The Ukraine-Russia-USA Conflict, Part 1: Evidence, Facts and US Expert Opinions vs. 1%-Serving Propaganda Narratives
As pointed out in the above picture and tweet, many people cognitively live in world which is determined less by evidence, facts and thereupon based analyses and more by 1%-serving narratives, stories or ways of telling them. One for the West and in particular for liberal to conservative centrists self-serving narratives is that the West is the democracy- and peace-bringing, rational, etc. good force and that Putin-Russia is the democracy-destroying, war-bringing, irrational and of course Hitleresque evil force.
Based on an analysis of evidence, facts, and the opinions of genuine US experts, this article shows how the above Western narrative is Orwellian western propaganda that ignores and twists history and reality and how the main blame for the Ukraine(-Russia-USA) conflict clearly lies with the USA and their treacherous and reckless eastward NATO expansion.
1. Broken Promises Regarding the Eastward NATO Expansion
One of the first, most obvious and for the current Ukraine conflict or rather Ukraine-Russia-USA conflict most relevant facts is that the USA undoubtedly broke their promises to Moscow to not expand NATO eastward. First, the famous “not one inch to the east” agreement from a February 9, 1990 “Memorandum of Conversation” between Baker, Gorbachev and Shevardnaze:
From the German magazine Der Spiegel from February 18, 2022 (“Newfound documents from 1991 confirm Russian complaint”):
The independent British publication Declassified UK published the following critical passages from the document:
And if that should not be enough evidence for you, you can also take it from the then German Minister for Foreign Affairs Hans-Dietrich Genscher (the footage is from 1991):
After sighting all this evidence there can be no doubt that the West and above all the USA repeatedly broke their promises to Moscow to not expand NATO eastward after the fall of the Iron Curtain — among other things with the false promise that there would only be a ‘Partnership for Peace’:
Here an overview and timetable of how the NATO expansion then actually happened, together with a fitting related commentary about the Ukraine conflict:
Excuses that I have heard so far, such as that there was no written contract or that the political entity changed from USSR to Russia, change nothing whatsoever about the fact the West and the USA broke their promises to Moscow.
2.0 The CIA in Ukraine (1950s-present)
Way before NATO’s eastward expansion though, the CIA was already meddling and stirring up unrest in Ukraine in a divide and conquer attempt in which the CIA cooperated with extremist Ukrainian nationalist elements and war criminals.
2.1 The CIA’s “Project AERO-/QRDYNAMIC” (1950s-1990)
As revealed by these declassified CIA documents, US cooperation with nationalist Ukrainians against Moscow can be traced back at least to the early 1950s and “Project AERODYNAMIC.” That project’s existence was also confirmed by the former US State Department employee Michael Springmann:
On the documents:
The purpose of Project AERODYNAMIC is to provide for the ex-
ploitation and expansion of the anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance
movement for cold war and hot war purposes. Such groups as the Uk-
rainian Supreme Council of Liberation (UBVR) and its Ukrainian In-
surgent Army (UPA), the Foreign. Representation of the Ukrainian
Supreme Council of Liberation (ZPUHVR) in Western Europe and the
United States, and other organizations such as OUN/B will be uti-
lized.
These connections to Western intelligence in turn partially explain why Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian nationalist hero and leader of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists or OUN/B (see part 3, section 5.5, for more on him), most likely died from KGB assassination in 1959.
However, it was not Bandera but Mykola Lebed (1909–1998), the Ukrainian nationalist and war criminal who led the OUN/B while Bandera was imprisoned by German Nazis during World War 2, who ran this US-Ukrainian propaganda operation. To quote from the 2018 Muckrock article “The CIA and ‘Uncle Louie’”, the internal handle and codename for Lebed:
The CIA facilitated Lebed’s move to the US, getting asylum for him and his family in 1949 and helping him obtain citizenship in 1957. As head of a CIA operation called Project AERODYNAMIC, Lebed spent the next few decades in control of a Agency-funded non-profit publishing company, the Prolog Research and Publishing Association.
His salary at that company in 1967, for example, was $11,970. That’s roughly equivalent to $91,700 in today’s terms according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. His job was to spread anti-Soviet, anti-Communist propaganda in Ukraine.
However, some publications were also distributed within the US — a knowing violation of laws against domestic distribution of propaganda.
Prolog Research and Publishing Association reincorporated in 1967 as a for-profit named the Prolog Research Corporation. The reorganization was in response to new regulations introduced by the Katzenbach Committee, according to an agency memorandum.
Although the policy recommended by the committee were specifically aimed at prohibiting the kind of work done by Lebed and Project AERODYNAMIC, the CIA quickly discovered a loophole — the publications could be printed somewhere other than on US soil.
(This wouldn’t be the last time the Agency would “terminate” a program, only to move it abroad.)
Project AERODYNAMIC was dissolved and its front company, Prolog Research and Publishing Association, shut down. But the self-described propaganda campaign continued under the new names QRDYNAMIC and Prolog Research Corporation.
Despite the turmoil for the Agency in the ’70s caused by the Church and Pike Committees, Lebed and QRDYNAMIC continued their work throughout the decade without incident.
The internal code name or “cryptonym” for the Prolog Research Corporation was “QRPLUMB”:
An audit of QRPLUMB, a cryptonym of Prolog, concluded in 1991 that the project had violated E.O. 12333 by distributing CIA-funded propaganda in the US. Among the 24 U.S.-based subscribers acknowledged in the audit and contemporary internal communications were “Harvard and some Ukrainian church-affiliated groups.”
The auditors made no suggestion to remedy to problem: “QRPLUMB was terminated 30 September 1990; therefore, we are not making any recommendations concerning QRPLUMB.”
