How The West Provoked The War In Ukraine.

With Trump and Putin's Recent Meeting, It Is Worth Looking Back At The History Of The War In Ukraine.

Trump and Putin’s Alaska meeting wrapped up yesterday with no real answer as to whether there will be a negotiated peace deal to end the war in Ukraine.

As Kelley Beaucar Vlahos from Responsible Statecraft noted, “no deal, nor a framework for a deal was announced” after the meeting.

While the meeting will hopefully make inroads to soon end the war in Ukraine, the real question is: how did the war start in the first place, and what originally soured U.S./Russia relations?

The hidden answer to this question, never reported on in mainstream media, is a coordinated neo-con campaign to launch a new Cold War with Russia and provoke a Russian invasion of Ukraine, to use the country and its people as cannon fodder to weaken Russia.

In this article, I will review the real history of the Ukraine war and the new Cold War with Russia.

Expanding NATO

Since the end of the Cold War, Russia experts across the board warned that expanding NATO membership eastward would ruin American/Russian relations and launch hostilities between the two countries.

In a 1997 Op-Ed for the New York Times, the well-respected U.S. diplomat George F. Kennan wrote that, “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”

He wanted that “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking. And, last but not least, it might make it much more difficult, if not impossible, to secure the Russian Duma's ratification of the Start II agreement and to achieve further reductions of nuclear weaponry.”

He noted that this view, “is not only mine alone but is shared by a number of others with extensive and in most instances more recent experience in Russian matters”.

NATO ignored this warning and expanded NATO to the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999, and Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004.

NATO also bombed the former Yugoslavia, a Russian ally, in 1999, leading to its balkanization and breakup.

The bombing was billed as a “humanitarian intervention” done to protect Albanians in Kosovo from the Serbian government led by Slobodan Milosevic, but in reality was geopolitically motivated.

In reality, the West armed the Kosovo militant group KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) in an attempt to incite a harsh Serbian government response to justify the bombing.

As James Byron Bissett, the former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, later wrote, “Media reports have revealed that as early as 1998, the central intelligence agency assisted by the British Special Armed Services, were arming and training Kosovo Liberation Army members in Albania to foment armed rebellion in Kosovo. The KLA terrorists were sent back into Kosovo to assassinate Serbian mayors, ambush Serbian policemen and do everything possible to incite murder and chaos. The hope was that with Kosovo in flames NATO could intervene and in so doing, not only overthrow Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian strong man, but more importantly, provide the aging and increasingly irrelevant military organization with a reason for its continued existence.”

As Noam Chomsky said, “In the year prior to the bombing, according to Western sources about two thousand people were killed, according to the British government, which was the most hawkish element of the Alliance, up until January 1999 a majority of killings came from the KLA guerillas who were coming in as they said, to try to incite a harsh Serbian response, which they got, in order to appeal to Western humanitarians to bomb.” Chomsky noted that “They were being supported by the CIA in those months.”

Chomsky noted that the real motivation for the bombing was geopolitical, saying:

Actually, we have for the first time a very authoritative comment on that from the highest level of Clinton administration, which is something that one could have surmised before, but now it is asserted. This is from Strobe Talbott who was in charge of the Pentagon/State Department intelligence Joint Committee on the diplomacy during the whole affair including the bombing, so that’s very top of Clinton administration; he just wrote the forward to a book by his Director of Communications, John Norris, and in the forward he says if you really want to understand what the thinking was of the top of Clinton administration this is the book you should read and take a look on John Norris’s book and what he says is that the real purpose of the war had nothing to do with concern for Kosovar Albanians. It was because Serbia was not carrying out the required social and economic reforms, meaning it was the last corner of Europe which had not subordinated itself to the US-run neoliberal programs, so therefore it had to be eliminated. That’s from the highest level.

As the Economist Jeffrey Sachs noted, “NATO bombed Belgrade for 78 days with the goal of breaking Serbia apart and giving rise to an independent Kosovo, now home to a major NATO base in the Balkans”.

Chomsky later noted that “High U.S. officials confirm that it was primarily the bombing of Russian ally Serbia — without even informing them in advance — that reversed Russian efforts to work together with the U.S. somehow to construct a post-Cold War European security order”.

By 2008, the U.S. again was given a dire warning about its provocative policy towards Russia, this time from the U.S. ambassador to Russia, William Burns, who later served as Biden’s director of the CIA.

In a secret memo, which was later released by WikiLeaks, Burns gave a prophetic warning saying, “Ukraine and Georgia's NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement and efforts to undermine Russia's influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests.”

