Anyone expecting an armchair strategist’s take on the fighting in Ukraine should look elsewhere. This is a very personal attempt to explain how I believe we arrived at war between Russia and Ukraine.
This is a litany of lies, mistakes, personal failings, and geopolitical manoeuvrings.
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HISTORY AND RUSSIA
Perhaps the only time Russia enjoyed near-unequivocal support in the West was when the Grand Armée was driven out in 1812. Even then, the West celebrated, not because we’d come to love Russians, but because we feared Napoleon.
After that, as England sought to extend her holdings in India she increasingly came into contact with Tsarist Russia pushing south, in what became known as ‘The Great Game’.
So hostile was the West to Russia – and so rehabilitated had France become – that Britain and France could even ally themselves with Ottoman Turkey against Russia in the Crimean War 1853 -1856.
An alliance of Protestants, Catholics and Muslims against Orthodox Russia. At a time when Muslim Turks were still enslaving Christian Europeans, including Russians.
Still, The Charge of the Light Brigade was a stirring distraction.
In 1904 / 05 there was a brief war between Russia and Japan, which saw Japan victorious, with British support.
Though when it became obvious that Kaiser Bill was shaping for a fight, and he’d roped in old Franz Joseph, then Russia proved a necessary eastern ally against Imperial Germany and the Hapsburg Empire.
That war over, and Russia now Communist, the Western powers and Japan invaded, but Lenin remained in power.
With Communism secured the Soviet Union became the enemy, admired in the West only by deluded leftists.
The role of ‘principal threat’ was temporarily usurped in the 1930s by Nazi Germany. Even so, had Germany focused its aggression exclusively on central and eastern Europe and invaded the USSR, it’s unlikely the West would have intervened.
Following WWII we entered the Cold War, and a series of proxy conflicts and situations from Korea to Cuba to Vietnam to Chile to . . . (pick any one from dozens).
Something often forgotten from this period is that the ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’ came about because the USA had placed ICBMs in Turkey, which bordered the USSR. Kennedy and Khrushchev eventually agreed to remove their missiles from both Turkey and Cuba.
The US military at this time contained a number of senior officers who sincerely believed that a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union was the best form of ‘defence’.
They looked almost comical when Stanley Kubrick gave them roles in Dr Strangelove. Though some of them were almost too off-the-wall to caricature.
The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 to support a friendly regime, giving the USA its chance to arm fanatics and boost opium production. The kind of thought-through strategic decision-making – like supporting Iraq against Iran – all too common in recent US foreign policy decisions.
As US allies skinned alive Russian conscripts and took Afghanistan back to the Middle Ages the USA claimed another victory for democracy and progress.
A further Western dividend was that the Afghanistan debacle contributed directly to the disintegration of the Soviet Union between 1988 and 1991.
This encouraged NATO, a Cold War alliance set up to defend Western Europe from Warsaw Pact aggression, to move eastwards!
Though as Noam Chomsky reminded us a few days ago:
Bush and Baker lied to Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. The USA, EU and NATO have been lying to Russia – and to the rest of us – ever since.
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UKRAINE INDEPENDENCE 1
Before moving on to more recent events mention must be made of the Ukrainian Famine, or Holodomor, in which 3 – 4 million Ukrainians died during Stalin’s forced collectivisation of agriculture in 1932-33.
There was definitely an anti-Ukrainian aspect to the project, but Stalin wasn’t really fussed who he killed. This article suggests ‘that about 20 million died in labour camps, forced collectivisation, famine and executions.’
The demise of the Soviet Union saw an attempt at a reconfigured federation of sovereign states. A kind of east European EU. This was aired by Gorbachev at the Communist Party Congress of July 1990.
Ukraine supported joining the Union if she had first achieved independence.
This prompted a last-ditch attempt by hard-line Communists to save the Soviet Union through the attempted coup of August 19, 1991; which led to the Ukrainian parliament agreeing a Declaration of Independence on August 24, 1991.
Ukraine became independent in December 1991 following a referendum on the August Declaration. In a turnout of 84.18% some 92.3% voted to approve the Declaration of Independence drawn up a few months earlier. Roughly 55% of ethnic Russians voted for independence. Though turnout was lower in Russian-speaking areas.
Immediately following the vote both Boris Yeltsin (President of Russia) and Gorbachev congratulated Ukraine on voting for independence . . . as a first step towards a reconfigured federation along with Russia, Belarus, and some Central Asian republics.
The independence vote was able to paper over a crack that would soon become evident because it satisfied moderate Ukrainian nationalists without alarming ethnic Russians and Russian speakers.
But there were elements in the West looking to exploit divisions.