(This was not the first time the Agency would escape consequences for engaging in illegal activities.)
Possibly driven by widespread press criticism in the mid-’80s, QRDYNAMIC officially ended in 1990 (though some accounts claim it ran through 1991), and Lebed died eight years later[.]
1990 to 1991 is a logical end for the official ‘end’ of this CIA operation, because with the fall of the Iron Curtain, there no longer was any need for the USA to meddle in the Ukraine in secret. Instead, they could now do it relatively openly via CIA cutouts such as the National Endowment for Democracy and under the guise of bringing ‘freedom and democracy’ and what have you.
2.2 The European Academic and CIA Asset Philip Ther
I would now like to draw your attention to the named places of “Munich” and “Harvard,” two places where the CIA propaganda about Ukraine was printed and, respectively, distributed. As coincidence would have it, I ran into a German academic by the name of Philip Ther at a panel discussion about Ukraine on June 7, 2022, at the Vienna-based Diplomatic Academy:
Ther and myself disagreed quite a bit about Ukraine — he for instance illogically proposed the magical disappearance of Ukrainian neonazis due to integration into the Ukrainian armed forces, engaged in latent Russiophobia via the ominous claim that Russian art and artists such as Valery Gergiev or Anna Netrebko (both sanctioned/fired) are not innocent, or refused to acknowledge the fairly obvious fact that the Ukraine conflict is a proxy war between the USA and Russia.
As coincidence would furthermore have it, Munich and Harvard just so happened to be among the places where Ther received his education/indoctrination about Ukraine:
Philipp Ther wuchs in Bayern auf. Sein Vater, Otto Ther, war Leiter jugendpädagogischer Einrichtungen, unter anderem der Outward-Bound-Kurzschulen in Baad und Berchtesgaden, und unterrichtete zeitweilig auch an der Deutschen Schule Istanbul, wo Philipp Ther einen Teil seiner Kindheit verbrachte.[1]
Ther studierte von 1988 bis 1992 Neuere Geschichte, Osteuropäische Geschichte, Soziologie und Politikwissenschaften an den Universitäten Regensburg und München. Mehrere Jahre lebte er in Polen und der Ukraine. Seinen Magister-Abschluss absolvierte er 1993 an der Georgetown University in den USA. 1997 promovierte er an der Freien Universität Berlin mit einer Arbeit über die deutschen und polnischen Vertriebenen von 1945 bis 1956. Er war 1997/1998 John F. Kennedy Fellow am Center for European Studies an der Harvard University. Anschließend war er bis 2002 wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Zentrum für Vergleichende Geschichte Europas der Freien Universität Berlin.
Philip Ther furthermore received a degree at Georgetown University which has been extremely well-known for its CIA affiliations for a long time (the following article is from 1980) — hence “pre-Carter-CIA” (first paragraph):
A more recent article that confirms a certain CIA connection to Georgetown is the one by Philip Giraldi from the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) titled “Crime and Punishment”:
The unfortunate fact is the Gina Haspel is not alone. She committed what are undeniably felonies and now enjoys a well-paid sinecure with a law firm that deals extensively with the government. One might recall similar trajectories relating to the former CIA Director George Tenet who lied America into a war with Iraq that is regarded as the greatest foreign policy failure since the Second World War. He was rewarded with a professorship at Georgetown.
As an amusing aside and since Ther’s father Otto was the head of some “Outward Bound” schools, you may also wish to note the historical existence of certain ‘outward bound’ NATO or Operation Gladio “stay behind” associations such as the “Austrian Association of Hiking, Sports and Society” (1951–64) which was the official cover for such NATO activity — information that can even be found on Wikipedia:
The Austrian Association of Hiking, Sports and Society (German: Österreichischer Wander-, Sport- und Geselligkeitsverein, abbreviated OeWSGV or ÖWSGV) was a name used to camouflage a secret paramilitary army in Austria which operated from 1951 to 1964. It was founded by the head of the Austrian Trade Union Federation (ÖGB), Franz Olah, to combat communism in Austria. The CIA provided finances and support. The organisation was a part of a network of “stay-behind” organisations left in Europe at the end of World War II as part of the West’s Cold War defences.
The similarities of the NATO logo and the Outward Bound logo are probably just coincidences:
What remains to be said though with very high certainty is that Ther is an academic whose a) higher education/indoctrination took an exceedingly curious and noticeable Munich-(Ukraine-)Georgetown-Harvard trajectory through exactly the places that had and have CIA or CIA propaganda about Ukraine stamped on them, who b) wittingly or unwittingly regurgitates CIA propaganda and talking points about Ukraine, and whose c) career just might have been fast-tracked due to being such a “witting or unwitting CIA asset” like many others.
The above article from 1978 by Russell Warren Howe also makes a reference to the the CIA-funded “CFF” or “Congress for Cultural Freedom,” a connection that was exposed by the anti-imperialist Ramparts magazine in the Sol Stern March 1967 article “A Short Account of International Student Politics & the Cold War with Particular Reference to the NSA,CIA,Etc.” These are two further facts or pieces of evidence which display and confirm the infiltration of Western academia and journalism by Western intelligence agencies.
As far as Ther is concerned, this means that he is, at best, yet another clueless and blissfully unaware academic “intellectual yet idiot” and unwitting CIA asset who had critical thinking about and serious research into the US empire driven out of him when he was given his education/indoctrination in and by the US empire — a practice which the Romans already used on the sons of the tribes which they conquered in order to create loyal colonial subjects — and who now regurgitates US and CIA propaganda about Ukraine. There even exists a respective “ism” for this policy or practice, namely “Macaulayism”:
Macaulayism refers to the policy of introducing the English education system to British colonies. The term is derived from the name of British politician Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859), who served on the Governor-General’s Council and was instrumental in making English the medium of instruction for higher education in India.[1]
From this article on the associated “downward filtration” theory:
He also advocated for the government to educate only a few Indians, who would then educate the rest of the population. This is referred to as the ‘downward filtration’ policy.
