Every day, the American and European public is subjected to a barrage of information telling them what they should think about the events in Ukraine now moving into the 3rd month of conflict since Putin launched his military intervention on February 24th.
From CNN, BBC, Fox News and everything in between, streams of talking heads perform spin while pictures of gruesome horror are flashed in front of our eyes. Narrative framing ensures that watchers of mainstream media are kept in a constant state of fear, hysteria and repulsion over Russia’s supposed crimes against humanity. Where evidence was once a precondition for judgement, under the careful management of Five Eyes ‘perception managers’, mere accusation and repetition are sufficient. Viewers doubting the trustworthiness of those same media sources that lied about weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons by Assad or Russia gate crockery, have increasingly found themselves cheerleading the very empire which many a liberal had protested and despised for years.
Despite the tendency to doubt the credibility of CIA-infested media outlets, recent Pew Surveys published on April 6 tell us not only that “seven-in-ten Americans now see Russia as an enemy” but also that “NATO is seen in an increasingly favorable light” by the majority of Americans. It is rare in this day in age to find agreement from both sides of the political aisle on anything, but on the issue of Russia being America’s enemy, an exception has been found with 72% of Democrats and 69% of Republicans falling into lockstep. Such numbers were not even approximated during the days of America’s illegal assault on Iraq or Libya which saw nearly a million deaths and great cultures driven back into the stone age by U.S.-tax payer money.
And so we find ourselves careening ever more quickly towards an abyss, as members of the UK special forces have officially entered Kiev with “boots on the ground” on April 15 in order to provide training to Ukrainian forces. This obviously increases the risk of military exchanges with Russian forces (and thus activating NATO’s Article 5 collective suicide pact).
As a “good ally to the UK”, the USA is feeling much pressure to follow suite.
The British journalist Michael Tracey recently noted that “Chris Coons, the Democratic Senator from Delaware who occupies Joe Biden’s old seat, and basically serves as a personal emissary to the Administration, started making the rounds to float the next phase of U.S. intervention. Again: Coons isn’t just some Senator, he’s the Senator who basically operates as a conduit directly to Biden. And so for Coons to all the sudden start going around declaring that it’s high time Congress and Biden figure out when they’ll be willing to send “not just arms but troops to the aid in defense of Ukraine” — that’s very telling. “Putin will only stop when we stop him,” warned Coons on TV this past Sunday.”
Some assert that this is no big deal since the western alliance has already been supplying lethal weapons and training for years to prepare Ukrainian cannon fodder for their inevitable war with Russia, so what difference does it make if NATO-affiliated troops enter the fray now while a hot war is in play? Russia is, after all, the modern Hitler and poor Zelensky is the greatest human being since Martin Luther King Jr so it seems like we are morally obliged to do everything we can right?
Moreover, other nations like Finland and Sweden are now making their intention to be absorbed into NATO known and why shouldn’t they? Russia did intervene militarily into Ukraine over the danger that the Kiev would join NATO, so it stands to reason that the best protection for other countries sharing borders with Russia should be to… join NATO?
Despite the fact that ISIS-affiliated groups from Syria have been deployed into Ukraine to continue their jihad against Russia, and despite the fact that even mainstream press agencies have had to begrudgingly admit the presence of neo Nazi groups in Ukraine, westerners barely blink an eye brushing off such uncomfortable facts with the statement “there will always be some bad apples”.
Sanctions continue to drive new fissures between east west relations and breakdowns of the already fragile supply chains which require vast inputs of Russian oil, coal and natural gas, not to mention minerals, wheat, and fertilizers to keep from collapsing. Millions of Europeans and Americans are already suffering after 2+ years of lockdowns with the danger of new “health crises” looming on the horizon. Job insecurity, inflation, and exploding gas prices are what most Americans and Europeans truly care about, but online survey systems like Pew are always ready with new statistics to help people re-calibrate their wrong thinking according to more “acceptable values”.
We are assured by these same media spin doctors that there was never a solution to this crisis beyond a military confrontation with Russian villains in some abstract fight to the death over liberty and democracy. We are constantly told that the blame of the terrible events of the past two months of war falls squarely on the shoulders of Putin who, we are assured by streams of experts, truly desires to overturn the western order, undermine democracy and restore a neo-Soviet authoritarian empire upon the world.
These claims are of course bunk. The fact is that Putin had done everything imaginable to avoid the military escalation now underway starting from his 2008 Munich Security speech calling out the designs for military containment of his nation and demanding the west respect Russia’s existential security concerns.
From the moment that Victoria Nuland installed a puppet regime in 2014, the predominant ethnic Russian populations of east Donbass watched their fellow citizens in Odessa burn alive by hoards of Nazis and wasted no time to vote for their secession from Kiev in the form of two breakaway republics.
Putin could have quickly recognized these newly aspiring states in 2014 but chose to go the way of Minsk II instead, doing everything possible to keep the Donetsk and Lugansk Peoples’ Republics integral members of an undivided Ukraine. For eight years we saw Russian diplomats try everything imaginable to keep Minsk II alive and for eight years we saw only the abrogation of this peace process and over 14,000 lives of eastern Ukrainians lost in turn.
By December 2021, the fact of a planned military intervention into in the East Donbass and Crimea was impossible to ignore, and Putin made it clear that all conflict could easily be avoided by simply obeying the Minsk II treaty while signing binding agreements to keep Ukraine a neutral territory outside of any anti-Russian military bloc. Simple.
The benefits to such an elegant solution are infinitely more favorable than the accelerated breakdown of supply chains, food production, energy supplies which will hurt Europeans, Americans and most importantly Ukrainians even more than they will hurt Russians who are finding new markets hungry for their bountiful resources in Asia. The obvious avoidance of thermonuclear war is also no small win for those who chose to think with clear heads during this time of existential crisis.
But time is ticking away, and the doors to a bright future of cooperation close faster with every passing minute. It is thus important to take the opportunity of the anniversary of Elbe Day (April 25) to recall and revive the spirit of U.S.-Russian brotherhood that jointly put down the Nazi machine in WWII and whose joint sacrifices created the possibility for an age of cooperation and brotherhood that even at this late stage may possibly be revived.
The author had the priviledge of participating in this year’s annual Elbe Day celebration hosted by Dr. Edward Lozansky and featuring speakers from Russia, the USA, Europe and Canada. The full proceedings are featured in the video below.
Matthew Ehret is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review , and Senior Fellow at the American University in Moscow. He is author of the ‘Untold History of Canada’ book series and Clash of the Two Americas. In 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation .