Contra Cold War Redux: 7. Ukraine's Unworthy Victims
With no dialogue between Ukraine and LDNR, with the USA and Russia respectively aiding each militarily whilst pointing the finger at each other, the peace plan was effectively defunct.
‘And the land was not able to bear them, that they might dwell together: for their substance was great, so that they could not dwell together. And there was a strife between the herdmen of Abram’s cattle and the herdmen of Lot’s cattle…And Abram said unto Lot, Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee, and between my herdmen and thy herdmen; for we be brethren.. Is not the whole land before thee? Separate thyself, I pray thee, from me: if thou wilt take the left hand, then I will go to the right; or if thou depart to the right hand, then I will go to the left.’—Genesis 13:7-91
To spell out what is in the above map, eastern Ukraine has a ‘significant ethnic Russian population’ and is ‘mostly Russian-speaking.’ Southern Ukraine varies from ‘mostly’ to ‘predominantly’ Russian-speaking. Crimea has an ‘ethnic Russian majority’ and is more than ‘predominantly Russian-speaking.’
To spell out what are in these above maps, in 2004 and 2010 western Ukraine voted for the national/pro-West ‘Fatherland’ party of Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko, whilst eastern and southern Ukraine voted for the federal/pro-Russia ‘Party of Regions’ of Viktor Yanukovych.
After the Euromaidan resulted in a far-right/foreign-backed regime-change in Kiev, there was massive civil unrest in the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine (which had closer past and present ties to Russia than western Ukraine). These were legitimate historic differences within Ukraine which could have been civilly resolved through cultural pluralism and political federalism, as many Ukrainians have advocated as a compromise to keep the country from breaking up along ethnic/linguistic lines coterminous with political lines.
Russia supported this compromise, but the U.S. of A. opposed it. Yet this is our selfsame system! We have a federal constitution; in fact, it is the world’s oldest federal constitution in existence. The sheer scale and scope of the American Union does not make very much sense on paper. If you were, like the Bolsheviks in 1918-1922, redrawing the map of North America according to what makes sense on paper, it would look something like the cover of Re-Thinking the American Union for the Twenty-First Century, but so far political federalism has more or less managed to unite this population of vast extent and variety of interests. We are also a multi-lingual society with no official language de jure. Although English is the de facto American language, there are federal, state, and local laws accommodating as many languages as possible. Reading, hearing, and speaking multiple languages in the public and private sector is an everyday part of American life.
So, why did we not support the Ukrainians who supported a culturally pluralist and politically federalist American-esque system? Would that not have been in our interest? I am anything but a chauvinist like the Clintons and the Bushes, who believe that the American way is the only way. ‘The future world should be characterized by multiplicity,’ is my belief. ‘Diversity should be taken as its richness and its treasure, and not as a reason for inevitable conflict: many civilizations, many poles, many centers, many sets of values.’ Nevertheless, when foreigners are voluntarily pursuing Jeffersonian Americanism, that is certainly in our interest, and we owe it to ourselves as much as to them to support that.
So, why did we not support Ukrainian cultural pluralism and political federalism? Because Russia also supported cultural pluralism and political federalism as a compromise in Ukraine, and our short-sighted and self-destructive Russophobic policy is evidently to oppose whatever Russia supports as a matter of principle. Thus, our cultural pluralism and political federalism ‘stops at the water’s edge,’ or at least at the Dnieper’s edge.
Alas, as American leaders did not support a pluralist and federalist Ukraine, neither did their Ukrainian counterparts (even someone personally inclined to support it like the non-ideological Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky), as the latter are dependent on the former to keep ‘aid’ flowing to front lines and ‘loans’ flowing to offshore bank accounts. (Indeed, according to the most recent rankings, Ukraine and Russia are side by side in terms of corruption.)
Viktor Yanukovych, the duly elected Ukrainian president who was deposed by far-right/foreign-backed insurrectionists during the Euromaidan, had been subjected to international denunciation for the brutality of the Kiev police against the Euromaidan protestors. Indeed, it was pictures and videos of police brutality which, more than anything else, delegitimised Pres. Yanukovych, at least in the minds of the various foreign interlopers in the capital and spectators outside of the country. Yet when other Ukrainians protested the results of the far-right/foreign-backed Euromaidan regime-change, international denunciation was not as forthcoming when Kiev’s post-Euromaidan regime reacted with the same brutality.
Just as the violent repression of the pro-Euromaidan Ukrainians turned a protest which was admittedly not-so-peaceful into an outright riot, so the violent repression of anti-Euromaidan Ukrainians turned civil unrest into a revolution.
The Russian-descended and Russian-speaking people in Donetsk and Lugansk (two oblasts in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine) declared new governments of, by, and for themselves, ‘Donetskaya Narodnaya Respublika’ and ‘Luganskaya Narodnaya Respublika’ (LDNR). The interim Ukrainian president, Oleksandr Turchynov responded with a declaration of a ‘war on terror’ in Donbas, where martial law was imposed.