Burns even correctly predicted that NATO expansion into Ukraine and Georgia would lead to a civil war in Ukraine and a Russian invasion, writing “Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”

Despite this accurate warning, NATO announced at the 2008 Bucharest Summit that “NATO Allies welcomed Ukraine's and Georgia's Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership and agreed that these countries will become members of NATO”.

Above: William Burns warns that NATO expansion into Ukraine and Georgia will trigger a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Above: NATO announces its intention to expand membership to Ukraine and Georgia.

The Maidan Coup.

By 2013, the CIA came up with a plot to overthrow governments surrounding Russia and turn them into Western puppet states to use against Russia.

The president of the NED (National Endowment for Democracy), Carl Gershman, a cutout of the CIA’s regime change arm, even laid this out in an op-ed for the Washington Post.

He wrote that “The United States needs to engage with the governments and with civil society in Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova” with the ultimate goal of regime change in Russia, writing “Russian democracy also can benefit from this process. Ukraine's choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents. There are signs of the emergence of a new Russian nationalism: the strong performance by opposition leader Alexei Navalny in Moscow's recent mayoral election and polls that show greater opposition to Putin in the Russian provinces, his traditional support base. This nationalism is concerned not with the restoration of Russia's imperial greatness, which would be inconceivable if Ukraine joined Europe, but with fighting corruption and addressing the severe economic and social problems of the Russian people.”

In this regime change plot against Russia, he wrote that “Ukraine is the biggest prize”.

Indeed, since 1991, the United States has spent 5 billion dollars on propaganda operations in Ukraine to try to turn it in a more pro-West and anti-Russia direction.

This ramped up in 2013, when the United States poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into think tanks that organized protests against Ukraine’s then democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, which eventually devolved into a far-right coup that deposed him and allowed the West to install a puppet government.

Journalist Branko Marcetic noted that the United States funded “groups like New Citizen, which the Financial Times reported ‘played a big role in getting the protest up and running,’ led by a pro-EU opposition figure.”

After Yanukovych was deposed, economist Jeffrey Sachs was asked to advise the new Western-installed Ukrainian government. Later on the show “Breaking Points” Sachs revealed that U.S. officials bragged about funding think-tanks that got the coup up and running, saying “I flew there (to Ukraine) … and when I got there somebody representing an American NGO … somebody explained to me how much American money had gone into pumping up the Maidan (coup). I saw it (the Americans said) we gave 50 thousand to this one (think tank), 5 million to this one, 5 thousand to this one, and so forth”.

The protests were eventually taken over by a large host of far-right militants, who were supported by the United States.

American senators Chris Murphy and John McCain even went to Ukraine to stand with the far-right leader Oleh Tyahnybok as he called for the overthrow of Yanukovych.

As MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes reported at the time :

When Senator John McCain and Senator Chris Murphy went to stand with these protesters in December, they stood next to this guy, who is an opposition leader and who also happens to lead Ukraine's right-wing nationalist party, Svoboda. They were also first registered as a neo-Nazi party and they're in the streets right now shooting at police.

You know what arguably could be called naive? Going on stage at a Ukrainian opposition rally and not realizing you're standing next to a man who heads Ukraine's right-wing nationalist party, a party that was first registered as a neo-Nazi party, which is exactly what John McCain did back in December when he stood next to Oleh Tiahnybok, the leader of Ukraine's Svoboda Party, which according to 'The New York Times' traces its roots to the Ukrainian partisan army of World War II, which was loosely allied with Nazi Germany.

Above: Chris Murphy and John McCain standing next to Ukrainian neo-nazi leader Oleh Tyahnybok during the uprising against Yanukovych.

When returning from Ukraine, Murphy went on C-Span and bragged that the United States was behind the coup against Yanukovych.

He bragged, “With respect to Ukraine, we (the U.S. government) have been very much involved, we have members of the Senate who have been there, members of the State Department who have been on the square.”

He also bragged that “it was our role, including sanctions and threats of sanctions, that forced, in part, Yanukovych from office” and boasted that the U.S. “helped lead to this change in regime”.

Another far-right group that was influential in the coup was Right Sector, which committed a series of massacres against protestors, which were then blamed on Yanukovych and used by the United States as justification for backing the coup.

The most consequential massacre occurred on February 20th of 2014, when 48 protestors were killed by sniper fire in Ukraine’s Maidan Square.

The Ukrainian-Canadian professor of political science Ivan Katchanovski has compiled a large database of evidence proving that the massacre was carried out by Right Sector and falsely blamed on Yanukovych’s forces.

