Can we please stop saying the Ukraine war was “unprovoked”?
With the startling admissions from Merkel, Hollande and Poroshenko, the evidence now is overwhelming that the West has been planning and provoking the war in Ukraine for many years.
When President Vladimir Putin launched his ”Special Military Operation” in February 2022, the Western media all announced in unison that the invasion was “unprovoked”. The White House immediately issued a statement calling the SMO an “unprovoked and unjustified attack”, and that “Russia alone is responsible for the death and destruction this attack will bring”.
It quickly became apparent that a memo had gone out, instructing all Western media, pundits and politicians that they must ALWAYS insert the word “unprovoked“ when discussing the conflict.
As the media analysis organisation FAIR noted at the time:
It’s a word that has been echoed repeatedly across the media ecosystem. “Putin’s forces entered Ukraine’s second-largest city on the fourth day of the unprovoked invasion,” Axios (2/27/22) reported; “Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine entered its second week Friday,” said CNBC (3/4/22). Vox (3/1/22) wrote of “Putin’s decision to launch an unprovoked and unnecessary war with the second-largest country in Europe.”
The battle lines of the propaganda war had been drawn: on one side, the West was characterising Russia’s move as “unprovoked and unnecessary”; on the other side, Russia was maintaining that the SMO was the result of many years of provocation, and the action was indeed necessary to ensure Russia’s security.
The First Betrayal: NATO Expansion
Perhaps the most important, pervasive and possibly the most long-standing provocation that Russia has endured from the West is the matter of NATO expansion.
Many readers will have heard the famous story of the Western diplomats promising Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not be expanded. I have been in many arguments with people who point out — correctly — that there was never any written agreement with Gorbachev.
But as Henry Kissinger pointed out, “It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but what is perceived to be true.”
Putin and the Russian leadership feel they were betrayed.
“Poking the Bear”
Regardless of the sophistry used by those stanning for the West, it must be acknowledged that every responsible US diplomat and foreign policy expert over the past 30 years has maintained that NATO expansion was and is a great provocation to Russia, a dangerous game of “poking the bear”.
The above quoted George Kennan was chief among these foreign policy gurus. And as FAIR notes, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in 1998 asked George Kennan specifically about NATO expansion. Kennan’s response:
I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.
Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are — but this is just wrong.
Ambassador Burns Memo: “Nyet means Nyet”
In 2008, then US Ambassador to Russia, William Burns (now Director of the CIA), sent a memo back to Washington, in which he outlined the seriousness of the Russian objections to NATO expansion. The memo was entitled “Nyet means Nyet” (No means No) and it stressed the extent to which Russia would react top NATO enlargement, specifically Ukraine:
Following a muted first reaction to Ukraine’s intent to seek a NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP) at the Bucharest summit (ref A), 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.
For his part, Vladimir Putin warned us that NATO expansion was dangerous. In a speech to the Defence Ministry Board (Russia’s top military officials) in 2021, Putin expressed his concerns:
It is extremely alarming that elements of the US global defence system are being deployed near Russia. The Mk 41 launchers, which are located in Romania and are to be deployed in Poland, are adapted for launching the Tomahawk strike missiles. If this infrastructure continues to move forward, and if US and NATO missile systems are deployed in Ukraine, their flight time to Moscow will be only 7–10 minutes, or even five minutes for hypersonic systems. This is a huge challenge for us, for our security.
In a February 2022 Address to the Nation, Putin reiterated the NATO threat perceived by Russian leadership:
Over the past few years, military contingents of NATO countries have been almost constantly present on Ukrainian territory under the pretext of exercises. The Ukrainian troop control system has already been integrated into NATO. This means that NATO headquarters can issue direct commands to the Ukrainian armed forces, even to their separate units and squads….
In other words, the choice of pathways towards ensuring security should not pose a threat to other states, whereas Ukraine joining NATO is a direct threat to Russia’s security.