As with the street fighting in Kiev during the Euromaidan, paramilitary forces comprised of extremists (the Azov Battalion) or criminals (the so-called ‘Volunteer Battalions’) did the bulk of the fighting in this civil war, as after the Euromaidan the regular Ukrainian military suffered massive losses in desertions and even defections. The popular militias of the LDNR, which gained new recruits with every new attack on their homes, steadily drove back the ‘anti-terrorist operation’ of the post-Euromaidan regime’s paramilitaries.
Officially, Russia denied that it intervened militarily in Donbas, but it is more or less an open secret that Russia provided the LDNR with arms and advisers as well as artillery and air support, though less than Ukraine and the USA claimed.
A major escalation in the Ukrainian civil war came when, as the nationalists lost to separatists on the ground, they began committing airstrikes on civilian areas in the cities of Donetsk and Lugansk:
The unrest in the east is a major obstacle for Ukraine's new government, and officials seem eager to combat it. President-elect Petro Poroshenko has compared the rebels to Somali pirates, and pledged to crush them. But military campaigns also come with risks, namely of alienating what is left of the moderate civilian population in the troubled areas. At a funeral on Wednesday for Alexander Gizai, one of the eight people killed by a Ukrainian airstrike two days before, anger hung in the air.
‘How could they use air power in the center of the city, in broad daylight, next to a jungle gym?’ asked a Russian literature teacher named Georgy, who had come to pay his respects to Mr. Gizai, and said he despised the separatists. ‘Ukraine was always divided. It was always hard to understand it as one country. Now it is even harder.’
[Border Guards in Ukraine Abandon Posts, by Sabrina Tavernise and Sergey Ponomarev, The New York Times, 4 June 2014]
This Ukrainian bombing of cities in Donbas has been ongoing and escalating for the past eight years.
Pres. Poroshenko announced Ukraine’s strategy of total war on Donbas, not just against separatist militants but against the civilian population: ‘We will have our jobs; they will not. We will have our pensions; they will not. We will have care for children, for people, and retirees; they will not. Our children will go to school, to kindergarten; theirs will hole up in basements, because they are not able to do a thing! This is how we will win this war.’
This may have been the first time in modern history that a head of state has publicly boasted about targeting children in wartime.
Despite this barbarity, Pres. Obama and Pres. Poroshenko thereafter met in Warsaw, Poland, where the American president hailed the Euromaidan as ‘an incredible outpouring of democracy’ proving that Ukrainians ‘reject corruption.’ The ‘rebels’ were the ones whom ‘have spurred great violence,’ he claimed. One year later, however, Pres. Poroshenko’s paramilitaries were turning on the president himself and fighting in the streets with the Ukrainian police.
Airstrikes did not conquer Donbas, which was winning its war for independence despite receiving no international aid from anywhere but Russia. Ukraine was losing ground and money, yet Pres. Poroshenko continued refusing to negotiate with the LDNR, even when Pres. Putin convinced them to compromise their initial demand for independence from Ukraine and settle for autonomous status within Ukraine. Instead, Pres. Poroshenko employed a strategy of escalation: He and other Ukrainian officials issued increasingly alarmist pronouncements of a Russian invasion and World War III, which pro-war American journos and pols accepted prima facie and repeated verbatim, thereby turning up the temperature and pressure of the conflict.
The terror of the Ukrainian ‘war on terror’ was not confined to Donbas. There were anti-Euromaidan protests in Ukrainian cities besides Donetsk and Lugansk, such as Kharkov, Mariupol, and Odessa, whereto neo-Nazi paramilitaries such as the Azov Battalion were dispatched to quell ‘terrorism.’
Odessa, a beautiful seaside and classically Novorossiyan city in southern Ukraine, was largely populated with people of Russian descent who spoke the Russian language. In the Russian Empire, Odessa was known as ‘the Palmyra of the South,’ with Saint Petersburg ‘the Palmyra of the North’ (after the great Syrian city in the Roman Empire). Although Odessa was not located in Donbas and did not belong to the LDNR, many of its people were nonetheless opposed to the anti-Russia nationalism of Kiev’s post-Euromaidan regime. When right-wing gangsters and a gang of soccer hooligans—chanting ‘glory to the nation!’ ‘death to the enemies!’ ‘Ukraine is above everything!’—mobbed a peaceful anti-Euromaidan protest in the city, the protestors fled and took refuge inside the nearby trade union hall. The gangs then began throwing Molotov cocktails inside the building and physically obstructing the doorways so that protestors had no choice but to jump out of the windows. ‘Slava Ukraini!’ chanted crowds outside the burning building filled with panicking protestors. The Odessan police and firefighters, apparently intimidated by the hooded, masked, and heavily armed street thugs, stood down as the building burned. Between 30 and 50 protestors were killed.
The official investigation of this mass-murder has been a veritable cover-up, and many of the participants are now public figures. Ukrainians on a live television show cheered the news of the deaths from the fire. Videos making fun of people jumping out of windows went viral on Ukrainian social media. ‘Vatnik shashlik’ (the former a slur for Russians, the latter a style of Russian shish kebab) was put on the menus of Ukrainian restaurants as a joke. ‘Russian Terrorists Burnt Alive!’ became the battle-cry of the Ukrainian nationalists. It was the Odessa massacre when the Ukrainian civil war began in earnest.
