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The Reasons For And Dangers Behind The War In Ukraine
The war in the Ukraine continues but the propaganda hysteria around it seems to have calmed down a bit as reality is setting in.
This gives room from more sane voices to be heard by the public. I will start with the Russian ones.
The Russian ambassador to the U.S., Anatoly Antonov, was interviewed by Newsweek. He explained Russia's political and judicial reasoning behind the war:
"The special operation in Ukraine is the result of the unwillingness of the Kiev regime to stop the genocide of Russians by fulfilling its obligations under the international commitments," Antonov told Newsweek. "The desire of the NATO member states to use the territory of a neighboring state to establish a foothold in the struggle against Russia is also obvious."
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To Russia, Antonov said that the [Maidan] revolution was a "bloody coup d'état instigated by the West" in which "ultranationalist ideas came to power in Kiev." He said that policies viewed by Moscow as hostile such as the removal of Russian as a national language and the rehabilitation of nationalist Ukrainian figures such as Stepan Bandera, who collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II, had "taken root in Ukraine under external administration."
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Antonov argued that it was the "nationalist frenzy and revanchist sentiments of the Kiev regime" that resulted in the effective death of the Minsk deals as Ukraine chose "the path of rapid militarization" with help from abroad.
"The NATO member countries have commenced a military exploration of Ukraine," Antonov said. "It was flooded with Western weaponry while President Vladimir Zelensky announced Kiev's plans to acquire nuclear weapons which would threaten not only neighboring countries, but also the entire world."
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"In this context, Russia had no other choice but to recognize the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics," Antonov said. "Then, in accordance with Chapter VII, Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, with the authorization of the Federation Council of Russia and in execution of the Treaties of Friendship and Mutual Assistance with the Donetsk People's Republic and the Lugansk People's Republic, President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin made a decision to begin a special military operation."
"Its aim is to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine in order to reduce military threats posed by the Western states that are trying to use the fraternal Ukrainian people in the struggle against the Russians," he added.
Sergey Karaganov is a high level Russian political scientist and commentator who is also a presidential advisor in Moscow. He was interviewed (in English) by the Italian Corriere Della Sera
Sergey Karaganov: «We are at war with the West. The European security order is illegitimate»
An excerpt:
How can an attack be justified on such grounds?
«For 25 years people like myself have said that NATO expansion would lead to war. Putin said several times that if it came to Ukraine becoming a member of NATO, there would be no Ukraine anymore. In Bucharest in 2008 there was a plan of quick accession of Ukraine and Georgia to NATO. It was blocked by the efforts of Germany and France, but since that time Ukraine has been integrated into NATO. It was pumped up by weaponry and its troops were trained by NATO, their army getting stronger and stronger day by day. In addition we saw a very rapid increase of neo-Nazi sentiment especially among the military, the society and the ruling elite. It was clear that Ukraine had become something like Germany around 1936-1937. The war was inevitable, they were a spearhead of NATO. We made the very hard decision to strike first, before the threat becomes deadlier».
I recommend to read the whole Karaganov interview to better understand the Russian thinking.
"It was clear that Ukraine had become something like Germany around 1936-1937," said Karaganov. The 'western' public has difficulties to understand that. But it is the prevailing Russian view and when analyzing the developments in the Ukraine over the last years with Russian history in mind one can easily come to the same conclusion.
It is also what the Canadian Russia expert Patrick Armstrong had mentioned as the most important item after he had read Putin's speeches at the start of the war:
Had I been at home I would have read Putin’s speech earlier and understood sooner. What he is talking about is what the Soviet Union tried to do from 1933 onwards: namely to stop Hitler before he got started. This time Russia is able to do it by itself. In other words, Putin feels that he is making a pre-emptive attack to stop June 1941. This is very serious indeed and indicates that the Russians are going to keep going until they feel that they can safely stop.
The Russian view is not really that far fetched.
Here is a recent news agency video of officials of the Ukrainian Security Service SBU in front of a destroyed house seemingly praying with a priest for the deceased.
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Note the fascist Right Sector patch the official carries on his arm and back. The SBU has become a kind of Gestapo tasked with eliminating opposition elements in Ukraine. The UN's OHCHR, the OSCE, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International have all reported about the SBU's many crimes.
There is also an 'SS Galizien' patch on the officers back which refers to the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) which fought with Nazi-Germany against the Soviet Union. Like many other SS division the 1st Galician was involved in serious war-crimes but later mostly whitewashed. After the war many of its surviving officers fled to Canada and to the United States.
The offspring of those officers and other immigrants from the Ukraine played a noticeable role in lobbying for the war.
