OMNI UKRAINE WAR ANTHOLOGY #30B, July 24, 2023

OMNI

UKRAINE WAR ANTHOLOGY #30B

July 24, 2023

Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture, of Peace, Justice, and Ecology

https://omnicenter.org/donate/

What's at Stake:  Countering the harms done by the US Warfare State with its Pentagon-Corporate-Congressional-Presidential-Propaganda Machine

CONTENTS

Chris Hedges Prophetic Indignation

2014 When, Why, Who.

Faina Savenkova. Why the War Started and Who Started It.

Oleg Nesterenko (Interview).  “Without the 2014 coup, Ukraine would be living in peace.”

Four Summary Essays

Joe Lauria.  “Ukraine Timeline Tells the Story.”

Chris Hedges.  “. . . And They Are Lying About Ukraine.”

Matthew Hoh.  “A War Long Wanted: Diplomatic Malpractice in Ukraine.”
Eve Ottenberg.   Summary of US Provocation of Ukraine War, Calamitous War, Worse Possibilities.

Special Issues

Cluster Bombs

Abel Tomlinson.  Prohibited by International and US Laws.

Jake Johnson.  Opponents Appalled by Biden’s Decision.

Al Mayadeen.  Cambodian Premier Objects.

Wolf GÖhring.  Complaint against German President Steinmeier.

Failure of Counteroffensive

B, Moon of Alabama.  “Failure of Ukraine Counterattack.”
Dimitri Kovalevich.  “Failed Counteroffensive.”

Peace

Arnold Schölzel.  A Peace Manifesto in Germany

Jeremy Kuzmarov.  2-19-23 “Left and Right…Rage against the Ukraine War.”

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies.  “The High Stakes”—WWIII.”

TEXTS

Chris Hedges’ Prophetic Indignation

Narrated by Eunice Wong [Text originally published 02/19/2023: “The architects of imperialism, the masters of war” (possible title for the speech-- Dick).]

Idolatry is the primal sin from which all other sins derive. Idols tempt us to become God. They demand the sacrifice of others in the mad quest for wealth, fame or power. But the idol always ends by requiring self-sacrifice, leaving us to perish on the blood-soaked altars we erected for others. 

For empires are not murdered, they commit suicide at the feet of the idols that entrance them. 

We are here today to denounce the unelected, unaccountable high priests of Empire, who funnel the bodies of millions of victims, along with trillions of our national wealth, into the bowels of our own version of the Canaanite idol, Moloch.

The political class, the media, the entertainment industry, the financiers and even religious institutions bay like wolves for the blood of Muslims or Russians or Chinese, or whoever the idol has demonized as unworthy of life. There were no rational objectives in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Somalia. There are none in Ukraine. Permanent war and industrial slaughter are their own justification. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman earn billions of dollars in profits. The vast expenditures demanded by the Pentagon are sacrosanct. The cabal of warmongering pundits, diplomats and technocrats, who smugly dodge responsibility for the array of military disasters they orchestrate, are protean, shifting adroitly with the political tides, moving from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party and then back again, mutating from cold warriors to neocons to liberal interventionists. Julien Benda called these courtiers to power “the self-made barbarians of the intelligentsia.”

These pimps of war do not see the corpses of their victims. I did. Including children. Every lifeless body I stood over as a reporter in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Palestine, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen, Bosnia, or Kosovo, month after month, year after year, exposed their moral bankruptcy, intellectual dishonesty, sick bloodlust and delusional fantasies. They are puppets of the Pentagon, a state within a state, and the weapons manufacturers who lavishly fund their think tanks: Project for the New American Century, Foreign Policy Initiative, American Enterprise Institute, Center for a New American Security, Institute for the Study of War, Atlantic Council and Brookings Institute. Like some mutant strain of an antibiotic-resistant bacteria, they cannot be vanquished. It does not matter how wrong they are, how absurd their theories of global dominance, how many times they lie or denigrate other cultures and societies as uncivilized or how many they condemn to death. They are immovable props, parasites vomited up in the dying days of all empires, ready to sell us the next virtuous war against whoever they have decided is the new Hitler. The map changes. The game is the same.

Pity our prophets, those who wander the desolate landscape crying out in the darkness. Pity Julian Assange, undergoing a slow-motion execution in a high-security prison in London. He committed Empire’s fatal sin. He exposed its crimes, its machinery of death, its moral depravity. 

A society that prohibits the capacity to speak in truth extinguishes the capacity to live in justice.

Some here today might like to think of themselves as radicals, maybe even revolutionaries. But what we are demanding on the political spectrum is, in fact, conservative: the restoration of the rule of law. It is simple and basic. It should not, in a functioning republic, be incendiary. But living in truth in a despotic system, one the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin called “inverted totalitarianism,” is subversive. 

The architects of imperialism, the masters of war, the corporate-controlled legislative, judicial and executive branches of government and their obsequious mouth pieces in the media and academia, are illegitimate. Say this simple truth and you are banished, as many of us have been, to the margins. Prove this truth, as Julian did, and you are crucified.

“Red Rosa now has vanished too…” Bertolt Brecht wrote of the murdered socialist Rosa Luxemburg. “She told the poor what life is about, And so the rich have rubbed her out.”

We have undergone a corporate coup d'état, where the poor and working men and women, half of whom lack $400 to cover an emergency expense, are reduced to chronic instability. Joblessness and food insecurity are endemic. Our communities and cities are desolate. War, financial speculation, constant surveillance and militarized police that function as internal armies of occupation are the only real concerns of the state. Even habeas corpus no longer exists. We, as citizens, are commodities to corporate systems of power, used and discarded. And the endless wars we fight overseas have spawned the wars we fight at home, as the students I teach in the New Jersey prison system are acutely aware. All empires die in the same act of self-immolation. The tyranny the Athenian empire imposed on others, Thucydides noted in his history of the Peloponnesian war, it finally imposed on itself.

To fight back, to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet from ecocide, to decry the domestic and international crimes of the ruling class, to demand justice, to live in truth, to smash the graven images, is to bear the mark of Cain.

Those in power must feel our wrath, which means constant acts of non-violent civil disobedience, social and political disruption. Organized power from below is the only power that can save us. Politics is a game of fear. It is our duty to make those in power very, very afraid.

The ruling oligarchy has us locked in its death grip. It cannot be reformed. It obscures and falsifies the truth.  It is on a maniacal quest to increase its obscene wealth and unchecked power. It forces us to kneel before its false gods. And so, to quote the Queen of Hearts, metaphorically, of course, I say, “Off with their heads!” 

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Why and When Did the War Start, and Who Started It?   A Testimony from  2014.

“Faina Savenkova: Too much pain.”  Editor.  Mronline.org (6-14-23).

Faina: "I have said many times that the war for me began on June 2, 2014, with the bombing of the Lugansk Regional State Administration by Ukrainian aircraft. And now comes another anniversary, already the ninth."

Originally published: Faina Savenkova: Too much pain  on June 2, 2023  (more by Faina Savenkova: Too much pain) (Posted Jun 13, 2023).

WarAmericas, Europe, Russia, Ukraine, United StatesNewswireRussia-Ukraine War

I have said many times that the war for me began on June 2, 2014, with the bombing of the Lugansk Regional State Administration by Ukrainian aircraft. And now comes another anniversary, already the ninth.

Strangely enough, that day is one of the few that I remember, albeit in fragments. Maybe because it was the first time we had so much noise, or maybe because I was worried about my grandmother, who was in the area of the shelling that day. I still don’t like it when someone doesn’t return my calls or messages for a long time, even though I know there can be plenty of harmless reasons for that. But it’s still scary. Really scary.

A heap of some scattered, jumbled memories that can not be gathered into a single chain… I remember having to go to the library to get a book for my brother from the summer reading list, but I was too lazy to go, so I told my mom that I was too tired. A little white lie. So we didn’t go. It’s quite possible that’s why we didn’t end up on the playground with my mom a little later, during the shelling in the park near the Regional State Administration building.

A couple of days later we went to the polyclinic, and mom talked to the pediatrician, including on this topic. At that time no one could believe that it was an air strike by Ukraine. Later, of course, all doubts dissipated, but back then many still had hope. Like the saleswoman at the newspaper kiosk. Her most vivid recollection of that day:

We’re looking up into the sky, and we don’t understand how this is possible, or where to fly, or where to run. We just stand there and look at the sky. And we see where this shell will land. So it hits us. We don’t have time to hide anyway.

What has changed since that day? A lot. And nothing. All of us have changed, the situation in Donbass has changed. But what has remained the same is the West’s approval of the fascist regime in Kiev. I think that was the main reason for the start of the Special Military Operation. The loss of hope for a peaceful solution and the provocation of an open war by the West. Did the Ukrainian people need this? No, of course not. Neither did we. Who needs war? But there is no other way. Children grow up when they begin to understand this simple truth.

What can we do? Try to understand cause and effect, try to learn a lesson. Even if too little time has passed for the present to be covered by the dust of time and become the past to which one can try to look dispassionately, there is no other way. The sooner the world realizes its mistakes, the better its chances for life. And the non-repetition of another June 2. Such mistakes, turning into crimes against humanity, bring too much pain to people.

Faina Savenkova

English translation: D. Armstrong

“ Without the 2014 coup, Ukraine would be living in peace.”

Interview of Oleg Nesterenko.

Oleg Nesterenko: "When we talk about the reasons that led the Russians to intervene militarily in Ukraine, root causes and triggers are often confused, especially in the Western press. The triggers are mistaken for the causes. As for the causes, we don’t even talk about them, or we just talk nonsense. It’s important to distinguish one from the other."   Editor.  mronline.org (7-13-23). 