Like most every foreign-backed colour revolution, Kiev’s post-Euromaidan regime became a ‘democratic dictatorship’ representing itself as the former for Western consumption but within its own borders ruling as the latter. Indeed, in as blatant gangsterism as anything that has ever happened in ‘Putin’s Russia,’ there was a sudden ‘suicide epidemic’ among members of opposition parties and opposition presses after the Euromaidan. Continuing its nationalistic suppression of the language spoken by a large minority of the population, Russian was banned from all new broadcasting and publishing. Political parties, news media, books, films, and even foreign journalists were banned from Ukraine as subversive and seditious foreign influences.
Have you ever heard the name ‘Ruslan Kotsaba’? He is a Ukrainian journalist who has been persecuted for his patriotic pacifism. Yet because what he has done and what has been done to him is dissonant from what American journos and pols want the public to believe about Ukraine, he is an ‘unworthy victim.’ ‘While the US State Department regularly canoodles with Russian “dissidents” who defile Orthodox churches and bare their breasts for the Western cameras,’ quipped Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com, ‘you won’t hear Marie Harf so much as mention Ruslan Kotsaba’s name.’
When Ukraine announced a general mobilisation of conscripts (i.e. a draft) to fight in the ‘anti-terrorist operation’ in Donbas, Mr. Kotsaba released a video titled, ‘I Oppose the Mobilization.’ ‘I believe that even a bad peace is better than a good war because I am a Christian and a patriot of Ukraine,’ stated Mr. Kotsaba. ‘I have recorded dozens of interviews with combatants in the warring parties, and the most regrettable thing is that both sides fight and are ready to die for their homeland.’
As an exemplary punishment intended to intimidate the Ukrainian anti-war and anti-draft movement, Mr. Kotsaba was arrested, jailed for 524 days, and charged with ‘treason’ and ‘espionage.’ These were not Mr. Kotsaba’s only crimes, however: He also committed the thought-crimes of referring to the war in Donbas as a civil war (which, of course, it was) and to the other side as fellow Ukrainians (which, of course, they were), but Kiev’s post-Euromaidan regime had made it literally illegal to refer to the war as anything other than a ‘Russian invasion’ and their enemies as ‘Russian terrorists.’
Mr. Kotsaba has been in and out of court ever since, and even though he has been acquitted on appeal twice, both times his acquittals have been overturned and retrials have been ordered. It is a Stalinist-style show trial combined with Anglo-style legal proceduralism. To make Mr. Kotsaba’s life even worse, the anarcho-tyrannical Ukrainian goon squads that do the dirty work of the Ukrainian state hound him and his family, attacking them not just in the streets but even in courts of law. Recently, members of the ‘Right Sector’ paramilitary attacked him with acid, yelling the old Ukrainian neo-Nazi salute ‘Slava Ukraini!’
If the true measure of a free society is how it treats its dissidents, then the post-Euromaidan regime in Kiev, as Daniel prophesied to the Babylonians, ‘hath been weighed in the balances and found wanting.’ It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Ukraine hath been ‘numbered and finished’ and ‘divided and given’ to the Russians and the Europeans.
If it had been a Red-Party president in the White House, then he probably would have looked the other way at the brutality of Ukraine’s ‘war on terror’ against its own people. After all, the last Red-Party president had violated national and international law to wage a global ‘war on terror,’ as he just accidentally reminded us with his characteristic absence of self-awareness. The Blue Party is more politically correct when it comes to democratic norms and forms, however, and so in a speech in Kiev, UN Ambassador Samantha Power earnestly invoked the example of none other than Abraham Lincoln, appealing to Ukrainians to hearken unto ‘the better angels of our nature’ and protect civil rights/liberties like freedom of the press. The Ukrainian nationalists, however, appear to have learned more from Honest Abe’s actions than his words: He unilaterally declared war and mobilised the militia (a violation of Article I, Section 8), unilaterally repealed habeas corpus (a violation of Article I, Section 9), abolished civil state governments and replaced them with military-governors (a violation of Article IV, Section 4), locked up anti-war dissidents without due process (a violation of the First Amendment), shut down anti-war presses (a violation of the First Amendment), and more of what Kiev's post-Euromaidan regime has done to its own people.
In June 2014 at Normandy, France, during an international celebration of the 70th anniversary of D-Day, the heads of state from France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine informally met and discussed proposals to end the Donbas civil war. This ‘Normandy Group’ was formalised as the ‘Trilateral Contact Group’ of Russia, Ukraine, and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), with France and Germany continuing their role as mediators. At Minsk, Belarus, in the fall of 2014, Ukraine, Russia, the OSCE, and representatives of the Donbass separatists agreed to a 12-point peace plan—‘Minsk I.’ The goal of Minsk I was the reunification of Ukraine, namely the return of Donbas to Ukraine under conditions acceptable to the nationalists and the separatists.
Unfortunately, Minsk I collapsed immediately, as both the nationalists and the separatists accused each other of violating the ceasefire. In the winter of 2015, at another meeting of the Trilateral Contact Group in Minsk, Ukraine, Russia, the OSCE, and representatives of the LDNR agreed to a 13-point peace plan—‘Minsk II.’