That has been successful as the U.S. had chosen to support extreme elements in Ukraine in opposition to peace. This has, as Aaron Maté writes, moved president Zelensky from an election campaign position of finding peace with Russia to becoming a war maniac:
On a warm October day in 2019, the eminent Russia studies professor Stephen F. Cohen and I sat down in Manhattan for what would be our last in-person interview (Cohen passed away in September 2020 at the age of 81).
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"Zelensky ran as a peace candidate," Cohen explained. "He won an enormous mandate to make peace. So, that means he has to negotiate with Vladimir Putin." But there was a major obstacle. Ukrainian fascists, Cohen warned, "have said that they will remove and kill Zelensky if he continues along this line of negotiating with Putin… His life is being threatened literally by a quasi-fascist movement in Ukraine."
Peace could only come, Cohen stressed, on one condition. "[Zelensky] can’t go forward with full peace negotiations with Russia, with Putin, unless America has his back," he said. "Maybe that won’t be enough, but unless the White House encourages this diplomacy, Zelensky has no chance of negotiating an end to the war. So the stakes are enormously high."
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Although Trump's impeachment failed to remove him from office, it succeeded in cementing the proxy war aims of its chief proponents: rather than support Zelensky's peace mandate, Ukraine would instead be used to "fight Russia over there."
I had earlier quoted an interview with Dmytro Yarosh, then the leader of the fascist Right Sector, who just a week after Zelenski had become president threatened him with death should he try to make peace with the eastern Ukrainian rebels. Yarosh later became an advisor to the chief general staff of the Ukrainian military. He is the main person behind the ongoing nazification of the Ukrainian military.
As ambassador Antonov has said the war in Ukraine is not only about the Ukraine.
Richard Falk, Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, is correctly pointing out the two levels of the war we see:
It is not that the empathy for Ukraine or support for Zelensky’s national resistance is misplaced, but that it has the appearance of being geopolitically orchestrated and manipulated in ways that other desperate national situations were not, and thus gives rise to suspicions about other, darker motives.
This is worrisome because these magnified concerns have acted as a principal way that the NATO West has gone out of its way to make the Ukrainian War about more than Ukraine. The wider war is best understood as occurring on two levels: a traditional war between the invading forces of Russia and the resisting forces of Ukraine as intertwined with an encompassing geopolitical war between the US and Russia. It is the prosecution of this latter war that presents the more profound danger to world peace, a danger that has been largely obscured or assessed as a mere extension of the Russia/Ukraine confrontation.
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If this two-level perception is correctly analyzed in its appreciation of the different actors with contradictory priorities, then it becomes crucial to understand that in the geopolitical war the US is the aggressor as much as in the traditional war on the ground Russia is the aggressor.
Falk concurs with professor John Mearsheimer who fears that the larger U.S. Russia conflict hidden behind the war in Ukraine may lead to widening of the conflict into a potential nuclear war.
Summarizing Mearsheimer's recent talk with Katrina vanden Heuvel and ambassador James Matlock, the former CIA analyst Ray McGovern writes:
Speaking at an April 7 webinar, Mearsheimer was, true to form, "offensively realistic". He explained: (1) the root cause lies in the April 2008 NATO summit Declaration that Ukraine (and Georgia) "will become members of NATO"; and (2) that Russia sees this as an "existential threat" and therefore "must win" this one.
For President Joe Biden and the Democrats, even though Ukraine poses zero strategic threat to the U.S., a Russian "win" would be, politically, a "devastating defeat", says Mearsheimer. In that sense, the conflict is a "must-win" for the US as well. Underscoring the obvious, he noted it is impossible for both sides to "win" – at least not in current circumstances.
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Noting that US academics and policy makers don’t believe NATO’s designs on Ukraine represent an existential threat to Russia, Mearsheimer is as blunt as his courteous mien permits. "What people in Washington believe is irrelevant. What matters is what Russia believes." He rejects the "mainstream" view that Putin’s Russia is motivated by expansionist aims, and asks the savants in Washington to put concrete evidence behind their claims. Moreover, "There is no evidence in what Putin has said that he wants to make Ukraine part of Russia," Mearsheimer adds.
Towards the end of a talk with Gonzalo Lira former Marine officer and UN Inspector Scott Ritter disputes the potential for escalation. The Pentagon, he says, knows the real situation on the ground and that the Ukrainian army will lose the war. Neither NATO, nor the U.S. nor single countries like Poland have their forces configured in a way that would allow them to successfully wage war against Russia. They would need more time to get ready than Russia will need to win the war in Ukraine.
Ritter predicts that the Pentagon will overrule any escalation the Ukraine warmongers in the State Department and National Security Council may plan and that those responsible for the current mess, Victoria Nuland, Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, will get silenced or removed after the midterms.
I hope he is right.
