If you read most western commentaries about the war in the Ukraine, they are all about saving the Ukraine to fight another day, about rebuilding an army of 800,000 soldiers, “militarising Ukraine to its teeth,” about “armed non-alignment,” about hanging on until Russia collapses, about Ukraine’s right to join NATO. These are among the many western versions of Ukraine’s future existence as an anti-Russian entity. They assume Russia’s military defeat, or a temporary “truce” until the next war which the Ukraine, they say, will win. Indeed, according to many sources in the Mainstream Media, the Ukraine is “winning,” so why stop the war? We have only to wait a little while and Russia will collapse. Or President Vladimir V. Putin can be lured into a “Minsk III,” that is, another bogus agreement with the west, offering a breathing spell to the Ukrainian army to rebuild and refit to fight another day. Putin has been played in the past, why not one more time? It is a question of perspective. Many Russians have concluded that the US and NATO are swindlers, incapable of agreement or of respecting an agreement, if concluded, incapable also of operating with common sense. They are nedogovorosposobnyi.
Background
A common western assumption is that the Ukraine is just another former Soviet Socialist Republic to acquire as the buckle of the NATO encirclement of Russia. This assumption is wrong. Before 1991, the Ukraine never existed as an independent state. In the High Middle Ages, it was part of Kievan Rus, with Kiev as its commanding centre for territories extending to Pskov and Novgorod in the northwest and including, inter alia, the Medieval principalities of Vladimir, Suzdal, Kostroma, Tver, and Moscow (mid 12th c.). In 1240, the Mongols or Tatars sacked Kiev and Kievan Rus disappeared. Novgorod survived as a city state, and there followed a struggle for dominance among the surviving Russian principalities, where Moscow emerged as the dominant centre of power. The grand prince of Vladimir and prince of Moscow Dmitrii Donskoi defeated the Mongols in 1380 at Kulikovo Pole, south of Moscow. It is a key moment in the history of Russia. The “Tatar yoke” was heavy to bear. For Russians the Tatars were a story to tell their children to encourage their good behaviour. “Only an uninvited guest,” goes an old Russian saying, “is worse than a Tatar.” The territories in the south, what had been part of Kievan Rus, and Byelorussia further north, became disputed borderlands between Poland-Lithuania, Moscow, and in the south, the Crimean Tatars and the Ottoman empire. These borderlands became a no man’s land for fugitives from Polish-Lithuanian and Muscovite justice, so to speak. Poland disappeared at the end of the 18th century, so did the Crimean Tatars. Catherine the Great established the Russian state on the shores of the Black Sea in Odessa and the Crimea. It became the dominant power in the former contested borderlands. Moscow replaced Kiev as the centre of Russian power and civilisation.
There was no Ukrainian state as such until the Russian Revolution and then only briefly, a few months in 1917-1919, limited to the city of Kiev, dominated by rootless intellectuals and middleclass politicians, out of touch with the revolutionary mass movement. At the time, the great powers, both European coalitions of WWI, eyed a satellite Ukrainian state as a place d’armes from which to attack then Bolshevik Moscow. This included France, Britain, Wilhelmine Germany, and Poland (re-established in November 1918). During the interwar years Poland and Nazi Germany continued this policy and France again in 1939-1940 after the outbreak of World War II before it collapsed in May-June 1940. The Grand Alliance (Britain, the USSR and United States) established in 1941 against the Axis powers represented a brief interregnum in western policy, only to be resumed after 1945, inter alia, by the US and Britain. That western policy of creating a satellite Ukraine and a place d’armes against Moscow has continued to the present day.
Collapse of the USSR
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a Ukrainian state emerged from the wreckage, but included large territories, populated by Russians. These areas could prove to be a danger to the new Ukrainian state if it pursued policies hostile to Moscow as the NATO powers envisaged. In 1990 the US and its allies promised to the USSR that NATO would not advance “one inch” toward the east, but the promise was false. NATO moved up to Russian western frontiers. Plans were developed to include the Ukraine in NATO. The trouble was that large territories of the new Ukrainian state with the exception of its far western districts, were populated in large majority by Russian speakers, or quite simply by Russians beached in a foreign entity after the USSR collapsed. The government in Kiev might have managed this potential problem if it had pursued inclusive domestic policies and maintained good relations with the Russian Federation. It did not do so because essentially the Ukrainian state was an artificial creation. Its history and peoples for more than a millennium were indelibly linked to Russia through religion, language, culture, intermarriage, besides history and shared experience. For Ukrainian “nationalists” and neo-Nazis this was a grave weakness that could only be remedied in one way, the rejection of Russia, Russian culture, history, religion, language, everything Russian, for otherwise why should a Ukrainian state exist, linked in so many ways to Russia? Probably, it could not have done so, but who knows. The neo-Nazis and other Ukrainian ultras, obviously, did not think it could survive.
