Most people realize that the United States and its capitalist impoverishing-war-system must be defeated if the world is to ever live in peace.
The war in Ukraine is now entering its second year, having reached its first anniversary this week. On February 24 last year, Russian forces entered Ukrainian territory. The conflict has taken many twists and turns over the past 12 months. But there seems to be one inescapable, paramount development. The contours of hostility have emerged to identify the primary global threat – the United States and its zero-sum obsession with imperialist hegemony.
Strictly speaking, the war in Ukraine is entering its tenth year because the origins of the conflict are traced to the coup d’état in Kiev in February 2014 sponsored by the American CIA and other NATO agents. The NeoNazi regime that was installed then and which continues in power (headed up by a Jewish president nonetheless) was weaponized and covertly supported by the United States and its NATO partners to aggress the Russian-speaking people of formerly southeastern Ukraine. The bigger objective for the regime was to draw the Russian Federation into an existential confrontation that is now underway.
The Western governments and their media propaganda outlets assert the nonsense narrative that Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an unprovoked aggression against Ukraine. The Western propaganda system – whose names include household brands like the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Financial Times, BBC, CNN, DW, and France 24, and so on – completely whitewashes the preceding eight years to the war erupting.
Putin reiterated the claim this week in an annual state-of-the-union type speech when he said “the West started the war”. The Russian leader was predictably vilified in the West for saying such. But the facts of history are on Putin’s side.
American scholar Professor John Mearsheimer is one of several eminent voices who confirm that the war in Ukraine was presaged by NATO and NATO’s relentless expansion toward Russia over many years. Ukraine was but the tip of the spear pointed at Russia.
Other sources on the ground in the Donbass region – formerly of Ukraine – also confirm that the NATO-backed Kiev regime was escalating its aggression during February last year before Russia’s military intervention. This would account for why American President Joe Biden was confidently predicting at the beginning of last year that Russian forces would “invade” Ukraine. The American paymasters of the Kiev regime knew that Russia would be compelled to intervene in order to forestall an incipient deadly assault on the Russian-speaking population inside the then-Ukrainian border.
The Donbass region has since seceded from Ukraine in referenda held last year and joined the Russian Federation following the footsteps of the Crimean Peninsula. Western media/propaganda outlets talk about Russia “annexing” the Donbass and Crimea, ignoring the referenda verified by international observers. But then the same Western media refuse to report on how the U.S. in an act of international terrorism blew up the Nord Stream pipelines five months ago. Thus, say no more about their craven credulity.
Lamentably, the hostilities in Ukraine have been exacerbated and unnecessarily prolonged because of the massive flow of American and NATO weapons into that country. At least $100 billion of armaments has been pumped into the regime whose foot soldiers model themselves on Ukrainian fascists who collaborated with the Nazi Third Reich in World War II. This is while Western populations suffer record levels of poverty and austerity imposed by callous elitist rulers.
Just this week, the Biden administration pledged another $2 billion in military aid to the Kiev regime, including the resupply of HIMARS long-range rockets. The sophisticated U.S.-supplied artillery is being used to target and kill civilians in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions which are now part of the Russian Federation. Reliable information shows that the HIMARS artillery units are being operated by NATO mercenaries, not Ukrainian troops.
The grave implication is that the United States and NATO are at war against Russia. This is no longer a proxy war of indirect support. The visit to Kiev this week by President Biden and the ludicrous talk about “defending world democracy” against “Russian aggression” clearly demonstrates that Washington is commanding the conflict and its dangerous charade of hoodwinking the world.
Russia’s stated aims of “denazifying” and “demilitarizing” the Kiev regime are far from met – yet. The aforementioned would-be offensive by the NATO-backed regime against the Donbass region in February last year was thwarted by Russia’s intervention and countless lives were no doubt spared. Nevertheless, the truth is that the people in the newly constituted parts of Russia are continuing to live under deadly conditions imposed by the NATO axis. Just this week, several civilians in Petrovsky near Donetsk City, including ambulance workers, were killed by NATO-backed shelling.
The war in Ukraine has escalated into an existential one that Russia cannot afford to lose. Likewise, the investment of political and financial capital by Washington and its imperialist allies is such that they also face an existential challenge whereby they cannot back down without losing fatal prestige.
There is barely any diplomatic or political effort to find a peaceful solution. China this week unveiled a 12-point peace plan to resolve the conflict in Ukraine, but the plan was quickly dismissed or undermined by the U.S. and European leaders. The ultimate problem is Washington and its imperialist minions are seeking a zero-sum hegemonic result, one where Russia is defeated, which will, in turn, pave the way for bigger ambitions of confronting China. Already, the American imperialists are well on their way to reinforcing the military encirclement of China.
The war in Ukraine is really a manifestation of underlying historical forces. The supposed end of the Cold War in 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union led to subsequent decades of unbridled American military lawlessness and wars of impunity. Arguably, one can go further back and contend that the United States and its imperialist gang of powers are the inheritors of the Third Reich’s task to conquer Russia’s vast landmass. Western capitalist powers backed the rise of the Third Reich, and only for a brief period expediently switched sides to defeat Nazi Germany in 1945 because Hitler had gone rogue, only for the Western powers to quickly resume the historic objective of vanquishing Russia under the guise of the Cold War. The truth is the Cold War never ended. Because the American-led capitalist warmongering order never ended. (And there will never be peace under this order.)
Russia’s envoy to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, in an address to the Security Council this week cited figures that showed that the U.S. engaged in illegal foreign military interventions on over 250 occasions since the ostensible end of the Cold War some three decades ago.
For its part, China this week denounced the United States as the major instigator of world conflicts, claiming that 80 percent of foreign wars and hostilities were attributable to covert and overt American actions.
No nation has overseen the number of coups, regime-change operations, mass killings, and assassinations compared with the United States. Its ruling regime even assassinated one of its own presidents – John F Kennedy in 1963 – because he stood in the way of imperialist objectives.
In the make-believe fairytale world of Western governments and media (a deluded global minority, it must be noted), the war in Ukraine is laughably portrayed as being about “defending democracy and freedom”. The reality is Ukraine has become a money-splurging war racket in which Western war and banking industries are drooling at the profits facilitated by a corrupt cabal in Kiev propped up by NeoNazi paramilitaries and NATO mercenaries who are killing Russian civilians. A gruesome video emerged this week showing NATO-backed murderers in uniforms hanging a man and his pregnant wife in the Lugansk region, an atrocity confirmed by the state prosecutor for the region.
It is estimated that up to 200,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed over the past year, while the United Nations estimates that about 7,200 civilians have died. Russia claims to be trying to minimize civilian casualties.
The United States and its NATO accomplices are fighting an imperialist war “to the last Ukrainian” and bequeathing another failed state as they have done elsewhere in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen among others. This time, however, the American Empire is pushing a war against nuclear power, Russia, which is not going to back down. Two existential forces are incrementally going head-to-head. And most people realize that the United States and its capitalist impoverishing-war-system must be defeated if the world is to ever live in peace.