He wished to create a pool of Indians [or Europeans] capable of serving British [or US] interests and remaining loyal to them. This group would be “Indian by blood and color, but English by tastes, opinions, morals, and intellect.”
At worst, Ther is someone who wittingly cooperates with the CIA and who knowingly disseminates their lies and propaganda in exchange for career advancement; maybe they also have something on him. It would be the usual scenario of “the carrot or the stick” or maybe both.
The question to me consequently is not if Ther is a CIA asset but only what type of CIA asset he is, and the problem for Ther is that neither main option — being an unwitting or witting CIA asset — makes him and what he is doing look good.
So much for the clear and evident CIA links to the Ukraine conflict which, contrary what Western propagandists and CIA assets such as Ther would have you believe, can be traced back to the 1950s and 1940s and which were and will be continued into and beyond the present under various guises. So much for setting the stage.
2.3 Further Reading
For further studies into this matter, I highly recommend this thread by Lori Spencer or the respective article by Red Street Journal:
In case you are doubting the current CIA presence in Ukraine, it is actually more in the open now:
The New York Times reports that Ukraine is crawling with special forces and spies from the US and its allies, which would seem to contradict earlier reports that the US intelligence cartel is having trouble getting intel about what’s happening on the ground in Ukraine.
This would also, obviously, put the final nail in the coffin of the claim that this is not a US proxy war.
In an article titled “Commando Network Coordinates Flow of Weapons in Ukraine, Officials Say,” anonymous western officials inform us of the following through their stenographers at The New York Times:
3. US Experts Speak Out: NATO Expansion and No Neutral Ukraine as the Main Causes of the Conflict
It is well-known that Putin and Russia regard NATO’s presence in Ukraine and their cooperation — something which can be traced back to at least 2008 and the Yulia Tymoshenko government —
23. NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO. (quote from the NATO 2008 Bucharest Summit Declaration)
as a threat to Russia and as a fundamental cause to militarily intervene in Ukraine. Some will dismiss that as Russian propaganda and as an excuse to invade Ukraine. Strangely enough though, precisely those points of view have been shared for years by high-ranking US diplomats, intelligence, military or security people or academics who warned of and sometimes even correctly predicted recent events and developments years before they happened.
3.1 Ted Galen Carpenter
Already in 1994, a Ted Galen Carpenter warned about NATO expansion:
3.2 Frank Blackaby
In 1996, Frank Blackaby did the same thing:
3.3 Joe Biden
In 1997, the current US president Joe Biden who is currently shifting all blame for the Ukraine conflict on Putin together with other US imperialist filth (“unprovoked Russian aggression”), himself acknowledged during the for Russia catastrophic Yeltsin era that NATO expansion eastward would provoke a “vigorous and hostile reaction” from Russia:
“If there was ever anything that was going to tip the balance, were it to be tipped, in terms of a vigorous and hostile reaction — I don’t mean military — in Russia, it would be that.”
Ben Norton, the founder of Multipolarista, provides some context:
Needless to say, Russians warned of NATO expansion since the early 1990s. But those warnings fell on deaf ears of arrogant and ignorant Westerners who thereby massively contributed to destroying a more liberal and pro-Western orientation that Russia, which even wanted to join NATO in the early 2000s and under Putin(!), could have had. To quote from the beginning of Anatol Lieven’s January 25, 2022 Time article “Russia Has Been Warning About Ukraine for Decades. The West Should Have Listened”:
When I was a journalist for The Times (London) in Moscow in December 1992, I saw a print-out of a speech by the then Russian foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, warning that if the West continued to attack vital Russian interests and ignore Russian protests, there would one day be a dangerous backlash. A British journalist had scrawled on it a note to an American colleague, “Here are more of Kozyrev’s ravings.”
Andrei Kozyrev was the most liberal and pro-Western foreign minister Russia has ever had. As he stated in his speech, his anxiety about Western behavior was rooted in fear that the resulting backlash would destroy liberalism in Russia and Russian co-operation with the West. He was proved right as we see today. Yet when he expressed this fear, in entirely moderate and rational terms, he was instinctively dismissed by western observers as virtually insane.
The point about this history is that the existing crisis with Russia has origins that go far beyond Putin. Russia has a foreign and security blob, just as does the United States, with a set of semi-permanent beliefs about Russian vital interests rooted in national history and culture, which are shared by large parts of the population. These include the exclusion of hostile military alliances from Russia’s neighborhood and the protection of the political position and cultural rights of Russian minorities.
3.4 James Matlock
Back in 1997, another US political heavyweight, the last US ambassador to the Soviet Union James Matlock, also explained how NATO expansion would be a terrible idea:
In his Consortium News article from February 16, 2022, a consistent Matlock then called the Ukraine conflict “An avoidable crisis that was predictable, actually predicted, willfully precipitated”:
Matlock furthermore points out that the Ukrainian leadership failed to implement the Minsk agreements and more specifically Minsk II which existed since 2015:
the Ukrainian government has made clear it has no intention of implementing the agreement reached in 2015 for reuniting the Donbas provinces into Ukraine with a large degree of local autonomy — an agreement with Russia, France and Germany which the United States endorsed.
On Putin’s most likely goals:
Actually, it seems most likely that President Putin’s goals are what he says they are — and as he has been saying since his speech in Munich in 2007. To simplify and paraphrase, I would sum them up as: “Treat us with at least a modicum of respect. We do not threaten you or your allies, why do you refuse us the security you insist for yourself?