Observe a ceasefire in and demilitarise Donbas (monitored by the OSCE)
Grant a general amnesty for the rebels in Donbas
Release/exchange prisoners of war
Allow humanitarian aid to access Donbas warzone
Restore socioeconomic ties between Ukraine and Donbas (e.g. pension payments, tax payments, utility services, banking services, etc.)
Return rebel-controulled state border with Russia to Ukraine
Hold local elections in Donbas (monitored by the OSCE)
Withdraw foreign troops and military equipment from Ukraine (monitored by the OSCE)
Disband all illegal militias in Ukraine
Grant autonomous status for Donbas
After a shaky start, Minsk II established a relative ceasefire—a stalemate ‘more honoured in the breach than the observance,’ truth be told—but virtually zero progress was made on any of the other points in the peace plan.
An essential first step in the implementation of these points was the initiation of a dialogue between Ukraine and the LDNR, but Ukraine refused to talk to either of them, claiming that they were ‘proxies’ of Russia and demanding to talk directly to Russia. In response, Russia conceded that whilst it could influence the separatists, it could not controul them, and maintained that Ukraine would have to talk to them itself. This impasse remained the status quo for seven years.
The Ukrainian nationalists and separatists have continually blamed each other for violating the ceasefire, and whilst there is anecdotal evidence for and against each side (such is war), there is comprehensive third-party data on casualties.
According to one UN report, from January of 2014 to May of 2016 (the opening phase of the civil war when fighting was the heaviest) separatist-controulled territory was where ‘the majority of the violations of the right to life in Ukraine over the last two years’ occurred. Of the minimum 9,404 deaths, approximately 2,000 of them were civilians, due primarily to indiscriminate shelling.
Another UN report covering the years 2018 to 2021 went into more detail. Whilst casualties in the Donbas civil war had evidently declined due to the Minsk ceasefire, they had declined disproportionately: 81.4% of the casualties in Donbas were in separatist-controulled territory, 16.3% were in nationalist-controlled territory, and the remaining 2.7% were in a ‘grayzone.’
It would appear, then, that at least according to the UN, that it is the nationalists and not the separatists who have been the primary aggressors in the Ukrainian civil war in its pre- and post-Minsk periods.
Russians are sympathetic to the plight of fellow Russians in Ukraine, just as Americans were sympathetic to the plight of their fellow Americans living in the Mexican territory of Tejas.2 The ‘de-militarisation’ and ‘de-Nazification’ of Ukraine may, to pro-war American journos and pols, be a mere pretence for war. To the Russians, however, de-militarisation and de-Nazification represent an earnest desire to liberate their longsuffering compatriots.
To American journos and pols, however, the people in Donbas are ‘unworthy victims,’ as defined by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, and hence the American public is virtually unaware of their existence:
A propaganda system will consistently portray people abused by enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy. The evidence of worth may be read from the extent and character of attention and indignation. The US media’s practical definitions of worth are political in the extreme and fit well the expectations of a propaganda model. While this differential treatment occurs on a large scale, the media, intellectuals, and public are able to remain unconscious of this fact and maintain a high moral and self-righteous tone. This is evidence of an extremely effective propaganda system
In Messrs. Chomsky and Herman’s example, an anti-Communist eastern-European priest murdered by an eastern-European Communist dictator is a ‘worthy victim’ (because the latter is an American enemy), whilst a Communist Latin-American priest murdered by a Latin-American anti-Communist dictator is an ‘unworthy victim’ (because the latter is an American ally). Likewise, a Ukrainian killed by Russian-backed separatist sniping/shelling is a worthy victim, whilst a Ukrainian killed by American-backed nationalist sniping/shelling is an unworthy victim.
Between Minsk I and II, Pres. Barack Obama decided—under intense pressure from the pro-war wings of both parties—against the policy of giving away American-made weaponry to Ukraine in order to fight a proxy war with Russia. ‘With the peace process stalled and violence escalating in Ukraine, a bipartisan coalition in Congress is defying President Obama and European allies by pressing the administration to provide weapons to the embattled nation,’ reported the New York Times. ‘So far, the Obama administration has refused to provide lethal aid, fearing that it would only escalate the bloodshed and give President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a pretext for further incursions.’
‘Okay, what happens if we send in equipment—do we have to send in trainers?’ an anonymous administration member paraphrased Pres. Obama to the New York Times. ‘What if it ends up in the hands of thugs? What if Putin escalates?’
In an Atlantic interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in the spring of 2016, the besieged Pres. Obama defended his non-interventionist policy:
Obama’s theory here is simple: Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one, so Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there.
‘The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do,’ he said.
I asked Obama whether his position on Ukraine was realistic or fatalistic.
‘It’s realistic,’ he said. ‘But this is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for. And at the end of the day, there’s always going to be some ambiguity.’
But what if Putin were threatening to move against, say, Moldova—another vulnerable post-Soviet state? Wouldn’t it be helpful for Putin to believe that Obama might get angry and irrational about that?
‘There is no evidence in modern American foreign policy that that’s how people respond. People respond based on what their imperatives are, and if it’s really important to somebody, and it’s not that important to us, they know that, and we know that,’ he said. ‘There are ways to deter, but it requires you to be very clear ahead of time about what is worth going to war for and what is not. Now, if there is somebody in this town that would claim that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it. The idea that talking tough or engaging in some military action that is tangential to that particular area is somehow going to influence the decision-making of Russia or China is contrary to all the evidence we have seen over the last 50 years.’
