing hundreds of meters every day – the National Guard.
Every day, the Ukrainian military makes a gradual movement several hundred meters to the south and southeast.
Source: Military Media Center , which cites the words of the director of the department of planning for the use of the Main Directorate of the National Guard of Ukraine, Colonel Mykola Urshalovych . . . . https://mronline.org/2023/07/22/weak-propaganda-talk/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=weak-propaganda-talk&mc_cid=ad2c344dbc&mc_eid=ab2f7bf95e
All attacks came to a halt in the security zone before the real and hardened Russian defense lines. Forty five days times ‘several hundred meters’ are at least 9,000 meter. That hasn’t been reached anywhere. The aim of the counter-offensive was to reach the Sea of Azov, some 100 kilometer south of the frontline. At the current speed it would take the Ukrainian army 1,000 days (and many more soldiers and material than it has) to reach it. Why do General Syrskyi and Colonel Urshalovych think they can fool the Ukrainian people and their soldiers with such weak propaganda talk?
UK IN THE UKRAINE WAR
Kit Klarenberg “Leaked files suggest hidden British hand in latest Kerch Bridge strike.” Editor. mronline.org (7-22-23).
| Originally published: The Grayzone on July 19, 2023 by Kit Klarenberg (more by The Grayzone) | (Posted Jul 22, 2023)WarAmericas, Britain, Europe, Russia, Ukraine, United StatesNewswireKerch BridgeThe Grayzone has exposed British intelligence freelancers for collaborating with Ukraine’s Security Service to destroy Kerch Bridge. Leaked documents suggest they played a role in the latest attack on the bridge, and may be helping Kiev hunt down accused collaborators.On July 16, a predawn assault on the Kerch Bridge connecting Crimea with mainland Russia left two civilians dead and a 14-year-old injured. As advisors to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky hinted at Ukraine’s culpability, Russian President Vladimir Putin pointed his finger at Kiev and vowed revenge.The attack was the second attempt at destroying the Kerch Bridge in less than a year. On October 8th 2022, a suicide attacker remotely detonated a truck bomb on the bridge, killing three and inflicting such severe damage the vehicular crossing remained closed until February this year, while railroad traffic resumed in May.As The Grayzone revealed two days after the bombing, a cabal of British mlitary-intelligence freelancers had drafted detailed plans for destroying Kerch Bridge months earlier. The blueprints were drawn up at the behest of Chris Donnelly, a senior intelligence operative and former high ranking NATO advisor. His transnational nexus manages London’s contribution to the proxy war at arm’s length, in conjunction with the Security Service of Ukraine’s (SBU) Odessa branch. After an initial burst of Ukrainian public and governmental celebration in the wake of the first Kerch bombing, officials in Kiev quickly backtracked, claiming it was in fact a Russian false flag. In May this year, SBU chief Vasyl Maliuk finally admitted his agency undertook “certain measures” to carry out the attack, coercing an innocent truck driver into unwittingly and unwillingly serving as a suicide bomber.This time, the SBU appears to have used unmanned submarines to target Kerch Bridge with explosives. A review of leaked files previously revealed by The Grayzone provides a solid basis for again blaming Donnelly’s cabal.These files show Prevail Partners as the cutout enlisted to train a secret Ukrainian partisan army to target Russian territory with terror attacks. Prevail pledged to provide the SBU with extensive targeting expertise and technology for operations targeting Crimea – particularly, the Kerch Bridge. They also raise grave questions about whether the Ukrainian Security Service is being assisted in its criminal war on collaborators by Donnelly’s shadowy clique.MORE (a wide=ranging discussion of Ukraine security services and geo-political changes throughout the region; see the next article) https://thegrayzone.com/2023/07/19/leaked-files-british-kerch-bridge-strike/ Remilitarized Germany Playing Long Game in Ukraine.Consortium News (7-14-23). There is always something volatile about a handicapped Great Power when a whole new intensity appears in political, economic and historical circumstances, writes M.K. Bhadrakumar. Read here…The hypothesis that the Anglo-Saxon axis is pivotal to the proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is only partly true. Germany is actually Ukraine’s second largest arms supplier, after the United States.Chancellor Olaf Scholz pledged a new arms package worth €700 million, including additional tanks, munitions and Patriot air defense systems at the NATO summit in Vilnius, putting Berlin, as he said, at the very forefront of military support for Ukraine. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius stressed, “By doing this, we’re making a significant contribution to strengthening Ukraine’s staying power.” However, the pantomime playing out may have multiple motives. Fundamentally, Germany’s motivation is traceable to the crushing defeat by the Red Army and has little to do with Ukraine as such.The Ukraine crisis has provided the context for accelerating Germany’s militarization. Meanwhile, revanchist feelings are rearing their head and there is a “bipartisan consensus” among Germany’s leading centrist parties — CDU, SPD and Green Party — in this regard. In an interview last weekend, the CDU’s leading foreign and defense expert Roderich Kiesewetter (an ex-colonel who headed the Association of Reservists of the Bundeswehr from 2011 to 2016) suggested that if conditions warrant in the Ukraine situation, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization should consider cutting off “Kaliningrad from the Russian supply lines. We see how Putin reacts when he is under pressure.”Berlin is still smarting under the surrender of the ancient Prussian city of Königsberg [now Kalningrad] in April 1945. Stalin ordered 1.5 million Soviet troops supported by several thousand tanks and aircraft to attack the crack Nazi Panzer divisions deeply entrenched in Königsberg. The capture of the heavily fortified stronghold of Königsberg by the Soviet army was celebrated in Moscow with an artillery salvo by 324 cannons firing 24 shells each. Nothing Forgotten in Berlin Evidently, Kiesewetter’s remarks show that nothing is forgotten or forgiven in Berlin even after eight decades. Thus, Germany is the Biden administration’s closest ally in the war against Russia. MORE https://consortiumnews.com/2023/07/13/remilitarized-germany-playing-long-game-in-ukraine/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=15ed651d-711d-4b46-b5be-aa4aef4af28b [As these opening passages suggest, the Ukraine War is reviving post-WWII and even WWII stresses. Check out the link to view helpful maps. –Dick] The War in Ukraine is composed of many “wars,” including efforts to replace the dollar byothercurrencies. Oleg Nesterenko. “The war in Ukraine is the war for the dollar.” Editor. mronline.org (7-14-23). “Moscow has really threatened the status of the American dollar on the international stage, and therefore the whole American economy behind it.” Originally published: Donbass Insider on July 5, 2023 by L’Eclaireur des Alpes (more by Donbass Insider) | (Posted Jul 13, 2023) Imperialism, State Repression, Strategy, WarAmericas, Europe, Russia, Ukraine, United StatesInterview, NewswireNorth Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Oleg Nesterenko, Russia-Ukraine WarThis is the second of three parts of an interview that Oleg Nesterenko, President of the CCIE, gave to the publication “L’Éclaireur des Alpes”. This part looks at the real reasons behind the war in Ukraine, which is really a war for the dollar, the third to be precise.Part 1, Part 3L’Éclaireur: At a time when the question of the end of the supremacy of the dollar is being raised, you say that the war in Ukraine is not only the war of the American dollar, but that it is not the first…Oleg Nesterenko: I see that you are referring to my analysis of the dollar wars, published some time ago… In fact, this is not the first, or even the second, but the third dollar war. The first was the war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The second was the war against Gaddafi’s Libya. And the third, against Moscow on the territory of Ukraine, waged on the territory of a third country, simply because you can’t wage war against the Russians in their own country. And it is only the hybrid and proxy war that can be waged against Russia.As far as the first two dollar wars are concerned, the first thing to understand is that countries like Iraq and Libya are, above all, major energy powers. Powers that dared to put the American currency at risk. In 2003, Saddam Hussein made good on his threat to stop selling hydrocarbons and gas in U.S. dollars. Saddam Hussein was the first to raise the question of the legitimacy of the dollar, of the petrodollar and, above all, to act in a very significant way against it. He signed his own death warrant.In February 2003, Saddam Hussein sold 3 billion barrels of crude oil for more than 25 billion euros. This sale was made in euros, not U.S. dollars. A month later, the United States invaded Iraq. We don’t know the exact figures, but the number of victims is estimated at one million, one in two of whom were minors. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands more who died in the years that followed as a result of the total destruction of the country’s social and economic infrastructure. The Americans themselves, their analysts worthy of the name, recognise this.In Libya in 2009, there was also a war on the dollar. Muammar Gaddafi, who was President of the African Union at the time, proposed a veritable monetary revolution to the entire African continent: to break away from the domination of the U.S. dollar and create a pan-African monetary union. Under this union, exports of oil and other natural resources from the black continent would be paid for not in dollars or petrodollars, but in a new currency he called the gold dinar. He too has signed his own death warrant.If such statements had been made not by Iraq or Libya, which are rich in oil and gas, but, for example, by Burkina Faso, which is rich in gold but lacks proven hydrocarbon reserves—there would have been no war. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Gaddafi’s Libya, as energy powers with gigantic reserves, were an existential threat to the American economy. Both leaders had openly and officially announced that they wanted to get rid of the U.S. dollar. They were also two countries with which the United States had no reason to fear harmful consequences in the event of aggression. So they had to be annihilated. And this was done without delay.With Moscow, this was not possible. Russia is not Iran, Iraq or Libya. With Russia, the United States could only act indirectly.L’Éclaireur: But what does the war between Ukraine and Moscow have to do with the American dollar?MORE https://mronline.org/2023/07/13/the-war-in-ukraine-is-the-war-for-the-dollar/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-war-in-ukraine-is-the-war-for-the-dollar&mc_cid=255959b424&mc_eid=ab2f7bf95e |
PEACE
BORIS KAGARLITSKY. “My Peace Plan.” July 4, 2023.