On the possibility of Biden trying to pretend to succeed externally as a classical political distraction from internal failures:
Maybe I am wrong — tragically wrong — but I cannot dismiss the suspicion that we are witnessing an elaborate charade, grossly magnified by prominent elements of the American media, to serve a domestic political end. Facing rising inflation, the ravages of Omicron, blame (for the most part unfair) for the withdrawal from Afghanistan, plus the failure to get the full support of his own party for the Build Back Better legislation, the Biden administration is staggering under sagging approval ratings just as it gears up for this year’s congressional elections.
Since clear “victories” on the domestic woes seem increasingly unlikely, why not fabricate one by posing as if he prevented the invasion of Ukraine by “standing up to Vladimir Putin”?
While the above is not unlikely, the more certain and longer-term geopolitical and economic goals that the USA pursues with the willful precipitation of the Ukraine conflict is the undermining of Nordstream 2 and, more fundamentally, dividing the EU and Russia according to the old maxim “divide and conquer.” Ukraine itself and its people is nothing but a piece — a pawn that is often enough sacrificed — on the global or “grand chessboard” for the USA:
In his article, Matlock also gives an affirmative answer to the question of whether the Ukraine crisis/conflict/intervention/war was avoidable:
Was the Crisis Avoidable?
Well, since President Putin’s major demand is an assurance that NATO will take no further members, and specifically not Ukraine or Georgia, obviously there would have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the alliance following the end of the Cold War, or if the expansion had occurred in harmony with building a security structure in Europe that included Russia.
Matlock’s comparison to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 during which he translated between Kennedy and Chrushchev is also apt, including in terms of bringing to light insane Western double standards:
How do other countries respond to alien military alliances near their borders? Since we are talking about American policy, maybe we should pay some attention to the way the United States has reacted to attempts of outsiders to establish alliances with countries nearby. Anybody remember the Monroe Doctrine, a declaration of a sphere of influence that comprised an entire hemisphere? And we meant it! When we learned that Kaiser’s Germany was attempting to enlist Mexico as an ally during the first world war, that was a powerful incentive for the subsequent declaration of war against Germany.
Then, of course, in my lifetime, we had the Cuban Missile Crisis — something I remember vividly since I was at the American Embassy in Moscow and translated some of Khrushchev’s messages to Kennedy.
An interesting respective ‘detail’ which is often omitted in the West and Western narratives of that 1962 crisis is that US nuclear missiles pointing at Russia were stationed in Turkey *before* that:
We American diplomats in Embassy Moscow […] were not even informed of the agreement regarding missiles in Turkey. We had no idea that we had come close to a nuclear exchange. We knew the U.S. had military superiority in the Caribbean and we would have cheered if the U.S. Air Force had bombed the sites. We were wrong.
“We were wrong.” This is something that Westerners should really consider and reflect on instead of engaging in blind group‘think’ or Orwellian “goodthink” that is in accordance with Western propaganda and the geopolitical goals of sick power elites which run the USA.
3.5 Paul Keating
The then prime minister of Australia Paul Keating likewise warned about and against NATO expansion in 1997:
3.6 A Panel of 50 US Foreign Policy Experts
The 1997 warnings about NATO expansion were rounded off by a panel of 50 US foreign policy experts:
3.7 George Kennan
In 1998, the US-diplomat, historian and foreign policy expert George F. Kennan (1904–2005) then warned of eastward NATO expansion. The following is originally from an interview with US and NATO propagandist Thomas Friedmann, published in the New York Times on Mai 2, 1998:
[I]n 1998, young Friedman asked old Kennan (then-94) what he thought about the expansion of NATO to include as members the recently ex-communist nations of central and eastern Europe getting every closer to the borders of Russia.
Kennan replied: “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. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.
[…]
I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe.
“Don’t people understand? Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime. And Russia’s democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we’ve just signed up to defend from Russia. 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.” (article here)
The remarkable thing about Kennan’s statements is that he refutes the Western Cold War 2.0 propaganda that Russia intends to invade the West —a view that probably also derives from the West/USA and Western/US leaders psychologically projecting their own traditionally colonial, expansionist, imperialist, invasive and violent foreigny policy on other countries and leaders. Kennan was also right in pointing out how current US foreign policy goes completely against the USA’s founding father’s principles and how, what we are seeing currently, is rather Russia’s reaction to it feeling provoked and threatened by the USA’s reckless eastward NATO expansion.
Relatedly and to quote Noam Chomsky from a 2022 interview by David Barsamian:
In 1952, [Kennan] was in favor of the unification of Germany outside the NATO military alliance. That was actually Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin’s proposal as well. Kennan was ambassador to the Soviet Union and a Russia specialist.
Stalin’s initiative. Kennan’s proposal. Some Europeans supported it. It would have ended the Cold War. It would have meant a neutralized Germany, non-militarized and not part of any military bloc. It was almost totally ignored in Washington.
There was one foreign policy specialist, a respected one, James Warburg, who wrote a book about it. It’s worth reading. It’s called Germany: Key to Peace. In it, he urged that this idea be taken seriously. He was disregarded, ignored, ridiculed. I mentioned it a couple of times and was ridiculed as a lunatic, too. How could you believe Stalin? Well, the archives came out. Turns out he was apparently serious. You now read the leading Cold War historians, people like Melvin Leffler, and they recognize that there was a real opportunity for a peaceful settlement at the time, which was dismissed in favor of militarization, of a huge expansion of the military budget.
