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