Russia was provoked into the war and is now being dragged into the escalation.
Another country should not be invaded by force - this is obvious according to international law, so Russian aggression against Ukraine is to be condemned. But! Nothing is without history.
So my goal now is not to exonerate Russia or Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin for starting a war against Ukraine, but rather to talk about the background.
Without it, we see a regrettable and painful event, the Russian-Ukrainian war, on one side.
To explain this, I will use two interviews: one was given by Jeffrey Sachs, a prestigious, world-famous professor at Columbia University, in Life and Literature (unfortunately, Biden does not know how to negotiate, February 23, 2024), and the other was given by American Colonel Douglas Macgregor, Trump he was a consultant on a channel called Hatstruth. The latter, Colonel Douglas Macgregor, is the one who gives a rather broad perspective to the war and the reasons that triggered and motivated it. It is worth quoting him first.
According to the colonel, the war in Ukraine is not about Ukraine, but about the globalist elite's plan to dismember Russia and exploit its natural resources, gas and oil deposits.
He claimed: “The globalists are running the show in Ukraine. It is a globalized neoconservative elite active in Congress and the White House, along with European elites, especially in Paris, Berlin, and London. They all want BlackRock to conquer Ukraine so they can systematically exploit its resources and make it a subordinate state,” Macgregor continued. “But they want it to happen in Russia as well. Therefore, this war was never about Ukraine. It was always about what could be done to destroy Russia.”
The colonel - who can hardly be accused of being on Russia's or Putin's side - also explains that for twenty years Putin always talked about America and NATO not bringing their borders closer to Russia, because Russia also has its own security needs. However, this was never considered by the United States.
Biden had previously made it clear that the real goal was to force a regime change in Russia, that is, to topple Putin at any cost. He added that Russia must be broken into its parts and exploited. This is what Putin eventually settled for, and countermeasures were taken before any of this could happen. If we accept the colonel's words and arguments, we can see the real reasons for the outbreak of the war in a slightly different way.
And we still haven't exonerated Russia for attacking. But we see this event in a slightly more nuanced way. Because history is never black or white, but all its shades.
But let's see what the world-famous professor Jeffrey Sachs has to say about the underlying reasons! He begins: “Since 1992, the United States has sought to weaken Russia, just as it has, of course, since 1945 tried to contain the Soviet Union. The goal of American foreign policy was hegemony—that is, complete, all-encompassing dominance.”
This is what Sachs says, who again cannot be accused of being Russian-friendly - rather of objectivity. He then explains that the US has relentlessly pursued the path of NATO expansion, even though in 1990 James Baker promised Gorbachev the opposite in exchange for Gorbachev agreeing to German unity and the dissolution of the Communist camp. He unilaterally canceled the ABM treaty on the anti-missile defense system in 2002 - when Putin was already the president, who was trying to get closer to the West - and installed the Aegis ballistic missile defense system in Russia's neighborhood despite strong Russian protests.
Sachs explains that the 2022 war could have been prevented:
"It would only have been necessary for Joe Biden to agree that NATO would not expand towards Ukraine, and for the USA to encourage Minsk II. compliance with the agreement."
The Minsk agreements were brought together by Merkel, Hollande, Putin and Poroshenko, but the "big one", that is, the USA, was missing from them, and the latter had no interest in preserving the guarantee of peace. It is true that both Merkel and Hollande recently admitted that these agreements were only necessary so that Ukraine would have time to prepare - more precisely, for the United States to prepare Ukraine for war with Russia.
What is this, if not a confession that the West is preparing for the Russian-Ukrainian war, and if someone is preparing for this, then they are doing something to ensure that this war breaks out, of course, so that it is not them, but the enemy who starts it? Clever - we could say that in a tongue-in-cheek way.
Sachs, who by the way was an advisor to both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, suggested to Washington: consider Russia your partner, not your enemy, because it is no longer that. "They didn't share my views," he says.
Consider one thing that Sachs emphasizes: American grand strategy has always seen Russia as an enemy, regardless of the changes that occurred in 1990. I ask: is it certain that Russia and Putin are always to blame for everything? And I'm not asking this because I'm pro-Russian - they get their money's worth, as they say - but I mention it modestly for the sake of an objective and realistic approach to foreign policy.
In the interview, Sachs states with surprising clarity that the future "revolution" of 2014 - when the pro-Russian Yanukovych was ousted from power - was a coup supported by the USA, without them it would not have happened. As he puts it: "The US is addicted to regime change operations." (We already know this - fortunately, it didn't work for us, just as the Americans left behind only ruins in many other countries.)
Finally, in the interview, he agrees with Viktor Orbán's views on the war and says that the European Union should help Ukraine through peace negotiations. Unfortunately, the US blocked the 2022 peace deal, so where was the EU? he asks. His answer: on the side of the United States, not on the side of Ukrainian peace interests.
In conclusion, I would like to connect the lessons of the two interviews, emphasizing that it was not Russian experts who spoke here, but respected American public figures. We know the mantra, we have to say it every day: Russia committed war aggression against Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
But how did we get here?
The Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, and the United States started the eastward expansion of NATO in a way that broke its promise, while as a defense system it was no longer in a hostile relationship with Russia, yet it still saw it as an enemy. Putin applied to join NATO as early as 2000, probably because he wanted a world war... His request was rejected. In his famous Munich speech in 2007, Putin outlined Russia's security interests and asked for their consideration. Nobody cared. In 2014, the USA helped and even organized the future coup, and installed a president and a government that was unquestioningly at the head of Ukraine.
The United States and certain global financial circles - Soros, BlackRock, and of course the giant companies and financial institutions belonging to the Davos elite - put their hands on Ukraine's most important energy sources, IT companies, and not least its agriculture. From then on, it was in the interest of both the Americans and the global elite to separate Russia from these sources.
At the end of 2021, Putin announced once again that he has no intentions of war, but that he wants to negotiate at eye level with the great powers and live in peace with Europe - he said this in almost every speech. He didn't get an answer.
At the Munich Security Conference in 2022, Zelensky announced that he wanted to become a member of NATO, and this was received positively. This was a milestone for Putin.
The war aggression started, but already at the end of February, in March, negotiations on the terms of the peace treaty began, and the parties roughly agreed. But then Boris Johnson came along - as a proxy for the Democrats and the global elite - and stopped the peace deal, reassuring Ukraine that the West would give them enough help to win this war against the Russians. Since then, every step taken by the United States and the EU promotes the continuation of the war, I will not go into detail about them. Zelensky would have been willing to negotiate peace again, for which the Bidens would allow them to use ATACMS missiles on Russian territory, and the British and French would immediately join them.
Here we are.
Who wants peace here?
Yes, Russia committed aggression. But will the provocateurs who brought Putin into this always remain pure and holy? Do provocateurs always escape prosecution?