3.8 Pat Buchanan
In 1999, the US politician Pat Buchanan uttered the same warning:
3.9 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
3.10 Vladimir Putin
Continuing with the 2000s and an expert on the USA, there is obviously also Putin’s reaction to and warning about NATO expansion at the 43rd Munich Security Conference on February 10, 2007:
3.11 Bill Burns
In a 2008 memo to the then US Minister of State Condoleezza Rice, the high-ranking US diplomat and since 2021 CIA director Bill Burns generally correctly predicted the Russian reactions in Crimea (2014) and in Eastern Ukraine (2022):
From this February 7, 2022 article by Peter Beinart:
Two years ago, Burns wrote a memoir entitled, The Back Channel. It directly contradicts the argument being proffered by the administration he now serves. In his book, Burns says over and over that Russians of all ideological stripes — not just Putin — loathed and feared NATO expansion. He quotes a memo he wrote while serving as counselor for political affairs at the US embassy in Moscow in 1995. ‘Hostility to early NATO expansion,” it declares, “is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.” On the question of extending NATO membership to Ukraine, Burns’ warnings about the breadth of Russian opposition are even more emphatic. “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),” he wrote in a 2008 memo to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “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.”
[…]
As the Bush administration moved toward opening NATO’s doors to Ukraine, Burns’ warnings about a Russian backlash grew even starker. He told Rice it was “hard to overstate the strategic consequences” of offering NATO membership to Ukraine and predicted that “it will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.”
These correct predictions also show that, contrary to Western propaganda and contrary to Western politicians who live in their own fantasy world in which a good USA protects democracy, etc., Putin actually is a rational political actor, because you can only predict the actions of rational actors but not those of irrational actors who act fairly randomly and non-predictably.
On the question of who ‘Condi’ was or is and to start addressing the huge topic of Western double standards, hypocrisy and propaganda which became particularly apparent during the recent (part of the) Ukraine conflict:
The view that the Ukraine conflict was “willfully precipitated” by the West and especially the USA is also shared by independent journalist Benjamin Norton, the founder of Multipolarista, who is referencing Bill Burns’ 2008 assessment and prediction:
3.12 Shiping Tang
3.13 Stephen F. Cohen
In 2010 at the very latest, the late Russia expert and professor Stephen F. Cohen uttered similar warning (in the forefield a further grand absurdity and “ultimate irony” of US allies):
To quote from the above 2010 lecture of Cohen on “double standards” about “spheres of influence” that also highlights the arrogance, ignorance, estrangement from reality and simply insanity of Western political actors:So there has been a tremendous expansion of America’s sphere of influence since the mid-1990s, right on Russia’s borders.
All the while, every American administration is saying to Russia, including the Obama administration: You can not have a sphere of influence because that is old thinking. Well? I mean, the Russians may be cruel but they’re not stupid.
In other words, [the Americans] say we can have the biggest sphere of influence the world has ever seen and you don’t get any, not even on your own border. In fact, we’re taking what used to be your traditional sphere of influence. Along with the energy and all the rest, it is ours now!
Again, this idea of a winner-takes-all policy. This is the enormous resentment in Russia.
The relationship will never become stable and cooperative until we deal with this problem. Does it mean Russia is entitled to a sphere of influence? … Yes, depending on what you mean by a sphere of influence.
Confirmed Joe Biden’s 1997 comment about a Russian “reaction,” Cohen also describes Putin as “75% reacting” in 2015 (27:24-)
“The consensual characterization of Putin, leaving aside KGB thug, is that he is an aggressor; that his foreign policy has been neo-Soviet imperial aggression.
No serious historian writing 20, 30, 40 years from now, will characterize Putin as that. They will see him primarily, as I do, as primarily — you wanna break it down to percentages, 75% — a reactive leader.”
3.14 John Mearsheimer
Like Burns in 2008, the US politologist and Chicago University professor John Mearsheimer also correctly predicted recent events in Ukraine in a currently much-quoted lecture from 2014:
Like others, Mearsheimer also understood the obvious problem and the obvious solution for it: Ukraine would have needed to stary neutral and now has to become neutral again and disconnected from USA and NATO:
Whether Russia’s respective military actions are the right or wrong way to accomplish that goal is questionable; but one does not have to wonder why Russia did what it did after long years of explanations, requests and warnings and after finally having lost its patience with the West and the situation it has created in Ukraine.
3.15 Malcolm Fraser
Other notable warnings also occurred in 2014, such as by the Australian prime minister Malcolm Fraser:
3.16 John Pilger
The indeed legendary Australian journalist and documentary film maker John Pilger uttered the same warning in 2014:
3.17 Henry Kissinger
Ironically and as a sign of the strange times we are living in, even the US war criminal Henry Kissinger
…proposed as much in 2014:
In 2022 and at the tender age of 99, the US war criminal Kissinger still made more sense than most other Western politicians and ‘experts’ about Ukraine by offering a realistic assessment and peace plan:
Former U.S. secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger said Monday that Ukraine should cede territory to Russia to help end the invasion, suggesting a position that a vast majority of Ukrainians are against as the war enters its fourth month.
Speaking at a conference at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Kissinger urged the United States and the West to not seek an embarrassing defeat for Russia in Ukraine, warning it could worsen Europe’s long-term stability.
After saying that Western countries should remember Russia’s importance to Europe and not get swept up “in the mood of the moment,” Kissinger also pushed for the West to force Ukraine into accepting negotiations with a “status quo ante,” which means the previous state of affairs.
“Negotiations need to begin in the next two months before it creates upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome. Ideally, the dividing line should be a return to the status quo ante,” said Kissinger, 98, according to the Daily Telegraph. “Pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine, but a new war against Russia itself.”
The “status quo ante” mentioned by Kissinger, who was secretary of state to Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald Ford, refers to restoring a situation in which Russia formally controlled Crimea and informally controlled Ukraine’s two easternmost regions of Luhansk and Donetsk. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has emphasized that part of his conditions for entering peace talks with Russia would include a restoration of preinvasion borders.
