by
Patrick Henningsen
New Dawn 192
(May-June 2022)
from
NewDawnMagazine Website
The
following article by Patrick Henningsen
- written
only months after Russia launched its special
military
operation in Ukraine on 24 February 2022 -
explains
the background dynamics of this war.
The facts
outlined here
- that
were suppressed in the West
but well
known to informed observers -
are only
now emerging in mainstream media
as Western
backers of Ukraine
begin to
face reality...
There is
no avoiding war;
it can only be
postponed
to the advantage
of others.
Niccolo
Machiavelli
They say timing is everything.
Had this war happened two years
earlier, or one year later, the outcome would have been vastly
different...
As for the great Atlanticist power bloc, this isn't a war they've
been willing to fight, not in the traditional military sense anyway.
As the mortars and bombs continue to fall and efforts to kickstart
negotiations are ongoing, a sustainable path to peace seems unlikely
to emerge in Ukraine.
While Russia seems intent on seeing through its "Special Military
Operation," the US and its allies will have to decide what they want
and exactly how long they plan to fight Russia down to the last
Ukrainian.
The western chorus of nations contends that by waging their 'war of
choice' against its neighbor Ukraine, the Russian Federation and
its President Vladimir Putin have fallen foul of the vaunted
Rules-Based International Order.
By doing so, they have effectively
left the international community.
However, on closer examination of the evidence and historical
context surrounding this highly contentious geopolitical event, it
becomes clear that it was the "international community" which left
Russia - leaving it with no choice but to pursue its national
security interests on its own accord.
As it stands, Russia, Ukraine, and the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) alliance are now at war, with each party firmly
in the belief that they are fighting an existential conflict,
not
over any particular political or territorial dispute but for their
future existence, or in the case of NATO, its relevance as a
regional hegemonic entity.
No one saw this coming, or did they...?
How Did We Get Here?
It's no secret that over past decades numerous foreign policy
experts warned that NATO's continued eastward expansion, coupled
with the US and UK's increasingly strident rhetoric and aggressive
policies directed against Russia would end up fomenting war in
Ukraine.
Chief among those were luminaries like George Kennan and
Henry
Kissinger.
Kennan, the architect of America's policy of
Soviet
containment during the Cold War, was adamant that unchecked NATO
expansion would eventually lead to war with Russia.
Kissinger
agreed, and thought that Ukraine should not be dominated by either
NATO or Russia but rather act as a neutral bridge between east and
west.
Also raising the alarm was one of America's leading international
relations scholars, Professor John Mearsheimer, who succinctly drove
this same point home in public interviews and lectures, 1 but even
his cogent and considered realist arguments garnered little interest
within Washington's foreign policy clique.
The US, UK, and western Europe were fully engaged on this path
following the February 2014
Maidan coup d'etat in Ukraine,
especially after Russia's supposed 'annexation' (as the West refer
to it, while Russians will regard it as a reunification) of Crimea,
an act that triggered some of the harshest economic sanctions seen
yet prosecuted by the US and European Union against Russia.
And just like that, The Great Game was truly in play... again...!
Undoubtedly, one of the material consequences of the 2014 US-backed
coup in Kyiv was Ukraine losing the Crimean Peninsula to the Russian
Federation in February/March of that year.
Two main factors made
this transfer a fait accompli.
Firstly, with a predominantly Russian
population, Crimeans viewed the unconstitutional toppling of
democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych in Kyiv as an
illegitimate seizure of the government and feared
ethnically-motivated retribution against Russians and
Russian-speaking citizens at the hands of western-backed radical
Ukrainian nationalists who had seized power.
This policy of disenfranchisement and lustration (where a new regime
bars any opponents to its legitimacy from participating in the
political process) had already reared its ugly head in other
primarily Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine, in the eastern region
of Donbass, where protests against Kyiv's illegal coup regime broke
out in Donetsk and Luhansk.