Originally published: Donbass Insider  on June 29, 2023 by L’Éclaireur des Alpes (more by Donbass Insider)  |  (Posted Jul 12, 2023)

Inequality, Movements, State Repression, WarAmericas, Europe, Russia, Ukraine, United StatesInterview, NewswireL’Éclaireur des Alpes, Oleg Nesterenko

This is the first of three parts of an interview that Oleg Nesterenko, President of the CCIE, gave to the publication “L’Éclaireur des Alpes”. This part discusses the responsibility of the 2014 Maidan coup for the tragic events that plunged Ukraine into war.

L’Éclaireur: Over and above Vladimir Putin’s responsibility for starting the war, what are the reasons that led the Russians to intervene militarily in Ukraine, and what are the underlying causes?

Oleg Nesterenko: When we talk about the reasons that led the Russians to intervene militarily in Ukraine, root causes and triggers are often confused, especially in the Western press. The triggers are mistaken for the causes. As for the causes, we don’t even talk about them, or we just talk nonsense. It’s important to distinguish one from the other.

There are two main interrelated triggers. The first is the coup in Kiev in 2014. Without this unconstitutional overthrow of power, Ukraine would be living in peace today. Without this coup, for which there is tangible evidence that the United States of America was behind with the help of its European surrogates, there would not be the war we are currently experiencing. It is important to stress that before this event in 2014, neither Crimea, nor the Donetsk region, nor the Lugansk region had the slightest intention of separating from Ukraine. In Crimea, I never heard anyone, either among the ordinary people or among senior officials in closed circles, talk about the possibility or necessity of separating from Ukraine and rejoining Russia. There was no reason to do so.

And even later, within the framework of the Minsk agreements, the idea of the separation of Ukraine from the regions of Lugansk and Donetsk was by no means foreseen, or even raised. It was the supplement of autonomy from the central power in Kiev that was the subject of the agreement, starting with linguistic autonomy: the right of the inhabitants of Eastern Ukraine to speak and use their native language, the language they want and not the one imposed by the new power bearing a more than questionable legitimacy.

The second trigger for the war in Ukraine was the Odessa massacre in 2014, about which not much is said in France. Local propaganda seeks to conceal this major event. It is far too embarrassing.

When the coup took place in Kiev and the ultra-nationalists, supported directly by the United States, came to power, the Russian-speaking and traditionally pro-Russian parts of Ukraine—the Russian-speaking regions of Donbass, Crimea, Odessa, Nikolayev and Kharkov—rose up.

And when the extremists came to Odessa to put down the perfectly peaceful demonstrations by the inhabitants, they came armed to kill. Officially, 48 people were killed. In reality—certainly more. And these were not abstract deaths, the victims of some accident. It was the people of Odessa who were massacred by ultranationalists and neo-Nazis from the traditionally Russophobic west of Ukraine. And these inhabitants were massacred with enormous savagery (raped and then strangled, burnt alive, etc.) for their refusal to accept the new power that had never been elected by anyone. The inhabitants of the pro-Russian regions were deeply traumatised by this massacre, even more so than by the events in Kiev, because this time it happened in their region and could happen again at any time. I was in Crimea in 2014 and I remember the locals saying “there’s no way these degenerates are coming here”.

Although almost all the perpetrators of the Odessa massacre are well known—there is a wealth of eyewitness accounts, photos and videos showing the unmasked faces of those who took part in the massacre—not a single one of them has been arrested or even investigated by the new Ukrainian government. This is the beginning, the foundation of the new Ukrainian “democracy” so much admired by the gullible and manipulated masses in the West.

So, after the proclamations of independence of the Crimea and Donbass regions from Ukraine—which were easy to achieve, given that at least three-quarters of the populations concerned were vehemently opposed to the new power installed in Kiev—the events in Odessa merely reconfirmed the validity of the separation.

L’Éclaireur: How do you explain the interference of the United States and the European Union in matters that could have remained regional?   MORE   https://mronline.org/2023/07/12/without-the-2014-coup-ukraine-would-be-living-in-peace/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=without-the-2014-coup-ukraine-would-be-living-in-peace&mc_cid=ef06d1b1fe&mc_eid=ab2f7bf95e

FOUR OVERVIEWS OF THE WAR

 Joe Lauria.  Special to Consortium News. “ Ukraine Timeline Tells the Story.  “    June 30/July 6, 2023.

Without historical context, buried by corporate media, it's impossible to understand Ukraine.  (Forwarded by E. San Juan, Jr.)

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/06/30/ukraine-timeline-tells-the-story/

AMERICAN EMPIRE, ANALYSIS, HISTORY, INTELLIGENCE, RUSSIA, RUSSIAGATE, UKRAINE, WIKILEAKS

Without historical context, buried by corporate media, it’s impossible to understand Ukraine. Historians will tell the story. But the Establishment hits back at journalists, like at CN, who try to tell it now. 

The way to prevent understanding of the Ukraine war is to suppress its history.

A cartoon version says the conflict began in February 2022 when Vladimir Putin woke up one morning and decided to invade Ukraine.

There was no other cause, according to this version, other than unprovoked, Russian aggression against an innocent country.

Please use this short, historical guide to share with people who still flip through the funny pages trying to figure out what’s going on in Ukraine.  

The mainstream account is like opening a novel in the middle of the book to read a random chapter as though it’s the beginning of the story.

Thirty years from now historians will write of the context of the Ukraine war: the coup, the attack on Donbass, NATO expansion, rejection of Russian treaty proposals — without being called Putin puppets. It will be the same way historians write of the Versailles Treaty as a cause of Nazism and WWII, but aren’t called Nazi-sympathizers.

Providing context is taboo while the war continues in Ukraine, as it would have been during WWII. Journalists have to get with the program of war propaganda while the war continues. Long after the war, historians are free to sift through the facts. 

Journalists are clearly not afforded the same liberties as historians.

For our efforts to provide real-time context in Ukraine, which you can find encapsulated below, we’ve had PropOrNot, PayPal and NewsGuard try to hinder us, and Hamilton 68 put CN‘s editor on its disinformation “dashboard.” Consortium News has been undeterred, thanks to its readers’ generous support. 

So please consider a donation during our Spring Fund Drive to help us keep delivering.

THE UKRAINE TIMELINE

World War II— Ukrainian national fascists, led by Stepan Bandera, at first allied with the German Nazis, massacre more than a hundred thousands Jews and Poles.

1950s to 1990 – C.I.A. brought Ukrainian fascists to the U.S. and worked with them to undermine the Soviet Union in Ukraine, running sabotage and propaganda operations. Ukrainian fascist leader Mykola Lebed was taken to New York where he worked with the C.I.A. through at least the 1960s and was still useful to the C.I.A. until 1991, the year of Ukraine’s independence. The evidence is in a U.S. government report starting from page 82. Ukraine has thus been a staging ground for the U.S. to weaken and threaten Moscow for nearly 80 years.

November 1990:  A year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Charter of Paris for a New Europe (also known as the Paris Charter) is adopted by the U.S., Europe and the Soviet Union. The charter is based on the Helsinki Accords and is updated in the 1999 Charter for European Security. These documents are the foundation of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. The OSCE charter says no country or bloc can preserve its own security at another country’s expense.

Dec. 25, 1991: Soviet Union collapses. Wall Street and Washington carpetbaggers move in during ensuing decade to asset-strip the country of formerly state-owned properties,  enrich themselves, help give rise to oligarchs, and impoverish the Russian, Ukrainian and other former Soviet peoples.

1990s: U.S. reneges on promise to last Soviet leader Gorbachev not to expand NATO to Eastern Europe in exchange for a unified Germany. George Kennan, the  leading U.S. government expert on the U.S.S.R., opposes expansion. Sen. Joe Biden, who supports NATO enlargement, predicts Russia will react hostilely to it.

1997: Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. national security adviser, in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, writes:

“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state.”

New Year’s Eve 1999:  After eight years of U.S. and Wall Street dominance, Vladimir Putin becomes president of Russia. Bill Clinton rebuffs him in 2000 when he asks to join NATO.

Putin begins closing the door on Western interlopers, restoring Russian sovereignty, ultimately angering Washington and Wall Street. This process does not occur in Ukraine, which remains subject to Western exploitation and impoverishment of Ukrainian people.

Feb. 10, 2007: Putin gives his Munich Security Conference speech in which he condemns U.S. aggressive unilateralism, including its illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq and its NATO expansion eastward.

He said: “We have the right to ask: against whom is this [NATO] expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them.” 

Putin speaks three years after the Baltic States, former Soviet republics bordering on Russia, joined the Western Alliance.  The West humiliates Putin and Russia by ignoring its legitimate concerns. A year after his speech, NATO says Ukraine and Georgia will become members. Four other former Warsaw Pact states join in 2009.

2004-5: Orange Revolution. Election results are overturned giving the presidency in a run-off to U.S.-aligned Viktor Yuschenko over Viktor Yanukovich. Yuschenko makes fascist leader Bandera a “hero of Ukraine.”

April 3, 2008: At a NATO conference in Bucharest, a summit declaration “welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO”. Russia harshly objects. William Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Russia, and presently C.I.A. director, warns in a cable to Washington, revealed by WikiLeaks, that,

“Foreign Minister Lavrov and other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat. NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains ‘an emotional and neuralgic’ issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene. … Lavrov stressed that Russia had to view continued eastward expansion of NATO, particularly to Ukraine and Georgia, as a potential military threat.”

A crisis in Georgia erupts four months later leading to a brief war with Russia, which the European Union blames on provocation from Georgia.