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UKRAINE INDEPENDENCE 2
I suggest you find time to read this account of Ukrainian politics in the period of the October 2010 presidential (run-off) election and the 2012 parliamentary election. These saw victories for Russia-leaning Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of the Regions.
Though these elections also revealed that the ‘crack’ I just referred to had now become a chasm. Ukraine was divided. Geographically divided.
The ostensible trigger for the subsequent violence seems to have been President Yanukovych’s refusal to sign – or his delay in signing – an EU association agreement in November 2013.
The protests against Yanukovych soon began. With Western media focusing almost exclusively on anti-Yanukovych events in Kyiv, thereby creating the impression that the whole country was against the president.
This was obviously not true. Given that he had been democratically elected not long before there was widespread support for Yanukovych. But this support was mainly outside of Kyiv, and went largely unreported by the Western media.
Regime change was effected by the USA and NATO on February 22, 2014 when Viktor Yanukovych was forced to leave Ukraine.
This set in train a number of events, not least Russian military occupation of Crimea and the secession from Ukraine of territory in the east. Here’s a useful timeline for events in that period.
And there was violence elsewhere. In May 2014, dozens of Yanukovych supporters were killed in largely Russophone Odesa / Odessa by far right thugs, many of whom had travelled south as football fans.
Oliver Stone’s documentary, Ukraine on Fire, gives excellent insights into this period.
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HUNTER BIDEN ON THE MAKE
In April 2014 Hunter Biden, the current US president’s younger son, joined the board of Burisma, Ukraine’s largest oil and gas company. This was at a time when Burisma and its founder Mykola Zlochevsky were under investigation for corruption in a number of jurisdictions. Including England.
Apart from being the son of the then vice-president it’s difficult to know what use Hunter Biden was to Burisma.
The younger Biden was trading on his father’s name to further enrich himself through companies in Russia and China.
Then, as the brown stuff started moving towards the fan with Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin looking into Burisma, Biden Senior stepped in to protect his son by insisting that Shokin be sacked. Which he was, to be replaced by a man with no legal background.
The whole business stinks. There are even allegations that President Biden himself benefitted financially from his son’s business dealings. Which would be fitting in a way, because Hunter Biden would have struggled to get a job as a janitor if he wasn’t his father’s son.
Knowledge of nefarious dealings in Ukraine and elsewhere was widespread before the 2020 US Presidential election, but all was confirmed with the emergence of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
UPDATE 14.04.2022: After reading this fascinating article by Azra Dale it’s only right that I suggest that Mykola Zlochevsky was a front man for Ihor Kolomoisky, who seems to have a penchant for using puppets. Among them the current president of Ukraine and the son of the US President.
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HUNTER BIDEN’S LAPTOP 1
In April 2019 Hunter Biden left a laptop to be repaired in Wilmington, Delaware. He was said to be in an ‘inebriated’ state when he called at John Paul Mac Isaac’s repair shop. He never went back to collect the laptop.
Eventually Isaac investigated the laptop’s hard drive. He found incriminating e-mails relating to Hunter Biden’s business dealings that traded on his father’s name and influence, also videos of the younger Biden’s drug taking and cavorting with prostitutes.
The news of the laptop was broken by the New York Post in October 2020, weeks before the Presidential election. And was immediately and unanimously rejected by the liberal media, Big Tech, FBI and CIA as ‘Russian disinformation’.
Twitter took down accounts daring to link to the New York Post story. Twitter even locked the account of the New York Post itself. (Reminder: the NYP is the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in America.)
This closing of ranks, this denial of the truth, put Joe Biden in the White House.
Today, with Biden’s presidency in tatters, the midterm elections already lost, the liberal media has decided the laptop story was true after all. New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, they’re all admitting what’s been known for a long time – the Bidens may have more than a few skeletons in the closet.
And the worst may be yet to come. It’s claimed there’s 450 GB of deleted material. And if that wasn’t bad enough, there are thought to be two other laptops (Hunter was a very careless boy); one is said to be safe with the FBI, but the other is believed to be in the hands of . . . Russian drug dealers with whom Hunter Biden partied!
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HUNTER BIDEN’S LAPTOP 2
The message from the Hunter Biden laptop saga is one I am becoming increasingly familiar with. And it’s worrying.
The Woke left has persuaded itself that those ranged against it are evil. Not just wrong. Not just misinformed. But evil. That being so, then the Righteous are justified in saying and doing anything to combat this ‘evil’.
This took a new twist just this week when former Congressman Joe Walsh fabricated a statement about Ukraine and attributed it to Fox TV host Tucker Carlson, a bête noire of the left. This was relayed by thousands on Reddit, Twitter and other platforms.
When it was pointed out to Walsh that Carlson had not said what had been attributed to him, his response was, ‘No, but it’s the kind of thing he might have said’.
