The Ukraine War: The Latest Confrontation Between The West And Russia

The fight for Europe between the Atlanticists and the Continentals predates the First World War. It can be traced to the great 18th-century wars that reshaped the continent before, during, and in the wake of the French Revolution when Napoleon sought to consolidate Europe around a Franco-Russian pact against Britain and her client-states. Although the Tsar’s government did not wish to sacrifice the lucrative economic relations with the United Kingdom to join the French emperor’s ‘continental blockade’, Russia helped create, after Waterloo, a European balance of power resting on a ‘Holy Alliance’ with the Austrian Empire and Prussia. That, however, did not prevent the Atlantic powers (England and France) from trying to push Russia out of the Black Sea a few decades later. Yet, under Bismarck’s rule, the renascent German Reich remained equidistant between the British and Russian geopolitical poles. After the Iron Chancellor’s forced resignation, the Wilhelmine Government adopted an interventionist policy in Balkanic and Carpathian Europe and allied with Turkey, intending to dominate the Eastern Mediterranean. The campaign to ‘germanise’ Ukraine began during the First World War when Russia incurred major defeats and fell into the turmoil of the 1917 revolution. The Leninist policy of carving national republics out of the Russian Empire carried seeds of civil strife that germinated during the second global conflict when the formerly Polish and Austro-Hungarian regions of Western Ukraine came under the rule of anti-Bolshevik, anti-Polish, and pro-Nazi elements which had been nurtured by the Western powers worried about communist expansion. Anti-Soviet separatism endured as a militant movement in Ukraine until the sixties, with continued support from British and US secret services, and came back to life with the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.  Anglo-American plans to create an anti-Russian bulwark with the European ex-Soviet States, from Estonia to Ukraine (from the Baltic to the Black Sea), were unshelved. Many German politicians saw a new opportunity to extend their economic and cultural influence in the lands between the three seas (Adriatic included). The French Gaullist opposition to NATO’s hegemony remained an obstacle for a few years. Still, since the early 1980s, Mitterand’s government, under great economic pressure, had drawn closer to the United States and gradually gave up the post-war vision of a  Europe of nations ‘from the Atlantic to the Urals,’ friendly to Russia and unsubordinated to the Anglo-Saxon block. The NATO-mandated attack of Yugoslavia manifested the expansionist intentions of US-led Western Europe, together with the rapid absorption of most countries to the East of the Elbe into the EU and NATO ‘twin’ systems. 

From 2008 on, the United States, under the George W Bush administration, signaled its firm intention to include Ukraine and Georgia in the North Atlantic Alliance. In a way, that was a throwback to the Third Reich’s strategic push into Southern Russia towards the oil-rich Caspian Sea and Central Asia. Although France and Germany opposed the openly anti-Russian move at that time, it was a watershed moment from which relations between NATO and Russia gradually deteriorated. Moscow was still smarting from the treatment meted out to Serbia by NATO, and Ukraine, in economic doldrums and political anarchy, was steadily being turned into a US-British proxy. The rest is history. The Obama and Trump regimes would not or could not stop the rising tide of anti-Russian (specifically anti-Putin) rhetoric and policies among the Atlantic ruling elites, which reversed the process of constructive collaboration between core European powers and Moscow fostered by German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder,  French President Chirac, and his Prime Minister Villepin in the months leading to the US-British invasion of Iraq in 2003.

By 2014, the Maidan coup against Ukrainian President Yanukovich demonstrated that the Anglo-Saxon powers, somewhat hesitantly backed by the rest of NATO and by the hapless EU administration, thoroughly penetrated by Neo-Conservative assets, would not accept a compromise on what they saw as a treasure trove for their economies. It is well established that the Minsk agreements were used as a dilatory diplomatic exercise to give time to NATO to solidify its presence in Ukraine. The continuous attacks on the Russophile Donbas region by Ukrainian para-militaries backed by regular forces were harbingers of an inevitably wider war involving some of the belligerents of the mid-19^th century Crimean conflict. 

The US Government saw the looming conflict as an opportunity to extract wealth and wear Russia down, perhaps even split her up at Europe’s expense without risking the lives of American soldiers, and most of the EU’s political leaders unquestioningly followed Washington. To quote former CIA agent Amaryllis Fox’s tweet that Tucker Carlson read out on his show: ‘In standing with Ukraine, the Biden-Harris administration convinced them to abandon a peace deal that would have ceded only half of the territory that Russia now occupies and, for that opportunity to lose twice as much of their homeland, they paid with tens of thousands of innocent lives. We did this to control the 11 trillion of minerals under the Donbas, to grind down the Russian war machine on the grist of Ukranian teenagers. We did it to hand hundreds of billions to US hedge funds, who are, as we speak, carving out rights to Ukraine’s fertile soil and vast mineral resources. The truth is the US never stood with the people of Ukraine. That is simply a jingle, an ad campaign broadcast to those who have never been there, designed to sell tax-payers on the appeal of prolonging the war for profit. 

We have cost Ukraine her territory; we have cost Ukraine her children. The war hawks and the bankers are no friends to Ukraine’.  

A consequence of this humanitarian disaster may well be the gradual splintering of NATO and the EU. Some envision the recreation of a neutral bloc of nations in Central and Eastern Europe; some are already turning against Brussels’ increasingly authoritarian, US-mandated policies.