HISTORIC CONTEXT
Immediately after the end of WW2, without missing a single beat, the USA embarked on a long term strategy to destabilize, sabotage, and destroy the USSR. A major part of this multi-faceted plan was funding and using extremist groups on Russian borders to gather intelligence, conduct secret and illegal operations such as sabotage or attack, and in general build up anti-communist forces for any future eventuality. First the US supported, funded, and trained Ukrainian ultra-nationalists, later the Afghan Jihadists, the Chechen rebels, and boosted, expanded, and supercharged anti-communist and anti-Russian groups and political factions within all countries of the former Eastern block.
Recently declassified CIA documents very clearly documents US intelligence massively funding using far-right Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and nazis, which was not only very useful during the cold war, but became increasingly so after, as a strategy to subordinate or destroy a modern Russia which refuses vassalage and refuses to be plundered.
The following are excerpts from this document hosted on the official CIA website:
Also born immediately after WW2 was an organisation called the “North Atlantic Treaty Organisation”, an anti-communist force, scion of the Third Reich (more on this in a separate piece), engineered to be a bulwark against the Soviet Union.
“The purpose of NATO is to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”
— Lord Hastings Lionel Ismay, first Secretary General of NATO, 1950s
Since the dissolution of the USSR, NATO became a blunt force weapon used against and all countries which refuse vassalage. Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya, Somalia, all victimised or destroyed by NATO, based on fabricated justifications.
And most importantly, besides the covert strategy of supporting and building up far-right anti-Soviet and anti-Russian forces in Eastern Europe, the overt strategy of the USA and its allies has been to expand NATO up to Russian borders, dotted with (55 known) bioweapons labs and countless military installations with missiles pointed at Moscow.
The following are a few statements regarding NATO expansion from prominent Western statesmen, analysts, and thinkers:
George Kennan, US diplomat and historian, architect of U.S. cold war strategy, as early as 1998 warned that NATO expansion was a “tragic mistake” that will ultimately provoke a “bad reaction from Russia”.
Henry Kissinger, US politician, diplomat, and geopolitical consultant who served as United States Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, in 2014 warned that “to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country” and that the West therefore needs a policy that is aimed at “reconciliation”. He was also adamant that “Ukraine should not join NATO”.
Jack F. Matlock Jr., career Foreign Service Officer, US Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987–1991, warned in 1997 that NATO expansion was “the most profound strategic blunder, [encouraging] a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat […] since the Soviet Union collapsed”.
William Perry, US Secretary of Defense under President Bill Clinton, explained, in his memoir, that to him NATO enlargement is the cause of “the rupture in relations with Russia” and that in 1996 he was so opposed to it that “in the strength of my conviction, I considered resigning”.
Stephen Cohen, a famed scholar of Russian studies, warned in 2014 that “if we move NATO forces toward Russia’s borders […] it’s obviously going to militarize the situation [and] Russia will not back off, this is existential.”
William Joseph Burns, current director of the Central Intelligence Agency under president Biden, in 2008: “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for [Russia]” and “I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests”.
Malcolm Fraser, 22nd prime minister of Australia, warned in 2014 that “the move east [by NATO is] provocative, unwise and a very clear signal to Russia”. He added that this is leading to a “difficult and extraordinarily dangerous problem”.
Paul Keating, 24th prime minister of Australia, warned in 1997 that expanding NATO is “an error which may rank in the end with the strategic miscalculations which prevented Germany from taking its full place in the international system [in early 20th Century].”
Robert Michael Gates, former US defense secretary, wrote in his 2015 memoirs: “Moving so quickly [to expand NATO] was a mistake. […] Trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching [and] an especially monumental provocation.”
Pat Buchanan, assistant and special consultant to U.S. Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan, wrote in his 1999 book A Republic, Not an Empire: “By moving NATO onto Russia’s front porch, we have scheduled a twenty-first-century confrontation.”