Katchanovski uncovered that, “51 out of 72 wounded Maidan protesters, with whose shooting on February 20 Berkut policemen (Yanukovych’s special police force) are charged and whose testimonies were revealed, testified at the trial and the investigation that they had been shot by snipers from Maidan-controlled buildings or areas, had themselves witnessed snipers there, or had been told by other Maidan protesters about such snipers.”

He also found that “The findings of forensic medical examinations done by government experts for the prosecution were first made public during the Maidan massacre trial, and revealed that the absolute majority of protesters were shot from the side or back, and from top to bottom. Most videos and photos, however, show that the absolute majority of those killed and wounded had the Berkut police in front of them and at ground level, whereas the Maidan-controlled buildings were generally behind them and on the left and right side” and that “48 out of 51 wounded protesters had steep entry wounds, consistent with the theory that they were shot by snipers in Maidan-controlled buildings, or on the roofs of these buildings.”

Along with this he found that “the forensic ballistic examinations presented at the trial found that 19 protesters were killed on February 20 by bullets which match the calibers not only of AKM Kalashnikov assault rifles, but also of hunting versions of Kalashnikovs, and other weapons, Videos showed protesters with hunting firearms in the Hotel Ukraina during the massacre” and that “A forensic ballistic examination conducted by government experts with use of an automatic computer-based IBIS-TAIS system, found that the bullets extracted from killed protesters, trees, and the Hotel Ukraina rooms did not match police database for Kalashnikov assault rifles of members of the entire Kyiv Berkut regiment, including the special Berkut unit deployed”.

The United States used this coup to install a puppet government in Ukraine. Then Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland was caught on tape plotting to install Arseny Yatsenyuk as the interim prime minister of Ukraine, who then got that position after Yanukovych was removed.

One of the reasons for this, as Forbes magazine noted at the time, was because “Yanukovych resisted the International Monetary Fund's demand to raise taxes and devalue the currency” while “Yatsenyuk doesn’t mind”.

Another reason was that the West wanted a Ukrainian government that was openly hostile to Russia. As Konstantin Bondarenko, one of Ukraine’s leading political scientists, put it , “The West, however, did not want a Ukrainian president who pursued a multi-vector foreign policy; the West needed Ukraine to be anti-Russia, with clear opposition between Kyiv and Moscow. Yanukovych was open to broad cooperation with the West, but he was not willing to confront Russia and China. The West could not accept this ambivalence. The West needed a Ukraine charged for confrontation and even war against Russia, a Ukraine it could use as a tool in the fight against Russia.”

At the time, George Friedman, the director of the Western intelligence contractor Stratfor, said :

At the beginning of this year there existed in Ukraine a slightly pro-Russian though very shaky government. That situation was fine for Moscow: after all, Russia did not want to completely control Ukraine or occupy it; it was enough that Ukraine not join NATO and the EU. Russian authorities cannot tolerate a situation in which western armed forces are located a hundred or so kilometers from Kursk or Voronezh.

The United States, for its part, were interested in forming a pro-Western government in Ukraine. They saw that Russia is on the rise, and were eager not to let it consolidate its position in the post-Soviet space. The success of the pro-Western forces in Ukraine would allow the U.S. to contain Russia.

Russia calls the events that took place at the beginning of this year a coup d’etat organized by the United States. And it truly was the most blatant coup in history.

Along with the Western puppet Arseny Yatsenyuk, many far-right figures responsible for the coup and the false flag massacre used to justify it were put into positions of power.

“The uncomfortable truth is that a sizable portion of Kyiv’s current government — and the protesters who brought it to power — are, indeed, fascists,” Foreign Policy magazine wrote at the time.

As Channel 4 News reported at the time, “In the new Ukrainian government, politicians linked to the far-right have taken posts from deputy prime minister to head of defence”.

Just as William Burns predicted, this led to clashes between the far-right and ethnic Russian Ukrainians.

In the most brutal case, far-right militants trapped ethnic Russians in a burning trade union building in Odessa and burned them alive.

An EU court recently ruled that the new U.S.-installed far-right government in Ukraine allowed this to happen intentionally, ruling that “The deployment of fire engines to the site of the fire had been deliberately delayed for 40 minutes, and the police had not stepped in to help evacuate people from the building promptly and safely. Therefore, the State had failed to ensure timely rescue measures”.

Eventually, clashes led to all-out civil war (as Burns predicted) in Eastern Ukraine, with Russian separatists backed by Russia and the new Ukrainian government backed by NATO.