“Missiles on our doorstep”
In December 2021, Putin gave his annual marathon press conference. According to a report in The Guardian, Putin mentioned the situation with NATO frequently, at one point stating:
“We have made it clear that Nato’s move to the east is unacceptable,” he said. “The United States is standing with missiles on our doorstep. Is it an excessive requirement not to install shock systems at our house? How would the Americans react if missiles were placed at the border with Canada or Mexico?”
No one stopped to realise that Putin’s harsh tone stemmed from having had his patience run out over the previous 8 years.
The Maidan Coup and its Deadly Aftermath
The US started messing with Ukraine long before 2014. In fact, the CIA had always seen Ukraine as a place in which to cause problems for Russia.
In 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had served as Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, published a book entitled The Grand Chessboard. In it, Brzezinski presents Ukraine as the pivotal country for containing Russia, declaring that:
“Ukraine is the critical state, insofar as Russia’s future evolution is concerned. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”
Thus the goal of US foreign policy for the past decades has been to “pry” Ukraine away from Russia.
In 2004, the CIA engineered one of its patented color revolutions in Ukraine. The so-called “Orange Revolution” sought to overthrow Russian-friendly government leaders and install a more U.S.-friendly regime.
William Schneider, writing in The Atlantic at the time, described how the Orange Revolution exposed the divisions in Ukraine:
Ukraine’s east is mostly Russian-speaking, Orthodox in religion, and strongly pro-Russian. Most people in Ukraine’s west speak Ukrainian and adhere to a church that acknowledges the authority of the Roman Catholic pope. Western Ukrainians are intensely nationalistic and distrustful of Russia.
In the November runoff, Schneider wrote, “the east voted for Viktor Yanukovich, a favorite of Moscow. Western Ukraine voted for Viktor Yushchenko, who favors stronger ties with Europe and the rest of the West.”
Unfortunately for the U.S., Yanukovich won the election runoff. The Orange Revolution had failed.
If at first you don’t succeed …
The U.S.’s goal in Ukraine finally came within reach when the US supported the Maidan Coup in 2014 and installed a pro-Western, pro-US, pro-NATO, pro-EU government that was hand picked by the US State Department.
Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the interim Prime Minister that the US put in office, was a Pro-Nazi revisionist, racist and ardent Russia hater who promised his government would “cleanse sub-humans” from Eastern Ukraine. They even published his Nazi plan for ethnic cleansing on the Ukrainian US Embassy web site (the text has since been redacted to substitute “inhumans” (not a real word) for the original “subhumans”, but the point is unmistakable.
Slaughter in the Donbas
These “cleansing” operations started in 2014 and continue today. And if you speak Russian, or if you cooperate with Russians, you will be tortured and shot in the head by the Nazi militia members. That is just a fact.
Everyone in the West KNEW they were playing with fire by allowing the Ukrainian Nazi militias like the Azov Battalion, Aidar Battalion, Kraken Battalion, Tornado Battalion, etc. to terrorise and slaughter pro-Russian Ukrainians in the Donbas.
The “Final Solution”
Putin’s December 2021 press conference was widely covered by Western media, all of whom commented on the bellicosity of the Russian leader.
Indeed, the above-referenced Guardian article starts with:
The Russian president did little to reduce tensions over Ukraine as he spoke at a televised press conference, saying he would be prepared to launch an intervention if he felt Ukraine or its western allies were preparing an attack on Russia’s proxies in the country and saying he was seeking an “immediate” response to his demands over Nato.
Putin could not have been clearer: If he felt that the “Russians” living in the Donbas were being threatened, he would intervene.
Ukraine responded by ramping up the shelling of the Donbas by 500% (according to the OSCE observers) and massing 120,000 troops (half its army) along the so-called “contact line”, ready to invade.
It was clear to any observer that the far right government in Kiev were getting ready to implement their “Final Solution” to what they perceived as their “Russian Problem” in the East. Just as Prime Minister Yatsenyuk had promised, the Ukrainians were about to “cleanse the land of Evil” and eliminate the “sub-humans” once and for all.
At that point, Putin felt he had to make good on his promise to intervene.
