TraductionHOW US AND ITS NATO FANNED THE FLAME OF WAR IN UKRAINE?
Propaganda machine in the West is making its best to deceive and to manipulate the populations and to manufacture consent according to Nazi minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels. Concerning the ongoing events in Ukraine, propagandists implement planed strategy of deception by slashing from the memory of the people the main events occurred over the past 20 years and they talk about all except the two main responsables of Ukraine crisis, the will of the United States to maintain its global hegemony and NATO’s expansionism eastward after the collapse of the USSR.
The best way to understand the provocativeness of this move to the Russians is the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1962, the Soviet Union began placing offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba, 90 miles off the coast of Florida. It was in response to the U.S. having installed similar missiles in Turkey. The Cuban missiles would be able to hit Washington D.C. in 30 minutes.
The U.S. became apoplectic, in fact, hysterical. There was no defense against the missiles. U.S. military forces were put on “DEFCON 2” alert, the highest state of preparedness short of actual war. It was the only time during the entire 45 years of the Cold War they were placed at such an elevated state of readiness.
It was only John Kennedy’s deft handling of the situation that defused the Crisis. Part of the resolution was that the U.S. agreed to remove its missiles from Turkey. It was an implicit acknowledgement on the part of the U.S. of just how provocative such forward-based offensive nuclear systems are. They are no less provocative today.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact (1991), the United States sought to implement its always Open door policy by absorbing all of eastern Europe into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), despite the agreement made in 1990 with the last government of the Soviet Union that, in the words of then US Secretary of State James Baker, NATO would not move ‘one-inch eastwards’.
That promise was broken almost immediately when, in 1999, Bill Clinton helped usher Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into NATO. Russia considered this move not just a betrayal, but an act of aggression. Poland is an implacable enemy of Russia, and has been for centuries. And NATO had just finished bombing Russian ally Yugoslavia out of existence. The perception of aggressiveness in NATO moving eastward was hardly the Russians’ alone. Bill Bradley, Paul Nitze, Sam Nunn, Robert McNamara, and more than 30 other foreign policy heavyweights wrote to Clinton that such expansion was both provocative and unnecessary, given the absence of a military threat.
The U.S. promise to not move NATO eastward was broken again in 2004 as NATO absorbed seven eastern European countries (Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia) In 2007, Putin accused NATO of ‘muscle-flexing’ in eastern Europe. From then on, NATO’s expansion became an increasingly contentious matter and began speaking out against what it might seem as encirclement by hostile forces. It was, however, NATO’s 2008 decision to offer membership to Georgia and Ukraine, two former Soviet republics, that thoroughly inflamed Moscow’s security anxieties.
In 2014, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych sought a loan from Russia, which Putin said he would provide if Yanukovych would sideline the country’s oligarchy-controlled financial networks. Instead, Yanukovych turned to the European Union (EU), which offered similar advice, but whose concerns were set aside by the United States, a dynamic that was on full display when US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland told US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, ‘Fuck the EU’. Earlier, Nuland had boasted about the billions of dollars the US spent on ‘democracy promotion’ in Ukraine, which in fact meant the strengthening of pro-Western and anti-Russian forces. Yanukovych was removed and replaced in a parliamentary coup by a string of US-backed leaders (Arseniy Yatsenyuk and Petro Poroshenko). President Poroshenko (2014–2019) drove a Ukrainian nationalist agenda around the slogan armiia, mova, vira (‘military, language, faith’), which became reality with the end to military cooperation with Russia (2014), the enacting of legislation which made Ukrainian ‘the only official state language’ and restricted the use of Russian and other minority languages (2019), and the Ukrainian church breaking ties with the Patriarch Kirill of Moscow (2018). These measures, along with the empowerment of neo-Nazi elements, shattered the country’s pluri-national compact and produced serious armed conflict in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, which is home to a substantial Russian-speaking ethnic minority. Threatened by state policy and neo-Nazi militias, this minority population sought protection from Russia. To mitigate the dangerous ethnic cleansing and end the war in the Donbass region, all parties agreed to a set of de-escalation measures, including ceasefire, known as the Minsk Agreements (2014–15)
Since the 2014 coup, the U.S. has shipped more than $2.5 billion in weapons to the new Ukrainian government. In early February, the government of Ukraine began shelling Donbass, that eastern region of the country with a majority Russian-ethnic population. This has been done with the implicit blessing of the U.S., Ukraine’s strategic sponsor. Between 2002 and 2020, the U.S. withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and the Open Skies Treaty. All were designed to reduce tensions with Russia by ensuring verifiable enforcement of strategic nuclear weapons systems.
Poland, Hungary, and Romania participate in NATO’s “nuclear preparedness posture” which means hosting offensive nuclear missiles aimed at Russia. These can hit major Russian cities in as little as 10 minutes.