They were suddenly treated as
insurrectionists for not recognizing the new putsch government in
Kyiv, which effectively suspended the parliamentary representation
of the Donbass parties, and even deployed the military to quell the
growing political opposition.
Knowing they may meet a similar fate, Crimea's local councils held a
regional referendum on leaving Ukraine and joining the Russian
Federation. The result was overwhelming, with roughly 95% favoring
secession.
The process was made that much easier by the fact that
Crimea is home to one of Russia's largest military installations
housing some 20,000 personnel located on the southern-most tip of
Crimea, in the port city of Sevastopol.
Since the time of Catherine
the Great it has been the historic home of Russia's Black Sea Fleet,
and since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia had been leasing the
base from the Ukrainian state.
It should be noted that none of this would have gone smoothly had
the overwhelming majority of Crimea not supported the new mandate.
That, and the fact that Crimea had previously belonged to Russia up
until 1954 when then Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev gave the
peninsula to the Soviet republic of Ukraine - a purely political
move designed to curry favor with Ukraine at the time - explains
why this changing of the guard was virtually seamless.
This brings us to the
second reason Crimea reunited with Russia.
From a national security standpoint, Moscow could not risk the fate
of its main naval port to the machinations of an unstable, US-backed
radical nationalist junta in Kyiv.
From Russia's point of view, if
Ukraine joined the EU, or worse, was folded into the NATO alliance,
it would only be a matter of time before Moscow's cherished warm
water port was jeopardized, and with that closing Russia's access to
the Mediterranean Sea.
If Ukraine joined NATO and then tried to take back Crimea by force,
Russia would be compelled to retaliate, triggering NATO Article 5,
opening the door for all-out war between NATO and Russia.
For
Russia, that risk was simply unacceptable.
From a statecraft point
of view, these series of events can be viewed as totally logical,
and not the impulsive machinations of an 'unstable despot' in Moscow...
Russia's canny but ultimately necessary geopolitical move incensed
the West to no end.
From this point on, Washington and London have been determined to find new ways to isolate Russia, beginning with
the work of discrediting and isolating them internationally, and
aiming to somehow retake the Donbass and Crimea, while edging ever
closer to achieving regime change in Moscow.
That's the general
plan, and war planners in Washington and Brussels are sticking to
it...
A War Like No Other
For all practical purposes, World War III has already begun.
It is a
war being fought on multiple levels, and the conflagration over
Ukraine may only be the start.
The "international community"
you often hear about.
For its part, the West has declared full-blown economic war against
Russia including,
a total embargo on trade and commerce, and the
banning and restriction of Russian communications, media, culture,
and even participation in international sports.
Who would have
imagined that a leading global power could be cancelled, at least in
western spheres of influence in the "International Community" as it
common refers to itself, the moralizing confederation comprised
mainly of,
North America, UK, the European Union, Japan, Australia
and New Zealand.
The rest of the world, including,
China, India,
Africa, the Middle East, and large portions of South America
including Brazil,
...have taken a much more neutral stance in relation
to Russia.
But in order to really understand what is happening, we must
consider how we arrived at this point in history, and maybe
speculate where events are likely to take us once the dust finally
settles on this phase of the conflict.
How We Got Here
The narrative in popular western mainstream media discourse is that
this war came out of nowhere - an impulsive act of hubris by an
'unstable mad man' and dictator, Russian President Vladimir Putin,
who simply decided one day to invade Ukraine to realize his ambition
of reconstituting the former Soviet empire.
That's a favorite
fallback position for most American and British politicians and
pundits...
If only it were true...
In reality, we are seeing the logical conclusion of a series of
events and provocations coming from NATO and Ukraine itself.
Ever
since their open invitation to Ukraine and Georgia at the 2008 NATO
Summit in Bucharest, the West has steadily supplied weapons,
military 'advisors', and other technical and intelligence support to
those former Soviet republics.
Could Russia afford to wait for
US-made medium-range missiles to arrive in those countries...?
