The U.S. sponsored coup of 2014 took Yanukovych, who was acceptable to Russia, out of power and replaced him with a Western-leaning president who was hand picked by Uncle Sam [...]
Though they are being fought in the confusion of a single catastrophic conflict, there are four closely related, but distinct, wars being fought in Ukraine. The first is the war within Ukraine. The second is the war between Russia and Ukraine. The third is the proxy war between NATO and Russia. And the fourth is the direct war between the United States and Russia. Deconstructing this single conflict into its four real wars may be necessary to understand the issues that must be resolved if a negotiated settlement is to be possible.
The latent domestic problems that have been ripped open by this war are not new. They are the torn fabric of the Ukrainian nation. They go back long before the war, and the war will not be safely resolved before they too are finally resolved.
Ukraine has always been a nation divided: northwestern and central Ukraine, which had once been part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, have always faced west to Europe; the southeast, long part of the Russian Empire, has always faced east to Russia. Historically, western Ukraine has voted for presidential candidates with European-oriented policies, and eastern Ukraine has voted for presidents with Russian-oriented policies. It is a national tug-of-war that always risked ripping the country in two.
The tug-of-war became overt during the 2004 election between Viktor Yanukovych and his Russian-leaning eastern base and Vikto Yushchenko and his American and European-leaning western base. When Yushchenko was forced to appoint Yanukovych as his prime minister, the nation and its government was being dangerously pulled in opposing directions.
For the first time, the nationalist view that saw only western, European Ukraine as truly Ukrainian was represented, through Yushchenko, in government. It polarized the nation. Soon his was the most unpopular government in the history of Ukraine, and six years later, Yushchenko would receive only 5.5% of the national vote. Yanukovych’s subsequent election was a bitter defeat for the nationalists. Nicolai Petro, Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island and the author of The Tragedy of Ukraine, says that “it was seen as a betrayal that proved that elections alone could no longer be relied upon to guarantee Ukrainian independence.” That set the stage for the coup four years later.
The U.S. sponsored coup of 2014 took Yanukovych, who was acceptable to Russia, out of power and replaced him with a Western-leaning president who was hand picked by Uncle Sam. The western and nationalist participants in the coup saw it as a vehicle to pull Ukraine back from Russia and return it to its European-Ukrainian identity. Petro quotes Igor Guzhva, who says that “for the first time in modern Ukrainian history, a change of regime had taken place through the assault of one part of the country on the rights of another.” The ethnic Russian regions of Ukraine had been defeated in a coup.
The new government guaranteed amnesty for all acts of violence that defended the coup. (There were many.) Petro explains that the new government had to rely on radical, nationalist elements and their militias. The ethnic Russians of the Donbas would subsequently suffer attacks on their language, their culture, their rights, their property, and their lives.
The first elected government after the coup, the government of Pyotr Poroshenko, became, in Petro’s words, the “prime sponsor…of Ukrainian nationalism.” Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at Kent, says, “Poroshenko inherited a government largely made up of militants.” His government represented “a monist vision of Ukraine statehood that denied the pluralist alternative demanded by the Donbas…”
The Donbas rebelled against the coup government, and by May 2014 had approved referendums declaring some form of autonomy. The war within Ukraine had begun.
It was the U.S. supported coup that exploited the inherent rip in Ukraine and was the catalyst for the first war.
If the U.S. bears a large share of the blame for the war within Ukraine, Russia bears the blame for the war between Russia and Ukraine.
That is not to accept the Western mantra of the “unprovoked” war. Russia has legitimate security concerns and may truly have felt that, in the words of its ambassador to the U.S., they had “come to the point when we have no room to retreat.” But that does not justify the assault on Ukraine. The war was a choice made by Russia without authorization by the United Nations or an immediate need for self-defense. It is an illegal war. And Russia bears responsibility for starting it.
In a February 7 opinion piece in The New York Times, Christopher Caldwell asks, “Russia started the war between Russia and Ukraine. Who started the war between Russia and the United States?”