Discrimination of the Russian language is the Koshchey’s needle¹ of Ukrainian Nazism (Vzglyad, Igor Karaulov, March 23, 2022 — in Russian)
De-Nazification is one of the main demands regarding the Ukraine, for the sake of which Russia has launched the special military operation. This is a new concept for us, the meaning of which is not obvious. Therefore, it is necessary to specifically determine what should be the scope of de-Nazification of the Ukraine, with what methods it should be carried out. This issue causes great controversy in the Russian–Ukrainian negotiations. The Ukrainian side generally pretends that it does not understand what is at stake, since, according to the Kiev leadership, there is no Nazism and no Nazis in the Ukraine.
In a recent interview with RT, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that de-Nazification in the Ukraine implies the abolition of any laws that discriminate against the Russian-speaking population. In my opinion, this is the most important clarification. Until now, the theme of the fight against Nazism and the theme of the defense of the Russian language were conceived as separate categories. Now these two aspects can and should be considered in conjunction.
Today, the image of Nazism in the Ukraine is associated for us primarily with national battalions (or rather, national gangs), such as Azov, Aidar, Donbass, with paramilitary formations of the Right Sector, etc. Their symbols (for example, the Azov logo) often resemble or coincide with the symbols of the Third Reich. Sometimes flags with a swastika and banners of SS divisions (for example, Totenkopf) are found in their lairs. In many photographs, their commanders are happy to pose against the backdrop of such artifacts.
These strong visual images alone are able to convince a reasonable person of the abundance of Nazism in the Ukraine. No less impressive is the anti-human practice of these gangs: improvised prisons, torture at the Mariupol airport and in many other places in Donbass, the use of the population as human shields, shelling of refugee columns, extrajudicial killings of civilians, mining of hospitals, theaters and dangerous industrial facilities.
There are tens of thousands of these Nazis, no one forcibly mobilized them, they themselves chose their idea and their destiny. They put their symbols on their skin in the form of tattoos, which today in the besieged Mariupol, many of them are trying to remove with improvised means. The initial opinion that the national battalions are one thing, and the Armed Forces of the Ukraine are completely different, turned out to be not entirely correct. It turned out that convinced Nazis, like a mycelium, permeate all the power structures of the Ukraine. They make an accelerated career in the Armed Forces of the Ukraine, they are welcomed into the SBU, they play the role of commissars educating fighters in a nationalist spirit.
Nevertheless, I would venture to say that these crowds of tattooed sadists are only a secondary sign of Nazism. You can eliminate these people—others will come. You can ban Nazi organizations—new ones will appear in their place. So it will be, if you do not eliminate the conditions in which they bred. Nazi mold grows where it’s damp. And the ideological dampness in the Ukraine was bred by completely different people.
Such phenomena begins not with pumped-up youngsters, but with quiet, flimsy intellectuals. At first, they may seem like harmless provincial local historians, national costume enthusiasts, and experts in local customs. But it is they who create the “road map”, according to which the Nazi battalions will then draw their way. What will we see on this map? The image of a holy, suffering people with a forgotten but great history. The concept of aliens, invaders, oppressors who have been tyrannizing this people for centuries, preventing them from straightening their shoulders and taking their rightful place in the world. The concept of the right, svidomi² people and the wrong people—mankurts,³ Moskals, subhumans. The right people should be encouraged in every possible way, and the wrong ones should be driven out of their land.
Then comes the time of other people. Local historians in embroidered shirts are followed by people in gray suits—politicians and officials. These people are cynical, often corrupt, but they need an ideology to gain and retain power. Politicians take the picture of the world formed by the ideologists of Nationalism and translate it into the language of law.
This is how a legal system of discrimination is created, a system of domination of one part of the population over another. This domination is realized in two main directions: discrimination of the language of the people, declared second-class, and discrimination of its narrative, that is, its interpretation of history, culture, values.
An important feature of this system of domination is that it is not static. It has a built-in tightening mechanism. The pressure must constantly increase, the rights of the objectionable minority must be consistently curtailed. In the Ukraine, we saw this in full measure. It all started quite innocently; one could laugh at the fact that in a purely Russian-speaking city with a million inhabitants, such as Odessa or Dnepropetrovsk, all street signs are in Ukrainian. However, gradually the Russian language began to be expelled from education, from publishing, periodicals and from television, and in the end there was even a special regulation on the language of communication in stores, that is, the Russian language began to be persecuted in a purely domestic sphere.
It is the political and legal consolidation of the system of humiliation and suppression of a part of the people that guarantees the growth of marginal ultra-right groups that exist in any society into a powerful force. The state simply does not have any arguments against such groups, because, in fact, it is doing the same thing as they do, the difference is only in the pace, scale and methods. For example, when there was discrimination against blacks in the United States, the American state had no arguments against the Ku Klux Klan.