Robert McNamara (8th US Secretary of Defense), Bill Bradley (former U.S. senator and presidential nominee), and Gary Warren Hart (US politician and presidential nominee) were part of a group of individuals who wrote a 1997 letter to Bill Clinton warning that the “US led effort to expand NATO is a policy error of historic proportions” and would “foster instability” in Europe.
Sir Roderic Lyne, former British Ambassador to the Russian Federation, warned in 2021 that “[pushing] Ukraine into NATO […] is stupid on every level.” He adds “if you want to start a war with Russia, that’s the best way of doing it.”
Fiona Hill, British-American foreign affairs specialist, former official at the U.S. National Security Council: ”We warned [George Bush] that Mr. Putin would view steps to bring Ukraine and Georgia closer to NATO as a provocative move that would likely provoke pre-emptive Russian military action. But ultimately, our warnings weren’t heeded.”
Jeffrey Sachs, famous US economist, academic, public policy analyst, and former director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, writing a column in the FT warning that “NATO enlargement is utterly misguided and risky. True friends of Ukraine, and of global peace, should be calling for a US and NATO compromise with Russia.”
John Mearsheimer — political scientist and arguably the leading geopolitical scholar in the US today — in 2015: “The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked […] What we’re doing is in fact encouraging that outcome.”
Vladimir Vladimirovich Pozner, Russian-American journalist, stated in 2018 that: NATO expansion to Ukraine is unacceptable to the Russians, that there has to be a compromise where “Ukraine, guaranteed, will not become a member of NATO.”
In this era of irreversible decline of the US empire and of the European imperialist block, this is the beginning of a desperate war to push back anti-imperialism around the world, and re-establish Western global dominance.
The “global South”, the majority of countries and citizens on this planet, understands this very well, and have either not condemned, not joined the sanctions against, or actively supports Russia.
This war was engineered since 2014 in Washington to achieve several objectives:
- break Europe (especially Germany) from economic integration with the rising Eurasian block; deindustrialise the subcontinent, and keep it a dependent vassal region under US hegemony.
- justify a sanctions war against Russia toward collapse of Russian economy, popular uprisings, the toppling of Putin’s government, and restoration of the domination and exploitation of Russian industries and resources by Western corporations like they had freely done in the 1990s.
- If 2 is not possible, weaken and drain Russian military resources by prolonging this war (turning Ukraine into Afghanistan 2.0 — explicitly stated by Joe Biden), create instability and conflict in Eastern Europe as a segue, a stepping stone, toward the coming war against the ultimate enemy of imperialism, the People’s Republic of China.
CONTEMPORARY CONTEXT
For 8 years, since the Washington orchestrated Euromaidan colour revolution and coup d’etat violently removed the democratically elected, Russia friendly government of Ukraine, which caused the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics to break away, in violation of the Minsk agreements designed to restore peace in the Donbass region and actually return the break-away republics to Ukraine, the US installed far-right friendly and rabidly anti-Russian regime in Kiev continued to imprison people for speaking Russian and other languages, continued to suppress Russian orthodox and other religions, and continued to imprison, torture, and mass murder ethnic Russians or simply Russian speaking Ukranians in the Donbass region, and conducting bombing campaigns which killed 14,000 by conservative estimate.
For 8 years Eastern Ukrainians asked for recognition from Russia of their independence, and pleaded for protection.
For 8 years NATO heavily armed the Ukrainian military, with nazis in high ranks, and routinely conducted training exercises with them.
For 8 years NATO repeatedly promised Ukraine membership, which Russia had repeatedly made clear was an absolute red line. 1 week prior to the military operation, EU representatives at the UN silently nodded when Zalensky motioned toward the acquisition of nuclear weapons.
For 30 years, in violation of numerous promises made since the dissolution of USSR, NATO expanded Eastward, to the borders of Russia, setting up more and more military bases, building more and more installations with more and more missiles pointed at Moscow. Western politicians and thinkers have been very clearly warning for decades that a war is coming, if NATO does not stop pushing and threatening Russia.