The U.S. and its NATO allies are providing Ukraine with the money, the weapons, the training, the intelligence, and the targeting to fight Russia. They are providing the plans and the war-games. They are providing an ever-increasing list of advanced weapons that cross previously self-imposed red lines. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said that “NATO, in essence, is engaged in a war with Russia through a proxy and is arming that proxy. War means war.” The speaker of the Russian Duma drew a similar conclusion: “The U.S. is taking part in the military operations in Ukraine. Today, Washington is basically coordinating and engineering military operations, thus directly participating in the military actions against our country.”
In his Times piece, Caldwell points out that “In an age of smart devices, robotics and remote control, the United States’ involvement in the war has always been greater than it appeared.” He explains that “Most of the new weapons’ destructive power comes from their being bound into an American information network…So the United States is participating in these military operations at the moment they happen. It is fighting.”
So, the U.S. and NATO bear their share of responsibility for the proxy war against Russia militarily. But they also bear responsibility diplomatically. Twice, in March and April 2022, Ukraine and Russia were ready to negotiate an end to the war that satisfied both their interests. But twice the U.S. and the United Kingdom intervened and put an end to these negotiations.
Up to that moment, the war between Russia and Ukraine was Russia’s responsibility; from that moment on, the U.S. and the UK shared responsibility. The war was now being fought, not to defend Ukraine’s interests, but to advance American and NATO interests in “a war that is in many ways bigger than Russia [and] bigger than Ukraine,” in the confessional words of State Department spokesman Ned Price.
It is the United States that bears the bulk of responsibility for its proxy war against Russia.
“The CIA argued that…it would have to be covert…Everyone understood the stakes…If the attack were traceable to the United States, ‘it’s an act of war.’”
According to reporting by Seymour Hersh, this was the internal discussion in the United States government before it decided to to attack the Nord Stream pipeline, jointly operated by Russia and Germany, on September 26, 2022.
If Hersh is correct, the U.S. is responsible for the, until now unknown, direct war on Russia. “It’s an act of war,” as the members of the Biden authorized task force, which was headed by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and included representatives of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, the State Department and the Treasury Department, were fully aware.
Their first meeting was held in December 2021. Hersh points out that the timeline reveals that President Biden had begun planning an act of war against Russia “two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine.”
The United States is responsible for the direct war on Russia.
There are four wars being fought at once in the war in Ukraine. Russia bears responsibility for the one that gets all the media attention: Russia’s war on Ukraine. But Washington bears significant responsibility for the three wars that don’t get enough attention: the war within Ukraine, the proxy U.S. and NATO war on Russia, and the direct U.S. war on Russia. If a comprehensive and lasting settlement to the war in Ukraine is to have a chance of succeeding, it may be necessary to analyze the war into its four related, but distinct, conflicts and to come to understand the causes and issues behind each.
Originally published on 2023-02-16
About the author: Ted Snider is a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets.
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/LegalStatement!
DonatetoSupportUs
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.
Šį straipsnį paskatino parašyti JAV specialiųjų tarnybų bei Lietuvos politinio elito sukelta ir eskaluojama plataus masto karo su Rusija propaganda ir tautinės nesantaikos kurstymas visame pasaulyje ir ypač Lietuvos viešoje erdvėje. Masinės Vakarų informacinės agresijos prieš Rusiją pretekstu tapo globalinė JAV-NATO karo nusikaltėlių gaujos klastotė 2014-03-16 Krymo pusiasalio gyventojų referendumo rezultatai ir jų pagrindu įvykęs Krymo prisijungimas prie Rusijos, savo istorinės, etninės Tėvynės. Vakarų reakcija į šį absoliučiai teisėtą Krymo gyventojų pasirinkimą, Vakarų inicijuotas ekonominis karas prieš Rusiją yra absoliučiai neteisėti tarptautinės teisės požiūriu – Vakarų sankcijos Rusijai už Krymo prisijungimą yra tik dar vienas globalinis JAV-NATO valstybių tarptautinis nusikaltimas. ...