[A PEACE PLAN BY A SCHOLAR IN MOSCOW. Instead of plans to win by one or the other side, here is an effort to map a road to peace that involves UN Peacekeepers and tries to negotiate justice to both sides. For his introductory comments go to https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/07/04/my-peace-plan/ Dick]
. . . Let’s try to imagine a real plan that would actually work to end the confrontation, and not simply to extend the Putin oligarchy. It could consist of four main points:
1. Stop fighting on both sides;
2. Cessation of any supply of foreign weapons and ammunition to both Ukraine and Russia;
3. Abandonment by the Russian Armed Forces of the territory of Ukraine as of February 1, 2014 (“zero option”);
4. The UN and its peacekeeping forces are temporarily introduced to the territories left by the RF Armed Forces.
In fact, even some official propagandists are beginning to understand the need to move in this direction. For example, Margarita Simonyan, head of the Russia Today TV channel, proposed to hold referendums again (in other words, from the point of view of the authorities, she calls for a review of the new borders of the Russian Federation). It seems that in the fall of last year, the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions, and the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics were entered into the Constitution of Russia. The Criminal Code even has a special article for such a case: “Art. 280.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. Public calls for actions aimed at violations of the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation.”
If you believe the Kremlin propaganda, one of the mouthpieces of which is Simonyan herself, there have already been “referendums” in these regions, but now she is proposing to hold new ones. So then, you will admit that what happened before was a circus, and not a vote?
But here a fundamental point emerges: it is necessary to stop the bloodshed not only to correct the previous injustices, but also to prevent new ones. It won’t be easy or simple. And in order to stop the escalation of violence and repression from any side, an appropriate policy is needed, which needs to be thought out today.
In order to avoid clashes and outrages on both sides, it is proposed to create a “humanitarian corridor” in the territories left by the Russian troops for the unhindered exit of residents in both directions, and to temporarily deploy UN peacekeeping forces from among countries that are not directly or indirectly involved in the conflict.
Failure to comply with at least one point entails the continuation of the war with innumerable victims and suffering for Ukrainian and Russian citizens, a war that claims hundreds and thousands of lives every day. So let’s find out, looking at the reactions to this program, what is actually more important to the elites and governments – is it land and territory, saving face (in fact, saving power and capital), or is it people’s lives? Bring out the hysterics to the slaughterhouse, who themselves are in no hurry to leave for the front, or send their children and relatives there!
Everything has gone too far, Russian territory is being shelled (it was foolish to believe that this would not happen – usually in wars, in response to constant shelling, the other side also starts shooting back!), and threats of a nuclear apocalypse are heard. Yes, the chances of this scenario occurring are extremely small, but such rhetoric itself speaks of the seriousness of the current situation. Time does not wait!
The peoples are tired of war, they want peace, and therefore a plan is needed that will stop the bloodshed and create conditions for the mutual laying down of arms, without fear of monstrous consequences for Ukrainians and Russians.
