12 mins read
Is the West finally ready to admit defeat in Ukraine?
The media is changing the narrative as the proxy war is running out of steam
11 mins read
This conflict has already brought the world to the absolute brink of World War III: A thermonuclear conflagration that would engulf the Northern Hemisphere of the globe and incinerate up to a billion people is now imminent and could break out at any time.
Yet the publics of the West remain willfully ignorant of the simple clear history of these awful developments – and of the central role of their own governments in conspiring to bring this cataclysm about.
The origins of the crisis could not be more clear or obvious. After the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, the Russian government of President Boris Yeltsin agreed immediately to allow Ukraine to become an independent state. For the next 23 years, Ukraine was peaceful, relatively stable, free, independent and democratic.
Governments tending towards the West or towards Russia peacefully, even if reluctantly turned over power to each other. This even happened after the demonstrations of the so-called Orange Revolution in 2004-5. Ukraine remained neutral and Russia respected its independence and the integrity of its borders.
Ukrainian democracy was far from perfect: Corruption abounded. And it was vastly at its worst under the notorious presidency of Viktor Yushchenko from 2005 to 2010 strongly supported by the West.
The country remained very poor. The central government was always very weak. Enormous criminal organizations with safe bases and centers of support outside Ukraine engaged in drug trafficking and human enslavement and trafficking activities on an unprecedented scale.
Nevertheless, there was full freedom of expression, a fully free media, open borders and peaceful relations with all Ukraine’s neighbors including Russia. On the global scene, the country remained neutral.
However, this state of affairs was deliberately destroyed in 2014. The European Union, with strong support from the Obama administration in the United States, imposed crippling terms for economic aid on Ukraine that the government of President Viktor Yanukovych understandably refused.
Western leaders were outraged and openly provoked and supported the violent Maidan Revolution – in effect a coup d’etat – in Kiev in February 2014. Some 42 Ukrainian anti-Maidan activists were burned alive by the revolutionaries in the Trades Union House in the city of Odessa. President Yanukovych and his family were threatened with murder if they did not flee the country immediately. They did so
Most shocking of all, the chief US policy maker on Ukraine and Russia, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland – a passionate neoconservative and the wife of neocon “senior priest” – for it is truly a cult – Robert Kagan, flew to Kiev and openly threw the support of the US government under President Barack Obama behind the revolutionaries.
Ludicrously, Nuland even handed out cookies generously to the rioters and revolutionaries thronging the streets of Kiev.
Also, Senator John McCain, a top leader of the Republican Party in the United States and the Republican candidate for president against Obama in 2008, gave screaming public speeches in Kiev supporting the revolutionaries. All of this was openly documented and broadcast at the time on international television news including across the United States.
The blatant and unprecedented nature of these events needs to be emphasized because they were so shocking and clear at the time. Senior US and European leaders were intervening openly, unapologetically and directly in the affairs of one of the largest countries in Europe. They were not merely calling for, but actually demanding the violent overthrow and destruction of its lawful, constitutional and democratically elected government! And this was done.
Had either the Soviet Union or the United States engaged in any comparable behavior during the Cold War, it would certainly have brought the world to the brink of a nuclear confrontation then. For all the successive leaders of governments in Washington and Moscow from 1949 to 2014, such behavior would have been regarded as inconceivable.
The new regime that violently seized power and control of the electoral process was never supported in its succession of highly dubious elections by more than a fraction of the voters who had elected pro-Russian and pro-Western governments alike in Kiev over the previous 23 years.
From the beginning, the new regime in Kiev was heavily influenced and often dominated by open neo-Nazis and ferociously anti-Russian elements from the fringe regions of western Ukraine.
Alarmed by these developments, the populations of the two Russian-speaking eastern provinces of Lugansk and Donetsk seceded from Ukraine and became secessionist republics with Russian support.
Successive regimes in Kiev refused to accept this reality – which certainly reflected the democratic preferences of the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of Donetsk and Lugansk. With far from secret US support, paramilitary and extremist groups in Ukraine started a long series of terrorist attacks against the two secessionist provinces.
Russia was also outraged by the forcible incorporation of Russian-population-majority Crimea under the new regime and supported the secession of Crimea to Russia directly. Successive Ukrainian governments in Kiev had all rejected every proposal for a plebiscite that would have allowed the people of Crimea to choose for themselves whether they wished to be part of Russia or Ukraine. Everyone knew the vote would have been overwhelmingly in favor of joining Russia.
Western leaders directed by Obama in the United States and – again – Nuland – professed outrage at these developments.
“The United States then responded along with its allies by imposing punitive economic sanctions on Russia. It was very clear that these sanctions were intended to collapse the resurgent Russian economy back into the state of abject poverty and despair it had experienced during the dark decade of President Boris Yeltsin, when those policies had been supported and in fact urged on Moscow by the US administration of President Bill Clinton.
Millions of ordinary citizens – Russian estimates put the fatalities as high as 27 million – during those awful years, the hostility of those measures and their meaning was all too clear to the Russian government and people.
