The Hidden History Of The Ukraine Proxy War For New Skeptics.

Welcome New Ukraine War Skeptics, Here Is A Guide To The History You Were Denied By The Mainstream Media.

Written By: Justin K.P.

After the Ukrainian government directly took part in the U.S/Israeli war on Iran, it seems more progressive and left-of-centre people have been more open to a more skeptical view of the proxy war in Ukraine.

Some who viewed the proxy war in Ukraine as a blatant act of imperialism from Russia against Ukraine may begin to see that the reality is far more complicated.

The reality is, we were all lied to on a mass scale about the war in Ukraine, and it was in reality, a proxy war intentionally provoked and prolonged by the U.S. empire to use Ukraine to bleed Russia.

This article is for new Skeptics to learn the history and context of the war in Ukraine that they were denied by the mainstream media, and hopefully will also serve as a good refresher for longtime opponents of the war as well.

The Ukraine war did not start in February of 2022.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. pumped billions of dollars into propaganda networks in Ukraine in an attempt to create a division between Ukraine and Russia.

In 2013, then Assistant Secretary, Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland admitted that the United States “invested over $5 billion” since 1991 into meddling in Ukraine’s internal affairs and moving the country away from Russia.

Furthermore, after the Cold War, virtually every Russia expert understood that NATO expansion eastward would be seen as a threat to Russia.

In 1997, veteran U.S. diplomat, George F. Kennan warned that NATO expansion eastwards would be “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era” adding that it would, “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” a belief he stated “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”.

The U.S. ignored this prophetic warning and expanded NATO membership to Czechia, Hungary and Poland in 1999 and Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004.

In 1998, while the Bill Clinton administration was pushing for further NATO expansion, George F. Kennan told the New York Times, “I think it is the beginning of a new cold war, I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely, and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. Of course, there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are -- but this is just wrong”.

While NATO presented itself as a purely defensive alliance, non defensive interventions in Serbia and Libya caused the Russians to believe it was an offensive military alliance further encircling Russia.

While the interventions in Serbia and Libya were billed as humanitarian, they were clearly to further imperial interests.

In the case of Serbia in 1999, NATO intervened under the pretext of protecting Albanians in Kosovo from Serbian militias, but the CIA was arming militants in Kosovo in an attempt to enflame the situation prior to the intervention.

The former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, James Bissett, noted :

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 (KLA) 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.

After bombing Yugoslavia into submission, NATO then stood by and submissively allowed the KLA to murder, pillage and burn. The KLA was given a free hand to do as they wished. Almost all of the non-Albanian population was ethnically cleansed from Kosovo under the watchful eyes of 40,000 NATO troops.

Noam Chomsky has documented how the bombing campaign was not actually motivated by humanitarian concerns, writing, “Strobe Talbott, who was in charge of the Pentagon/State Department intelligence Joint Committee on the diplomacy during the whole affair including the bombing”, “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”.

In the case of the NATO overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, a 2015 UK parliament report acknowledged that “the proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence”, referring to the bogus humanitarian pretext used by NATO to justify the regime change operation.

Furthermore, in 2008, NATO severely ramped up its provocations against Russia.

At the 2008 Bucharest Summit, NATO officially “welcomed Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership”.

Then U.S. ambassador to Russia, William Burns, wanted at the time that :

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

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

Burns also said at the time that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite, not just Putin. In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests” adding that “Today’s Russia will respond. Russian-Ukrainian relations will go into a deep freeze…It will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine”.

Then German Chancellor Angela Merkel even stated at the time that Russia would view NATO enlargement into Ukraine as a “declaration of war”.

This was far from the end of U.S. provocations.

By far the most provocative action carried out by the U.S. was covertly overthrowing Ukraine’s elected president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 and installing a puppet government more hostile to Russia.

Carl Gershman, then head of the U.S. government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a cutout of the CIA’s foreign meddling machine, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post in 2013 calling for the overthrow of the government surrounding Russia in hopes that as a result “Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself” adding that “Ukraine is the biggest prize”.

The NED did exactly this the following year, funding NGO’s that organized protests against Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.

