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2/22/2022

NATO may get the war it wanted. By: John Wojcik & C.J. Atkins

1 Comment

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Picture
People from the Donetsk People's Republic, the territory controlled by a pro-Russia separatist government in eastern Ukraine, board a train to Russia after evacuating in the Rostov-on-Don region, near the border with Ukraine, Russia, on Sunday, Feb. 20, 2022. They were fleeing shelling by the Ukrainian Army. | AP
The big news regarding the Russia-Ukraine conflict over the President’s Day holiday was that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin ordered troops to enter two separatist regions of Ukraine for “peacekeeping” purposes. There has been no confirmation yet that Russian troops, in addition to those that may or may not have already been in those regions, have actually moved into the areas yet.
Russia’s order has been almost universally described by Western media as ratcheting up tensions and bringing the Ukraine crisis closer than ever to actual war. Putin ordered the troops to move in just hours after he recognized the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine.

In the last two days, there has been extensive shelling of the areas by the Ukrainian Army, and at least 60,000 civilians have thus far evacuated across the border into Russia. Since 2014, Ukrainian troops are estimated to have killed 15,000 or more Russian-speaking civilians in the two breakaway republics.
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Picture
Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics in eastern Ukraine on Monday and signed friendship treaties with them, opening the way for Russian troops to come to their aid against Ukrainian forces. Western governments say it paves the way for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and represents a major escalation by Russia. | Alexei Nikolsky / Sputnik / Kremlin Pool Photo via AP
Although cable networks carried parts of Putin’s speech on Monday, none carried the entirety of his remarks, which were a mix of nationalist territorial claims, revisionist history, and legitimate charges of Ukrainian hostility in the Donbass.

The press gave heavy attention to his provocative claim that Ukraine lacked “real statehood,” a position seen as justification for a potential Russian absorption of the country. The media provided little to no analysis of the details of Putin’s assertion, however.

In his speech, Putin laid out his own version of the history of Russian-Ukrainian relations, putting blame on Communist leaders of the Soviet era for upsetting “the historical destiny of Russia and its peoples” by focusing on the “right of nations to self-determination” in the years after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

“Lenin’s principles of state development were not just a mistake,” Putin said, “they were worse than a mistake.” He said these principles, along with subsequent shifting of the internal territorial boundaries of the USSR by other leaders, led to what he implied were artificial divisions between Russians and Ukrainians. Putin said that governing such a vast territory as a “confederation,” as was the case in the Soviet period, was “far removed from reality” and the “tradition…of the Russian Empire.”

With the spotlight on Putin’s comments concerning territory and statehood issues, few U.S. media outlets provided much attention to his charge that the government in Kiev had organized “a terrorist underground movement” in the Donbass region and Crimea. Nor was note taken of the plans of Ukraine’s government, according to its own strategists, to execute a war “with foreign military support” against Russia and the breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine.

President Joe Biden, waiting barely a minute after Putin finished speaking, announced sanctions against the two republics of Lugansk and Donetsk. He is expected to announce new severe sanctions against Russia shortly.

It should be clear that even though they don’t involve “troops on the ground,” sanctions are, themselves, also an act of war. Russia has been living with a variety of painful sanctions imposed by the U.S. for eight years now already.