For those and other reasons, Russia's military intervention did not
surprise foreign policy heavyweights like Kissinger or Mearsheimer.
Even Ukrainian president Vodolymyr Zelenskyy's political advisor,
Oleksiy Arestovich, predicted this clash would unfold during
a 2019 interview. 2
If that's not convincing enough, read the RAND Corporation's 2019
strategic report, "Overextending and Unbalancing Russia,"
3 which
describes chapter and verse how Washington's primary goal has been
to undermine Russia by repeating what it considers as past successes
against the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Only this time, rather
than 'hedge for peace' by simultaneously engaging in productive
bilateral relations or outpacing the enemy in arms and technology,
the report opines that,
NATO should focus on enacting a dizzying
range of anti-Russia measures in what it calls 'hybrid war'...
This
includes,
-
leveraging NATO members against Russia
-
engaging in
political and economic warfare
-
active measures across all
information warfare fronts
Whereas communism vs. capitalism was the
defining dialectic that shaped strategy and tactics during the old
Cold War, new quasi-ideological fault lines should be reframed, like
'dictatorship vs. democracy,' and the fomenting of divisions on
religious and ethno-nationalist lines.
Beyond this, we have the
military theatres.
For war planners at RAND, these are ranked
according to perceived risks, benefits, and "likelihood of success"...
The RAND report also suggests capitalizing on what the West
perceives as Russia's "deep-seated" anxieties about provocations
from the West and advises that this vulnerability must be exploited
to get Russia to react.
And react it did...!
When Russia launched its military intervention in Ukraine on 24
February 2022, it was the culmination of a long series of events
that had effectively forced Russia into a national security quandary
that would be difficult to avoid without making serious compromises.
It could ultimately degrade its current position as a global power
in the short term but, more importantly, pose a severe risk to its
territorial integrity in the long term.
Operation Z - Putin Springs the
Trap?
To present a thorough analysis of this historic impasse taking place
over Ukraine, we need to first cast the scene back a few centuries,
followed by a detailed depiction of both World Wars, and give a
brief analysis of the formation and dissolution of the Soviet Union,
including a granular look at the post-Soviet development of its
respective satellite states.
In
New Dawn 191 (Mar-Apr 2022), I covered
some of the historical rivalries between the British and Russian
empires in my article, 'The Great Game 2.0: The Race for Eurasian
Dominance'.
For this analysis, we'll move the timeline forward to February 2014,
to the infamous Maidan uprising, known locally as the "Revolution of
Dignity" in Kyiv.
While the mainstream media likes to portray this
color revolution as a grassroots uprising 'embodying the spirit of
western democracy' with young Ukrainians expressing their EU
aspirations, the hard reality was that this was a violent coup
d'etat, leading to the ouster of a democratically elected president,
Viktor Yanukovych.
The evidence now reveals that he was replaced by
a succession of hand-picked US political puppets installed to do the
bidding of regime change practitioners in Washington.
This was exposed in detail during a leaked phone call between then
US Undersecretary of State, Victoria Nuland, and US Ambassador
Geoffrey R. Pyatt in Kyiv.
The degree to which they were
micromanaging their new incoming regime was astonishing. The full
sequence of events is well-documented in director Igor Lopatonok's
2016 film, 'Ukraine on Fire', featuring
Oliver Stone.
It turns out that this hostile takeover of Ukrainian politics was in
the works for a very long time.
Perhaps the most shocking aspect of
the 2014 Maidan coup was how the US and its allies harnessed the
power of Ukraine's radical far-right nationalist cells to enforce a
political line on the streets of towns and cities across the
country.
Many refer to movements like Right Sector (Pravyy Sektor) and their
respective paramilitary and 'volunteer corps' militant factions as
Neo Nazi.
However, they are much more than that.
By any reasonable
measure, these are not 'neo', but rather, bona fide Nazis -
adherents to the Nazi ideology, descendants in the political (and in
some cases, genealogical) lineage of Hitler's western Ukrainian
brigades, and inspired by controversial figures like Stepan Bandera,
who to this day, is still idolized by radical nationalists in
Ukraine.