November 2009: Russia seeks new security arrangement in Europe. Moscow releases a draft of a proposal for a new European security architecture that the Kremlin says should replace outdated institutions such as NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

The text, posted on the Kremlin’s website on Nov. 29, comes more than a year after President Dmitry Medvedev first formally raised the issue. Speaking in Berlin in June 2008, Medvedev said the new pact was necessary to finally update Cold War-era arrangements. 

“I’m convinced that Europe’s problems won’t be solved until its unity is established, an organic wholeness of all its integral parts, including Russia,” Medvedev said.

2010: Viktor Yanukovich is elected president of Ukraine in a free and fair election, according to the OSCE.

2013: Yanukovich chooses an economic package from Russia rather than an association agreement with the EU. This threatens Western exploiters in Ukraine and Ukrainian comprador political leaders and oligarchs.

February 2014: Yanukovich is overthrown in a violent, U.S.-backed coup (presaged by the Nuland-Pyatt intercept), with Ukrainian fascist groups, like Right Sector, playing a lead role. Ukrainian fascists parade through cities in torch-lit parades with portraits of Bandera.

Protesters clash with police in Kiev, Ukraine, February 2014. (Wikimedia Commons)(photo deleted—D)

March 16, 2014: In a rejection of the coup and the unconstitutional installation of an anti-Russian government in Kiev, Crimeans vote by 97 percent to join Russia in a referendum with 89 percent turn out. The Wagner private military organization is created to support Crimea. Virtually no shots are fired and no one was killed in what Western media wrongly portrays as a “Russian invasion of Crimea.”

April 12, 2014: Coup government in Kiev launches war against anti-coup, pro-democracy separatists in Donbass. Openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion plays a key role in the fighting for Kiev. Wagner forces arrive to support Donbass militias. U.S. again exaggerates this as a Russian “invasion” of Ukraine. “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pre-text,” says U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who voted as a senator in favor of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 on a completely trumped up pre-text.

May 2, 2014: Dozens of ethnic Russian protestors are burnt alive in a building in Odessa by neo-Nazi thugs. Five days later, Luhansk and Donetsk declare independence and vote to leave Ukraine.

Sept. 5, 2014: First Minsk agreement is signed in Minsk, Belarus by Russia, Ukraine, the OSCE, and the leaders of the breakaway Donbass republics, with mediation by Germany and France in a Normandy Format. It fails to resolve the conflict.

Feb. 12, 2015: Minsk II is signed in Belarus, which would end the fighting and grant the republics autonomy while they remain part of Ukraine. The accord was unanimously endorsed by the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 15. In December 2022 former German Chancellor Angela Merkel admits West never had intention of pushing for Minsk implementation and essentially used it as a ruse to give time for NATO to arm and train the Ukraine armed forces.

2016: The hoax known as Russiagate grips the Democratic Party and its allied media in the United States, in which it is falsely alleged that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to get Donald Trump elected. The phony scandal serves to further demonize Russia in the U.S. and raise tensions between the nuclear-armed powers, conditioning the public for war against Russia.

May 12, 2016: U.S. activates missile system in Romania, angering Russia. U.S. claims it is purely defensive, but Moscow says the system could also be used offensively and would cut the time to deliver a strike on the Russian capital to within 10 to 12 minutes.

June 6, 2016: Symbolically on the anniversary of the Normandy invasion, NATO launches aggressive exercises against Russia. It begins war games with 31,000 troops near Russia’s borders, the largest exercise in Eastern Europe since the Cold War ended. For the first time in 75 years, German troops retrace the steps of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union across Poland.

German Foreign Minister Frank Walter-Steinmeier objects. “What we shouldn’t do now is inflame the situation further through saber-rattling and warmongering,” Steinmeier stunningly tells Bild am Sontag newspaper. “Whoever believes that a symbolic tank parade on the alliance’s eastern border will bring security is mistaken.”

Instead Steinmeier calls for dialogue with Moscow. “We are well-advised to not create pretexts to renew an old confrontation,” he warns, adding it would be “fatal to search only for military solutions and a policy of deterrence.”

December 2021: Russia offers draft treaty proposals to the United States and NATO proposing a new security architecture in Europe, reviving the failed Russian attempt to do so in 2009. The treaties propose the removal of the Romanian missile system and the withdrawal of NATO troop deployments from Eastern Europe.  Russia says there will be a “technical-military” response if there are not serious negotiations on the treaties. The U.S. and NATO reject them essentially out of hand.  

February 2022: Russia begins its military intervention into Donbass in the still ongoing Ukrainian civil war after first recognizing the independence of Luhansk and Donetsk.

Before the intervention, OSCE maps show a significant uptick of shelling from Ukraine into the separatist republics, where more than 10,000 people have been killed since 2014.

Ukrainian troops in the Donbass region, March 2015. (OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons) (photo deleted, D)

March-April 2022: Russia and Ukraine agree on a framework agreement that would end the war, including Ukraine pledging not to join NATO. The U.S. and U.K. object. Prime Minister Boris Johnson flies to Kiev to tell Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to stop negotiating with Russia. The war continues with Russia seizing much of the Donbass.

March 26, 2022: Biden admits in a speech in Warsaw that the U.S. is seeking through its proxy war against Russia to overthrow the Putin government.

September 2022: Donbass republics vote to join Russian Federation, as well as two other regions: Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

May 2023: Ukraine begins counter-offensive to try to take back territory controlled by Russia. As seen in leaked documents earlier in the year, U.S. intelligence concludes the offensive will fail before it begins.

June 2023: A 36-hour rebellion by the Wagner group fails, when its leader Yevegny Prigoshzin takes a deal to go into exile in Belarus. The Wagner private army, which was funded and armed by the Russian Ministry of Defense, is absorbed into the Russian army.

The timeline clearly shows the aggressive Western intent towards Russia, and how the tragedy could have been avoided if NATO would not allow Ukraine to join; if the Minsk accords had been implemented; and if the U.S. and NATO negotiated a new security arrangement in Europe, taking Russian security concerns into account.

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe     

Chris Hedges Report.  “They Lied About Afghanistan. They Lied About Iraq. And They Are Lying About Ukraine.“  The U.S. public has been conned, once again, into pouring billions into another endless war.  July 2, 2023.  

The playbook the pimps of war use to lure us into one military fiasco after another, including Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and now Ukraine, does not change. Freedom and democracy are threatened. Evil must be vanquished. Human rights must be protected. The fate of Europe and NATO, along with a “rules based international order” is at stake. Victory is assured.

The results are also the same. The justifications and narratives are exposed as lies. The cheery prognosis is false. Those on whose behalf we are supposedly fighting are as venal as those we are fighting against. 

The Russian invasion of Ukraine was a war crime, although one that was provoked by NATO expansion and by the United States backing of the 2014 “Maidan” coup which ousted the democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych wanted economic integration with the European Union, but not at the expense of economic and political ties with Russia. The war will only be solved through negotiations that allow ethnic Russians in Ukraine to have autonomy and Moscow’s protection, as well as Ukrainian neutrality, which means the country cannot join NATO. The longer these negotiations are delayed the more Ukrainians will suffer and die. Their cities and infrastructure will continue to be pounded into rubble.

But this proxy war in Ukraine is designed to serve U.S. interests. It enriches the weapons manufacturers, weakens the Russian military and isolates Russia from Europe. What happens to Ukraine is irrelevant. 

“First, equipping our friends on the front lines to defend themselves is a far cheaper way — in both dollars and American lives — to degrade Russia’s ability to threaten the United States,” admitted Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. 

“Second, Ukraine’s effective defense of its territory is teaching us lessons about how to improve the defenses of partners who are threatened by China. It is no surprise that senior officials from Taiwan are so supportive of efforts to help Ukraine defeat Russia. Third, most of the money that’s been appropriated for Ukraine security assistance doesn’t actually go to Ukraine. It gets invested in American defense manufacturing. It funds new weapons and munitions for the U.S. armed forces to replace the older material we have provided to Ukraine. Let me be clear: this assistance means more jobs for American workers and newer weapons for American servicemembers.”

Once the truth about these endless wars seeps into public consciousness, the media, which slavishly promotes these conflicts, drastically reduces coverage. The military debacles, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, continue largely out of view. By the time the U.S. concedes defeat, most barely remember that these wars are being fought. 

The pimps of war who orchestrate these military fiascos migrate from administration to administration. Between posts they are ensconced in think tanks — Project for the New American Century, American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, Institute for the Study of War, The Atlantic Council and The Brookings Institution — funded by corporations and the war industry. Once the Ukraine war comes to its inevitable conclusion, these Dr. Strangeloves will seek to ignite a war with China. The U.S. Navy and military are already menacing and encircling China. God help us if we don’t stop them.

These pimps of war con us into one conflict after another with flattering narratives that paint us as the world’s saviors. They don’t even have to be innovative. The rhetoric is lifted from the old playbook. We naively swallow the bait and embrace the flag — this time blue and yellow — to become unwitting agents in our self-immolation.

Since the end of the Second World War, the government has spent between 45 to 90 percent of the federal budget on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest sustained activity of the U.S. government. It has stopped mattering — at least to the pimps of war — whether these wars are rational or prudent. The war industry metastasizes within the bowels of the American empire to hollow it out from the inside. The U.S. is reviled abroad, drowning in debt, has an impoverished working class and is burdened with a decayed infrastructure as well as shoddy social services. 

Wasn’t the Russian military — because of poor morale, poor generalship, outdated weapons, desertions, a lack of ammunition that supposedly forced soldiers to fight with shovels, and severe supply shortages — supposed to collapse months ago? Wasn’t Putin supposed to be driven from power? Weren’t the sanctions supposed to plunge the ruble into a death spiral? Wasn’t the severing of the Russian banking system from SWIFT, the international money transfer system, supposed to cripple the Russian economy? How is it that inflation rates in Europe and the United States are higher than in Russia despite these attacks on the Russian economy? 