[‘The Obama Doctrine,’ The Atlantic, April 2016]
Thanks, Obama! (No, really, thank you, and way to earn that Peace Prize retroactively!)
Perhaps one day, exactly who said what to whom will be leaked and published on WikiLeaks, but for now, suffice it to say that aside from the lone figure of Pres. Obama—‘said to resist growing pressure from all sides to arm Ukraine’ in the words of the New York Times—other American leaders with whom Ukrainian leaders were talking did not publicly support Minsk II.
Although the U.S. of A. was neither a party nor a signatory to the Minsk Accords, it had endorsed them and had some responsibility to enforce them as a member of the OSCE. In spite of this, top Red- and Blue-Party members regularly traveled to the nationalist front of the Ukrainian civil war to glad-hand and grand-stand. In December of 2016, for example, Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch (who later became a Blue-Team star during UkraineGate) appeared with Pres. Poroshenko himself to encourage violence and ensure American support in violation of Minsk II:
Sen. Graham: I admire the fact that you fight for your homeland. Your fight is our fight. 2017 will be the year of offense. All of us will go back to Washington and we will push the case against Russia. Enough of Russian aggression. It is time for them to pay a heavier price. Our fight is not with the Russian people but with Putin. Our promise to you is to take your cause to Washington, inform the American people of your bravery, and make case against Putin to the world.
Sen. McCain: I believe you will win. I am convinced you will win. We will do everything we can to provide you with what you need to win. You have succeeded, not because of equipment, but because of your courage. So, I thank you, and the world is watching. Because we cannot allow Vladimir Putin to succeed here. Because if he succeeds here, he will succeed in other countries.
Sens. Graham and McCain never saw a foreign war that did not give them FOMO, but what was Sen. Klobuchar doing there? Why, she was there on behalf of the North Star State’s large population of Ukrainian immigrants! The influence of naturalised American citizens on foreign policy, who lobby their elected officials to intervene in their native countries regardless of what American national interests actually are, was one aspect of what another Minnesotan, Sen. Eugene D. McCarthy, meant when he lamented that these U.S. of A. have become a ‘Colony of the World.’
The argument in favour of the Americans arming the Ukrainians drew force from the war propaganda of the post-Euromaidan regime in Kiev—that it was not fighting Ukrainian popular militias in the Donbas but the Russian military itself. A month before the 2022 invasion Samuel Charap and Boston, two senior policy analysts from the RAND Corporation (the Pentagon’s think tank), wrote an article for Foreign Policy arguing that the American attempt to fight a proxy war with Russia by arming Ukraine had been ineffective. ‘Ukraine has mainly not been fighting Russia’s armed forces,’ stated Messrs. Charap and Boston, adding that whilst Russia has ‘armed, trained, and led the separatist forces…the vast majority of rebel forces consist of locals—not soldiers of the regular Russian military.’ According to Messrs. Charap and Boston, the Russian military had ‘never used more than a tiny fraction of its capabilities against the Ukrainians,’ and the couple times that it had ‘ended in crushing Ukrainian defeats.’
However, a 354-page study from RAND, ‘Overextending and Unbalancing Russia,’ argued that finding a way to turn the reality of Russia’s auxiliary role into the invasion of Ukrainian propaganda would ‘exploit Russia's greatest point of external vulnerability’ and thus be in the USA’s interest. ‘Expanding US assistance to Ukraine, including lethal military assistance, would likely increase the costs to Russia of holding the Donbass region,’ the study stated. Noting that Ukraine and Russia were both ‘bleeding’ each other in Donbas, the study predicted that increasing American military assistance to Ukraine ‘could lead Russia to increase its direct involvement in the conflict and the price it pays for it,’ and further predicted that Russia ‘might respond by mounting a new offensive and seizing more Ukrainian territory.’ (I guess this is considered good news when you work for a Pentagon-funded think tank…)
Current Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, perhaps unwittingly, recently revealed how committed the U.S. of A. was to this strategy to use Ukraine for ‘overextending and unbalancing Russia’ in an interview with CNN. ‘I requested them personally to say directly that we are going to accept you into NATO in a year or two or five, just say it directly and clearly, or just say no,’ stated Pres. Zelensky. ‘And the response was very clear, you’re not going to be a NATO member, but publicly, the doors will remain open.’ In other words, instead of admitting to Russia what it had already decided anyway (that Ukraine would never join NATO) and thereby avoiding a war, NATO baited Russia by continuing to send NATO arms to Ukraine and acting as if NATO expansion into Ukraine was imminent. Please, remember this cynical strategy to use Ukraine as a proxy against Russia when pro-war American journos and pols are wringing their hands over the war and/or banging their fists on the table for more war.