And in neighboring Canada, by the way, there was its own Ku Klux Klan, which acted against the Francophones, whom, despite their completely white skin color, the English-speaking population for a long time considered subhuman, since the then legislation provided for discrimination against both native French speakers and their culture. It was only about half a century ago that the current bilingualism was established in the country. And this is the best lesson that modern Ukraine-loving Canada could teach Ukrainians.
Thus, in order to prove the Nazi nature of the state built in the Ukraine, it is not at all necessary to list the crimes of the national battalions and demonstrate the collections of Nazi symbols they have collected. The fact that the Russian language, which is native to at least half of Ukrainian citizens, has no official status in that country, in itself makes the Ukrainian state Nazi.
By the way, the abolition of the law, which gave at least some rights to the Russian language, was the first act of the Verkhovna Rada after the overthrow of Yanukovych in 2014. It was because of that act that the withdrawal of Crimea and Donbass from the Ukraine began. It was then that the main priority of the new Ukrainian government was highlighted, but at the same time it became clear where its Koshchey’s needle¹ was.
In order for Nazism in the Ukraine to be destroyed and never revived, it is not enough to exterminate the Nazis and disperse their battalions. It is necessary to eradicate any discrimination against the Russian language and Russian culture.
Footnotes:
¹ Koshchey is a Russian fairytale villain who is immortal, except one weakness: his death is contained inside a needle—if the needle is broken, he dies. That’s why Koshchey goes to great lengths to protect it: he puts the needle inside an egg, the egg inside a duck, the duck inside a hare, the hare inside a chest, and chains the chest up to a tree on a far-away island. The Koshchey’s needle is used figuratively to refer to a well-hidden, but deadly weakness of a seemingly unstoppable evil, kinda like the Death Star’s thermal exhaust port.
² Svidomi is Ukrainian for “conscious”, “aware”. In the period when political debate still existed in the Ukraine (before Maidan), Ukrainian Nationalists kept calling those Ukrainians who acted according to their ideology svidomi, thus implying that their opponents are either stupid, unthinking or uninformed. That’s how svidomi became another political term for Ukrainian Nationalists and their followers. A parallel can be drawn to “woke”.
³ Mankurt is a brainwashed slave, made to forget his name, family and tribe, from Kyrgyz writer Chinghiz Aitmatov’s novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years.
Posted by: S | Apr 11 2022 20:16 utc | 77
I posted this quote on b’s previous piece but I’ll post it again slightly expanded.
Lavrov stated on Monday that the operation in Ukraine aims to put an end to America’s plans for global domination.
He also criticised EU top diplomat Josep Borrell for his latest statements, and noted that now the rules have changed drastically.
“This is an utterly serious change, even in the policy that the EU and the West under US leadership – there is no doubt about it – began to pursue after the start of our special military operation. A policy that reflects anger, in some ways even frenzy, and which, of course, is determined (…) by Ukraine being transformed into a foothold for the final suppression of Russia”.
What astounds me and of course it’s driven by the West’s inherent racism, that imbues the very nature of Western society, is the complete lack of understanding of Russia’s motive for neutralising the incipient Fascist state called Ukraine, itself an expendable, disposable ‘asset’ of US Imperialism! Yes, the Imperialist powers will fight Russia to the very last Ukrainian!
They either don’t see or refuse to recognise the 27 million Soviet citizens who died in the Great Patriotic war, including my maternal relatives, I might add, that it’s the fact that every, single Russian family lost at least one family member during that conflagration!
And when I first read the following, actually some time ago, it brought home the fact that, the word ‘Untermensch’ or ‘under people’ is embedded in Ukrainian society’s view of ethnic Russians, you realise why even while 1000s of Russian soldiers die fighting in Ukraine, that the Russian people are solidly behind the ‘police action’ and that support has actually increased!
Bogdan Boutkevitch: “We don’t need to understand the Donbas, we need to understand Ukrainian national interests. Donbas must be exploited as a resource, which it is.” “At least 1.5 million people are superfluous“. “No matter how cruel it may sound, there is a certain category of people who must be exterminated.”
And who is funding these Fascists?
From WIKIPEDIA:
“According to the interim financial report Hromadske TV was funded in 2013 by the Netherlands Embassy (793,089 Ukrainian hryvnias, -Z-), the US Embassy (399,650 2) and by George Soros’ International Renaissance Foundation (247,860).[16] By June 2014 Hromadske TV had received another 558,842a from the Government of Canada, 394,1812 from the Fritt Ord Foundation, 287,898? from the Embassy of the United States, Kyiv, 207,4022 from an auction organized by ‘Dukat’ (the Auction House) and 1,875,180a from individual contributors.”?
Source: https://youtu.be/ICkcyt87Lw0
Posted by: Barofsky | Apr 11 2022 20:34 utc | 80
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