Wasn’t the nearly over $150 billion in sophisticated military hardware, financial and humanitarian assistance pledged by the U.S., EU and 11 other countries supposed to have turned the tide of the war? How is that perhaps a third of the tanks Germany and the U.S. provided, were swiftly turned by Russian mines, artillery, anti-tank weapons, air strikes and missiles into charred hunks of metal at the start of the vaunted counter-offensive? Wasn’t this latest Ukrainian counter-offensive, which was originally known as the “spring offensive,” supposed to punch through Russia’s heavily fortified front lines and regain huge swathes of territory? How can we explain the tens of thousands of Ukrainian military casualties and the forced conscription by Ukraine’s military? Even our retired generals and former CIA, FBI, NSA and Homeland Security officials, who serve as analysts on networks such as CNN and MSNBC, can’t say the offensive has succeeded. 

And what of the Ukrainian democracy we are fighting to protect? Why did the Ukrainian parliament revoke the official use of minority languages, including Russian, three days after the 2014 coup? How do we rationalize the eight years of warfare against ethnic Russians in the Donbass region before the Russian invasion in Feb. 2022? How do we explain the killing of over 14,200 people and the 1.5 million people who were displaced, before Russia's invasion took place last year?

How do we defend the decision by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to ban eleven opposition parties, including The Opposition Platform for Life, which had 10 percent of the seats in the Supreme Council, Ukraine’s unicameral parliament, along with the Shariy Party, Nashi, Opposition Bloc, Left Opposition, Union of Left Forces, State, Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, Socialist Party of Ukraine, Socialists Party and Volodymyr Saldo Bloc? How can we accept the banning of these opposition parties — many of which are on the left — while Zelenskyy allows fascists from the Svoboda and Right Sector parties, as well as the Banderite Azov Battalion and other extremist militias, to flourish? 

How do we deal with the anti-Russian purges and arrests of supposed “fifth columnists”  sweeping through Ukraine, given that 30 percent of Ukraine’s inhabitants are Russian speakers? How do we respond to the neo-Nazi groups supported by Zelenskyy’s government that harass and attack the LGBT community, the Roma population, anti-fascist protests and threaten city council members, media outlets, artists and foreign students? How can we countenance the decision by the U.S and its Western allies to block negotiations with Russia to end the war, despite Kyiv and Moscow apparently being on the verge of negotiating a peace treaty? 

I reported from Eastern and Central Europe in 1989 during the breakup of the Soviet Union.  NATO, we assumed, had become obsolete. President Mikhail Gorbachev proposed security and economic agreements with Washington and Europe. Secretary of State James Baker in Ronald Reagan’s administration, along with the West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, assured Gorbachev that NATO would not be extended beyond the borders of a unified Germany. We naively thought the end of the Cold War meant that Russia, Europe and the U.S., would no longer have to divert massive resources to their militaries. 

The so-called “peace dividend,” however, was a chimera.

If Russia did not want to be the enemy, Russia would be forced to become the enemy. The pimps of war recruited former Soviet republics into NATO by painting Russia as a threat. Countries that joined NATO, which now include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia, reconfigured their militaries, often through tens of millions in western loans, to become compatible with NATO military hardware. This made the weapons manufacturers billions in profits. 

It was universally understood in Eastern and Central Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Union that NATO expansion was unnecessary and a dangerous provocation. It made no geopolitical sense. But it made commercial sense. War is a business.

In a classified diplomatic cable — obtained and released by WikiLeaks — dated Feb. 1, 2008, written from Moscow, and addressed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, NATO-European Union Cooperative, National Security Council, Russia Moscow Political Collective, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State, there was an unequivocal understanding that expanding NATO risked conflict with Russia, especially over Ukraine.

“Not only does Russia perceive encirclement [by NATO], and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests,” the cable reads. “Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face. . . .”

“Dmitri Trenin, Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, expressed concern that Ukraine was, in the long-term, the most potentially destabilizing factor in U.S.-Russian relations, given the level of emotion and neuralgia triggered by its quest for NATO membership . . .” the cable read.  “Because membership remained divisive in Ukrainian domestic politics, it created an opening for Russian intervention. Trenin expressed concern that elements within the Russian establishment would be encouraged to meddle, stimulating U.S. overt encouragement of opposing political forces, and leaving the U.S. and Russia in a classic confrontational posture.”

The Russian invasion of Ukraine would not have happened if the western alliance had honored its promises not to expand NATO beyond Germany’s borders and Ukraine had remained neutral. The pimps of war knew the potential consequences of NATO expansion. War, however, is their single minded vocation, even if it leads to a nuclear holocaust with Russia or China. 

The war industry, not Putin, is our most dangerous enemy.   

MATTHEW HOH.   “A War Long Wanted: Diplomatic Malpractice in Ukraine.  JUNE 9, 2023.”   [How the Ukraine War functions as an economic system.]

Author’s Note: This is the original draft of the letter to President Biden and the US Congress published in The New York Times on May 16 by the Eisenhower Media Network. This version, which is substantially longer than the published letter, is published here amended from its original formatting as a group letter. This version goes into much greater depth on the background of Russia’s invasion, the role of the military-industrial complex and the fossil fuel industry in US policy-making, and speaks to the toxic and dangerous diplomatic malpractice that has dominated US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. 

The essay is not exhaustive, for example, I don’t write of events after February 2022 or offer predictions as to what will come if ceasefire and negotiations are not begun, other than stating a general fear of unending stalemated war, a la WWI, or expressing concern for an escalation towards a nuclear WWIII. It also does not address the substantial complaints that can be made about the Russians. Repeating what is found abundantly in US media was not my intent, but rather what is omitted, particularly examining deliberate US decision-making over three decades and noting the absence of strategic empathy from the US/NATO side, hence the charge of diplomatic malpractice.

These are my views and don’t necessarily represent the views of my fellow co-signers on The New York Times letter.

Nothing written excuses or condones Russia’s actions. The Russian invasion is a war of aggression and a violation of international law. An attempt at understanding the Russian perspective on their war does not endorse the invasion, occupation and war crimes committed, and it certainly does not imply the Russians had no other option but this war. Rather, this essay seeks to communicate that this war was not unprovoked and that the actions of the US and NATO over decades led to a war of choice between the US, NATO, Ukraine and Russia. A war long wanted by megalomaniacs and war profiteers in DC, London, Brussels, Kyv and Moscow became realized in February 2022.

The US Provoked Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

The direct cause of the current inter-state war in Ukraine is Russia’s invasion, but America’s relentless expansion of NATO up to Russia’s borders provoked the attack. Since at least 2007, Russia repeatedly warned NATO’s armed forces on Russian borders, especially Ukraine, were intolerable – just as Russian forces in Mexico or Canada would be intolerable to the US now or as Russian missiles in Cuba were in 1962. Coupled with these provocations has been an American militarized foreign policy characterized by unilateralism, regime change and preemptive war. This has ensured a reality since the end of the Cold War of confrontation and slaughter throughout the world. Thus, the famed predictions of the 1990s of a clash of civilizations became a reality of our own making.

The Broken Promises of Post-Cold War Peace

In the wake of the Cold War, US and Western European leaders made assurances to Soviet and then Russian leaders that NATO would not expand toward Russia’s borders. “…there would be no extension of…NATO one inch to the east” was what US Secretary of State James Baker promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990. Similar assurances from other US leaders, as well as from British, German and French leaders, throughout the 1990s form the foundation for the Russian argument of being double-crossed by NATO’s eastward expansion.

This resentment is not the only grievance expressed by the Russians over the actions of the US in the decade following the end of the Cold War. The economic shock doctrine forced upon the Russians, and the looting of Russian finances and industry, led by US bankers and consultants, saw an incredible drop in living standards, including a severe decline in life expectancy. The post-Soviet economic collapse saw GDP cut in half and millions die. This coincided with the US influencing and possibly rigging the 1996 elections for the corrupt and drunken Boris Yeltsin. Put all that together and you have a decade of humiliation and harm that still aggrieves Russian leaders and their public and informs a nationalist desire to stand up to the US, the West and NATO.

US and NATO bombings of Russia’s ally Serbia in 1999 occurred not just in the same year as the first expansion of NATO membership into Eastern Europe but the same month. This attack on their Serb allies is a continued theme in Russian messaging and talking points. Mostly now forgotten here in the US, NATO’s 78-day air war on Serbia is often the starting justification for Russia’s defense of its own war on Ukraine. Seen by the Russians as unjustified and illegal, as the first instance of NATO’s kinetic bullying, the 1999 war against Serbia leads Russian arguments about the Ukraine War being a necessary war of defense.

The Russians saw George W. Bush’s unilateral exit from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2001 in the context of NATO expansion and the US’ Global War on Terror. To the Russians, NATO expansion meant the US moving its bases and missile launch sites closer to Russia while US leaders announced policies of “with us or against us”. At the same time, the US withdrew from the decades-old ABM Treaty, enacted to ensure nuclear deterrence by limiting one side’s ability to launch a first strike and then be protected from a retaliatory strike by defensive missiles (defensive missiles that the Russians understood would be made more effective by being moved closer to their borders). The withdrawal from the ABM Treaty announced monthsbefore the 9/11 attacks, was an early element of what would come to be known as the Bush Doctrine. The Bush Doctrine had three core components: unilateralism, preemptive military action and regime change. The Bush Doctrine peaked with the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.

NATO-Backed Regime Changes Stoked Russia’s Fears

A year to the month after the US waged an unprovoked preemptive war against Iraq, NATO conducted its second post-Cold War enlargement. In March 2004, seven more Eastern European nations were admitted into NATO, including Russia’s three Baltic neighbors, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. NATO troops were now on Russia’s direct border.