Western Policy
NATO, the European Union, the United States, continued to pursue the traditional western policy of transforming the Ukraine into a place d’armes against Moscow and the buckle of encirclement of the Russian state. They therefore encouraged and financed a policy of hostility toward the Russian Federation culminating in the February 2014 coup d’état against the elected government in Kiev. The new regime, spewed hatred of Russia and Russians, heavily influenced by neo-Nazis celebrating the history of Ukrainians who had collaborated with Nazi Germany. It ran summer camps for teenagers teaching hatred of Russia, the handling of arms, and the Hitler salute. The putschist government launched an armed campaign, in effect a civil war against internal resistance to the coup d’état in Kiev. This meant most importantly in the Crimea and Donbas, in the districts of Lugansk and Donetsk. The Crimea easily broke away, but a bloody civil war erupted in the Donbas. In fighting in 2014-2015 the Russian militias there succeeded in establishing independent governments in spite of Kiev’s attempts to crush them. This civil war continued until February 2022—notwithstanding the so-called Minsk I and II accords intended to settle the conflict, but never respected in the west.
For the US/NATO the Minsk accords served only to cover the resting and refitting of the Ukrainian army. In the so-called Maidan-Ukraine, the Russian language was banned, Russian history and culture “cancelled,” Russian books burned, monuments destroyed, the Russian Orthodox Church taken over. The history of collaboration with the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941 was celebrated. Nazi collaborators were treated as fathers of the Nation, in particular Stepan Bandera, whose face appeared on stamps and in whose memory, statutes were erected. Ukrainian “nationalists” needed an anti-Russian ideology and neo-Nazism fit the bill. The United States, Britain, Canada had welcomed Nazi collaborators as emigrants or sought to protect them in Europe from the victorious Red Army after 1945, so there was no problem in turning a blind eye to the celebration of neo-Nazism in the Ukraine. Torch light parades were commonplace shouting hatred of Russia and inviting Russians to “pack up their shit and leave.” Any critics in the west who dared to note the obvious presence of Ukrainian neo-Nazis, fascists in effect, were shouted down and smeared as Putin dupes. Deny, deny, deny became part of western propaganda. Hear no evil; see no evil. Russia and its president are vilified. It is always Russia’s fault.
The west claims that Putin started an “illegal” war by “invading” the Ukraine. In fact, the war started in the aftermath of the US/NATO engineered coup d’état in Kiev in February 2014. The US shelled out five billions over time to make it happen. It was a proxy war, backed by the west and intended to encircle European Russia. The west claims that the war was “unprovoked,” gratuitous aggression, but that is not true. The real aggressor made itself out to be the victim. In 2014 a new Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko boasted that “Our children will go to schools and kindergartens, theirs will be holed up in basements… This is exactly how we will win this war!” Russian children would be holed up in basements because of Ukrainian attacks on civilians. According to the anti-Kiev resistance, an estimated 14,000 civilians were killed in these attacks between 2014 and 2022. In one of the first atrocities, as though it was some kind of springtime festival, 48 Russians were burned alive in front of video and TV cameras in the Trade Unions building in Odessa in early May 2014. More than two hundred people were wounded. Young women were seen preparing Molotov cocktails to throw at the trapped Russians. There was no shortage of atrocities to inspire the anti-Kiev resistance. A mother and child were killed in a random Ukrainian shelling. She became known as the “Madonna of the Donbas”; a photograph shows her bled out, her legs mangled, still holding close her dead ten-month old child. The Maidan regime denied everything and so did the western powers. Be that as it may, Ukrainian forces attacked civilians trying to vote in an early referendum to approve independence and eventual union with the Russian Federation. Putin warned Kiev in vain not to use military force against its own people. The coup d’état and Ukrainian attacks against Russian “sub-humans” and “terrorists” provoked the organised resistance movement. “Truck drivers and miners,” President Putin said of the Donbas militias, formidable people, the opolchentsy, who beat the Ukrainian army. There is a Russian saying: The Russian takes a long time to harness his horses, but once he does he rides very fast.
Matters came to a head in January-February 2022. Open intelligence sources reported the massing of Ukrainian forces on the front lines of the Donbas, heavy artillery daily bombarded civilian areas. A Ukrainian invasion of Lugansk and Donetsk appeared imminent which the Donetsk and Lugansk militias could not have repulsed. In mid-February the Donbas authorities ordered an evacuation of civilians to Russia. In Moscow, it appeared as though a Ukrainian invasion of the independent Donbas was about to begin.
The Russian population in the Donbas had long mistrusted President Putin and resented his willingness to leave them under Ukrainian sovereignty (via the Minsk accords). One had only to listen carefully to the statements of Aleksandr V. Zakharchenko, the charismatic leader of the Donetsk republic, to note the strains with Moscow. If the Crimea, Russians thought, why not the Donbas? In August 2018 Zakharchenko was assassinated by Ukrainian secret services. Putin understood that the west had duped him, although he was loath to admit it. The Russian government was thus faced with the choice of letting the anti-Kiev militias be crushed as the Croatians had done to the Serbs in Krajina in August 1995, or of intervening to thwart a looming invasion of the Donbas. The west likes to apply the rule: what is good for me is not good for thee. In fact, Putin had no choice because his reputation would have been ruined had he failed to act. He announced the beginning of the “Special Military Operation” in late February 2022.