Bandera was leader of the Organization of Ukrainian
Nationalists in the 1930s and 1940s, which fought alongside the Waffen SS during Nazi Germany's scorched earth march towards
Stalingrad.
It is a matter of historical record that Banderites
engaged in pogroms and atrocities against Jews, as part of the
broader Holocaust, as well as slaughtering Poles.
History also
reveals that Washington and the CIA groomed Banderite cells in
western Ukraine after WWII through programs like Operation
Aerodynamic. 4
Following the Maidan coup, Washington installed interim Prime
Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, followed by billionaire oligarch,
President Petro Poroshenko, who marshaled these same radical
nationalist forces and began integrating them into the Ukrainian
military structure.
Extremist militias like the Aidar and Azov
Battalions were deputized to help Kyiv prosecute a brutal civil war
in eastern Ukraine's Donbass region - to put down the rebellion
against the post-coup government which the rebel opposition in
Donetsk and Luhansk regarded as an unconstitutional regime.
After his election, Poroshenko mounted an "anti-terror operation" in
the eastern regions - bringing the full force of Ukraine's military
against its own people.
A bloody eight-year-long civil war ensued
that was systematically whitewashed from Western mainstream media
and politics.
Burying this inconvenient truth was essential for the
United States, British and their NATO partners to condition the
western public to see no evil in a newly-minted 'democratic'
Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Russia was incensed, only it could not intervene
militarily in Ukraine to protect ethnic Russians without provoking a
major international incident.
So instead, it provided diplomatic,
economic aid, no doubt some special military support and technical
training, likely comprising of some arms, hardware, intelligence and
communications support.
For its part, Moscow also offered invaluable
international media coverage of the conflict through Russian outlets
like RT and Sputnik.
In order to de-escalate the situation, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus,
France and Germany drafted the
Minsk Accords, or "Minsk I & II," in
2014 and 2015 respectively.
This initially helped reduce fighting
which had already taken thousands of lives and displaced many
hundreds of thousands from the region.
It's important to note here
that Minsk Process was codified by UN Security Council Resolution
2202, unanimously endorsing the "Package of measures for the
Implementation of the Minsk Agreements."
But unfortunately, in the
years that followed, successive US-backed governments in Kyiv
systematically undermined the agreement and rather than de-escalate
the fighting in
Donbass, increased the military build-up,
culminating in a massive uptick in troop and equipment deployments
to the region under President Zelenskyy.
Ironically (or not), Zelenskyy ran for office in 2019 on the promise
of uniting the country and 'bringing peace' to Donbass, neither of
which happened.
Instead, the violence and proliferation of far-right
militias in Donbass increased dramatically...
It was clear this is
what Ukrainians wanted, which was a far cry from what eventually
unfolded.
To make matters worse, Zelenskyy threw gasoline on the
fire by constantly courting NATO membership when he (and his western
handlers) knew full well that this was an absolute red line for
Russia. Zelenskyy could have defused tensions earlier by disavowing
NATO aspirations and declaring Ukraine a neutral state.
The coup de
grace came in February 2022 after Zelenskyy remarked at the Munich
Security Conference that he would like his country to acquire
nuclear weapons.
At that point few can argue that Russia lacked
sufficient reason to make its bold move in order to secure its own
vital national security interests.
It is not at all surprising that most western pundits are largely
aloof to this progression of events, and that Russia's concerted
moves are as much political as they are military.
The great
strategist Carl von Clausewitz said it best in his seminal text,
'One
War':
"War is simply the continuation of political intercourse with
the addition of other means."
In the spring of 2021, Moscow would increase its frequency of
military drills and maneuvers, amassing more military forces along
its border with Ukraine.
In December of that year, Washington and
its allies began raising the alarm that Russia was planning to
invade Ukraine.
