The armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine is claiming more and more human lives, while the U.S. political leadership continues to reject the peace proposals of authoritative experts, including Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs. Will there finally be a politician who will put an end to the war madness…

“The researches of many commentators have already thrown much darkness on this subject, and it is probable that, if they continue, we shall soon know nothing at all about it” (Mark Twain as quoted by former U.S. ambassador Chas Freeman, “The Many Lessons of the Ukraine War”). 

President Biden has been consistent over the past two years in ruling out the dispatch of U.S. troops to fight Russia in Ukraine.

The tragic consequences of Russia’s February 2022 attack on Ukraine are amply documented in our mainstream media: one third of pre-war population lost, through death, displacement or flight; Ukraine’s infrastructural and environmental catastrophes; the grim echo of the trench warfare-like conditions of World War I, with incrementally small advances by either side at costs of thousands more lives.  The actual causes of the conflict are more the purview of independent media, this being an inconvenient topic for the Western narrative.  Bluntly put, the Ukraine tragedy was born of a series of missed opportunities, mostly willfully so, and mostly attributable to NATO and the West: if ever the words of Clausewitz rang true: War is politics by other means, they do so in the case of the Ukrainian tragedy.

Those familiar with the great Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin’s biography would assume that the connection is his birthday date, June 6, the same as the beginning of the Normandy landing. But, as will be explained later, the connection is much deeper.

While Western Allies invaded Normandy on June 6, 1944, John Wight recalls the coordinated operation by the Red Army to break German resistance in Europe.

An unusual gathering took place in Washington on May 21, 2024. At a time when U.S.-Russia relations hit the lowest historical level, when Washington keeps pumping tens of billions of dollars plus vast volumes of all kinds of weapons into its proxy war with Russia in Ukraine and rejects calls for using diplomacy to end the conflict, a large group of American and Russians, some via Zoom, assembled at The Washington Times headquarters, not far from Capitol Hill.

The following except is from the historian John Lukacs’ The End of the Twentieth Century (Ticknor & Fields, 1993),

“As we celebrate the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944, and the liberation of Europe that followed, let us also commemorate and honor the role that the former Soviet Union, now Russia, played in that liberation. It was the sacrifice of the Soviet people, with the loss of over 27 million lives and massive devastation to its own economy and infrastructure, that Europe was saved from fascism. This defeat of fascism and the resultant democracy that came about in Europe would not have been possible without the Russian sacrifice. On this anniversary, 80 years after the Normandy landings, and as Europe moves closer and closer to a confrontation with Russia, let us reflect on this salient reality. It is time for us to pull back from confrontation before it is too late. President Kennedy reminded us on June 10, 1963, during his commencement address at American University, “We all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children’s future, and we are all mortal.” Let us live up to this admonition and this challenge.

The 80th anniversary of D-Day falls on June 6 and of the start of Operation Bagration which crushed the Nazi Wehrmacht in the east on June 22. The Cold War has been over for almost a quarter of a century. And yet the looming threat of global thermonuclear war and universal destruction between the United States and its NATO allies with a relatively open, free market, non-ideological and definitely capitalist Russia is now greater than it ever was then, except for the fleeting few weeks of the Cuban MIssile Crisis in October 1962.