The left must offer a program of an honest peace without territorial conquest or any further aggressive policy, with remuneration for all destruction, not from the pockets of the working people, but at the expense of those who unleashed this massacre. It cannot be ruled out that such a “peace plan” could bring the revolution in Russia closer, contribute to the awakening of class consciousness among the soldiers, to their desire for self-organization, and to an awareness of themselves as an independent force. The left is fundamentally in favor of finally saying its word to “His Majesty the Working Class,” the same class that is often thrown into a meat grinder against his will and desire. So that there are no “agreements” behind the back of the people, and at their expense, and the working people themselves ought to be the ones to stop the war. However, for the time being we have to be guided not by what we ultimately desire, but by the existing reality. And therefore, we need to take responsibility, take the first step, and begin the process that will lead to an end to the war, and lead the workers to victory in the struggle for their power, so that the defeat of the insane adventurist plans of the government of the Russian Federation does not turn into a defeat for the people and the country.
Translated by Dan Erdman
Boris Kagarlitsky PhD is a historian and sociologist who lives in Moscow. He is a prolific author of books on the history and current politics of the Soviet Union and Russia and of books on the rise of globalized capitalism. Fourteen of his books have been translated into English. The most recent book in English is ‘From Empires to Imperialism: The State and the Rise of Bourgeois Civilisation’ (Routledge, 2014). Kagarlitsky is chief editor of the Russian-language online journal Rabkor.ru (The Worker). He is the director of the Institute for Globalization and Social Movements, located in Moscow.
AUGUST 15, 2023
A Growing Nuclear Threat Requires a Diplomatic Solution to the Russo-Ukrainian War. CounterPunch.
Many years after Ukraine declared independence in 1991, the physical symbols of the country’s decades-long membership in the Soviet Union were still visible: in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, a massive statue of Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet state, dominated the city’s main square. He was cast with a confident forward stride, showing the way to the Kharkiv Regional Administration building located just opposite him. Farther away in a residential neighborhood, a modest concrete statue of a seated Lenin reading a book occupied a quiet corner of a school’s playground.
Having lived and studied in Kharkiv in the 1990s, I knew the city well and was sickened to see images of that school and the administration building on fire, their windows blown out, targets of Russian missiles. I have no idea what became of the people I knew and whom I liked. The possibilities are grim. But the statues of Lenin, both big and small, were spared the shelling because they were removed a long time before the Russian assault. For many Ukrainians, Lenin and his successors were part of the country’s long history of colonial domination.
That the statues were torn down should have told President Vladimir Putin of Russia something important. Ukraine is not, as he asserted, an artificial space that Lenin carved out of Russian territorial reality and now must be returned. Ukrainians partly rejected Lenin’s statues because he led a government in Moscow that extinguished Ukraine’s early twentieth-century efforts at independence; it was a regime that later engineered genocide and settler colonialism in the country. Putin’s ideological certainty that Ukrainians yearned for an ethno-cultural reunification with Russia—one curiously conducted at gunpoint—is a species of deep historical ignorance.
The larger geopolitical reasons for the war have been fiercely debated since the invasion began on February 24, 2022. Some claim that US-led NATO expansion into Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union eventually triggered Russia’s criminal invasion of Ukraine. European refusals of earlier Russian proposals for a security agreement that would have guaranteed Ukraine’s neutrality and granted autonomy for its eastern territories are also cited as contributing to the war. Others argue that Putin’s appetite for a reconstituted Russian or Soviet empire is the primary motivation for the conflict; thus, the claim is that he would have taken the current course of action even if new security arrangements had been established and NATO had not expanded eastward. Since these measures were never attempted, we will never know if they would have worked, which makes reading Putin’s sociopathic mind a speculative exercise.
The current controversy centers less on why the war started and more on how to end it. Publicly, the Ukrainian government aspires to victory, full Russian withdrawal, and the return of every inch of territory Moscow has taken since 2014, including the Crimean Peninsula and the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian population mostly agrees. The anger and trauma resulting from Moscow’s atrocities have cemented Ukrainians’ political unity and sense of nationalism. However, intense nationalist feelings in any country often become a type of zealotry, an uncompromising insistence that a nation’s future is fated to be optimal even despite evidence that its allies and enemies will not conform in ways that will make that preferred future a reality.
Others advocate for a negotiated peace with more modest and provisional territorial concessions. Today, however, the mere suggestion of a peace agreement instantly inspires angry criticisms of an immoral caving-in to Putin’s illegal aggression and charges of practically collaborating with war criminals. For many, including some Ukrainians with whom I have spoken, fighting till inevitable victory has become the only acceptable position. Such rigid thinking has frankly blinded people to the fact that the present course will result in more death and destruction, perhaps on a scale that dwarfs the present carnage. A military solution alone that requires maximalist gains and greater foreign military aid, as well as an intolerance of concurrent diplomatic options, could end in a nuclear confrontation. For example, let’s suppose that Crimea can be wrested from Russia by military force. With enough NATO help, it is possible. More than a few military analysts have argued that the moment this looks like a real possibility, the chances of Putin or his military commanders resorting to a nuclear option sharply increase. In that case, there will be no habitable Crimea—or much else—to save. For those who survive such a disaster, they will have the small consolation that they were true to their maximalist goals.