The Ukrainian regime reacted to Kissinger’s statements by blacklisting him:
Some fitting replies to Ivan Katchanovski (note that “Langley, VA” is the location of the CIA headquarters)…
and two replies to Sharmine Narwani:
And it’s funny how, about one week after Kissinger, Biden at least vaguely hinted at Ukraine needing to officially part with some of its territory in a “negotiated settlement”:
President Biden on Friday declined to rule out Ukraine having to cede part of its territory to Russia in order to end Moscow’s more than three-month-old invasion.
“Does Ukraine have to cede territory to achieve peace?” a reporter asked Biden after his remarks on the May jobs report.
“From the beginning, I’ve said and I’ve been — not everyone’s agreed with me — nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,” Biden began his answer. “It’s their territory. I’m not going to tell them what they should and shouldn’t do.
“But it appears to me that at some point along the line, there’s going to have to be a negotiated settlement here,” the president added. “And what that entails, I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows at the time. But in the meantime, we’re gonna continue to put the Ukrainians in a position where they can defend themselves.”
About a week later, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg (2014-) joined in:
An analysis:
But it is not so much “idiocy” but rather profit-driven and also geopolitical and geostrategical calculation:
3.18 Zbigniew Brzezinski
A not exactly russophile Zbigniew Brzeziński — the US-‘National Security’ Adviser under president Jimmy Carter, highranking founding member of the Rockefeller-related Trilateral Commission, and more so one of the main architects of US geopolitics and the author of the respective and world-renowned book The Grand Chessboard (1997) — stated and confirmed in a 2015 interview with the German Der Spiegel that a neutral Ukraine is required:
Ukrainian NATO ambitions, by contrast, were a dangerous delusion that recently went up in smoke as predicted:
3.19 Robert Gates
3.20 Noam Chomsky
3.21 Oleksiy Arestovych
3.22 Tim Marshall
3.23 Vladimir Pozner
3.24 Sir Roderic Lyne
Warnings from 2021:
3.25 George Beebe
3.26 Tulsi Gabbard, Douglas McGregor, Daniel L. Lewis
Concerning warnings after the very predictable war broke out on February 24, 2022, there are the three US military officers Tulsi Gabbard (more well-known as an anti-war politician and US presidential candidate who confronted a war-mongering Hillary “We came, we saw, he died — hahahahaha” Clinton), Col. Douglas McGregor and Lt. Col. Daniel L. Lewis who gave fundamentally identical statements about the Ukraine-Russia-USA conflict (see Gabbard at around 31:00 of the Glenn Greenwald video):
3.27 Pope Francis
It is even Pope Francis who has arrived at the fundamentally same understanding:
Pope Francis repeated similar statement more than a month later:
In an interview published Tuesday, Pope Francis said Russia’s war in Ukraine was “perhaps somehow either provoked or not prevented” — controversial remarks that will raise eyebrows internationally.
He made the remarks during an interview with Jesuit magazine La Civiltà Cattolica conducted in mid-May but published Tuesday.
“Someone may say to me at this point: but you are pro-Putin! No, I am not,” Francis said. “It would be simplistic and wrong to say such a thing. I am simply against reducing complexity to the distinction between good guys and bad guys, without reasoning about roots and interests, which are very complex.”
The pope also recalled a conversation he had before the war with an unnamed head of state — a “wise man” — who told Francis he was concerned about NATO and Russia.
“He said, ‘They are barking at the gates of Russia. The situation could lead to war,’” the pope said. “That head of state was able to read the signs of what was happening.”
[…]
The pope’s new comments come a month after he said himself in an interview that NATO may have “perhaps facilitated” the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine by “barking” at Russia’s door.
Predictable McCarthyite (part 13a, section 15.1.2) replies by Western propagandists followed, including by the indeed “unhinged” Louise Mensch:
3.29 Olaf Scholz and Shinzo Abe
It is also interesting to note that Russia’s military actions against Ukraine occurred only 5 days after Zelenskiy rejected the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s proposal that Ukraine drop its NATO aspirations. From this article by Michael David Morrissey:
On April 1, 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported that
Mr. Scholz made one last push for a settlement between Moscow and Kyiv. He told Mr. Zelensky in Munich on Feb. 19 that Ukraine should renounce its NATO aspirations and declare neutrality as part of a wider European security deal between the West and Russia. The pact would be signed by Mr. Putin and Mr. Biden, who would jointly guarantee Ukraine’s security.
Mr. Zelensky said Mr. Putin couldn’t be trusted to uphold such an agreement and that most Ukrainians wanted to join NATO. His answer left German officials worried that the chances of peace were fading.
This is remarkable for three reasons, all of which are obvious and important but none of which, as far as I know, have been pointed out in either the German or the American press. First, it shows Scholz knew exactly what was needed to prevent the war. If the same proposal had been made to Zelensky by Joe Biden, it would not have been rejected. Ukraine would not have been able to fight the Russians effectively, and would not have wanted to, without American support.
Secondly, it shows that Olaf Scholz did not have the backbone to allow the news of his rejected proposal to be reported by the German press. Germans did not hear about it until 40 days later, after it appeared in the WSJ.
[…]
Thirdly, Scholz’s “last push” offer and the effort to keep it from being publicized shows how pitifully weak and spineless is the strongest “ally” of the US in NATO. If Scholz had had the guts to announce to the world that he had made this offer to Zelensky instead of keeping it secret, Zelensky would not have been able to reject it out of hand and the US would have been forced to choose between supporting its NATO ally or supporting Zelensky. It would be very interesting to know if Scholz discussed his proposal with the Americans before making it to Zelensky, and what the American response was.