In 2016, with the non-interventionist Pres. Obama on the way out, the Blue and Red parties each drafted a party platform pledging to arm Ukraine in what it claimed was a war with Russia. At the Red Party’s convention in Cleveland, Ohio, however, one of Donald Trump’s advisers proposed changing ‘lethal assistance’ to ‘appropriate assistance.’ The Red Party’s platform was still staunchly pro-war: It accused Russia of ‘occupying parts of Ukraine and threatening neighbors from the Baltic to the Caucasus’ and called for ‘increasing sanctions, together with our allies, against Russia unless and until Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity are fully restored,’ but because of ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome,’3 American journos and pols on the right and left alike pointed to this semantical softening of an already hardline party platform as proof that Mr. Trump was ‘Putin’s puppet.’ That is, declining to escalate a conflict between foreign countries—let alone trying to deescalate it—was somehow treasonous to your home country, and thus diplomacy was ruled out a priori.
The media, the Clinton campaign, and many Bushites coordinated their neo-McCarthyite attacks on Mr. Trump, who had dared to suggest that the USA and Russia could ‘get along’ and that he could ‘work with’ Pres. Vladimir Putin. (These politically incorrect musings of his were the germ of the RussiaGate conspiracy theory in the summer of 2016.) Even after the election was over, journos continued to give embittered Clintonite and Bushite pols a platform to smear Americans who believed that a better relationship with Russia was preferable and possible (such as me) as unpatriotic, disloyal, and other such slurs.
Pres. Trump’s reaction to this disgraceful Russia-baiting was, at the advice of Red-Party members like Kurt Volker (his ‘special envoy’ to Ukraine), to give away American-made weapons to Ukraine for the nationalists to use against the separatists. ‘I am NOT a Russian puppet,’ he tweeted. ‘I authorized anti-tank busters to Ukraine!’ (Mr. Volker, who was the director for the Raytheon-funded McCain Institute for International Leadership, was allowed to keep his private-sector job ‘consulting’ for BGR, a lobbying firm which represented both the country of Ukraine and the corporation of Raytheon, the former of which manufactured the missiles which Pres. Trump gave away to the latter.)
Red- and Blue-Party Americans who wanted to fight a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine used the popular hysteria over the RussiaGate conspiracy theory to secure the arms deal with Ukraine that Pres. Obama had wisely resisted. The lie of RussiaGate has, like Eris, sowed the seeds of discord which her brother, Ares, is now reaping.
Pres. Trump’s decision to arm Ukraine was not all that astonishing per se. After all, from his short-run point of view, the escalation of the American proxy war with Russia in Ukraine should have convinced Russophobic American journos and pols that he was not colluding with Vladimir Putin.
What was astonishing, however, was that Pres. Trump aided a foreign regime which colluded with his opponent in the 2016 presidential election. Yes, it was ‘UkraineGate,’ not ‘RussiaGate,’ that was the true scandal. It was especially astonishing considering that UkraineGate was the inception of RussiaGate, the conspiracy theory which consumed Mr. Trump’s presidency and Mr. Trump personally.
How did Ukraine interfere in the American election? Ukrainian officials openly campaigned against Mr. Trump in proto-RussiaGate terms and colluded with operatives from the Democratic National Convention to conduct opposition research on Mr. Trump and the members of his campaign team. Why did Ukraine interfere in the American election? Because it knew that Hillary Clinton was hostile to Russia as a country and to Vladimir Putin as a person, whereas Mr. Trump was thinking out loud about ‘getting along’ with Russia and ‘working with’ Pres. Putin.
After Mr. Trump’s upset victory, Pres. Poroshenko covered up what happened by forcing out the members of his government implicated in UkraineGate and sucking up to the unexpectedly elected president in some eyebrow-raising ways. An article for The New York Times, ‘Inside Ukraine’s Push to Cultivate Trump from the Start,’ published in the fall of 2019 during the UkraineGate impeachment, detailed how Pres. Poroshenko ‘alternately flattered President Trump, signed deals with U.S. firms, and met with Rudy Giuliani’ in order to obtain the ‘lethal weapons’ (are there any other kind?) that Pres. Obama had refused to provide to him.
In the end, this election-meddler and war-monger (who has now, in the time-honoured tradition of ex-presidents of Ukraine, been charged with treason, terrorism, and corruption), wheedled more out of the ‘America First’ Pres. Trump than he got from the ‘post-American’ Pres. Obama, and probably as much as he would have got from a Pres. Clinton: American-manufactured arms for free for Ukrainian nationalists to use against Ukrainian separatists.
All of this and more was reported immediately after the election by mainstream mass-media, but sadly this real story of Ukrainian election interference on behalf of the more anti-Russia candidate was memory-holed during the faked story of Russian election interference on behalf of the pro-Russia candidate.
Yahoo News: ‘The 16 People Who Shaped the 2016 Election: Alexandra Chalupa’
The Financial Times: ‘Ukraine's Leaders Campaign against “pro-Putin” Trump’
Later, in an apparently corrupt quid pro quo to pressure Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the Biden family’s no-less-apparent corruption in Ukraine, Pres. Trump briefly suspended and then renewed this military aid. The Blue Party reacted to this sordid affair—of a quid that should never have been given being used for a quo that never should have been asked—by impeaching Pres. Trump. The whole affair was ludicrously overwrought and a distraction from the real question, which was how we had gone from not arming Ukraine to bipartisan agreement that—in the deranged words of chief RussiaGater Adam Schiff—‘The United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there, so we don’t have to fight Russia here.’