The raising of the stakes and the raising of tensions resulting from Putin’s announcement ordering in “peacekeepers” Monday are, at least in part, a predictable result of NATO, the U.S., and Ukraine ignoring a number of legitimate security issues repeatedly mentioned by Russia for the last 30 years, including and especially Russia’s objection to the eastward expansion of NATO and the placement of offensive weapons on Russia’s borders.
Picture
Russian army tanks are loaded onto railway cars to move back to their permanent base after drills in Russia on Friday, Feb. 18, 2022. The Russian military said it was pulling some troops back to their permanent bases after drills in regions near Ukraine, but the U.S. and its allies charged that Moscow was actually beefing up troops near Ukraine. Putin’s recognition of the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Lugansk in eastern Ukraine could bring about fresh Russian troop deployments. | Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP
The tension-raising announcement by Russia Monday did not, of course, come out of the blue. It followed months of bad faith negotiations by the West. Rather than implementing the 2014 Minsk Protocols under which the parties agreed to autonomy for Lugansk and Donetsk, for example, the West only offered Russia the right to inspect offensive missiles placed on its borders. To add insult to injury, while they were offering that, they established three additional bases with such missiles, two in Slovakia and one in Poland.
​
They also ignored French President Emmanuel Macron’s suggestion of a “Finlandization” solution for Ukraine whereby Ukraine, like Finland during the Cold War, selects its own form of government and remains independent while it pursues a nonaligned neutral foreign policy with no offensive weapons stationed on its soil and aimed at Russia.

Another unfortunate result of where all of this leaves us is that, unless all sides pull back from the brink and negotiate seriously, we already have an unwanted winner in this war.
​
The winner is the multi-national fossil fuel industries based in the U.S. The CEOs must have been rubbing their palms together with glee when they heard Biden warn Americans they will have to pay higher prices for energy as the U.S. imposes sanctions on Russia. Futures for gasoline and home heating oil were already up on Monday and Tuesday. Those companies hate the fact that Russia has been supplying Europe’s energy needs. They want to sell Europe their gas, fracked in the U.S., even though that gas will be far more expensive for Europe than the Russian gas.
Picture
Imports of natural gas into Europe come from both pipelines and via ship terminals for liquefied natural gas (LNG). The Ukrainian government worries it could lose massive amounts of revenue if the joint German-Russian Nord Stream 2 pipeline becomes operational, as Kiev currently collects hefty transit payments for Russian gas that crosses its territory. Western-based oil and gas companies, which rely on the LNG terminals to import their products, stand to see handsome profits from possible disruptions to Russian gas sales. | via AP
Western gas and oil companies got part of what they wanted Tuesday morning when German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a joint Russian-German project completed last year and due to become operational by mid-2022. Scholz’s decision will directly benefit the gas giants by keeping Europe’s consumption of cheap Russian gas capped at current levels, or even less. That means more profits from European purchases of fracked U.S. gas.

The Ukrainian government was also excited by the pipeline blockade, as a major part of its annual revenues come from acting as middleman fees for current overland pipelines between Russia and Europe. Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba praised Germany’s move as “a morally, politically, and practically correct step in the current circumstances.”
Americans, meanwhile, will be expected to pay more to help offset the costs to Europeans of an obscene profit-making machine operated by the fuel monopolies—a machine that has no concern whatsoever for Ukrainians, Russians, or Americans. The other winners of this war, of course, are the arms and munitions companies who drive up the U.S. military budget and take money from the social programs urgently needed at home.
​
In the most serious crisis to envelop Europe since the Cold War, NATO has proven, once again, that it cannot meet the security needs of Europe and that a new security framework for the continent is sorely needed. An organization that takes in all of Europe, including Russia, on an equal basis, would be a sane and sensible way to go.

Author

​​John Wojcik is Editor-in-Chief of People's World. He joined the staff as Labor Editor in May 2007 after working as a union meat cutter in northern New Jersey. There, he served as a shop steward, as a member of a UFCW contract negotiating committee, and as an activist in the union's campaign to win public support for Wal-Mart workers. In the 1970s and '80s he was a political action reporter for the Daily World, this newspaper's predecessor, and was active in electoral politics in Brooklyn, New York.

C.J. Atkins is the managing editor at People's World. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from York University in Toronto and has a research and teaching background in political economy and the politics and ideas of the American left. In addition to his work at People's World, C.J. currently serves as the Deputy Executive Director of ProudPolitics.


This article was produced by People's World.