Later in 2004, Ukraine underwent its Orange Revolution. Seen in the West as affirmations of democracy, the Orange Revolution and its sister color revolutions in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics from 2000–2010 threatened, often successfully, the rule of pro-Russian leaders. Russia’s ally in Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, was removed in Serbia’s Bulldozer Revolution of 2000. Three of these revolutions, all successful, occurred within 18 months of one another: Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004 and Kyrgyzstan in 2005. All three Moscow- friendly leaders were deposed. Less successful color revolutions occurred in the former Soviet Republics of Belarus in 2006 and Moldova in 2009.

In Kyrgyzstan in 2010, a second color revolution occurred. This time, Kurmanbek Bakiyev was chased out of office after closing an American air base in his country. To the Russians, these were not revolutions but coups, all part of a grand strategy by Washington to weaken Russia by removing its allies.

Historical evidence for Russia’s paranoia exists. Since the end of World War II, the US has conducted dozens of coups across the globe. With the Bush Doctrine openly enshrining preemptive warfare and regime change, the color revolutions, the enlargement of NATO and the abrogation of the ABM Treaty, the Russians saw a clear danger in the West’s actions. The idea of Russia joining NATO seems to have been broached with and by NATO and Russia on multiple occasions, but by several years into Vladimir Putin’s reign, distrust and animosity between Russia and NATO were in control.

Dramatic Escalation: NATO’s Role in Ukraine and Georgia

In 2008, NATO leaders, including President Bush, announced plans to bring Ukraine and Georgia, also on Russia’s borders, into NATO. That summer would see a five-day war between Georgia and Russia, with Russia invading after Georgia fired first. Washington and Brussels failed to understand that the Russians would not hesitate to use force if provoked, demonstrating Russia’s determination to enforce red lines. Rather, in 2009, the US announced plans to put missile systems in Poland and Romania. Announced as missile defense, the launchers could fire defensive weapons or launch offensive cruise missiles into Russia, only 100 miles away from the missile bases in eastern Poland.

In 2009, the Russians witnessed the US dramatically escalate the war in Afghanistan, and then in 2011, NATO carried out regime change in Libya. In both Afghanistan and Libya, the wars were sustained by lies. In both countries, military victory by the US and Western Europe was paramount and any efforts at negotiation were not only dismissed but denied.

By 2012, the US’ goal of regime change in Syria was clear. Like Serbia more than a decade earlier, the Syrian government was a Russian ally now under threat. As in Afghanistan and Libya, negotiations would not be possible, as the Americans set a precondition that required Syrian President Bashar Assad to step down as an outcomeof the talks. That was unacceptable to Assad and to the Russians. To the Russians, these three wars of the Obama administration displayed an American determination to wage war without regard for consequence and to never negotiate.

By the end of 2013, political tensions in Ukraine, a country with a long and deep historical split between its eastern and western halves, had developed into a crisis. Protests occurred across the country and in Kyiv protestors occupied the central square. By January 2014, violence was underway and by the end of February the legally elected, if corrupt, Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, had fled to Moscow. The US presence in the overthrow of Yanukovych’s government was readily observable. Senior US State Department officials and members of Congress, led by Senator John McCain and Victoria Nuland, attended anti-government rallies, boasted of spendingover $5 billion to promote democracy in Ukraine, and infamously discussed plans for a post-coup government in Kyiv. Much more happened covertly and quietly, and if known, reported only by US journalists outside the mainstream.

The Russians believed what happened in Ukraine to be a coup. A repeat of the color revolutions that had replaced Russian-friendly governments with US/NATO-friendly ones. The Russians saw a determined US and NATO willing to overthrow governments and engage in war. From their perspective, they were being besieged by NATO enlargement and threatened by American missiles. Warnings against not just NATO enlargement but interference in Ukraine had gone unheeded. The Russian parliament had formally denounced NATO expansion in 2004 and the Kremlin started issuing regular warnings in 2007. In 2008, following NATO’s announcement to eventually bring Ukraine and Georgia in as members, Vladimir Putin warned George W. Bush: “if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and the eastern regions. It will simply fall apart.” [Andrew Cockburn points out that US recognition of an independent Kosovo in February 2008 further incensed Russia and that even Mikheil Saakashvili complained to Secretary Rice that this would provoke a dangerous reaction from Russia.]

In response to what they saw as a coup in neighboring Ukraine, Russia seized Crimea, home to their centuries-old warm-water naval base, and invested significant military support into Eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region by backing Russian- speaking separatists in a steadily worsening civil war. The following year, in a similar manner, the Russians heavily intervened with their military in Syria, something they had warned they would do to ensure the survival of the Syrian government. Russia’s actions in Ukraine and Syria were predictable and should have been expected.

A Desperate Push for Peace: Minsk II Accords

The civil war in Ukraine worsened through 2014 until negotiations delivered the Minsk II Accords in 2015. This agreement between Ukraine and Russia dramatically diminished the devastation and set a pathway to autonomy within a federalized eastern Ukraine for the Donbas. By and large, the violence remained low until 2021, until tensions renewed fighting, although both Moscow and Kyiv were failing to honor aspects of the agreement. The Russians argued the Ukrainian government was failing to implement the Accord’s framework for Donbas autonomy, while the Ukrainians argued Moscow was refusing to withdraw military support from the region.

Late in 2022, the former leaders of Germany, France and Ukraine attested that the West had no intentions of ever seeing through or honoring the Minsk II Accords. Per Angela Merkel, Francois Hollande and Petro Poroshenko, the West’s purpose was to use the time to arm Ukraine and prepare for eventual war with Russia and not to prevent such a war (it appears the Russians did the same, preparing their economy to protect it from the inevitable US sanctions, to include enhancing relationships with other nations, and building out their military-industrial base to support a high-intensity conventional war – the Russians seem to have been much better prepared for this war than the West). The Russians accepted these admissions as a validation of the bad faith they alleged of the West, another betrayal, and more reason to see force as having been the correct option for securing their needs.

During the Obama administration, the US provided only nonlethal support to Ukraine, but it did begin a troop buildup in Europe, including conducting more exercises in the new NATO nations on Russia’s borders. The Trump administration escalated the US role in Ukraine’s civil war by sending Ukraine hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons. This was interpreted by the Russians as an indication of a US preference for conflict and possibly a preparation for war.

That interpretation was reinforced when President Trump unilaterally ended the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) and Open Skies treaties. The INF Treaty prohibited exactly the type of medium-range missile that the US could now place in the NATO countries of the former Soviet bloc, allowing Moscow to be hit by first-strike nuclear missiles in a manner of minutes. For decades, the Open Skies Treaty had allowed each nation to conduct surveillance missions as a key element of trust. These overflights verified adherence to nuclear weapons treaties and ensured each side could see the other side’s actions. This limited the real peril of mistaken assumptions and misinterpretations that could lead to nuclear war. To its discredit, the Biden administration has refused to reenter either treaty.

As fighting in the Donbas increased in late 2021, the Russians put forward negotiation proposals while sending more forces to the border with Ukraine. US and NATO officials rejected Russia’s proposals immediately. In the first months of 2022, violence dramatically increased in eastern Ukraine. Stated attempts at dialogue, viewed in hindsight, belie a sincere desire by either side to avoid conflict. By mid-February, observers of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe countedthousands of explosions weekly. On February 24, Russia invaded Ukraine.

Understanding the War Through Russia’s Eyes or, inversely, How to Commit Diplomatic Malpractice

For years, the Russians made clear their red lines and demonstrated in Georgia and Syria that they would use force to defend those lines. In 2014, their immediate seizure of Crimea and their direct and major support to Donbas separatists again showed they were serious about protecting their interests. Why US and NATO leadership did not understand this can only be explained by incompetence, arrogance, cynicism or a treacherous mixture of all three. This mixture illuminates the pathway to war in Ukraine and helps clarify the over 250 wars, military operations, interventions and occupations the US has conducted since the end of the Cold War.

What is written here is and was not unknown. Almost as soon as the Cold War ended American diplomats, generals and politicians warned of the danger of expanding NATO to Russia’s borders and maliciously interfering in Russia’s sphere of influence. Former Cabinet officials Madeleine Albright, Robert Gates and William Perry made these warnings, as did venerated diplomats Strobe Talbott, George Kennan, Jack Matlock and Henry Kissinger. At one point in 1997, 50 senior American foreign policy experts wrote an open letter to President Clinton advising him not to expand NATO. They called NATO expansion “a policy error of historic proportions.” President Clinton ignored these warnings and called for NATO expansion, in part to pander to American voting blocks of Eastern European descent.

Perhaps most important to our understanding of the hubris and Machiavellian calculation in US decision-making is the disregard for the warnings issued by Williams Burns, the current director of the CIA. First in an official cable in 1995 while serving in Moscow, Burns wrote: “Hostility to early NATO expansion…is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.”

Then in 2008 Burns, as US Ambassador to Moscow, wrote these warnings on multiple occasions in stark language:

“I fully understand how difficult a decision to hold off on [Ukranianin NATO membership] will be. But it’s equally hard to overstate the strategic consequences of a premature [membership] offer, especially to Ukraine. Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests. At this stage, a [NATO membership] offer would be seen not as a technical step along a long road toward membership, but as throwing down the strategic gauntlet. Today’s Russia will respond. Russian-Ukrainian relations will go into a deep freeze. … It will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.”

and again, in another cable to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice titled Nyet Means Nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement Redlines:

“Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences, which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”

To reiterate these were the words of the current US Director of Central Intelligence.

Who Profits from War?  [The Economics of NATO Expansion.]