In sum, with no dialogue between the parties to the conflict (Ukraine and the LDNR) and with the U.S. of A. and Russia each militarily backing those respective parties to the conflict whilst pointing the finger at each other, the peace plan was effectively defunct.
In the winter of 2015, as the civil war raged in Donbas whilst the diplomats met in Minsk, Ukrainian nationalist soldiers arrived at the village of Velikaya Znamenka in Zaporozhye oblast to announce that its male population would soon be drafted to fight the separatists. The percentages of Ukrainians reporting for duty were in the single digits, so in addition to closing down the borders to prevent draft evasion, soldiers were going from village to village, door to door, to find men to be drafted. In the course of the officer’s speech, a local woman rushed the stage, wrested away the microphone, and passionately denounced the war to a cheering crowd. I will print what she said here just to be sure that you read it, but you must listen to her speak for the full effect.
Officer: ‘At the moment, the soldiers of the Ukraine Armed Forces are carrying out their duties in East Ukraine, in the service of the integrity of our Ukrainian lands and our state…’
Crowd: ‘Yeah, right!’
Officer: ‘We want Ukraine to be one whole. From east to west, we have one Ukrainian nation, but, in March, illegally, the Autonomous Republic of Crimea was taken from us by force! For some reason, it is not part of the Russian Federation!’
Crowd: ‘Why didn’t you do anything back then!’ ‘This is bulls—t!’
Woman 1: ‘You are saying Crimea was taken by force? It left without a single shot fired! It’s Russian land and they took it back!
‘Donetsk and Lugansk did not want to obey your junta which usurped power illegally!
‘Now it turns out we’re all “separatists,” “criminals,” and we have to go fight Donetsk?
‘You’re the illegitimate junta! You’re the separatists!
‘We talk Russian; Donetsk talks Russian. You had no right to take our language from us! We don’t make you talk in Russian!’
Officer: ‘What do you mean “us”?’
Woman 1: ‘You, Poroshenko, and all! You started it when you talked about banning Russian language, killing Muscovites, killing separatists!
‘If we support Russian people then we are bad, then we are traitors! What right do you have to take our rights from us?
‘You call us separatists, and then you tell us we have to go kill people in Donetsk and Lugansk? Because they want to live in their own land? If they want to, let them! Why should our men go and kill them? That’s what you keep saying—that we have to go and kill them!
‘Your Ukrainian junta—Poroshenko, Yatsenyuk—keep spouting that drivel, we’re sick of it! We won’t listen to it anymore! Our children aren't going anywhere! Our husbands aren’t going anywhere! They have all served already! We won’t believe you anymore! You speak nothing but lies!’
Woman 2: ‘I can speak for the whole district: No one in the district will go to war. Any volunteers that wanted have already gone.’
Woman 1: ‘We want to build Ukraine, quit destroying it, quit bringing it to its knees!
‘Poroshenko should go to Minsk peace talks, then there will be peace!
‘Who needs this war? You need it? You go fight, we don’t need it!
‘We want to raise children and grandchildren and build Ukraine!
‘We want to work here! Why did you come to take all our men?’
Crowd: ‘They won't bring our men back!’
Woman 1: ‘You say there are enemies there? You go fight them, we have no enemies there! There are our people there, best friends and family!
‘Why do you conscript people? If someone wants to volunteer, let them go fight, I don’t know for what cause.
‘We're tired of listening to poison on TV! How much longer should we endure those propaganda lies? Do you think we’re all idiots here?
‘You think people are sheep, and you can lie to us and scare us and we’ll do what we’re told?
‘No! We’re tired of it! We will also defend ourselves! All of us together, then we’ll be strong!’
Crowd: ‘Well said!’
Woman 1: ‘Quit ruining our families, our human lives! That’s enough!
‘Look at Donetsk, what’s going on there—poor people are hiding in cellars, hungry, and Russia sends them humanitarian aid! Did Kiev send them any food? Did it send them anything at all?
‘They’re sitting there without electricity, heating, food—why are they suffering? What for?
‘They lived there their whole lives, built the place! Have you built anything at all there, in the 23 years of “independence”?
‘You can only destroy! Show us something you’ve built! Only banks!
‘I build, I don’t destroy anything, only build! We work, till the soil, grow crops! And you are always trying to cheat us and take our money!
‘What right do you have to take our money for this war? We’re against the war!’
Crowd: ‘Well said!’
Woman 1: ‘You have completely taken all our rights, we have no right to speak! And we are against EU, against NATO!
‘We want to live as one nation! We want to be friends with Russia! And we were always friends with Russia!
‘We grow tomatoes here—you think we’re gonna sell them to America?
‘We want to live with Russia like we always did, in peace and friendship!’
I cannot overstate how moving this video is to me and how much of an effect it had on me when Justin Raimondo first shared it in an article on Antiwar.com, ‘Kiev’s Bloody War is Backfiring.’ It may have been one of the first stories that I read about Ukraine at the time.