Journalist Branko Marcetic documented that “In practice, this meant funding 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. Journalist Mark Ames discovered the organization had received hundreds of thousands of dollars from US democracy promotion initiatives”, including the NED.

The NED funded protests were eventually overtaken by far-right nationalist extremists, who eventually overthrew the elected Viktor Yanukovych government with force.

As Branko Marcetic reported:

The driver of this violence was largely the Ukrainian far right, which, while a minority of the protesters, served as a kind of revolutionary vanguard. Looking outside Kyiv, a systematic analysis of more than 3,000 Maidan protests found that members of the far-right Svoboda party — whose leader once complained Ukraine was run by a “Muscovite-Jewish mafia” and which includes a politician who admires Joseph Goebbels — were the most active agents in the protests. They were also more likely to take part in violent actions than any group but one: Right Sector, a collection of far-right activists that traces its lineage to genocidal Nazi collaborators.

Ukrainian Canadian academic Ivan Katchanovski has meticulously documented how one far-right militant group, Right Sector, fired snipers at civilian protestors in the Maidan square, and then falsely blamed the massacre on Viktor Yanukovych’s police forces to justify overthrowing him in a violent coup.

American Senators John McCain and Chris Murphy even went to Ukraine and stood alongside Oleh Tyahnybok, the leader of the far-right Svoboda party, while he called to violently overthrow Yanukovych.

Following the coup, Chris Murphy boasted on C-span that it could not have been carried out without U.S. support, saying, “With respect to Ukraine, we have not sat on the sidelines; we have been very much involved. Members of the Senate have been there, members of the State Department that have been there on the (Maidan) square. The Obama administration passed sanctions, the Senate was prepared to pass its own set of sanctions, and as I said, I really think the clear position of the United States has been in part what has led to this change in regime” and concluding, “I think it was our role, including sanctions and threats of sanctions, that forced, in part, Yanukovych from office”.

George Friedman, the director of the U.S. government-tied private intelligence firm Stratfor, wrote after the coup took place :

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.

As Ukrainian political scientist Konstantin Bondarenko documented, “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,” adding, “this was why Western politicians, diplomats, and civil society representatives actively supported the Euromaidan as a mechanism for overthrowing Yanukovych, even going as far as providing financial support for the ‘revolutionary’ process”.

Shortly after the coup, leaked audio showed that then Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland hand-picked the Ukrainian opposition politician Arseniy Yatsenyuk to be the interim Prime Minister of Ukraine following the coup, in part because, as Forbes magazine noted, “Yanukovych resisted the International Monetary Fund’s demand to raise taxes and devalue the currency. Yatsenyuk doesn’t mind.”

Economist Jeffrey Sachs was invited to Ukraine to advise the U.S. installed Yatseniuk, and quickly left after U.S. officials boasted to him about engineering the coup in Ukraine. Sachs later revealed, “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 coup brought far-right militants who were openly hostile to Russia, and Ukraine’s ethnic Russian population, to the mainstream.

“The uncomfortable truth is that a sizeable portion of Kyiv’s current government — and the protesters who brought it to power — are, indeed, fascists,” Foreign Policy magazine noted at the time , while the UK’s Channel 4 news noted that“the far-right took top posts in Ukraine’s power vacuum”.

This all came to a head , when far-right militants trapped ethnic Russian Ukrainian in the Trade Union Building in Odessa after it was set on fire during a clash, and the U.S. backed Ukrainian government “had not done everything they reasonably could to prevent the violence, to stop that violence after its outbreak, and to ensure timely rescue measures for those trapped in the fire in the Trade Union Building” according to an EU court which added 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”.

This eventually led to a full-scale civil/proxy war in Eastern Ukraine, between the U.S. backed Ukrainian government and Russian-backed separatists.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, however, was elected in 2019 as a peace president, promising to implement the Minsk 2 accords, a peace deal that would have ended the proxy war in Eastern Ukraine.

The U.S., however, put a stop to it.

As Ukrainian political scientist Konstantin Bondarenko documented, “On March 7 (of 2019), U.S. Deputy Secretary of State David Hale held new meetings with the main presidential candidates,” including the current Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky where, “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”.