Professor Noam Chomsky said it would be “no small trick” for the Ferguson protests to turn into an anti-racism and social justice movement, considering America’s founding principles are slavery and the extermination of the indigenous population. In a sweeping interview covering everything from Iraq and Syria to China, capitalism, and the protests in Ferguson, MIT linguistics professor Chomsky told GRITtv’s Laura Flanders that events in Ferguson and the protests that have followed show how little race relations in the United States have advanced since the end of the Civil War.“This is a very racist society,” Chomsky said. “It’s pretty shocking. ...
The United States is indisputably the world’s most frequent and extensive wager of aggressive war, largest occupier of foreign lands, and biggest weapons dealer to the world. But when the United States peeps out from under the blankets where it lies shivering with fear, it sees itself as an innocent victim. It has no holiday to keep any victorious battle in everyone’s mind. It has a holiday to remember the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor — and now also one, perhaps holier still, to recall, not the “shock and awe” destruction of Baghdad, but the crimes of September 11, 2001, ...
Hitler was a very good student. Those who read Mein Kampf will find therein many good words about America. More precisely, not about the whole of America, but about the numerous attempts of the American socialists to change the foundations of the American way of life.The ideas of forced sterilization and forced abortion were adopted by Hitler from the founder of feminism, American socialist Margaret Sanger. Madame Sanger even founded a special clinic to promote mass abortions of black people to reduce their number with the aim of completely eradicating blacks in America. This organization still exists–it is called Planned ...
At the first glance, an ordinary citizen of the globe can think that probably it must be that everything that is now happening in Banderistan Ukraine and around, including and reconstruction of international relations and reformulation of the global order in politics, is just a big misunderstanding. For the same people, probably NATO's constant expansion to the east since 1999, i.e., to the direction of Russia, has nothing to do with the attempt to subdue and tear Russia apart as wanted the same both Napoleon (in 1812) and Hitler (in 1941). They will tell you that instead of a war ...
My father was a doctor in the British Royal Navy, and I grew up traveling by troop-ship between the last outposts of the British Empire – Trincomalee, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Malta, Aden, Singapore – and living in and around naval dockyards in England and Scotland.The British naval bases where I grew up and the fading empire they supported are now part of history. Chatham Dockyard. a working dockyard for over 400 years, is now a museum and tourist attraction. Trincomalee Dockyard, where I was born, has been in the news as a site where the Sri Lankan Navy is accused of torturing and ...
The U.S. Has Only Been At Peace For 21 Years Total Since Its BirthIn 2011, Danios wrote:Below, I have reproduced a year-by-year timeline of America’s wars, which reveals something quite interesting: since the United States was founded in 1776, she has been at war during 214 out of her 235 calendar years of existence. In other words, there were only 21 calendar years in which the U.S. did not wage any wars.To put this in perspective:* Pick any year since 1776 and there is about a 91% chance that America was involved in some war during that calendar year.* No U.S. president truly qualifies as a ...
Trump the Anti-Globalist Champion of the People?Many Americans who’ve been supporting President-elect Trump see him as the populist leader who will save America from ruin. Trump supporters have been unfairly marginalized and pigeonholed by the MSM broad stroke as white supremacy extremists bent on plunging America back into a new Jim Crowism era and a second Civil War along with a growing number of angry, uneducated, disenfranchised blue collar, mostly white male redneck loser types. Despite a spike in racist graffiti and vandalism since the election, this gross overgeneralization is the Hillary/Soros/Rothschild/MSM’s desperate attempt to discredit Trump’s victory while Soros ...