The Final Betrayal: The Minsk Accords
As I mention up top, we have recently discovered that the Ukrainians and Western powers who negotiated the Minsk Accords with Putin never had any intention of honoring them. In the past weeks, we have had startling admissions from Minsk negotiators Angela Merkel, François Hollande, and Petro Poroshenko, the previous Ukrainian President.
All three of these “negotiators” have now openly admitted that the Minsk Accords were simply a ploy to “buy time” so that the West could continue to arm and train Ukraine and prepare that country for the inevitable war with Russia.
In an address on February 21, 2022, shortly before he authorised the SMO, Putin seemed to already know what had happened:
A peace plan was drafted during the negotiating process called the Minsk Package of Measures because, as you recall, we met in the city of Minsk. But subsequent developments show that the Kiev authorities are not planning to implement it, and they have publicly said so many times at the top state level and at the level of Foreign Minister and Security Council Secretary. Overall, everyone understands that they are not planning to do anything with regard to this Minsk Package of Measures.
PUTIN WAS RIGHT.
A note to all you fans of the Western Narrative: I understand that Gorbachev did not get any promises in writing, BUT PUTIN DID. And guess what? It did not make any difference.
Western Media Madness
The West knew all along what was happening. They had been following the developments in Ukraine and documenting the drift towards war since 2014. And THEY DID NOTHING. Consumed by their own Russophobia, they were happy to have Ukrainian “ultranationalists” kill Russian speakers in the Donbas.
Here is an excerpt from a New York Times article in August of 2014:
Despite growing jitters in the West, Ukraine’s military leaders say they are making a well-calculated gamble, betting that Mr. Putin feels he has too much to lose to invade, including the possibility of crippling international sanctions. So while Western officials view each new Ukrainian artillery barrage in Donetsk as drawing the country closer to the brink, the Ukrainians see their unchecked advance as further confirmation that Mr. Putin is mobilizing troops only as a scare tactic to keep them from reclaiming territory.
And from a Guardian article of the same time:
For the first time since the Reagan years, the US is threatening to take the world to war. With eastern Europe and the Balkans now military outposts of Nato, the last “buffer state” bordering Russia — Ukraine — is being torn apart by fascist forces unleashed by the US and the EU. We in the west are now backing neo-Nazis in a country where Ukrainian Nazis backed Hitler.
The Western media covered all these provocations. They even seemed to be raising concerns and alarms. But nothing changed. The US steadfastly refused to respond to Putin’s requests for negotiation, and Putin finally issued a “stern warning” in December 2021, according to the CBC:
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday sternly warned the West against encroaching further on Russia’s security interests, saying Moscow’s response will be “quick and tough” and make the culprits feel bitterly sorry for their actions.
The warning came during Putin’s annual state-of-the-nation address amid a massive Russian military buildup near Ukraine, where cease-fire violations [by the Ukrainians] in the seven-year conflict between Russia-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces have escalated in recent weeks.
The Big Lie is actually a Big Cover-Up
The TRUTH is that the Western powers and their allied media got it all wrong.
They KNEW Russia had been provoked. They KNEW there was a danger of war. But their entire world view seemed to be built on the belief that Putin was bluffing, and that he would not actually react as he had promised.
This is why every Western politician, every Western media outlet, every Western pundit and celebrity NOW must always insert the word “unprovoked” when talking about Russia’s invasion. They need to do this in order to make people forget their massive FAILURE.
And they need to make this Big Lie as big as possible, because, as Josef Goebbels said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it”.
It’s time we stopped lying. There is no way we can bring this war to an end if we cannot see the truth of how it began in the first place.
#End.
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https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/4/ukraine-crisis-who-are-the-russia-backed-separatists
I don't understand why Russia, a massive country, needs to support these rebel states in Ukraine. It also seems like a smear tactic to refer to the Ukrainian fighters as neo-Nazis based on involvement with Germany before any of these fighters were born. Just trying to understand. The rebel pro-Russian states sound very harsh in their treatment of drug addicts.