For 8 years, Vladimir Putin did not move a finger, and continued to try to solve these problems, which blatantly violate human rights in Eastern Ukraine and directly threaten Russia, with diplomacy, with negotiations, long after the other side proved to be clearly insincere, completely dishonest, cynical and with hostile intentions.
No nation in the world would allow dozens of hostile military bases set up on its borders. Why should Russia?
No nation in the world would allow a hostile nation on its borders to host nuclear weapons intended for use against itself. Why should Russia?
No nation in the world would allow their people to be mass murdered for 8 years. Why should Russia?
The RF military operation in Ukraine is an extension of failed, dead-end diplomacy, conducted after all diplomatic possibilities had been exhausted, and is a humanitarian mission to end a war which began 8 years ago, to end Western backed atrocities in the Donbass region, to denazify, demilitarise, and neutralise Ukraine, and to stop NATO aggressive expansion in order to ensure Russian national security.
Russian demands are: 1. Neutrality for Russia’s neighbouring country; 2. End the Kiev bombings and program of ethnic cleansing in Eastern Ukraine; 3. End the hostile expansion of NATO, which has unleashed extreme violence and committed war crimes against Yugoslavia, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, just to name a few in the past 30 years.
And at any point in the past 8 years, simple recognition of the legitimacy of these very reasonable demands, and Russia’s security concerns, by the West, with sincere diplomacy, would have prevented this conflict.
In the middle of March this year, 1 month into the conflict, Josep Borrell, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security, actually admitted at the end of an interview with a French publication, that “inviting Ukraine to join NATO was a mistake.” If he had said that 1 month prior, this conflict would have been prevented.
If EU members had said a clear “No” when Zalensky motioned for nuclear arms, this conflict could have been prevented.
In August Zalensky had already agreed to most of the Russian demands in meetings in Turkey, and afterwards, if Boris Johnson had not pressured him to reverse those diplomatic advances, the conflict would have ended there.
If the collective West had taken Russia’s repeatedly stated red-lines seriously, had viewed Russians as not even necessarily equals, but human beings deserving of fundamental rights, this conflict would have been prevented.
But of course, looking at it from a larger perspective of the imperialist agenda, clearly stated in numerous official and think tank papers, to maintain total domination and specifically to destabilise and overthrow the Russian government, this conflict was never preventable. It would have happened sooner or later; and it is likely that the decisive actions of Putin’s administration prevented a larger conflict down the line.
OPERATION
The Special Military Operation was not a war, nor an invasion, because its aim is not destruction or occupation of Ukraine, but rather demilitarisation, protection of Eastern citizens, and ending Kiev’s dreams of joining the hostile NATO alliance.
The analysis of the Special Military Operation in Ukraine as an extension of diplomacy, because it had been made impossible by Western deception and total hypocrisy, is corroborated by every evidence from the war itself. The empirical reality in numbers, of troops, of weapons, of casualties, and the pace of this operation is entirely consistent with Russia’s repeatedly declared objectives, and entirely contradicts the narrative of “Russian conquest” fabricated by the West.
Western voices say the operation having been slow is proof of Russian military weakness. But the actual main reason is that Russian military advance was put on pause many times for negotiations to take place, which prolongs the process, which allowed the enemy to regroup, and which puts the lives of Russian soldiers at risk. During each round of negotiations the same Russian demands of Ukrainian neutrality, demilitarisation, and end of NATO expansion were made. During each round of negotiations the Ukrainian forces could have agreed to the demands which would also benefit Ukraine itself, and immediately putting an end to the conflict — but repeatedly, at the behest of its Western masters, Ukrainian government refused to sign.
The way Russian forces have conducted the SMO was to leave open the possibility for the Ukrainian government to resume governance as soon as the conflict ends, and to immediately restore Ukraine as a functional, independent, and democratic country — the opposite of the failed states that the US/NATO leaves in the wake of their invasions. This is another reason for the slow pace, another goal for which Russia has sacrificed the lives of more of their soldiers than in the case of an ordinary invasion.