It is the voice of an ‘unworthy victim,’ an anonymous woman from the eastern-European borderlands breaking through the Western media’s ‘iron curtain’ and speaking with emotion and from experience. It is dramatic—downright cinematic, in fact—especially considering that what she said was, technically, a crime in Ukraine. Other Ukrainians (such as Ruslan Kotsaba) have been charged with espionage and sedition for saying much less than she said, and it is likely that the only reason she was not arrested on the spot was because the crowd was on her side.
It is also one of the most powerful messages against war and for self-determination that I have ever heard. Its power is in the real-life immediacy of the conflict to the speaker and all of the people who were there with her: Why are you taking away our men and our boys away? Why are you taking away our money? Why won’t you just go away and let us be? Why should we fight our friends, family, and fellow countrymen? The impassioned language of this unworthy victim burns away the stupefying, lugubrious fog of ‘national sovereignty’ and ‘territorial integrity.’
‘In our time,’ George Orwell wrote in an essay, ‘political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.’ Arguing that corrupt thought corrupted language and that corrupt language corrupted thought, Orwell was outlining the ‘Newspeak’ that he would fictionalise in 1984. ‘Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties,’ he wrote. ‘Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness.’
Orwell provide clear examples of his argument:
Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.’ Probably, therefore, he will say something like this: ‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’
According to Orwell, ‘Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’
The news from Ukraine over the past eight years has been rife with Orwellian political language. The Euromaidan, a riot in the Ukrainian capital which forced elected officials to flee the city and then the country, is sanitised as ‘democracy.’ The Ukrainians who resisted the new regime, eventually forming popular militias to fight together for their freedom, are ‘terrorists.’ The Ukrainian regime bombing cities in rebel-held territory, including schools and churches, is sanitised as an ‘anti-terrorist operation.’ The Russians arming and advising the Ukrainian rebels, with whom they have every element of nationality in common save borders (those having been redrawn by an extinct Communist regime which never asked the people there where they wanted to live) is ‘imperialism.’ The Americans arming and advising the Ukrainian regime, aiding them kill other Ukrainian ‘terrorists,’ is sanitised as ‘defending Ukraine’s territorial integrity and national sovereignty.’
I hold with this woman from Velikaya Znamenka. I do not hold with the West’s crony regime in Kiev, which has sold out Ukraine and picked a fight with Russia. I do not hold with the neo-Nazis in the Ukrainian military and police who have terrorised their own people in order to reenact a mythical Ukrainian nation that never existed.
Next: ‘8. The Blundering Generation’
Previous: ‘6. Treason, Treason!’
Here, Bronze-Age tribes behave more liberally than 21st-century Ukrainians and Americans. What would Abraham have done if he were a Ukrainian nationalist? Get chariots from the Canaanites and the Perizzites that his herdmen could use to kill Lot’s herdmen until Lot recognised his ‘national sovereignty’ and ‘territorial integrity’?
Indeed, the Texas Revolution is, perhaps, the best historical analogy for Americans to understand the Ukrainian civil war. In that war, ‘Anglos’ (Southerner-American settlers) and Tejanos (Hispanic Texans) fought for independence from Mexico when the caudillo Santa Anna overthrew its federal constitution, just as the Russian-speaking and Russian-descended Ukrainians living in Donbas fought for independence when the post-Euromaidan regime imposed ‘de-Russification.’ The U.S. of A. did not officially intervene on the side of the self-declared Republic of Texas, just as the Russian Federation did not officially intervene on the side of the Donbas peoples’ republics. Individual Americans who were not living in Texas volunteered to fight with other Americans in the Texas Revolution (like the Tennessean Davy Crocket), just as individual Russians who were not Ukrainians volunteered to fight with other Russians in the Ukrainian civil war. The Mexicans accused the Americans of instigating the Texas Revolution in order to annex the territory for themselves, just as the Ukrainians accused the Russians of instigating the secession of the Donbas peoples’ republics in order to annex the territory for themselves. I, for one, as an American who remembers something of his heritage—who ‘remembers the Alamo’—refuse to be on the side that is against the Davy Crocketts, Jim Bowies, and Buck Travises.
‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ (TDS) occurs when someone singles out Donald Trump for doing something which other U.S. Presidents, both before and after him, have done without the same degree of criticism. The Red Party is as susceptible to TDS as the Blue Party, and, in fact, those Red-Party members afflicted with TDS are some of the worst cases. So, when Pres. Trump, enforcing U.S. immigration law, banned travel from foreign states which the U.S. government claims are sponsoring terrorism and ‘separated’ children from adults amongst foreign nationals apprehended at the border for illegal entry, those Americans afflicted with TDS treated that as an unprecedented deviation—a betrayal of everything that made these U.S. of A. ‘exceptional.’ How could the Bad Orange Man Donald Drumpf make the Statue of Liberty cry? Hadn’t he read the poem inscribed on her very base on a plaque in a stairway landing which is the supreme law of the land won a poetry contest? When Pres. Obama practised these selfsame policies years earlier, however, and then when Pres. Brandon Biden practised them again years later, there were no protests at airports against ‘Muslim bans,’ no rogue ‘Hawaiian judges’ effectively vetoing the administration of the entire executive branch, no staged images of ‘kids in cages’ going viral, and no comparisons of Border-Patrol facilities to ‘concentration camps.’