Underwriting this wanton diplomatic malpractice and its attendant megalomania is the American military-industrial complex. More than 60 years ago, President Dwight Eisenhower warned of “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” in his farewell address. He was famously describing the ever-increasing influence, if not control, of the military-industrial complex.

At the end of the Cold War, the military-industrial complex faced an existential crisis. Without an adversary like the Soviet Union, justifying massive arms spending by the United States would be difficult. NATO expansion allowed for new markets. Countries coming into NATO would be required to upgrade their armed forces, replacing their Soviet-era stocks with Western weapons, ammunition, machines, hardware and software compatible with NATO’s armies. Entire armies, navies and air forces had to be remade. NATO expansion was a cash bonanza for a weapons industry that originally saw destitution as the fruit of the Cold War’s end. From 1996–1998, US arms companies spent $51 million ($94 million today) lobbying Congress. Millions more were spent on campaign donations. Beating swords into plowshares would have to wait for another epoch once the weapons industry realized the promise of Eastern European markets.

In a circular and mutually reinforcing loop, Congress appropriates money to the Pentagon. The Pentagon funds the arms industry, which, in turn, funds think tanks and lobbyists to direct Congress on further Pentagon spending. Campaign contributions from the weapons industry accompany that lobbying. The Pentagon, CIA, National Security Council, State Department and other limbs of the national security state directly fund the think tanks and ensure that any policies promoted are the policies the government institutions themselves want.

It is not just Congress that is under the sway of the military-industrial complex. These same weapons companies that bribe members of Congress and fund think tanks often employ, directly and indirectly, the cadre of experts that litter cable news programs and fill space in news reporting. Rarely is this conflict of interest identified by American media. Thus, men and women who owe their paychecks to the likes of Lockheed, Raytheon or General Dynamics appear in the media and advocate for more war and more weapons. These commentators and pundits seldom acknowledge that their benefactors immensely profit from the policies of more war and more weapons.

[Revolving Door]  The corruption extends into the executive branch as the military-industrial complex employs scores of administration officials whose political party is no longer in the White House. Out of government, Republican and Democratic officials head from the Pentagon, the CIA and the State Department to arms companies, think tanks and consultancies. When their party retakes the White House, they return to the government. In exchange for bringing their rolodexes, they receive lavish salaries and benefits. Similarly, US generals and admirals retire from the Pentagon and go straightto arms companies. This revolving door reaches the highest level. Before becoming Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State and Director of National Intelligence, Lloyd Austin, Antony Blinken and Avril Haines were employed by the military-industrial complex. In Secretary Blinken’s case, he founded a firm, WestExec Advisors, devoted to trading and peddling influence for weapons contracts.

There is a broader level of commercial greed in the context of the Ukraine War that cannot be dismissed or ignored. The US fuels and arms the world. US fossil fuel and weapons exports now exceed its agricultural and industrial exports. Competition for the European fuel market, particularly liquid natural gas, has been a primary concern over the last decade for both Democratic and Republican administrations. Removing Russia as the key energy supplier to Europe and limiting overall Russian fossil fuel exports worldwide has greatly benefited American oil and gas companies. In addition to wider commercial trade interests, the sheer amounts of money the American fossil fuel business makes as a result of denying Europeans the option of buying Russian fossil fuels cannot be disregarded.

The Cost of War

Hundreds of thousands may have been killed and wounded in the fighting. The harrowing psychological wounding of both combatants and civilians will likely be greater. Millions have been made homeless and live now as refugees. The damage to the environment is incalculable and the economic destruction has not been solely confined to the war zone but has spread throughout the world, fueling inflation, destabilizing energy supplies and increasing food insecurity. The rise in energy and food costs has undoubtedly led to excess deaths far from the geographical boundaries of the war.

The war will likely continue to develop as a protracted stalemate of purposeless killing and destruction. Horrifically, the next likely outcome is for the war to escalate, perhaps uncontrollably, to a world war and possible nuclear conflict. Despite what the crackpot realists in Washington, London, Brussels, Kyiv and Moscow may say, nuclear war is not manageable and certainly not winnable. A limited nuclear war, perhaps each side firing 10 percent of their arsenals, will result in a nuclear winter during which we get to watch our children starve to death. All our efforts should be devoted to avoiding such an apocalypse.

The Potential for Peace

The intent of this essay has been to delineate how deliberate US and NATO provocations toward Russia have been perceived from the Russian perspective. Russia is a nation whose current geopolitical anxiety is defined by memories of invasions by Charles XII, Napoleon, the Earl of Aberdeen, the Kaiser and Hitler. US troops were among an Allied invasion force that intervened unsuccessfully against the winning side in Russia’s post-WWI civil war. Possessing historical context, understanding an enemy and having strategic empathy toward your adversary is not deceitful or weak but prudent and wise. We are taught this at all levels in the US military. Nor is dissent from continuing this war and a refusal to take sides unpatriotic or insincere.

President Biden’s promise to back Ukraine “as long as it takes” must not be a license to pursue ill-defined or unachievable goals. It may prove as catastrophic as President Putin’s decision last year to launch his criminal invasion and occupation. It is morally not possible to endorse the strategy of fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian nor is it moral to be silent as our nation pursues strategies and policies that cannot achieve its stated goals. It is not only an affront to our moral and humane senses, but this senseless pursuit of an unattainable defeat of Russia in the spirit of some form of 19th-century imperial victory or grand geopolitical chess move is vainglorious, counterproductive and self-destructive.

Only a meaningful and genuine commitment to diplomacy, specifically an immediate ceasefire and negotiations without disqualifying or prohibitive preconditions will end this war and its suffering, bring stability to Europe and prevent a nuclear third-world war.

Deliberate provocations delivered this war. In the same manner, deliberate diplomacy can end it.

Matthew Hoh is a member of the advisory boards of Expose Facts, Veterans For Peace and World Beyond War. In 2009 he resigned his position with the State Department in Afghanistan in protest of the escalation of the Afghan War by the Obama Administration.

Summary of US Provocation of Ukraine War, Calamitous War, Worse Possibilities

EVE OTTENBERG.  “Annals of the Ukraine War: Year Two.”JUNE 9, 2023.

 From the human-caused climate catastrophe to a nuclear showdown between Washington and Moscow or Beijing, to fascism ascendant, three terrifying disasters loom over humanity like the shadow of death. These threats have lurked for some years, but the Ukraine war, facilitated by Joe Biden’s arrival in the white house in 2021 and his pronounced aggressiveness toward Moscow, shifted nuclear Armageddon to center stage and pushed the doomsday clock close to midnight.

[Russian Perceptions and Biden’s Prevarications]
Trust between the Kremlin and western governments vanished long ago, so it’s hard to see how this calamity ever gets resolved. Russian officials watched the U.S. fork over more than $30 billion in armament to Ukraine with billions more in the pipeline, arm neo-Nazis, whitewash them and cover Kiev’s government payroll. They’ve seen (and often destroyed) the weapons Washington sent. Those weapons would never include long-range missiles that could strike inside Russia, Biden promised. Well, that oath wasn’t worth the toilet paper it was written on. The U.S. would never provide Ukraine with tanks, Biden swore up and down – until he changed his mind. American fighter jets, he gave his word, would not fly in Ukraine. Well, now we see what his word is worth. What next? NATO troops in Ukraine? Because then the bombing of U.S., European and Russian cities will commence. It’s called World War III. Biden knows this. So do the Russians. And despite their loud protests in the face of this nonstop U.S. escalation, they have become ominously quiet about their red lines.

Once upon a time in Bucharest back in 2008, Moscow basically told the west that if its neighbor Kiev joined NATO, that would be the end of Ukraine. Feckless Eurocrats and birdbrain American presidents did not listen. Years passed. Washington sponsored a coup against the duly, legally elected leader of Ukraine in 2014, then installed a west friendly, Russophobic regime, or perhaps more accurately a puppet, whose idiotic economic policies led to a population outflow of millions of Ukrainians, as Washington proceeded massively to arm and train far-right fanatics.

Through all of this, until December 2021, Moscow only protested about its red lines in general terms. It also periodically indicated it might snap. Then, in late 2021, the Kremlin sent detailed letters to Washington, listing Russian security concerns, chiefly that Ukraine should not join NATO. Moscow also was alarmed at the fate of Donbas Russians, 12,000 of whom Ukraine had slaughtered since 2014 and on whose borders Kiev had massed troops and, in early 2022, dramatically stepped up assaults, as noted by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Such a deadly uptick signaled assault and possibly ethnic-cleansing for Russian-speaking Ukrainians. But the U.S. blithely responded with hokum about NATO being a defensive organization. Hokum any half-wit can see right through by looking at U.S. missiles in Poland and Romania, two countries that border Russia.

Washington also insisted on every country’s sacred right to join NATO, though decades ago when Moscow mentioned joining, it got the cold shoulder; apparently Russia did not have that right. So the Kremlin could be excused for regarding NATO as a hostile military axis. Indeed, as our leading public intellectual Noam Chomsky said, “Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was clearly provoked, while the U.S. invasion of Iraq was clearly unprovoked.” (He also said whataboutism is “otherwise known as elementary honesty.”) Both invaders wrecked the target country, Russia more slowly, but make no mistake, that will be the outcome if this war doesn’t end soon.

The moral of the story is that if you can avoid war, that is a very good idea. If someone says “I will attack, if you don’t stop threatening me,” well, listen. The peacemakers are blessed, but sadly they were absent from the world’s imperial capital, Washington, in December of 2021. Currently they are absent everywhere they are needed, period.