Special Military Operation
In March-April 2022 there were negotiations in Istanbul to settle the conflict. It looked like they might succeed, and so the British and Americans intervened to block the conclusion of an agreement. The conflict became a proxy NATO war against Russia, with the US and NATO powers pouring several hundred billion dollars and euros into supporting the Maidan regime in Kiev. The west claimed to be supporting “freedom and democracy” but it was nothing of the sort. A new president, Volodymyr Zelenskii, campaigned on a peace platform, but threatened by the neo-Nazis, continued the civil war, declared martial law, banned virtually all opposition parties, closed down opposition newspapers and TV stations. Opposition politicians and journalists were assassinated, jailed, or forced to flee. Zelenskii now operates as an unelected dictator. Nazi paraphernalia and symbols are commonplace and freely displayed in torchlight parades copied from Nazi models in the 1930s. It is not surprising that the western powers would support a neo-Nazi regime in the Ukraine or turn a blind eye to it. History was being repeated for western elites had been sympathetic to fascism in Europe during the 1930s.
The EU, NATO declared that secession from the Ukraine was “illegal,” referencing the UN charter. The original UN idea enshrined in the Charter was to balance the territorial integrity of states against the right of peoples to self-determination. However, self-determination could not be decided by force. The trouble is that the US and EU flaunt the UN Charter, and in reality, self-determination is almost always decided by force or the law of the strongest, for example, in Catalonia, Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Palestine, Syria, Nigerian Biafra, Tamil Sri Lanka, Armenian Artsakh, the Confederate States of America, etc. For Maidan Kiev, its lost territories are mere properties to be recovered without any consideration of the people who live there. Thus, property rights take precedence over the right of self-determination, well, unless sponsored by the west. The EU, NATO states declare that they are waging a struggle for “democracy” against an invading dictatorship. This assertion does not correspond to reality. As Russian armies advance, they are welcomed as liberators, understandable in view of Ukrainian Russophobia.
So Where Are We Now?
The Russian army continues to advance against weakening Ukrainian resistance. Russia is winning the proxy war against NATO. At home Putin enjoys strong popular support. The army takes in approximately 35,000 volunteers every month. Public opinion wants the government to get on with the war and finish off the Ukrainian army. Think about it: approximately twenty-seven million people in the USSR died defeating the last Nazi regime in Europe. Is it possible that Russia would allow a second neo-Nazi regime to remain on its southern borders?
This question has probably not occurred to US president Donald Trump, who is a poor historian. If it has, he is trying a finesse by organising a ceasefire in order to freeze the conflict, provide a breathing spell to the Ukrainian armies to rest and refit once again, and to get western troops into the Ukraine as “guarantors.” Russians are not stupid people and it appears that most Russians, excepting certain business elements, will not fall for a Minsk III or tolerate the continuation of an anti-Russian Ukrainian state, backed by NATO. Trump pretends to act as a disinterested intermediary, but he is nothing of the kind. The US remains a co-belligerent in the war; Russia is still the enemy. Putin continues apparently to play up to Trump hoping to obtain economic improvements in Russian-US relations. Why he thinks he can do that is a mystery since no one else, not even in NATO, trusts Trump to keep an agreement from one day to the next. “No matter how much you feed the wolf,” goes a Russian proverb, “it will always look to the forest.” If Putin comes to terms with Trump, he will expose himself to potential US blackmail in the future, just as Canada has learned in free trade with the US. One cannot ignore history; the evidence is there. The wolf remains a wolf. Remember, Trump is nedogovorosposobnyi; his predecessors also were. The Americans got a reputation early on as astute “Yankee traders,” but this was perhaps a euphemism. With them you always had to mind your pockets and your back.
On the other hand, Kiev and NATO have submitted terms to Russia as though they are the victorious belligerent. They are not in spite of western claims to the contrary. In war the victorious army dictates terms to the defeated side, not the other way around. That is why until now no settlement has been possible. This conflict looks to being settled on the battlefield. Most of the EU states want to keep the war going in hopes that the Russian economy will break under sanctions and that the Ukraine will eventually take the upper hand. This seems like a pipe dream. The Ukrainian army has suffered horrendous casualties. To replace them, the Kiev authorities have to resort to violent press gangs, using bludgeons and fists, to kidnap new recruits off the streets. Desertions and resistance to conscription are widespread. Now, the government cannot supply electricity or heat to its largest cities, unable to stop the Russian air bombardment of infrastructure and power plants. Kiev cries foul but it was the Ukraine which first so acted, cutting off water and electricity to the Crimea. Pot calling Kettle black, one could say.
So, is the Ukrainian army finally beginning to disintegrate? It is hard to say; it might be, but who knows how long the war will continue?
