The US-led Western Mainstream Media is waging an intense information warfare campaign against Russia’s ongoing special operation in Ukraine. One of the top narratives right now is that Americans, Poles, and Ukrainians don’t support Russia for whatever reason it is that they claim, usually one that’s predicated on false pretexts and due to the propaganda that they’ve been fed from their respective governments. While acknowledging that perhaps there’s some truth to that claim since everyone is of course entitled to their own views regardless of whether they’re based on facts or not, there’s a notable exception to this narrative, and that’s me personally.

I’m an American-Pole whose surname has Ukrainian ancestry and I very proudly stand with Russia. That’s because I’m keenly aware of the reality behind what’s happening as I’m also a Moscow-based political analyst who closely follows my host country’s foreign policy and have been doing so for most of my life actually even before I moved here in August 2013. I read President Putin’s “Expanded Meeting With The Defense Ministry Board” from 21 December, his “Security Council Meeting” and address to the Russian people from 21 February when he recognized the Donbass Republics as independent states, and his early Thursday morning address to the Russian people announcing his special operation in Ukraine.

From the objectively existing and easily verifiable facts that the Russian leader shared, I’m confident that “President Putin Didn’t Spark World War III, He Just Averted It!” The US and NATO were secretly establishing diverse military infrastructure in neighboring Ukraine – including air, land, and sea bases – for the purpose of advancing their grand strategic goal of neutralizing Russia’s nuclear second-strike capabilities. That would have placed the country in a perpetual position of nuclear blackmail vis-à-vis the US had it succeeded, but President Putin preemptively thwarted that scenario by commencing Russia’s ongoing special operation in Ukraine. I’m also very well aware of the immediate humanitarian motivations behind this campaign, too.

The indigenous Russian people of Donbass have been blockaded and bombed by Kiev for eight years already. Their lives have remained in peril this entire time, and if there’s one constructive critique about President Putin that even his most vehement supporters here all share in my experience over the years interacting with countless Russians from all echelons of society, it’s that he didn’t do enough to protect them. Instead, the Russian leader patiently opted for a diplomatic solution to the Ukrainian Civil War, hoping to resolve this very sensitive issue through political means instead of the military ones that he had at his disposal this entire time. After reading his article from last summer “On The Historical Unity Of Russians And Ukrainians”, I now know how much he sincerely cares about those fraternal people.

The last thing that President Putin wanted to do was inadvertently add fuel to the US’ infowar fire for further dividing Russians and Ukrainians in order to ultimately rule them both. He wisely knew that launching a humanitarian intervention at the onset of this crisis nearly a decade ago wouldn’t have been properly understood by the Ukrainian population at large that had been largely brainwashed by their Western-backed ultra-nationalist (fascist) “perception managers” into wrongly regarding Russia as “imperialist”. That’s not to say that all Ukrainians believed those lies, but just that plenty of them did or at least were very susceptible to it around the time that the “EuroMaidan” coup succeeded.

Immediately intervening would have fed into the false optics of so-called “Russian aggression” allegedly initiated to restore ousted President Yanukovich to power, which wasn’t Moscow’s intentions in either the soft power or political senses. Being as sensitive to the Ukrainian peoples’ concerns (including those that they’ve falsely come to believe due to foreign-backed propaganda campaigns emphasizing fascist narratives) as he is due to his expertise in understanding these fraternal people, President Putin patiently sought a diplomatic solution to the Donbass conflict over the past eight years. He truly didn’t want to do anything that could feed the US’ infowar campaign.

As time went on, though, he became increasingly pessimistic about the prospects of the Minsk Accords succeeding since Ukraine’s US-backed post-coup fascist authorities showed no sincere will to implement their international legal obligations that were endorsed by the UNSC in a relevant resolution passed in 2015. President Putin might also have thought that the Ukrainian people themselves would successfully reform their country’s power structure through peaceful political means but must have become despondent upon realizing the seemingly irreversible authoritarian trajectory that the country entered into in recent years following President Zelensky’s rise to power.

As Ukraine became nothing more than a US puppet state controlled by its overseer’s permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”), President Putin realized that he could only resolve this crisis by dealing directly with America. That explains his proactive diplomatic outreaches to former US President Trump and incumbent President Biden, though both were for naught, which is attributable to the subversive influence of that country’s anti-Russian “deep state” faction. His last-ditch attempt at diplomacy came in December when he shared his country’s security guarantee requests with the US and NATO.

These called for legally binding agreements halting NATO’s eastward expansion, the removal of strike weapons from Russia’s borders, and a return to the continental military status quo enshrined in the now-defunct 1997 Russian-NATO Founding Act. Regrettably, the West didn’t sincerely negotiate with Russia, nor did it take that country’s security guarantee requests seriously. Realizing that war between them was unavoidable due to Russian intelligence’s confident assessment to that end as revealed by President Putin early Thursday morning and recalling how eerily similar the build-up to that scenario is to Hitler’s invasion of the USSR, President Putin felt compelled to take decisive action without delay.