US-Russian relations plummeted in the eight years that followed. Lugansk and Donetsk with a combined population of six million suffered 14,000 fatalities from the terrorist attacks backed by covert US forces and neo-Nazis in Ukraine operating openly and with total impunity under a succession of US-backed regimes in Kiev. Critics and dissidents within Ukraine during this time were systematically terrorized and murdered.
But if you watched CNN, PBS and the four major news networks in the United States or read the New York Times and the Washington Post, which always instruct the rest of the slavish, lockstep and conformist US mainstream media what to think, you would have remained totally ignorant of these realities.
For eight years, the Russian government sought to peacefully end the violent terrorist attacks against the populations of Lugansk and Donetsk. Proportionately, they killed 14 times as many people as Israel suffered in the Second Palestinian Intifada from 2000 to 2005 and 10 times as many fatalities as Israel suffered in the Hamas terror attack on October 7, 2023.
The United States and the nations of Western Europe fully supported Israel in its retaliatory military operations following both those series of attacks and terrorist outrages even though the retaliatory operations killed many times the number of original victims.
Russia remained committed to a peaceful, diplomatic resolution of the attacks against the populations of Lugansk and Donetsk. Eventually the United States and its allies agreed to sign the two Minsk accords of 2014 and 2015 with Moscow.
These two accords have never been implemented by the United States and by successive Ukrainian governments in Kiev. Two of the main Western leaders involved in negotiating them, President Francois Hollande of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany have openly and publicly admitted that there was never the slightest intent by the West to implement and honor them.
Russia’s incursion into Ukraine in February 2022 was therefore a desperate measure to end the long campaign of murders and terror where all peaceful efforts over the previous eight years had been rejected by Washington, Kiev and their allies.
Through all that time, successive governments in Kiev remained totally dependent on US aid which even then poured into the country on the scale of multiple billions of dollars. It was all unregulated and vast quantities of it were stolen as many successive official reports by element institutions within the US government itself repeatedly documented.
Since the current Ukraine conflict began in February 2022, the Biden administration in the United States has repeatedly blocked and destroyed all diplomatic initiatives from Moscow and even also from Kiev to peacefully end it.
The US Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support has poured unprecedented multiple billions of dollars into Ukraine. Senior US senators and commentators close to the Biden administration have openly proclaimed and even boasted that the real intent of these policies is to keep the Ukrainians fighting in order to bleed Russia white.
Russia has indeed suffered many thousands of deaths and casualties in combat, but Ukraine has suffered far more. Realistic assessments put the current total of Ukraine dead at least at 600,000 and probably considerably higher by now. An entire generation of Ukrainian men has been needlessly sent to be slaughtered in a war that should never have started or been allowed to continue.
Even NATO has suffered since its members at US urging have donated most of their arsenals of modern combat weapons to Ukraine – whose corrupt and incapable civilian administrators, military commanders and poorly trained troops proceeded to misuse, waste and lose them.
Today, the Biden administration continues to prosecute this most dangerous, disgusting and unnecessary war even though Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that further escalation by Ukraine and its NATO allies will certainly lead to an overwhelming, no holds barred annihilating response from Russia.
There is no secret about any of this. It is all a matter of public record. Yet the media in the West, most especially in Britain and the United States, never prioritize it or effectively warn their populations of it.
Every Sunday, at least 12 hours of National Football League games are broadcast on the four main US television networks. Yet absolutely no time is allotted to warning the American public that they are facing total annihilation because of the direct and consistent actions over the past decade of their own government.
Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump raised the issue seriously and warned of the dangers in his one permitted presidential debate with the number two person in the Biden administration and the Democratic candidate in the November 5 national election, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Harris never responded or raised the subject at all. She never does. She appears totally ignorant and oblivious to it. As does Biden himself.
Indeed, the President of the United States is now so clearly incontinent and senile that no one bothers to seriously deny it.
Biden has repeatedly referred in public recently to Harris as already the sitting president and he even appeared on the beach wearing a MAGA (Make America Great Again) baseball cap worn only by Trump supporters. Yet Biden remains in control of the US nuclear release codes.
This state of affairs is outrageous, It is unprecedented. And it is literally insane. The irresponsibility of the Biden administration and of almost all the members of both parties in the United States Congress is infinite and knows no bounds.
The only signs of responsibility and moral independence in decision and action have come from the top civilian and military figures at the head of the US armed forces – Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs US Air Force General Charles Q. Brown. They both rejected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s demands for deep strike missiles to hit strategic targets deep in Russia. The Russian government had previously made clear that complying with such a request would trigger a no-holds-barred overwhelming military response.
This is where we are and how we got there. Officially, the symbolic Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warning of the threat of nuclear war remains set at 90 seconds to midnight — the closest setting to Armageddon it has ever been. But even this is a cowardly abdication of responsibility by the BAS. For we are at only one second to midnight now.
There is no more time left.
Martin Sieff is the former chief foreign correspondent of the Washington Times and Senior Research Fellow of the American University in Moscow