So now, thanks to Biden, we stare down the barrel of nuclear war. The alternative in 2024 will likely be Trump, who promises accessories like martial law, a presidency for life, show trials of his political enemies and possibly nuclear war with China, in short, fascism. For this lousy choice we can blame our corrupt plutocracy and its media parasites. Put another way, those who rise to the top in Washington are not the cream of the crop, but the cream that curdled, years ago. Obama, Bush, Clinton – slick hustlers all, who slaughtered innocents across the globe, and all very short-sighted about anything other than looking out for the main chance, even if it meant bombing helpless residents of impoverished nations.

Meanwhile in the U.S. imperial capital, blood-soaked neocons run the show. This led to events May 26, when Russia’s foreign ministry summoned U.S. diplomats “over what it called ‘provocative statements’ by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan,” according to RT. “The American official was de facto supporting Ukrainian strikes against Russian territory.” Given that Sullivan’s up to his elbows in blood for his responsibility in this Ukrainian debacle, the blood of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and tens of thousands of Russian ones, I’m not surprised he was, de facto or otherwise, basically advocating World War III. Moscow called his endorsement of Ukrainian attacks on Russia “hypocritical and untruthful.” That’s called understatement.

Sullivan, secretary of state Antony Blinken and his undersecretary Victoria Nuland are in charge in Washington, instead of the unfocussed, forgetful figurehead, Joe Biden, and they want war, for decades, if they so choose. Inauspiciously, sane, non-neocons now resign from the Biden regime en masse, a development covered in depth by Moon of Alabama May 25. Rick Waters, head of the state department’s “China House” leaves his post. After the ridiculous spy balloon hysteria, with its wild delusions of assault and evil designs by a mortal enemy, Waters was one of the more rational actors, trying to limit the damage, reportedly emailing state department staff to postpone some sanctions and export controls on China, you know, moves that could have been viewed as, um, hostile.

Also dispiriting to those hoping to restrain imperial war schemes, deputy secretary of state Wendy Sherman announced her retirement. Sherman backed the original Iran nuclear pact and pushed hard to get an inept Biden administration to return to it, something, contrary to campaign promises, Biden couldn’t manage to do. As a result, the Middle East teeters constantly on the edge of regional war, which the pact would have helped prevent. Colin Kahl, a defense undersecretary departs this summer. He opposed escalating the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine. Nor was he popular with lunatic Sinophobes. To make the loss of these realists even worse, Biden tapped a ferocious China hawk to head the joint chiefs of staff, thus replacing the less rabid though rather ineffectual Mark Milley. All these moves spell trouble. They mean ?  

[NOAM CHOMSKY’S ANALYSIS]So the situation has deteriorated dangerously, and this is what Chomsky predicted if Washington didn’t face the “ugly” post-invasion choice of rewarding Moscow by enforcing Kiev’s neutrality and the Minsk Accords for the Donbas. No one has documented the U.S. empire’s depravity as long and relentlessly as Chomsky. His new book, Illegitimate Authority, continues this effort, singling out the triad of cataclysms – climate collapse, nuclear war and fascism – thundering in humanity’s front yard like the crack of doom. These interviews, collected from Truthout, at first zero in on how rich countries burning oil, gas and coal have crushed anything resembling a normal climate, with a few that focus on rising fascism.

But when the book reaches early 2022, it shifts its emphasis to Ukraine. Chomsky is well aware of Washington’s provocations, while regarding Moscow’s response to them as criminal. He quotes Eastern Europe specialist Richard Sakwa: “NATO’s existence became justified by the need to manage threats provoked by its enlargement.” Well, now NATO has provoked a threat that, according to one whose hands are red with blood from this war, Nuland, could last “16 years.”

Chomsky also addresses the imbecilic fantasy of regime change, noting that historically this has led to worse, more extreme leaders, for which he cites a convincing discussion by Andrew Cockburn. Chomsky called NATO dreams of overthrowing Vladimir Putin “foolish,” because someone far more menacing would very likely take over. Among Kremlin leaders, Putin is, in fact, a moderate, with far less of an appetite for war than the others who advocated invading Ukraine for years, while he demurred.

In March 2022, when neutral countries sponsored talks between Moscow and Kiev, Chomsky warned, “negotiations will get nowhere if the U.S. persists in its adamant refusal to join…and if the press continues to insist that the public remain in the dark by refusing even to report Zelensky’s proposals.” Well, nowhere is exactly where they went, thanks to the then U.K. prime minister, the buffoonish Boris Johnson, who jetted into Kiev, allegedly at Biden’s behest, and clarified to Zelensky that while the Ukrainian president might be ready for peace, the west was not. That scuttled the talks.

That’s where we are now. Washington just extracted itself from losing a 20-year military quagmire in Afghanistan. Now it’s up to its neck in a proxy war its boosters say could last decades. Unfortunately for the imperial team, its opponent in this latest bloodletting is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. This is not some helpless undeveloped country that Washington can bully and then prevaricate about pusillanimous American behavior not amounting to a military defeat. Russia is a great power and a nuclear one. In 16 years of confrontation with it, a lot could go very, very wrong.

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Roman Summer. She can be reached at her website. https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/06/09/ukraine-war-only-gets-worse/

SPECIFIC ISSUES

Thomas Palley.  “Ukraine destroyed the Kakhovka dam: a forensic assessment.”   Editor.  Mronline.org (7-7-23).  In multiple ways, the dam’s destruction echoes the 2022 destruction of the Russian-owned Nord Stream 2 pipeline.  Originally published: Thomas Palley Blog  on July 4, 2023 (more by Thomas Palley Blog) (Posted Jul 06, 2023);  Inequality, Strategy, WarEurope, Russia, UkraineNewswireKakhovka dam.

The Kakhovka dam was a massive two-mile-long structure that dammed the Dnieper River which bisects Ukraine. It was built by the Soviet Union in 1956 and raised the Dnieper by 16 meters (52 feet), creating the Kakhovka Reservoir. The dam was destroyed on 6 June 2023, resulting in massive flooding downstream on both sides of the river which created a social and environmental disaster. The city of Kherson, located near the river’s mouth with the Black Sea, was also flooded.

Both Ukraine and Russia deny blowing up the dam and blame the other. At this stage, all the evidence is circumstantial and conjectural, but a forensic assessment of that evidence overwhelmingly suggests Ukraine destroyed the dam. Despite that, U.S. and Western European politicians and media have uniformly sought to implicate Russia as the perpetrator.

In multiple ways, the dam’s destruction echoes the 2022 destruction of the Russian-owned Nord Stream 2 pipeline. That pipeline was a piece of civilian infrastructure; was destroyed by an explosion; its destruction caused a massive environmental disaster; Ukraine denies any role; many European governments claimed Russia had blown up its own pipeline; and Western media either explicitly claimed Russia had done it (Time) or tendentiously sought to implicate Russia (New York Times, Guardian).

The evidence: a forensic assessment   MORE https://mronline.org/2023/07/06/ukraine-destroyed-the-kakhovka-dam-a-forensic-assessment/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ukraine-destroyed-the-kakhovka-dam-  a-forensic-assessment&mc_cid=b50a0bbf6c&mc_eid=ab2f7bf95e

CLUSTER BOMBS

PEACE
Arnold Schölzel. “Germany: Reactions to peace manifesto.”  February 18, 2023.   Editor,  mronline.org (2-21-23).  Intense policy struggle in Germany over support of the war.  What happened? Even Gregor Gysi has now signed the “Manifesto for Peace” by Sahra Wagenknecht and Alice Schwarzer.

Originally published: Defend Democracy Press  on February 18, 2023 (more by Defend Democracy Press)  |  (Posted Feb 20, 2023)

Movements, State Repression, Strategy, WarAmericas, Europe, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, United StatesNewswire“Manifesto for Peace”, Gregor Gysi

CovertAction Magazine, Countercurrents, The Chris Hedges Report

FEBRUARY 19, 2023 RAGE AGAINST THE WAR RALLY IN DC

Jeremy Kuzmarov.  “Left and Right Join Together to Rage Against Ukraine War on Its One Year Anniversary.”  CovertAction Magazine(Feb 20, 2023) 11:45 am.

Several thousand people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, February 19, to protest U.S. support for the war in Ukraine around the time of its one-year anniversary.

The protest was organized by the People’s Party and Libertarian Party. It brought together groups on the left and libertarian right which were unified in their demand that the U.S. government should not spend one more penny on the war in Ukraine.

Nick Branna, the founder of the People’s Party and a main organizer of the event, told CovertAction Magazine that the rally was “the biggest anti-war demonstration since the Iraq War and it was sorely needed.” Branna said that it was nice to see groups on the left and right coming together, though “these labels are largely artificial” as “working people are being screwed whether they are left and right and we need to collectively fight back.”

Pat Ford, a member of the Libertarian Party national committee, echoed Branna when he told CovertAction Magazine that the “rally was a complete success as an exercise in coalition building.” According to Ford, while the latter “can be challenging, fractious, and messy, it is the best possible avenue for grassroots organizers to affect social change” and “succeeded before when people of differing outlooks came together to end the Vietnam War.” […]

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THE WAR COULD HAVE BEEN PREVENTED,

First Aim of Peace Movement: PREVENTING WARS, Not Allowing Them to Start, Not PREPARING for WAR BUT FOR PEACE , AND NOW IT MUST BE STOPPED.

[The following article published by CAM in Nov. 2021 explained why a US/NATO war over Ukraine should not happen and how to prevent it.  It is even more important today.]

“The High Stakes of the U.S.-Russia Confrontation Over Ukraine” by MEDEA BENJAMIN,  NICOLAS J.S. DAVIES.
Americans should beware of romanticizing the "old" Cold War as a time of peace, simply because we somehow managed to dodge a world-ending nuclear holocaust.