Everyone’s entitled to their own views, but to me as a person who regards peace as the highest goal that all countries should strive towards, I feel morally obligated to support Russia’s preemptive move to avert World War III through its ongoing special operation in Ukraine. Like many, I would have preferred for there to be a diplomatic resolution to this undeclared US-provoked missile crisis in Europe but knew that it’s better for there to be a limited proxy conflict between Russia and NATO in Ukraine right now than to wait for a direct one between them sometime later down the line when it would obviously be much more deadly for everyone involved.

There are those who claim that all military actions are “aggressive” and that’s their personal right to think so, but sometimes military means must be employed for peaceful ends, especially when a country risks having its nuclear second-strike capabilities eventually neutralized and thus subsequently placed in a perpetual position of nuclear blackmail. If Russia would have “peacefully” submitted to the US like its critics wish happened, then there’s no doubt that this multiethnic federation would have then been dismantled through the most militant means possible after the West resumed its support of terrorist-separatist movements like those that it previously backed during the Chechen Conflict.

The amount of death and destruction that would have inevitably followed the Yugoslav-like “Balkanization” of the Russian Federation would have been many orders of magnitude greater than the impressively minimal collateral damage that’s thus far occurred throughout the course of Russia’s special operation in Ukraine. That’s not even to say what would have come afterwards with respect to China upon Russia’s “Balkanization”. America would then have assuredly turned its sights towards it in attempting to replicate the exact same sequence that would have then earlier succeeded against Russia.

The nuclear second-strike capabilities of the People’s Republic would have been neutralized, after which multidimensional Hybrid Wars would have been unleashed against it for “Balkanizing” this civilization-state of around 1.4 billion people. The horrors of World War II would have paled in comparison to the evils that the US would have been bound to unleash in such a terrifying scenario. By preemptively putting a stop to these genocidal plans for restoring the US’ declining unipolar hegemony over the plaent, President Putin quite literally saved billions of lives in the process.

I’m fiercely proud of my identity as an American-Pole with Ukrainian ancestry and believe that everyone should be proud of who they are too, but our ethnicities and nationalities don’t predetermine our political beliefs, nor should they ever. Thinking otherwise is literally fascist because it presupposes that political beliefs are transmitted through blood, which isn’t true. Those who thought such carried out the genocides of World War II on that false ethno-racial basis, believing as they wrongly did that doing so would “rid the world of the evils” supposedly associated with people of a given identity such as Jews, Slavs (including Poles such as myself), Roma, and many others.

There is no way that I as a fiercely proud Pole could ever accept someone demanding that I hold one or another political view on the basis of my ethnicity when our ancestors fought, suffered, and were even literally genocided by Nazi Germany due to our resistance to those debunked fascist ideas. In fact, an estimated 17-25% of the Polish population was exterminated during World War II. As an American citizen, I’m also very fiercely proud of our constitutionally enshrined freedom of speech that grants me the right to express my opinions about whatever it may be, including contrarian ones that contrast with my own government’s interpretation of events. Those who want to deny me that are thus un-American.

As for the Ukrainian angle of my identity, I fully support President Putin’s treatise on our historical unity with our fraternal Russian brothers. I’m obviously aware of various Polish and Ukrainian narratives about our peoples’ relations with Russia across the centuries and understand why my co-ethnics might feel a certain way, but I don’t believe that the problems of the past should stain the promise of our future. Reconciliation is an importance principle in my life and I believe that all of our people should focus more on working together with Russia than on obsessing over our supposed differences. I also don’t believe it’s fair to blame the Russian Federation for what the USSR and Imperial Russia did.

All that I want is for the three most prominent parts of my identity – American, Polish, and Ukrainian – to pragmatically cooperate with Russia in the interests of peace, prosperity, and stability. We all gain much more by working together than feuding. The US shouldn’t have sought to use Ukraine as an impending platform from which to attack Russia with the rest of NATO, including Poland, sometime in the coming future. Russia has legitimate national security red lines that must be respected. The failure to do so prompted it to decisively react to the imminent threat that the US-led West poses to it from Ukraine. I’m personally very thankful that President Putin commenced his special operation there.

I can’t imagine what would have happened in the next few years had he not done so and the US eventually succeeded in neutralizing Russia’s nuclear second-strike capabilities. World War III would likely have broken out with time as NATO’s tanks rolled over the Russian border from Ukraine, the US intercepted most Russian missiles launched in self-defense at America, and Moscow was thus forced to nuke the most massive invasion army since Hitler while still on its territory out of sheer desperation. This could even have been preceded by the Hybrid War-driven “Balkanization” of Russia that was earlier explained. Countless people would have died, and that’s not even considering those in China afterwards.

It’s for these reasons why I as an American-Pole with Ukrainian ancestry have nothing but pride in standing with Russia during its ongoing special operation. As crazy as it may sound to some, Russia embodies my principles much more than the three governments associated with my triple identity. I can’t in good conscience support the American, Polish, and Ukrainian interpretations of this crisis since they’re based on false claims aimed at gaslighting the public into misperceiving Russia as the “aggressor” when it’s really the US and its NATO allies like Poland that are exploiting Ukraine as a platform from which to attack Russia in the future. In all sincerity, I’m truly thankful for Russia’s operation.