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1 Comment
Charles Brown
2/23/2022 09:25:52 am

Russ Bellant , author of

https://www.latvianlegion.org/index.php?en/accusers/bellant-old-nazis/level-000-intro.ssi

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/seven-decades-nazi-collaboration-americas-dirty-little-ukraine-secret/

http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/07/detroit-water-works-expert-russ-bellant.html


http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/08/russ-bellant-takeover-of-dwsd-is-near.html


Begin forwarded message:

From: Russ Bellant <russbellant@gmail.com>
Date: February 20, 2022 at 2:16:01 AM EST
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: The Drumbeat for War


I am putting together a more comprehensive statement on the context for the confrontation evolving around the Ukraine question, but events are moving fast, so I want to raise a few questions while a semblance of peace exists. Americans are being bombarded with half-truths, no-truths and speculation such as we saw in the buildup to the US invasions of Iraq (weapons of mass destruction and biological warfare stockpiles that never existed), Vietnam (Gulf of Tonkin, with one claimed attack that never happened and promises of no wider war) and invasions of Grenada and Panama and our ongoing war in Syria.

While the U.S. is saying they are trying to protect Ukraine's sovereignty, it was the U.S. that overthrew the elected government of Ukraine in 2014, using the nazi networks of the Banderist faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) as the foot soldiers of the Maidan assemblies. Even the New York Times described them as nazis before the coup. The OUN-B has had long-standing links to the CIA, some of which I have witnessed myself in multiple meetings and that others have well documented in books such as Blowback. The CIA ignores their WWII record of the mass murder of Poles, Jews and Russians and their formation of a Ukrainian SS Division that was lauded in OUN-B publications decades after WWII.

The principal U.S. decision makers around the 2014 coup were Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and then Vice President Joe Biden. Nuland put together the leadership of the Ukrainian government after the coup. When the latter became President, he promoted Nuland to Deputy Secretary of State for Policy, from where she continues to prosecute an aggressive policy against Russia. She has been part of the neocon network that has pushed for US invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and backed Reagan and both Bush administrations in militaristic ventures.

Another pretext for war by some, including some media commentary, is that Putin is a bad actor. Well, there are many bad actors in world affairs, but how many Ukrainian, Russian, European and possibly American lives are you willing to sacrifice because you don't want Putin? Would you justify foreign military buildups around the U.S. because those governments did not like Trump? Should we invade Turkey, Saudi Arabia or Brazil because they have bizarre leaders? Actually, the US helps arm these governments.

Despite a Congressional ban on training and arming the nazi Azov battalion, the US and its European military asset, NATO, are training Azov for conventional and unconventional war in and around Ukraine. Azov is a military arm of the OUN-B. They had clubs, pistols and firebombs during the Maidan Square protests in 2013. Now they have tanks, artillery and other heavy weaponry. It was used to attack eastern Ukrainians that know who the OUN-B are and wanted no part of the post-coup government of 2014, with its nazi links. The effort to suppress the eastern Ukrainians have led to over 14,000 deaths, but there is no hue and cry from American Presidential administrations, media, politicians, NATO, etc. Who do you think paid for and authorized the supply of weapons to Azov to suppress those Ukrainians?

Why did the US start a large military buildup on Russia's border over the last six years? Placing long range missiles in the Baltic countries and Poland, conducting U.S Navy naval exercises in the Black Sea on Russia's doorstep, significant military aircraft travel on the border all add up to threat and intimidation policies. So when Russia moves more troops to its borders in response (as any nation would do) they are portrayed as aggressors. Yet when US troops and billions in massive US military hardware are placed on the Russian border, our motives are not questioned. Can we not see through that?

Forces in the west have been invading Russia for centuries, from Teutonic knights, Napoleon, the German Kaiser, and Adolph Hitler. It was and is so commonplace that historians call it Drang Nach Osten, or the urge to go east. The US even invaded twice in 1919. There is a memorial in Troy to the Michigan soldiers who were part of one of those invasions. And the US helped run a proxy war in Ukraine, where WWII did not end until the early 1950's, while the rest of the world ended it in 1945. And the OUN-B was part of that little known proxy war.

Look, even the Ukrainian

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