Thanks to the repackaged Marxism of identity politics we are in a post-reality world where ‘truth’ is whatever those who scream loudest say it is.
Which brings us back to Ukraine.
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A PLEA FOR HONESTY
The USA, the EU, and NATO broke promises to Russia and made promises to Ukraine that Russia regarded as threats to her own security.
Then, to further promote Western interests, a democratically-elected leader was ousted in 2014 in yet another US-engineered regime change, with the muscle provided by, among others, Nazi militias, which now seem to be part of the Ukrainian army.
This is what President Putin talks of when he refers to ‘denazification’. He’s not making it up.
And through their interference these Western agencies irreparably fractured an already divided country.
And further corrupted an already corrupt country. With the Biden family playing its role.
So let’s have no more black and white interpretations from Western politicians, no more propaganda masquerading as news from an already discredited Western media.
Let’s hear no more talk of every civilian casualty being a ‘war crime’, or even ‘genocide’! Because when a government arms its civilians those civilians risk being viewed as combatants. And please, let’s see fewer staged photographs using teddy bears.
To give a more balanced picture, let’s hear of the Russian PoWs being killed in cold blood. Let’s be told the role played by Ukrainian Nazis in Mariupol and other cities. And the ‘volunteers’ fighting for Ukraine.
As with Hunter Biden’s laptop, the truth will out eventually. Let’s make a start tomorrow.
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GOOD v EVIL? WHICH IS WHICH?
The war in Ukraine is presented as a struggle between Western liberal democracy and something evil. The truth is more complicated.
We in the West are now surveiled 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, by CCTV, by our mobile phones, and by gizmos answering to stupid names like ‘Siri’ and ‘Alexa’.
What we are allowed to say online, what we are allowed to read, is determined by the brainwashed underlings of billionaire nerds in Silicon Valley. And their ‘fact-checkers’.
We are expected to line up like sheep to be injected with untested vaccines because of a virus developed under mysterious circumstances in a Chinese laboratory. Politicians like that demented woman in New Zealand have used this virus to put us all under house arrest and close down whole countries.
We must accept that women have penises and men have cervixes. To deny this will bring down the wrath of those who preach freedom and practise tyranny. Fanatics who have political support from Corruption Bay to the Oval Office.
We are being pushed towards a cashless society – ‘cos only crooks need cash, innit!’. The true motivation was revealed not so long ago by Pierre Trudeau’s little boy when he froze the bank accounts of those who dared oppose him.
That was a warning in 300-feet-high flashing neon letters with an accompanying wall of sound.
Our children are being taught that they’re evil because they’re White. Leftists and liberals support this demonisation of a race oblivious to the historical precedents. Justified, they argue, because Whites are ‘privileged’.
The Nazis said the same thing about the Jews – ‘too much money, too much influence’. Hardly surprising that anti-Semitism is back in vogue with the Left and we see the Comrades marching in step with the Jihadists.
Because both wish to destroy Western civilisation. Partly through undermining from within, partly through unlimited immigration from without.
The reality is that never before have individual and national liberties been under such threat as they are today in the Western – particularly the Anglophone – world. Because never before have those seeking to take away our freedoms possessed such power.
If I was a Russian I’d do everything I could to keep my country free of this repacked-for-the-twenty-first-century Marxism.
Especially after hearing Joe Biden demand regime change in my country. Does Sleepy Joe think Russia is a banana republic in the Caribbean!
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FINAL THOUGHTS, FEARS
I wish I hadn’t felt the need to write this, but I believe Russia has been forced into a conflict she would have preferred to avoid.
Due to its history, Russia is understandably suspicious of the West. And the West has lived down to Russia’s expectations time after time. But still, it needn’t have come to this . . .
Not if the USA and NATO had kept the promise made to Mikhail Gorbachev.
Not if the USA and NATO hadn’t removed a democratically-elected President of Ukraine.
Not if the USA and NATO hadn’t encouraged Nazis and gangsters in Ukraine.
My real worry now is that there are in the USA and NATO people not a lot different to those ridiculed by Kubrick in Dr Strangelove – maniacs wanting full-scale war with Russia.
I hope I’m wrong. Or, if I’m right, then I hope to God they can be slapped down.
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P.S. I have been critical of the USA for a reason. That’s because I think the USA is still the greatest country on Earth, and the best hope for mankind.
But the USA is in a bad place right now. Liars, hypocrites, and the seriously unhinged are calling the shots. They increasingly control the government, the media, and the education system. Thankfully, decent people are fighting back.
That fightback must intensify and win its first major victory in November’s midterm elections. Because if the USA can’t be saved from itself then we’re all fucked.
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