November 22, 2021

A report in Covert Action Magazine from the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic in Eastern Ukraine describes grave fears of a new offensive by Ukrainian government forces, after increased shelling, a drone strike by a Turkish-built drone and an attack on Staromaryevka, a village inside the buffer zone established by the 2014-15 Minsk Accords.

The People’s Republics of Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR), which declared independence in response to the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014, have once again become flashpoints in the intensifying Cold War between the United States and Russia. The U.S. and NATO appear to be fully supporting a new government offensive against these Russian-backed enclaves, which could quickly escalate into a full-blown international military conflict.

The last time this area became an international tinderbox was in April, when the anti-Russian government of Ukraine threatened an offensive against Donetsk and Luhansk, and Russia assembled thousands of troops along Ukraine’s eastern border. 

On that occasion, Ukraine and NATO blinked and called off the offensive. This time around, Russia has again assembled an estimated 90,000 troops near its border with Ukraine. Will Russia once more deter an escalation of the war, or are Ukraine, the United States and NATO seriously preparing to press ahead at the risk of war with Russia? 

Since April, the U.S. and its allies have been stepping up their military support for Ukraine. After a March announcement of $125 million in military aid, including armed coastal patrol boats and radar equipment, the U.S. then gave Ukraine another $150 million package in June. This included radar, communications, and electronic warfare equipment for the Ukrainian Air Force, bringing total military aid to Ukraine since the U.S.-backed coup in 2014 to $2.5 billion. This latest package appears to include deploying U.S. training personnel to Ukrainian air bases.

Turkey is supplying Ukraine with the same drones it provided to Azerbaijan for its war with Armenia over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020. That war killed at least 6,000 people and has recently flared up again, one year after a Russian-brokered ceasefire. Turkish drones wreaked havoc on Armenian troops and civilians alike in Nagorno-Karabakh, and their use in Ukraine would be a horrific escalation of violence against the people of Donetsk and Luhansk.   

The ratcheting up of U.S. and NATO support for government forces in Ukraine’s civil war is having ever-worsening diplomatic consequences. At the beginning of October, NATO expelled eight Russian liaison officers from NATO Headquarters in Brussels, accusing them of spying. Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, the manager of the 2014 coup in Ukraine, was dispatched to Moscow in October, ostensibly to calm tensions. Nuland failed so spectacularly that, only a week later, Russia ended 30 years of engagement with NATO, and ordered NATO’s office in Moscow closed.

Nuland reportedly tried to reassure Moscow that the United States and NATO were still committed to the 2014 and 2015 Minsk Accords on Ukraine, which include a ban on offensive military operations and a promise of greater autonomy for Donetsk and Luhansk within Ukraine. But her assurances were belied by Defense Secretary Austin when he met with Ukraine’s President Zelensky in Kiev on October 18, reiterating U.S. support for Ukraine’s future membership in NATO, promising further military support and blaming Russia for “perpetuating the war in Eastern Ukraine.” 

More extraordinary, but hopefully more successful, was CIA Director William Burns’s visit to Moscow on November 2nd and 3rd, during which he met with senior Russian military and intelligence officials and spoke by phone with President Putin. 

A mission like this is not usually part of the CIA Director’s duties. But after Biden promised a new era of American diplomacy, his foreign policy team is now widely acknowledged to have instead brought U.S. relations with Russia and China to all-time lows. 

Judging from the March meeting of Secretary of State Blinken and National Security Advisor Sullivan with Chinese officials in Alaska, Biden’s meeting with Putin in Vienna in June, and Under Secretary Nuland’s recent visit to Moscow, U.S. officials have reduced their encounters with Russian and Chinese officials to mutual recriminations designed for domestic consumption instead of seriously trying to resolve policy differences. In Nuland’s case, she also misled the Russians about the U.S. commitment, or lack of it, to the Minsk Accords. So who could Biden send to Moscow for a serious diplomatic dialogue with the Russians about Ukraine?   

In 2002, as Under Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, William Burns wrote a prescient but unheeded 10-page memo to Secretary of State Powell, warning him of the many ways that a U.S. invasion of Iraq could “unravel” and create a “perfect storm” for American interests. Burns is a career diplomat and a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, and may be the only member of this administration with the diplomatic skills and experience to actually listen to the Russians and engage seriously with them.

The Russians presumably told Burns what they have said in public: that U.S. policy is in danger of crossing “red lines” that would trigger decisive and irrevocable Russian responses. Russia has long warned that one red line would be NATO membership for Ukraine and/or Georgia. 

But there are clearly other red lines in the creeping U.S. and NATO military presence in and around Ukraine and in the increasing U.S. military support for the Ukrainian government forces assaulting Donetsk and Luhansk. Putin has warned against the build-up of NATO’s military infrastructure in Ukraine and has accused both Ukraine and NATO of destabilizing actions, including in the Black Sea.

With Russian troops amassed at Ukraine’s border for a second time this year, a new Ukrainian offensive that threatens the existence of the DPR and LPR would surely cross another red line, while increasing U.S. and NATO military support for Ukraine may be dangerously close to crossing yet another one.

So did Burns come back from Moscow with a clearer picture of exactly what Russia’s red lines are? We had better hope so. Even U.S. military websites acknowledge that U.S. policy in Ukraine is “backfiring.” 

Russia expert Andrew Weiss, who worked under William Burns at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, acknowledged to Michael Crowley of The New York Times that Russia has “escalation dominance” in Ukraine and that, if push comes to shove, Ukraine is simply more important to Russia than to the United States. It therefore makes no sense for the United States to risk triggering World War III over Ukraine, unless it actually wants to trigger World War III.

During the Cold War, both sides developed clear understandings of each other’s “red lines.” Along with a large helping of dumb luck, we can thank those understandings for our continued existence. What makes today’s world even more dangerous than the world of the 1950s or the 1980s is that recent U.S. leaders have cavalierly jettisoned the bilateral nuclear treaties and vital diplomatic relationships that their grandparents forged to stop the Cold War from turning into a hot one. 

Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, with the help of Under Secretary of State Averell Harriman and others, conducted negotiations that spanned two administrations, between 1958 and 1963, to achieve a partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that was the first of a series of bilateral arms control treaties. By contrast, the only continuity between Trump, Biden and Under Secretary Victoria Nuland seems to be a startling lack of imagination that blinds them to any possible future beyond a zero-sum, non-negotiable, and yet still unattainable “U.S. Uber Alles” global hegemony.

But Americans should beware of romanticizing the “old” Cold War as a time of peace, simply because we somehow managed to dodge a world-ending nuclear holocaust. U.S. Korean and Vietnam War veterans know better, as do the people in countries across the global South that became bloody battlefields in the ideological struggle between the United States and the U.S.S.R. 

Three decades after declaring victory in the Cold War, and after the self-inflicted chaos of the U.S. “Global War on Terror,” U.S. military planners have settled on a new Cold War as the most persuasive pretext to perpetuate their trillion dollar war machine and their unattainable ambition to dominate the entire planet. Instead of asking the U.S. military to adapt to more new challenges it is clearly not up for, U.S. leaders decided to revert to their old conflict with Russia and China to justify the existence and ridiculous expense of their ineffective but profitable war machine.     

But the very nature of a Cold War is that it involves the threat and use of force, overt and covert, to contest the political allegiances and economic structures of countries across the world. In our relief at the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which both Trump and Biden have used to symbolize the “end of endless war,” we should have no illusions that either of them is offering us a new age of peace. 

Quite the contrary. What we are watching in Ukraine, Syria, Taiwan and the South China Sea are the opening salvos of an age of more ideological wars that may well be just as futile, deadly and self-defeating as the “war on terror,” and much more dangerous to the United States.

[NEW NUCLEAR WEAPONS, WWIII]

A war with Russia or China would risk escalating into World War III. As Andrew Weiss told the Times on Ukraine, Russia and China would have conventional “escalation dominance,” as well as simply more at stake in wars on their own borders than the United States does. 

So what would the United States do if it were losing a major war with Russia or China? U.S. nuclear weapons policy has always kept a “first strike” option open in case of precisely this scenario.

The current U.S. $1.7 trillion plan for a whole range of new nuclear weapons therefore seems to be a response to the reality that the United States cannot expect to defeat Russia and China in conventional wars on their own borders. 

But the paradox of nuclear weapons is that the most powerful weapons ever created have no practical value as actual weapons of war, since there can be no winner in a war that kills everybody. Any use of nuclear weapons would quickly trigger a massive use of them by one side or the other, and the war would soon be over for all of us. The only winners would be a few species of radiation-resistant insects and other very small creatures.

Neither Obama, Trump nor Biden has dared to present their reasons for risking World War III over Ukraine or Taiwan to the American public, because there is no good reason. Risking a nuclear holocaust to appease the military-industrial complex is as insane as destroying the climate and the natural world to appease the fossil fuel industry. 

So we had better hope that CIA DIrector Burns not only came back from Moscow with a clear picture of Russia’s “red lines,” but that President Biden and his colleagues understand what Burns told them and what is at stake in Ukraine. They must step back from the brink of a U.S.-Russia war, and then from the larger Cold War with China and Russia that they have so blindly and foolishly stumbled into.

MEDEA BENJAMIN  Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women for Peace, is the author of the 2018 book, "Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran." Her previous books include: "Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection" (2016); "Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control" (2013); "Don’t Be Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart" (1989), and (with Jodie Evans) "Stop the Next War Now (Inner Ocean Action Guide)" (2005). 

NICOLAS J.S. DAVIES

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

Current Published Russia Ukraine Article Count

Survey of OMNI’s first 30 R/U Anthologies (#1-30A), 2014-2023.
Total number of entries: 528 as of 7/24/2023   

Most of these entries were necessarily from sources other than the corporate mainstream because those newspapers support the nation in its wars.