Bondarenko added, “[then U.S.-backed Ukrainian president Petro] Poroshenko fully relied on his U.S. curators, believing that the State Department would see him as the only viable candidate to lead the country as the main outpost of American policy in Eurasia,” but then “could not believe that the State Department would view him with indifference and reach the same agreement with Zelensky.”

Once elected, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was explicitly threatened by far-right militants integrated in the Ukrainian army after the 2014 coup against ending the war in Eastern Ukraine.

The NGO Finnish Peace Defenders documented at the time that :

While President Zelensky is trying to follow commitments given to his electorate and international obligations in implementation of the Minsk Agreements, he has to overcome obstacles placed by irregular armed groups who identify themselves as patriots of Ukraine.

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.

The President of Ukraine (Zelensky) went to a frontline in Donbas to personally convince far-right military formation members, reportedly from the neo-Nazi-led Azov regiment, to stop blocking implementation of the Minsk agreement to withdraw troops along with the militants of the self-proclaimed entities.

Andrii Biletsky is reported to continue threatening the president with thousands of volunteers engaged in “defending the last checkpoint” of Zolote if the president goes on with the disengagement plan.

The same U.S. sponsored NGOs that funded the Maidan coup similarly backed the far-right in opposing the Minsk Accords.

Ivan Katchanovski documented that “The Western governments and foundations, such as Soros foundation, funded all but one of about two dozen Ukrainian NGOs, which initially issued in 2019 a collective statement that any talks with Donbas separatists were impermissible after the head of Zelenskyy’s presidential administration supported creation of a consulting group with representatives of the separatist-controlled Donbas during the Minsk negotiations”.

By the time Russia was prepared to invade Ukraine in January of 2022, following the decades of provocations outlined previously, the Biden administration refused to negotiate, wanting to draw Russia into Ukraine to use it to bleed Russia.

The Ukrainian news outlet Stranaua noted that “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.”

This was effectively admitted by Amanda Sloat, a top Biden administration official, who years later admitted that, “We had some conversation even before the war started, about what if Ukraine comes out and just says to Russia, ‘fine, you know, we won’t go into NATO if that stops the war, if that stops the invasion,’ which at that point it may well have done. I guess if you want to do an alternative version of history, one option would have just been for Ukraine to say in January of 2022, ‘fine, you know, we won’t go into NATO, we will stay neutral.’ Ukraine could have made a deal around March/April of 2022 around the Istanbul talks. There is certainly a question, almost three years on now, would that have been better to do before the war started, would that have been better to do in Istanbul talks, it certainly would have prevented the destruction and the loss of life”.

Furthermore, the U.S. and U.K. actively blocked a peace deal that Russia and Ukraine agreed to during negotiations in Istanbul, Türkiye, in April of 2022.

This fact, while blacked out in all mainstream media coverage, has been acknowledged by top diplomatic officials around the world who were involved in the negotiations.

Some of these acknowledgements as Ivan Katchanovski documented, are :

-Naftali Bennett said that the US and other Western leaders blocked the Ukraine-Russia peace deal, which he negotiated with Putin on Zelenskyy’s request in March 2022 when he was prime minister of Israel, and which according to him had about 50% chance of being reached, because they wanted to ‘continue to strike Putin’

-Davyd Arakhamia, the head of the Zelenskyy’s party faction in the Ukrainian parliament and the head of the Ukrainian delegation in the Ukraine-Russia talks independently confirmed that the peace deal could had been reached in spring 2022 if Ukraine agreed to neutrality and that the British prime-minister (Boris Johnson) blocked it. Arakhamia said that Russia was ready to end the war in such a case and that Ukrainian neutrality was the main Russian condition. He also said that Western countries knew everything concerning peace talks and told Zelenskyy not to sign the peace deal.

-Mevlut Cavusoglu, the foreign minister of Turkey, which hosted the peace talks in Istanbul, said on April 20, 2022 that Turkey ‘did not think that the Russia-Ukraine war would last that long after the peace talks in Istanbul’ ‘but following the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting, it was the impression that... there are those within the NATO member states that want the war to continue, let the war continue and Russia get weaker’

-Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan corroborated in 2024 the involvement of Boris Johnson in blocking the possible peace deal in spring 2022.