Moscow issued an urgent letter to the Washington
demanding that its security concerned be addressed immediately to
avoid further escalation, but its overtures were largely brushed
aside and ignored by the US State Department.
For the next three
months, western alarm bells dominated media coverage, all the while
Russia was denying any intention to move its forces into Ukraine.
Then on 21 February something extraordinary happened.
Vladimir Putin
sprung the trap...
After eight long years of bloodshed and failed peace negotiations,
the Russian president took to the airwaves to announce Moscow's
formal recognition of the independent
republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.
For a legal perspective, this immediately qualified them
for official Russian military protection, including the
establishment of humanitarian corridors which were quickly opened.
After more than seven years of stalled diplomacy, Moscow finally
chose to abandon the already dead Minsk agreement and directly deal
with the situation in Donbass - and the threat posed by a
US-controlled and NATO-occupied Ukraine to its national homeland
security.
On 24 February, Putin took to the airwaves again to deliver an
hour-long lecture on the geographical, cultural, political, and
geopolitical history of Ukraine and its interconnected relationship
to Russia.
Western pundits were left puzzled.
Why was Putin
delivering this masterclass in Soviet history and articulating
concepts underpinning Russia's national security doctrine?
Those questions were soon answered when Moscow announced its
military intervention code-named "Z," effectively invading Ukraine
from four different directions, with these goals:
to secure the Donbass, followed by "demilitarization," and "denazification" of
Ukraine.
Within 72 hours, the Russian armed forces had begun their "Special
Military Operation" (SMO).
For the West, decrying Russia's surprise invasion of Ukraine means
they've suddenly discovered the concept of international law and are
pointing to Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, and how the
international community must condemn this egregious violation of
Ukraine's territorial integrity.
While this may be true with respect
to the letter of the law in this instance, such international
treaties have never hindered the United States and its allies in the
recent past:
not in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Yugoslavia, nor in
Vietnam, to name but a few...!
The same could be said for Turkey's
incursions and occupations in Cyprus and northern Syria, and
especially Israel's 75 year-long incursion, illegal occupation and
systematic ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinian population.
Following Russia's SMO, the West enacted an unprecedented reflexive,
collective response:
a program of full-spectrum dominance - which
includes overlapping strategies of hybrid warfare, the results of
which have invariably altered the current world order.
Hybrid Warfare and Full-Spectrum
Dominance
Governments and military structures are engaged in hybrid warfare.
If you're living in the West, they don't tell you that you are
immersed in a theatre of constant conflict is a 360-degree
hippodrome of mass media information warfare with active measures
and countermeasures.
Even seemingly innocent bystanders - the
general public - are viewed by governments and military strategists
as active participants in the broader war theatre.
This has always been the case throughout history, articulated as
propaganda and soft power, with citizens in whatever country on
whatever side find themselves in a war for the age-old 'battle for
hearts and minds'.
The process of public engagement also requires an
incendiary ingredient to drive it, whereby the state conditions the
people to both fear and hate the enemy de jour.
Without that sense
of personal and collective threat, or at the very least, in the
Orwellian sense, that "two minutes of hate," members of the public
will not feel civically and emotionally invested in the process.
Additionally, an emerging new compliment to the military theatre is
cyber warfare, now touted by western planners as a key domain to
build up offensive and defensive capabilities.
Klaus Schwab in Davos
is gaming out this digital conflagration with the World Economic
Forum's "Cyber Polygon" tabletop simulations.
As much as the mainstream media spinners try to frame it, this
Russia vs. 'The West' conflict is not the proverbial 'black hat vs.
white hat' square-off.
On the contrary, it is incredibly complex
with many overlapping layers of history, culture, ethnic strife, and
political and geopolitical forces which push and pull various
actors, both in the theatre of war and on its periphery.
It's crucial to understand that this is a proxy war pitting a
US-UK-led NATO against Russia using Ukraine as the proxy, or cudgel,
to poke the Russian bear.
This was done numerous times during the
Cold War, and it should be of no surprise history again repeats
itself here.
