Russia-Ukraine war: How the US paved the way to Moscow’s invasion
Russia-Ukraine war: How the US paved the way to Moscow’s invasion
Nearly a year after Russia’s invasion, the western narrative of an ‘unprovoked’ attack has become impossible to sustain
“……US fingerprintsIt did not end there. Post-Soviet Ukraine was deeply divided geographically and electorally over whether it should look to Russia or to NATO and the European Union for its security and trade. Close-run elections swung between these two poles. Ukraine was a country mired in permanent political crisis, as well as profound corruption.
That was the context for a coup/revolution in 2014 that overthrew a government in Kyiv elected to preserve ties with Moscow. Installed in its place was one that was openly anti-Russian. Washington’s fingerprints – disguised as “democracy promotion” – were all over the sudden change of government to one tightly aligned with US geostrategic goals in the region.
Many Russian-speaking communities in Ukraine – concentrated in the east, south and the Crimea peninsula – were incensed by this takeover. Worried that the new hostile government in Kyiv would try to sever its historic control of Crimea and Russia’s only warm-water naval port, Moscow annexed the peninsula.
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According to a subsequent referendum, the local population overwhelmingly backed the move. Western media widely reported the result as fraudulent, but later western polling suggested Crimeans believed it fairly represented their will.
But it was the eastern Donbas region that would serve as the touch-paper for Russia’s invasion last February. A civil war quickly erupted in 2014 that pitted Russian-speaking communities there against ultra-nationalist, anti-Russian fighters mostly from western Ukraine, including unabashed neo-Nazis. Many thousands died in the eight years of fighting.
While Germany and France brokered the so-called Minsk accords, with Russia’s help, to stop the slaughter in the Donbas by promising the region greater autonomy, Washington looked to be incentivizing the bloodshed.
It poured money and arms into Ukraine. It gave Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist forces training, and worked to integrate the Ukrainian military into Nato through what it termed “interoperability”. In July 2021, as tensions heightened, the US held a joint naval exercise with Ukraine in the Black Sea, Operation Sea Breeze, that led to Russia firing warning shots at a British naval destroyer that entered Crimea’s territorial waters.
By winter 2021, as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov noted, Moscow had “reached our boiling point”. Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s border in unprecedented numbers – in an unmistakable sign that Moscow’s patience was running out over Ukraine’s collusion with these US-engineered provocations.
President Zelensky, who had been elected on a promise to make peace in the Donbas but appeared to be unable to subdue the far-right elements within his own military, pushed in precisely the opposite direction. ……..”
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