According to UN observers as well as Russian official statements, Russian military has used about 30% to 40% of available fire power.
Russian military casualties number 10X higher than US casualties in the same number of days in the beginning of the Iraq war.
Russian forces have been methodically careful to avoid hospitals, schools, the electrical grid, the water pipes, the sewage system, and all life support systems. Telephone and even Internet access in Ukraine still ran perfectly 3+ months into the conflict, when communication systems could have been, and usually is in cases of invasion by other countries the first thing taken out (only half a year into the conflict, when negotiation had been repeatedly sabotaged by the West and the strategy had changed to become closer to a conventional war, did the RF military begin destroying TV towers and other media infrastructure).
In conventional warfare, the usual ratio of civilian casualties to military is 1:1. In the first 4 months of the operation, The Ukraine estimates of civilian deaths was only 800, less than 1/10th of the 6,000 total military casualties.
The number of Ukrainian civilians killed is roughly 1/10th of Iraqi civilian casualties in the same number of days in the beginning of the Iraq war.
If the Russia plan was to conquer, occupy, and absorb Ukraine, then move onto neighbouring states such as Latvia or Poland, they would have deployed much more troops than the initial 80,000, and would have used much more ruthless tactics. If it was a conventional invasion and war, the conflict would have only lasted a week to 10 days, at the most 2 weeks, as vastly superior Russian military with total air supremacy would have destroyed the country faster than the US destroyed Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yugoslavia.
The Russian methods employed in this defensive operation were the opposite of the USA/NATO style of invasion in their wars of aggression, destruction, domination, and occupation: shock and awe, total war, flatten cities, destroy factories and hospitals, burn every man, woman and child.
As of today, 23rd of Mach, 2023, Russian forces have total tactical and strategic supremacy. The Russian economy has withstood the biggest sanctions in history, the Ruble at a 20 year high; and the popularity ratings of Putin’s administration remains high.
While the US, UK, Germany, and other countries in the NATO alliance are beginning to feel the economic devastation caused by their ill-conceived sanctions on Russia; their industries are at risk of collapse from losing access to affordable energy; as their governments face political quagmires, some of the lowest approval ratings ever, and increasing popular discontent.
This is an incredibly dangerous situation: the colonial and neo-colonial powers which have ruled the world with brutality and repression are backed into a corner, and by every measure, are no longer rational actors on the world stage. Ukraine is already maxing out military manufacturing capacity of the USA, while Russia is using roughly 25% of its productive forces. And in a clear and frightening demonstration of irrationality, the war mongers in Washington and Brussels are now trying to pick a fight with the PRC, whose manufacturing sector is greater than that of the US and Europe combined.
These world historical processes will just have to play themselves out. For now lets just all hope that we as a species can avoid nuclear war.
SUMMARY
Russia has never hurt Europe. Russia has never wanted to hurt Europe. 80 years ago Russia liberated Europe, at enormous cost to itself.
Yesterday Russia wanted to provide Europe with energy, and do business, and collaborate, and grow together.
And all Russia ever got from Europe and the USA was cold war, economic war, proxy war, propaganda war, destabilisation, sabotage, coup d’etat, many waves of violent extremists, mass murder of Russians, endless aggression, relentless bullying, more and more militarist threats.
I used to naively think that Europe might be allowed to naturally integrate with Russia and China, and all of humanity could begin to work together to solve our common problems, toward a peaceful, cooperative, shared future. But no, that was never possible, with Europe and USA being ruled by the same colonial forces as the previous century, bent on world domination.
It is what it is now.
Today we begin to go separate ways. The colonial empire, the imperialist gang, and the anti-imperialist sphere of Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, and all of the former colonised peoples.
And tomorrow, it will become very clear which side is on the just side of history, which side will thrive, and which side, without the blood of victims that has kept it rich and developed, will slide into another dark age.