Despite the courage of the Ukrainian army and its stunning successes in repelling Putin’s forces in 2022, the war has become something of a stalemate, and the longer it continues, the greater the chances of escalation. At the one-year mark of Russia’s invasion back in February, James Rands at Jane’s Defense noted that the conflict had already become a war of attrition, and the tremendous loss of personnel and equipment on both sides would make more of the same “unsustainable.” Ivo Daalder and James Goldgeir’s analysis in Foreign Affairs earlier this year proved prescient: Since both sides were not likely to negotiate, the authors argued that the situation would become “a prolonged, grinding war.” Russian attempts to gain ground have largely failed, and although the Ukrainians have advanced in some places, those gains have generally been modest and come at great cost. As Michael O’Hanlon, an analyst at the Brookings Institution, recently wrote in the Washington Post, there have been no significant territorial strides by either side since last autumn. That will probably not change in the foreseeable future. And, according to Constanze Stelzenmuller, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings, the West has indicated that it will not invite Ukraine to join NATO anytime soon, but it will keep providing extensive military aid, suggesting that the current impasse will continue. The West should help Ukraine defend itself, but it must also seek ways to end the war on the diplomatic front.
Both Russia and Ukraine have dug in and by large majorities their respective populations support their governments’ war efforts, making the prospects for negotiations unlikely. This increases the chances that the fighting will eventually spill over into NATO countries or that Putin will attempt a nuclear strike. The Council on Foreign Relations noted that the lack of a significant diplomatic solution could lead to “a dangerous escalation, which could include Russia’s use of a nuclear weapon.” Daalder and Goldgeir assert that defeating Russia will be incredibly challenging, but the chances of a Ukrainian victory would be better if US-NATO support were substantially increased. However, “that would risk starting a direct war between NATO and Russia, a doomsday [nuclear] scenario that no one wants.”
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an organization whose founding members included Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, announced their findings on the current risks of terminal nuclear war. Last January, the organization’s Science and Security Board stated that it moved the hands of its Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight, the closest humanity has come to nuclear Armageddon. Midnight means the termination of the human experiment. The reasons for the greater threat are “largely (though not exclusively) because of the mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine.” Elsewhere in the statement, the board noted that “Russia’s thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons remind the world that escalation of the conflict—by accident, intention, or miscalculation—is a terrible risk.” It is important to add that by this sixteenth month of the war, the threats from some of Putin’s hardline advisors are no longer veiled. A few have openly written about limited nuclear strikes to tip the balance in Russia’s favor, and Russian army officers have also discussed using nuclear weapons.
A slim but feasible option to reduce growing threats of escalation can be found in the 2015 Minsk II agreement. In principle, its terms were agreed to by Ukraine, Russia, Germany, and France. Although far from perfect and never carried out because of disagreements about implementation, its 13 points might at least provide a reprieve in the fighting and a path forward. Among its provisions are a ceasefire, prisoner exchanges, and humanitarian aid to be sent to beleaguered areas. It also allows for Ukrainian sovereignty over the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the east. Its terms could be modified and expanded to accommodate developments since then.
Given that both a continuation of the current conflict and conventional military escalation, such as deploying NATO troops in Ukraine proper or establishing a no-fly zone, may lead to a nuclear exchange, Minsk II could provide the basis for an end of hostilities. Putin, despite his massive, hideous crimes, is neither invulnerable to external diplomatic pressures, nor is he an all-powerful leader pulling the strings on each politician in Moscow. No leader can control every faction in one’s own government. That means he may eventually succumb to the hardliners who, angry that the Russian army did not decapitate Kyiv’s leadership and occupy the entire country, may pressure him to resort to nuclear weapons.
Michael Slager is an English teacher at Loyola University Chicago.
Sources (12)
Al Mayadeen
Barnes and Noble
Consortium News
Counterpunch
Covert Action Magazine
Donbass Insider
The Grayzone
Harper’s Magazine
Indian Punchline
Kagarlitsky (personal pub.)
Monthly Review (Mronline.org)
Moon of Alabama
END UKRAINE WAR #31