As it cannot engage in a direct military fashion, NATO
is applying the Syrian model - trafficking an unlimited number of
lethal arms, supplies and military advisors into Ukraine, with the
express goal stated in the RAND document of wearing down and'
overextending' Russia.
Western planners openly boast about creating
"another Afghanistan" for Russia.
Economic Warfare
Part of this hybrid warfare was the "mother of all sanctions,"
an
all-out economic war waged by the West against Russia to destroy
their economy, hoping it provokes the Russian population to rise up
and overthrow their leader.
This is an attempt to cancel what is
arguably the world's top commodities producer:
exporting a large
share of the world's gas, oil, wheat, fertilizer, minerals and key
components for the highly globalised nuclear power, and space
exploration industries.
The move to ban and restrict the Western bloc from purchasing
Russian natural gas, oil, food and fertilizer has come even though
Europe overly relies on these Russian supplies to heat their homes
and provide power, minerals and product to run their industries, and
put food on their tables.
This highly self-destructive collective
economic suicide pact is already backfiring spectacularly in the
West, triggering tumults in already shaky natural gas and oil
markets, and causing food shortages, supply chain disruptions, and a
lack of available and affordable supplies of grains, sunflower oil,
fertilizer and other essential staples.
Some western farmers cannot plant in the spring due to either a lack
of supplies or the fact that the fertiliser price is too high,
making farming unprofitable.
A hike in fuel prices has triggered
record-levels of inflation across the board in the West, spelling a
lower standard of living for the working and middle classes right
across the western world.
In another significant development, in late March the US sanctioned
Russia's Central Bank and seized some $300 billion of Russia's
foreign currency assets to bring on financial Armageddon in Russia.
President Putin turned the tables by announcing that Russia would no
longer accept dollars and Euros for its gas and oil, and payment
would need to be made in Rubles. With the stroke of a pen, Putin
made the Russian Ruble a type of reserve currency, and there was an
immediate effect on the US dollar's near-global monopoly as the
pre-eminent world reserve currency.
To make this move stick, Putin
pegged the Ruble to gold, effectively making the Ruble a
gold-backed currency.
Russia's currency was further bolstered by the
fact it's backed by a basket of essential commodities like oil, gas,
and wheat. Interestingly, this very same move propelled the US
economy after the Second World War following the Bretton Woods
Agreement.
Time will tell how well this pans out for the Russian economy, but
early signs are western economies are suffering most in sanctions
blowback - the sort of damage that might eventually lead to
political consequences in elections.
The only people in the West who seem pleased with these ruptures are
the green lobby and Klaus Schwab's
Great Reset parishioners, both,
dreaming to leverage this artificial crisis to advance their
'sustainable' agendas and press home the argument that fossil fuels
are now too expensive and a liability to global stability (because
they supposedly pad the pockets of the Russian war machine)...
Will it work or will it all end in tears?
You might ask the Central
Bankers who have certainly used this crisis to accelerate their
roll-out of a new Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), completely
in line with the Great Reset's
digital global fiat and cashless
society, with its digital ID wallets, to be tied to your
social and
carbon credits...
Many believe, and rightfully so, that this looks
very much like,
the final implementation stage of the globalist plan
to enslave the planet.
It's becoming harder to argue with that
conspiracy theory.
Are we seeing a new bipolar or even multipolar world order taking
shape,
with Russia and China leading Eurasia in one direction, while
Klaus and the West head towards their technocratic digital 'utopia'...?
If this unfolds, we may see a bifurcated world economy and digital
media, on polar ends of a bifurcated world order, with different
rules, values, and practices in different hemispheres.
Negotiating
into a New World
As we go to press, Ukraine's actor-cum-statesman, Volodymyr
Zelenskyy, was still being paraded (via Zoom) in front of US
Congress, the British, Canadian, and Australian parliaments, and the
Council of Europe in Brussels, with western leaders enthusiastically
chanting the nationalist mantra "Slava Ukraini!" (Glory to Ukraine!)