-Gerhard Schröder, the ex-leader of Germany, made in 2023 a similar statement, saying ‘At the peace negotiations in Istanbul in March 2022 with Rustem Umerov (then Ukrainian negotiator) , the Ukrainians did not agree on peace because they were not allowed to. For everything they discussed, they first had to ask the Americans. I had two talks with Umerov, then a one on-one meeting with Putin, and then with Putin’s envoy. Umerov opened the conversation with greetings from Zelenskyy. As a compromise for Ukraine’s security guarantees, the Austrian model or the 5+1 model was proposed. Umerov thought that was a good thing. He also showed willingness on the other points. He also said that Ukraine does not want NATO membership. He also said that Ukraine wants to reintroduce Russian in the Donbass. But in the end, nothing happened. My impression was that nothing could happen, because everything else was decided in Washington. That was fatal. Because the result will now be that Russia will be tied more closely to China, which the West should not want’.

-Victoria Nuland, who was at that time one of the top US State Department officials, stated in her interview in September 2024 that the Ukraine-Russia peace deal, which was close to being finalized in spring 2022, ‘fell apart’ because the US, the UK and other Western governments ‘advised’ the Zelenskyy government that it was not ‘a good deal.’

-Oleksii Arestovych, who was a member of the Ukrainian delegation at the peace talks in spring 2022, said after leaving his position as an adviser of Zelenskyy that this was the most advantageous ‘draft of agreement’ that Ukraine could have. He stated that the last round of the peace talks in Istanbul was ‘completely successful negotiation’ and that the Ukrainian delegation even opened a bottle of champagne afterwards. Arestovych also said that ‘the Istanbul agreement was a protocol of intentions and was completely/90% prepared for a direct meeting of Putin and Zelenskyy.’ Arestovych also stated that he ‘knew that in two or three weeks there would be a meeting in Istanbul, and it should end the war altogether. And then the meeting between Zelenskyy and Putin. All this was decided, there was a calendar… I knew exactly the calendar of Istanbul meetings, everything was moving towards reconciliation.’He elaborated that Russian representatives offered the talks on the first day of the invasion, that the Istanbul agreements were ‘fully acceptable,’ and that a meeting between Zelensky and Putin was supposed to be on April 9, 2022. The former Zelenskyy’s adviser and a member of the Ukrainian delegation at the peace talks stated that the talks ended because the West decided to use Ukraine as a trap to fight Putin’s Russia.

-Alexei Venediktov, the well-connected former editor of the pro-Western Ekho Moskvy radio station, which was banned following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, commenting on the Nuland’s admission in September 2024 confirmed that the peace treaty ‘was already initialed by the head of the Ukrainian delegation’ and said that ‘he saw this signature.’

-Ambassador Oleksandr Chalyi, who participated in the peace talks with Russia in Spring 2022, stated that ‘we concluded’ the ‘Istanbul Communique’ and ‘were very close in... April to finalize our war with some peaceful settlement.’ He said that Putin ‘tried everything possible to conclude agreement with Ukraine.’ He noted that it was Putin’s ‘personal decision to accept the text of this communique.’

-source in Times on March 31, 2022, that the Johnson government ‘urged’ Ukraine not to ‘back down’ by accepting such peace deal under the terms negotiated in Istanbul and that the British prime minister ‘warned’ Zelenskyy in a phone call.

-Robert Fico, the Prime Minister of Slovakia, stated publicly that the West blocked a peace deal to end the Ukraine war in spring 2022 and used Ukraine for a proxy war with Russia in a failed strategy

This fact was also more recently directly confirmed by Iuliia Mendel, the former press secretary for Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

This history has been blacked out and hidden by virtually the entire Western mainstream media, but it is as well documented as anything could be.

Hopefully, new skeptics of the Ukraine war will take this article into consideration, and begin to rethink what the public was told about the war in Ukraine from the beginning.

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