The horrendous bloodshed this week in Gaza is directly related to US President Trump’s controversial decision to relocate the American embassy to the contested city of Jerusalem.The US bears responsibility in large part for the atrocity in which more than 60 unarmed Palestinians were shot dead by Israeli military. This was a cold-blooded massacre.Thousands of others were maimed from live fire. An eight-month-old baby girl, Layla Ghandour, was among the victims after she died from asphyxiation from tear gas fired at the protesters.Washington’s shameless defense of Israel’s brutal use of lethal force as “restrained” and its subsequent blocking of an ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]SaveSave
By the time you read this piece, it will already be out of date. The reason’s simple enough. No matter what mayhem I describe, with so much all-American weaponry in this world of ours, there’s no way to keep up. Often, despite the headlines that go with mass killings here, there’s almost no way even to know.On this planet of ours, America is the emperor of weaponry, even if in ways we normally tend not to put together. There’s really no question about it. The all-American powers-that-be and the arms makers that go with them dream up, produce, and sell ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.
American capitalism is based on plunder. With the continental USA plundered, American capitalism hoped to continue enriching itself by plundering Russia as it did under Yeltsin, carefully including the Russian “Atlanticist Integrationists” in the spoils in order to have support from the liberal, progressive forces in Russia for stripping Russia of its assets. But Putin more or less put a halt to the American/Israeli rape of Russia, although it still continues through the neoliberal economics that Harvard brainwashed into the Russian central bank and economics profession. Brainwashed Russian economists are the main reason Washington is able to punish a powerful ...
How can it be that in virtually all of the Presidential-candidate head-to-head Democratic versus Republican polling that was done of both Democratic and Republican candidates during the primaries, the preferred Democratic candidate against any one of the Republican candidates was Bernie Sanders, but he almost certainly won’t be that Party’s nominee (and there’s more on that here); and the preferred Republican candidate against either one of the Democratic candidates was John Kasich, but he certainly won’t be the Republican nominee?Sanders and Kasich also scored the highest in his respective Party for net favorability rating, but almost certainly neither candidate will ...
US-installed Ukrainian fascists commemorated Poroshenko’s established victory in Europe Day of Remembrance by vowing to “destroy Moscow,” free its people, and let them “shape their own future.”Ukrainian ultranationalists attending a May 8 commemoration included 14th SS Waffen Grenadier division veterans, Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) members, and Nazi-infested volunteer battalions involved in what they call “the Russian-Ukrainian war.”Svoboda party overt Nazis participated. Their slogan is “Ukraine for the Ukrainians” – meaning ethnically pure, free of Jews, Russians and others not wanted, by extermination or other means.Party member Yuri Sirotyuk called war on Russia Ukraine’s historic mission. “I believe that if we ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
Watching the Ken Burns-Lynn Novick 18-hour series, “The Vietnam War,” is an emotional experience. Whether you served in the US military during the war or marched in the streets to end it, you cannot remain untouched by this documentary. The battle scenes are powerful, the stories of US veterans and Vietnamese soldiers who fought on both sides of the war compelling.The toll in human terms caused by the war is staggering. Nearly 58,000 Americans and 2 to 3 million Vietnamese, many of them civilians, were killed in the war. Untold numbers were wounded. Many US veterans of the war suffer ...
It’s all over but the postmortems. Trump and Clinton are their parties’ presumptive nominees. Choice for voters in November amounts to death by hanging or firing squad. Democracy is pure fantasy. None whatever exists. Trump was the last GOP aspirant left standing after all others dropped out, an unlikely choice, a surprise winner, prevailing despite party bosses opposing him.Democrat power brokers chose Clinton before primary/caucus season began. The race was over before it started.Voters in November get to choose between a dirty business as usual billionaire racist, demagogue and a recklessly dangerous neocon racketeer, war criminal, Wall Street tool she ...
If we have to use force, it is because we are America.We are the indispensable nation(Madeleine K. Albright, February 1998)[1]Madam SecretaryAs a matter of very fact, regardless to the reality in global politics that the Cold War was over in 1989, Washington continued to drive toward the getting the status of a global hyperpower at any expense for the rest of the world. The Balkans undoubtedly became the first victim in Europe of the old but esthetically repacked American global imperialism. The US' administration is a key player during the last 25 years of the Balkan crisis caused by the ...