The former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe concurs that the West and Ukraine could have prevented the Ukraine proxy war:
Then again, caring for Ukraine and Ukrainians was never the aim of the parasitic elites in the West and Ukraine, which is why they kept provoking Russia and crossing its red lines until they had their war:
On July 8, 2022 and not too long after having made his statements about Ukraine, Shinzo Abe would be assassinated while on a political campaign trail by, supposedly, Tetsuya Yamagami and with an improvised gun.
3.30 Irakli Garibashvili, Prime Minister of Georgia
Another leading politician who blamed NATO enlargement is Irakli Garibashvili, the Prime Minister of Georgia:
3.31 NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg
The icing on the cake and definitive proof that this conflict and war was intended by the USA came from NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s September 8, 2023 remarks which revealed Russia’s last ditch-efforts to avoid a conflict in late 2021 — efforts that were rejected by the as always conflict- and war-hungry US empire that does not care in the slightest about the well-being of Europeans, Ukrainians or Russians:
Stoltenberg’s revealing remarks were the following:
Relevant comments from journalist Branko Marcetic:
4. Conclusion: The Conflict Was Intended and Is Mainly the USA’s and the West’s Fault
[section 4 is still being edited]
US elites all the way up to president Joe Biden himself understood and predicted years and decades ago that eastward NATO expansion would create massive tensions with Russia and that it could very well lead to military conflict. The fact that they went ahead with eastward NATO expansion anyway can therefore easily be interpreted as the US wanting those military conflicts to happen and that they provoked Russia until they had their military conflict:
…..
4.1 US Aggression and Its Nuclear First Strike/Use Doctrine vs. Russia’s Initially Limited Military Measures in Ukraine
This view is also justified in light of a) the USA’s/NATO’s wars of aggression in Iraq, Libya or Syria under absurd pretexts (e.g. Iraq supposedly cooperating with Al-Qaeda or supposedly still having weapons of mass destruction/WMDs) or in light of b) the USA’s/NATO’s nuclear “first use/strike” doctrine and according suggestions of insane US politicians and “our zombie political class”. From a 2020 Newsweek Article:
The policy signals that any U.S. president has the authority, without consulting anyone, to order a pre-emptive nuclear strike — not merely in retaliation if and when missiles start flying in our direction. Our warheads could be launched in defense of allies, after the onset of a conventional war involving our troops (think: Iraq, 2003) or in response to a bellicose threat posed by a nuclear (e.g., North Korea) or not-yet-nuclear state (e.g., Iran).
[…] one president after another has argued, when asked about the possible use of nuclear weapons during any crisis, that “we won’t take anything off the table” or “we can’t tie one arm behind our back.”
To provide some further perspective on this with some interesting trivia:
So last but not least, the Ukraine conflict is also about the nuclear threat that the USA poses to Russia, and after long years of being ignored by the arrogant, provoking and willfully blind West, Russia finally reacted to all that. Contrary to the USA’s/NATO’s usual mode of operation, Russia’s initial reaction was also one of military restraint. This is also why Putin spoke of “special operations” (against a hostile and harmful US and right-wing extremist presence in Ukraine) and not of “war” (against Ukraine):
In particular, US Col. Douglas MacGregor’s respective opinion on this is noteworthy:
Here is the full interview in which MacGregor goes against FoxNews’ and its host’s predictable take on/against Russia:
…….
4.2 A Little EU Fiasco Intermezzo and on the Madness of No Fly Zones
Since I have already mentioned geopolitics, it is also worth mentioning that the EU and most of its countries continue to be amazingly naive, clueless, self-harming and a nothing but a useful idiot for the USA in this respect while the USA but also Russia and China pursue their own geopolitics. Behold, for instance, the following insane “collapsing the Russian economy” and “total war” against Russia quote from the French finance minister Le Maire from March 1, 2022:
“We will bring about the collapse of the Russian economy,” Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told the Franceinfo broadcaster a day after France, the EU and others said they would impose a new round of sanctions on Russia.
[…]
“We are waging total economic and financial war on Russia,” he said.
What is also so ‘fitting’ here is the adjective “total” since it is totally non-reminiscent of Hitler’s und Goebbel’s “total war” (simply replace “Jewish” with “Russian”). In comparison to this Western insanity, behold the Russian former president and prime minister Dmitry Medvedev’s reaction which shows calm reflection and historical awareness:
By contrast, German politicians like the Green US-Imperialist Annalena Baerbeck are just as useless and and dangerous in their ignorance as Le Maire and no more than “Biden’s pet dog[s]” (“Biden’s Schößhündchen”) who might end up talking us into a nuclear World War 3 and who “do not speak for us”:
By contrast, this is what responsible politics from a left Labour MP looks like (agreeing with the one thing where the notorious liar Boris Johnson actually makes sense):
To also address the important topic and side-theme of no-fly zones in Ukraine and why they would be total madness in greater detail:
In particular Glenn Greenwald’s longer analysis and warning about no-fly zones which lays bare the insanity of certain Western establishment figures is worth viewing and listening to:
And not very surprisingly, it is especially older people who do not know how to properly inform themselves via new media and who instead rely on mainstream media propaganda who would opt for a most likely catastrophic no-fly zone:
….
Also behold the Western ‘logic’ of NATO expansion:
This conclusion receives further confirmation from the fact that such conflicts are profitable for US power elites in various ways, including in terms of implementing their geopolitical agenda such as driving a wedge between the EU and Russia or sabotaging Nordstream 2 (both goals were accomplished via the sacrificed pawn Ukraine).
