For over twenty years NATO and the European Union have been expanding Eastwards and Russia has been in voluntary imperial retreat, leaving behind sovereign countries which democratised only to be consumed into the corporatist EU Superstate where their newly attained democratic sovereignty and economic identity were sacrificed. As the EU pursued its imperial political dream so NATO pursued its military imperial conquest, placing weapons and troops ever closer to the Russian border.
Countries freed by Russia at the end of the Soviet Communist Empire were gradually enticed with “neighbourhood agreements” “Individual Partnerships” and “partnerships for Peace”.
But the EU would not trade fairly with them unless they sacrificed their sovereign constitutions and NATO would not defend them except by integration into full military control. Prosperity and protection did not come without sacrifice!
Despite protests since the early 1990s under Yeltsin, Russia under Putin tolerated the accession of the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into NATO and the EU despite their proximity to critical Russian military (Kaliningrad and Kronstadt) and political (St Petersburg) infrastructure. The communists in the Duma tried to impeach Yeltsin in 1998 for allowing NATO to expand. This shows how fortunate Putin’s pragmatism was for the West compared to the two alternative Russias – communist or nationalist!
The extent of this western aggression and the growing existential risk to Russia was clear to all experts who knew intimately the Cold War and its (initially) peaceful aftermath – Henry Kissinger, Mikhail Gorbachev, George Kennan, James Baker and the modern military experts and arms negotiators (Larry Johnson, Scott Ritter, Douglas MacGregor) who had warned about the serious war risks the West was courting in its new imperialist moves. The growing threat to Russia is even clearer in these two maps of NATO’s advance Eastwards since 1986 and the Cold war boundaries:
RUSSIANS IN UKRAINE
The history of the Ukraine (meaning the border land) is as part of Russia. The “Rus” tribe came from around Kiev. Russian speakers and Russians make up the dominant population in the East as this linguistic map of Ukraine shows:
So Vladimir Putin did not “invade Ukraine” but sent a military force to protect Russians in Ukraine from a twenty year political and cultural war against them by Kiev and an 8 year shooting war in which up to 14,000 had been killed by Kiev’s troops – principally openly Nazi militia like AZOV, C14, The Right Sector and AIDAR.
When the 2010 elections were held and President Yanukovych (who had been thrown out by western financed revolutionaries) was re-elected in elections recognised by the West, the distribution of votes shows the extent of the unpopularity of the Kiev regime and the resentment of Russian speakers in the East: there were even pockets of Yanukovych support in the North and West.
PROMISES BROKEN
Overturning election results which did not attack Russians and Russia has been the aim of western politics in Ukraine for two decades.
Like most political criminals caught breaking their word the West has always denied that there were any promises not to advance militarily Eastwards towards Russia. Then when it became clear there were indeed several such promises they asserted “but there was nothing in writing”
In this final image we see the writing:
This unclassified memorandum of a meeting between US Secretary of State James Baker, Russian President Gorbachev and Russian Foreign Secretary Shevardnaze put in writing the “assurances” that “there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction…one inch to the East”.
The West has moved aggressively Eastwards for decades (the most blatant was the break up of Yugoslavia in another NATO war (against its own defensive charter and without UN approval). Russia warned for nearly 20 years that there was a limit to the military threat they would tolerate. Ukraine, like Yugoslavia, was used as a battering ram against Russia, with the threat of NATO membership and the wish of Zelensky for nuclear weapons being the final straw which broke Moscow’s patience.
The move into Ukraine was inevitable both as a defence of Russians in Ukraine, a move against the blatant resurgence of that Nazi ideology which had wiped out 25 million Russians in the Second World War, against the refusal of Ukraine to adopt neutrality and against the encirclement of Russia by NATO.
No one with the slightest knowledge of these matters could not see war was inevitable. The trouble was that the adolescent, geopolitically ignorant, western political class did NOT have that slightest knowledge!