This issue has become a global cause célèbre in the West, with
Ukrainian flags flying over municipal buildings, businesses, and
lapel pins, and with school children and churches doing bake sales,
airline hostesses passing the hat around on long-haul flights, and
other endless online fundraisers - all raising money for the
Ukrainian cause as everyone joins in the biggest geopolitical
virtue-signaling campaign in modern history.
However, none of this will change the facts on the ground.
What we know of the ongoing conflict resolution talks between Russia
and Ukraine is that there is a stalling for time which is likely
being directed behind the scenes by the US State Department.
In
reference to the previously-cited RAND report and US/UK/NATO
strategy, stretched-out negotiations allow for the unrestricted flow
of weapons over the Polish border into western Ukraine.
But the
longer Kyiv drags this on, the more territory Zelenskyy's Ukraine
stands to lose.
The territory presently held by Russian forces is
beginning to resemble historic "Novorossiya," which is also the
proposed confederation of the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republic.
This would create a land bridge stretching from Moldova, over to
Crimea, across to Mariupol, and up to Kharkov.
The remainder of the
current Ukrainian state would have lost access to the Black Sea.
Another potential outcome is providing the West and its media
establishment with a face-saving 'out' - something like how the
invasion has gone so poorly for Russia and wore them down so much
that in the end they were forced to negotiate a settlement due to
the 'brave' Zelenskyy-led resistance...
Remember,
the western PR machine
can spin anything into a win, no matter how bad things have really
gone.
One of the most extraordinary parts of this story is the revelation
that just days before the Russian invasion, Zelenskyy was offered a
peace deal by German chancellor Olaf Scholz while attending
the Munich Security Conference - but the Ukrainian president turned
it down. 6
The peace deal was,
"that Ukraine should renounce its NATO
aspirations and declare neutrality as part of a wider European
security deal between the West and Russia" and that "the pact would
be signed by Mr. Putin and Mr. Biden, who would jointly guarantee
Ukraine's security."
It's reported that Zelenskyy rejected the
offer, saying,
"Putin couldn't be trusted to uphold such an
agreement and that most Ukrainians wanted to join NATO."
Was Zelenskyy in a position to dial-down tensions and nullify one of
Russia's main reasons for the invasion?
But through a combination of
incompetence and pressure from anti-Russia US hawks, did he make one
of the most careless and fatal mistakes in history?
This rapid sequence of events has exposed the intellectual, ethical,
and moral bankruptcy of western neoliberal chauvinism, and its
postmodern civilisational narcissism.
That phase of
unipolar
dominance may be coming to an end...!
It is a time of great turbulence, but it is also a time of great
revelations.
In just a few short months, this war is already
reshaping the global order, and before long it may not be the same
world order the 'master' planners had envisioned.
Don't look now, but these are those interesting times you always
dreamed about.
The great awakening continues...!
Footnotes
-
John Mearsheimer: Is the West Responsible
for the Ukraine Crisis?,
https://21stcenturywire.com/2022/03/02/john-mearsheimer-is-the-west-responsible-for-the-ukraine-crisis/
-
Former Ukrainian presidential advisor
perfectly predicted Russian invasion in 2019,
https://www.intellinews.com/former-ukrainian-presidential-advisor-perfectly-predicted-russian-invasion-in-2019-238183/
-
RAND Corp - Overextending and
Unbalancing Russia
-
Operation Aerodynamic,
https://cryptome.org/2016/01/cia-ua-aerodynamic.pdf
-
Pentagon-Ukraine Bio Labs: The Hunter
Biden Connection,
https://21stcenturywire.com/2022/03/23/pentagons-ukraine-bio-labs-the-hunter-biden-connection/
-
Vladimir Putin's 20-Year March to War in
Ukraine - and How the West Mishandled It,
https://www.wsj.com/articles/vladimir-putins-20-year-march-to-war-in-ukraineand-how-the-west-mishandled-it-11648826461
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