To quote from this article of hers:
This proxy war isn’t about defending Ukraine, it’s about quashing a nation [Russia] which has consistently resisted absorption into the US-centralized imperial blob. That agenda is best served by keeping this war going as long as possible and making it as gruelling and costly as possible for Moscow. Peace is not on the menu.
Representatives of the US and broader Western empire accordingly did what they could to a) scuttle negotiations and peace talks between Ukraine and Russia and to b) instead drawing that conflict out as much as possible. That is because it is their goal to turn Ukraine into a second Afghanistan for Russia, and they intend to implement that by “fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian.”
There is much evidence that supports the above hypotheses, such as the Common Dreams April 27 article “Experts Warn Against ‘Perpetual War’ in Ukraine as US Signals Long-Term Strategy” by Jake Johnson:
Earlier this week, Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin openly acknowledged something that analysts and critics of American foreign policy have suspected since Russia attacked Ukraine in February: That one of the Biden administration’s primary objectives in arming Ukrainian forces to the teeth is to severely degrade Russia’s military capacity.
“We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” Austin told reporters Monday following a visit to Kyiv, where he and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken pledged an additional $713 million in military aid to Ukraine, which has received billions of dollars worth of heavy weaponry from the Biden administration.
Respective news from May:
Fred Kagan (2:58–3:13): “I think we are at a bifurcation point in the world, and I do think that’s why it’s so incredibly important, ah, that we make sure that we are giving the Ukrainians everything that they need actually to defeat Russia and to liberate their country.
Kirby: “The training and effort that went into getting the Ukrainians ready for this kind of war over the last eight years: the United States, Canada, Britain, other allies really helped train the Ukrainians in small unit leadership, command and control, operational maneuver […]”
US Senator Joe Manchin said at the World Economic Forum on Monday that he opposes any kind of peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia.
Manchin, who at the moment is one of the most powerful elected officials in Washington, added that only the complete forcible ejection of Russia from all of Ukraine is acceptable, that the war should ideally be used to remove Putin from power, and that he and the strategists he talks to see this war as an “opportunity”.
“I am totally committed, as one person, to seeing Ukraine to the end with a win, not basically with some kind of a treaty; I don’t think that is where we are and where we should be,” Manchin said.
“I mean basically moving Putin back to Russia and hopefully getting rid of Putin,” Manchin added when asked what he meant by a win for Ukraine.
Mearsheimer is also on record for having stated that the military conflict is likely going to be a prolonged affair:
The usual question that needs to be considered also here is: “Cui bono” or “who benefits?”
Answer: The military industrial complex and the US empire:
In light of pro-war statements by US state representatives such as Manchin or the following one by Steny Hoyer, it furthermore needs to be considered whether the Ukraine conflict is still a proxy war between the USA or Russia or already a more direct military confrontation. That’s also because, in terms of economic or information warfare, it already is a direct confrontation:
“British soldiers must get ready to fight Russia in Third World War”:
Some ‘fringe’ reporters in mainstream media are also slowly arriving at the general conclusion of the US empire waging war against Russia via Ukraine:
It is not just CIA personell but also some NATO commando troops from various Western countries that are already in Ukraine:
But even as the Biden administration has declared it will not deploy American troops to Ukraine, some C.I.A. personnel have continued to operate in the country secretly, mostly in the capital, Kyiv, directing much of the massive amounts of intelligence the United States is sharing with Ukrainian forces, according to current and former officials.
At the same time, a few dozen commandos from other NATO countries, including Britain, France, Canada and Lithuania, also have been working inside Ukraine.
Additionally, there is also some first evidence that (former) US troops are indeed “in combat in Ukraine”:
The families of two US fighters captured by Putin’s army in Ukraine are begging the Biden administration to negotiate their release as fears grow that they will be handed death sentences like the two Brits captured earlier this year who now await death by firing squad.
Robert Drueke, 39, and Andy Huynh, 27, were captured by Russian soldiers last week as they defended the city of Kharkiv as part of a ten-man squad along with other French and US volunteer fighters.
Drueke served in the US Army in Iraq whereas Huynh was a Marine for four years. He had never been in active combat before flying to Ukraine in April to volunteer. Both of the US fighters captured yesterday are from Alabama, but it remains unclear if they knew each other before they ventured to the war zone.
Now, the families of the two men are begging the government for help as the situation in Ukraine intensifies; Russia continues to advance through eastern Ukraine, prompting military officials to concede yesterday that the numbers ‘favor’ Putin’s forces so far
And the above does not yet even include some US mercenaries of which some just so happen to share white supremacist views, among other not so pleasant details:
But yeah: This is totally not a US war against Russia via the proxy of Ukraine.
Now in case anyone who has not even understood the extent of their ignorance and deep propagandisation (see especially parts 6, 11 and 12 for a discussion of Western propaganda) should claim that people and analysts like myself who blame mainly the USA and the West for the Ukraine conflict can only be far-right authoritarian Putin-apologists, crazy conspiracy theorists or some such thing, we can easily refute those propagandized herd animals — almost without exception liberal to conservative centrists who cognitively vegetate in their bubble of not even semi-knowledge, who have never even heard of concepts such as “manufacturing consent” and the respective role of mainstream media — by pointing out that 1) US president Joe Biden himself and world-renowned US experts had already understood, warned of and/or predicted recent events and developments and their main cause (eastward NATO expansion) more than 20 years ago, that 2) we can hardly call these people Putin-apologists, crazy conspiracy theorists, etc. and that 3) the same applies to evidence- and fact-based analysts such as myself who use sound methods to arrive at sound conclusions. It is just not possible for everyone to blindly follow self-serving, ego-stroking narratives about the allegedly oh so good and democracy-bringing West and to find satisfaction in superficial virtue signalling. Here a related clarification:
[continue with part 2]