When Zelensky was elected in 2019, the United States pressured him to reject the Minsk Accords, a peace deal to end the fighting that he campaigned on implementing.

Konstantin Bondarenko wrote that while Zelensky was running for president in 2019, “U.S. Deputy Secretary of State David Hale held new meetings with the main presidential candidates (including Zelensky). He shared this information at a press conference in Kyiv the same day” and “some politicians who knew Zelensky and were involved in his presidential campaign at that time claim that the meeting with David Hale clinched Zelensky’s future ‘reprogramming’”.

He noted that “Zelensky was clearly told about the U.S.’s interests in Ukraine and the need to follow the rules set by the American authorities in Ukraine after Maidan: cooperation with the IMF, continuing the confrontation with Russia, sabotaging the Minsk agreements, and protecting the interests of transnational corporations, among other things”.

Once elected, Zelensky was threatened by far-right militants to not end the war in Donbas, and the United States sided with the militants.

The Finnish NGO peace defenders wrote at the time :

On October 7, the Ukrainian Army should have withdrawn from the settlements at the frontline, Zolote and nearby Katerynivka, in the Luhansk Region. The 72nd Mechanized Brigade, which is currently deployed to the area, should have received the order in the morning that day. The same should have been done by the units of the opposing side controlling part of the villages. The OSCE SMM should have overseen the pullback.

It didn’t happen, due to the open threats and blackmail by far-right military circles in Ukraine, including the National Corps led by Andrii Biletski.

As Ivan Katchanovski noted at the time,“This shows that a few thousand neo-Nazis not only have power to block the crucial agreement towards peace in Donbas but that the president has no power and will to disband and arrest them and has to plead with them in person. This is another manifestation of the actual power of the far right in Ukraine”.

The late professor of Russian studies Stephen F. Cohen, one of the leading Russia experts, said at the time, the West sided with the “quasi-fascist movement” threatening Zelensky not to implement the Minsk Accords.

Donald Trump, during his first term, ramped up tensions further with Russia.

While Obama backed the coup that started the war in Eastern Ukraine, he refused to sell lethal arms to Ukraine while the war was ongoing.

Trump, however, approved this policy and approved lethal arms shipments to Ukraine.

Instead of pressuring Trump to support Zelensky in implementing the Minsk Accords, Democrats attempted to impeach him for allegedly temporarily pausing weapons shipments to Ukraine.

The leader of the impeachment inquiry, Adam Schiff, used the impeachment hearing to laud the virtue of fueling the war in Ukraine, saying, “The United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there and we don’t have to fight Russia here”.

Prolonging The War.

Along with sending lethal arms to Ukraine, Trump also pulled out of the INF Nuclear Treaty with Russia.

By 2022, Russia set out a list of demands (including re-entering the INF treaty) to the West to stop their invasion of Ukraine. These demands were :

-NATO guarantees that it will not deploy missiles in nations bordering Russia. (They are already in place from Slovenia to Romania, with Poland to follow)

-NATO to stop military and naval exercises in nations and seas bordering Russia.

-Ukraine will not become a member of NATO.

-the West and Russia to sign a binding East-West security pact.

– the landmark treaty between the US and Russia covering intermediate-range nuclear weapons to be restored. (The US abandoned it in 2019)

The Biden administration refused to negotiate on a single one of these demands.

Noam Chomsky noted in his book, “The Myth of American Idealism, “Even As the U.S. warned of an impending invasion, it made no diplomatic efforts to influence Russia's behavior”. He noted that “The United States ... declined to push for a settlement. It refused to consider revoking the commitment to admit Ukraine into NATO. In fact, in December 2021, NATO reaffirmed that it was ultimately planning to integrate Ukraine.”

He noted that this was because the United States wanted to “weaken Russia to the point where it was militarily incapable of aggression”.

As the veteran diplomat Chas Freeman noted at the time, “the West was basically saying, ‘We will fight to the last Ukrainian for Ukrainian independence’”.

The aforementioned Jeffrey Sachs testified at the EU that the Biden administration also refused to say that it would not expand NATO into Ukraine publicly, despite having no intention of doing so privately. Sachs said:

At the end of 2021, Putin put on the table a last effort to reach a modus operandi with the US, in two security agreement drafts, one with Europe and one with the United States. He put the Russia-US draft agreement on the table on December 15, 2021.

Following that, I had an hour-long call with [National Security Advisor] Jake Sullivan in the White House, begging, “Jake, avoid the war. You can avoid the war. All the US has to do is say, ‘NATO will not enlarge to Ukraine.’” And he said to me, “Oh, NATO’s not going to enlarge to Ukraine. Don’t worry about it.”

