The origin of the current war in Ukraine lies in the transformation of Zelenskyy’s country into a military platform for the United States and NATO to harass Russia and eventually launch an attack. In fact, Zelensky’s accelerated immersion into the Western military apparatus is the third act in the operation to finally separate Ukraine from Russia, designed by the Pentagon and the US State Department: the first was the 2004 Orange Revolution, which spawned the government of Viktor Yushchenko, and the second, the Maidan coup in 2014.
Further back, the germ of the war lies in the breach of Western agreements with Moscow: Soviet approval of a reunited Germany with Gorbachev and the withdrawal of its troops from all of Eastern Europe had not wanted NATO’s counterpart to expand eastward. Washington has done just the opposite over the past 25 years, aggravating the situation by installing its missile defense shield and implicitly threatening to deploy nuclear missiles in Poland, Romania and Ukraine. Now, with the war, Germany, which already has US nuclear weapons stationed on its territory, will increase their numbers.
NATO continued its irresponsible expansion, offering Ukraine its future integration at the 2008 Bucharest summit, regardless of Russia’s security. Yushchenko, Ukraine’s president between 2005 and 2010 after the Orange Revolution, used the extraordinary powers granted to him by parliament to make joining NATO the main objective of his foreign policy. Until then, the country had been neutral, and it is often concealed that the pro-Russian Yanukovych, with the approval of Moscow, was the only Ukrainian president who maintained a neutral Ukraine as a goal, while Poroshenko and Zelenskyy continued with the adventurous option of joining NATO, encouraged by the United States.
Putin’s warnings in Munich in 2007 went unheeded in Washington. On the contrary, the United States brought to power Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili (a notorious pawn of theirs, who died after the Rose Revolution and a suspicious election in which he received more than 95 of the votes) to start the war against Ossetia in 2008 to begin a clear operation to bully Russia. The Maidan putsch, the warning war initiated by Kyiv against the Donbass and the gradual transformation of Ukraine into a NATO military platform did the rest. The war in Donbass began in 2014, and all Western powers turned a blind eye to the slaughter.
The ubiquitous campaign of new power that emerged from the coup d’etat combined a new identity that abhors the Soviet past and glorifies a Ukraine steeped in old Ruthenian and Ukrainian nationalism that collaborated with the Third Reich with the recovery of Stepan Bandera and anti-Russian indoctrination. Added to this was the determined American and Polish intervention, which trained the Ukrainian army and secret services, and the preparation of the campaign against the Donbass, which was prevented by the Russian intervention. Zelenskyi’s ban on the Russian language in administration and entertainment is something Moscow might not like. The Communist Party was already banned and with the war all left-wing organizations were banned, while across the country people are being lynched on the pretext that they are looters, thieves, spies or gypsies. War Makes Monsters: The denunciation of the Romani Union’s appalling persecution of Gypsies is another example of the character of Ukrainian xenophobic nationalism.
NATO’s massive expansion into Eastern Europe and Russia’s borders is an obvious threat to Russia’s national security and, moreover, ignores OSCE agreements and commitments made in the Russia-NATO Committee. The United States, well aware of this, decided to keep up the pressure: if Moscow’s weakness had forced them to put up with five waves of NATO expansion, despite Putin’s earnest warning in Munich in 2007, they might as well put up with it how Ukraine becomes a new member of the Atlantic Club.
General Sergej Rudskói, chief of operations of the Russian General Staff, announced that the Ukrainian army would launch a major offensive to recapture the Donetsk and Lugansk regions. According to the vision of the Russian command, given the impending attack of the Ukrainian army on the Donbass, Russia had a duty to help them, and for this they had two options: to intervene exclusively in the Donbass, with the additional problem that the rest of the Ukrainian army would join the attack or intervene in other areas of Ukraine to prevent it and prevent its displacement to the east. That was the option decided by the Russian army.
The development of the war so far has been shaped by this Russian operational plan, which after five weeks of fighting was followed by the partial withdrawal of the siege of Kyiv in order to concentrate Russian troops in the Donbass. All of this amid harsh economic sanctions against Russia, the paralysis of Nord Stream 2, the delivery of large arsenals of sophisticated Western weapons to the Ukrainian army, and amid a gigantic propaganda campaign aimed at demonizing Putin, encouraging protests within Russia, and the did not notice the blatant lies: from the “attack on the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant” to the false bombing of the Mariupol maternity hospital and the suspicious “Bukhan massacre”.
War is always the worst option, however, and the Russian government is not in the best position to respond to a challenge that threatens Russia’s very existence: as the Russian Communist Party claims, a capitalist Russia deepens the abyss. What the illegal partition of the USSR meant is often ignored, as the population voted by a large majority to preserve the union in 1991: from Moscow’s point of view, the country lost a third of its territory and half of its population. For this reason, the option of reintegration, although today it seems impractical and remote, has not been abandoned by many, such as the Russian Communist Party. If it was reasonable and logical for the Federal Republic of Germany to uphold the goal of German reunification, why shouldn’t Russia and other peoples of the dissolved Soviet Union do so? Undoubtedly, the war today has opened a chasm between Russians and Ukrainians, but heavier and more brutal was the one that separated the Germans and French after the Second World War and today they coexist without much difficulty in the European Union.
Relaxation needs agreements and security for all, but the US is going in the opposite direction: Biden has just proposed the largest military budget in human history: $813,000 million by 2023, with the modernization of the nuclear triad and large items to supply arms to Ukraine. Even the agreements at the NATO summit in Brussels in March 2022 cannot reassure Moscow, as military spending is expected to increase to up to 2% of GDP. Even fewer words like those of Polish Deputy Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński, who stated that “Poland is open to the stationing of US nuclear weapons on its territory”. Kaczyński, leader of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party, has more political clout than Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki. Nor the scandalous increase in Germany’s military budget, which will spend more than Russia on weapons, trailing only the US and China. Germany is abandoning its timid notions of autonomy before the United States, and Japan has embarked on the road to rearmament, ignoring the precautions of its constitution.
Russia started the war in Ukraine, but the main threat to peace and stability of the planet is the United States, because all crisis scenarios are connected, and the conflict in Ukraine is reflected in the East: the United States is stepping up its intervention in Ukraine is using the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait to draw China into a confrontational arena, while encouraging Japan’s Kishida government to become more involved in the US Pacific program by increasing its military budget, and stands behind worrying statements by the South Korean Defense Secretary, who alluded to the possibility of a “pre-emptive strike” on North Korea.
The bitter war in Ukraine must end. An international conference involving the great powers, the United States, the European Union, Russia and China, the UN and other countries from India to Japan is essential to shape the new world security that also addresses nuclear arsenals got to. However, this possibility runs up against a major obstacle: the United States does not want international security, but its hegemony.
Rebelión has published this article under a Creative Commons license with the permission of the author, respecting his freedom to publish it in other sources.