I said, “Jake, say it publicly.” “No. No. No. We can’t say it publicly.” I said, “Jake, you’re going to have a war over something that isn’t even going to happen?” He said, “Don’t worry, Jeff. There will be no war.”

The Ukrainian outlet Strauna noted that this was done to intentionally provoke a Russian invasion of Ukraine, writing:

Biden and his key advisers, Nuland and Blinken, apparently imagined themselves to be great ‘geopolitical combinators’ and decided to play a ‘cunning game’, actually pushing Putin to invade, hoping that it would lead to his collapse. Therefore, on the one hand, they did not make any compromises with the Russian Federation regarding the neutral status of Ukraine. And on the other hand, almost daily they repeated like a mantra that ‘the United States will not enter the war.’

New York Times journalist Adam Entous wrote that, “In some ways, Ukraine was, on a wider canvas, a rematch in a long history of U.S.-Russia proxy wars — Vietnam in the 1960s, Afghanistan in the 1980s, Syria three decades later.”

In the case of Afghanistan, the United States armed the Mujahedin in an attempt to trigger a Soviet Invasion and “give the USSR its Vietnam war”.

In Ukraine, the same was true, where the U.S. and NATO intentionally tried to draw Russia into the “Ukraine trap” in order to use the country to weaken Russia.

This is best underscored by the fact that the West blocked the peace deal at Istanbul between Ukraine and Russia in April of 2022, just two months into the war.

The Ukrainian outlet Pravda reported at the time that :

The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson, who appeared in the capital almost without warning, brought two simple messages.

The first is that Putin is a war criminal; he should be pressured, not negotiated with.

And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not.

Johnson’s position was that the collective West, which back in February had suggested Zelenskyy should surrender and flee, now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined, and that here was a chance to "press him."

Three days after Johnson left for Britain, Putin went public and said talks with Ukraine "had turned into a dead end".

Later, the Ukrainian leader of the negotiations, David Arakhamia, confirmed this, saying:

Russia's goal was to put pressure on us so that we would take neutrality. This was the main thing for them: they were ready to end the war if we accepted neutrality, as Finland once did. And we will give a commitment that we will not join NATO. This is the main thing

but

Boris Johnson then came to Kyiv and said that he did not want to sign anything with the Russians and (said) "let's just fight.

According to the Ukrainian diplomat Oleksandr Chalyi, Russia “tried to do everything possible to conclude an agreement with Ukraine” and “really wanted to reach some peaceful settlement” during the Istanbul talks.

The former Zelensky advisor Oleksii Arestovych later lamented the West blocking the deal, saying, “The Russian side still insisted on peace initiatives. And the Istanbul peace initiatives were very good, an intermediary document... Now 200-300 thousand would be alive, probably, and half of Ukraine would not be destroyed and mined... They agreed to political discussions on Crimea... We made concessions, but the amount of their concessions was greater. This will never happen again, it won’t, they will push more and more.”

The Current Situation

Because the West provoked and prolonged the war in Ukraine, one million people have been killed or wounded on both sides.

The majority of Ukrainians are now desperate for an end to the war. According to a recent Gallup poll, “69% (of Ukrainians) say they favor a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible, compared with 24% who support continuing to fight until victory”.

Meanwhile, the Western-backed Zelensky government is trying to continue the war to hold onto power. One former senior official in Zelensky’s administration told The Spectator magazine that Zelensky is “prolonging the war to hold on to power”.

Because of this, the Ukrainian government has resorted to forcing people into vans and forcing them to die in the unwinnable war. The Financial Times wrote that, “Videos shared on social media have shown Ukrainian men being picked off the streets and brutally crammed into vans, while angry locals are lashing out at military recruiters”.

The Telegraph newspaper recently wrote that “Ukraine is ‘visibly losing the war’, says Konrad Muzkya, a Polish military analyst, largely because of the manpower crisis.”

The outlet noted that, “Around 650,000 men of fighting age are thought to have fled Ukraine. Others hide, or bribe draft officers and army psychiatrists for health exemptions”.

Continuing the war at this point would be pure cruelty, forcing a war-weary population to fight in an unwinnable war.

But the fundamental point is that the war should never have happened to begin with, and has brought nothing but death and destruction to Ukraine with no benefit.

The West could have prevented the war; they could have negotiated a stop to the Russian invasion, and they could have supported the Istanbul peace talks, but instead, they decided to use Ukraine as a pawn to weaken their geopolitical enemy, Russia.

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