A Tipping Point Has Been Reached In Ukraine
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, its “Special Military Operation”, has reached a tipping point. It is now being acknowledged, even by many Western mainstream news outlets, that Ukraine is in a dire and desperate situation.(1) The Western public’s perception has shifted. Seventy percent of Americans believe that it’s time for peace negotiations to begin between Ukraine/the US and Russia.(2) Meanwhile, upwards of 90% of Europeans have now seen through the Western corporate media’s heavily curated spin and no longer believe that Ukraine can win. (3) To those outside the Western sphere, it’s been obvious for almost a year now that Ukraine stands no chance of victory.(4)
Meanwhile, people like American President Joe Biden, NATO Security Chief Jens Stoltenberg and President of the European Commission Ursula von Der Leyen continue to cheerlead and push for the war to continue until Ukraine regains its territory and “stops Putin”.(5) This ridiculous cheerleading persists despite the fact that these people know, perfectly well at this point, that Russia is going to win the war.
It’s become clear that the continual refusal by The US/NATO to engage in diplomacy is only going to result in a scenario in which Russia eventually ends up dictating the terms and conditions of surrender to a completely defeated Ukrainian military.(6),(7),(8).
This is the reality of the situation though, and the US tends not to concern itself with reality when it comes to its rapacious desire to augment its now waning hegemony. In the case of the war in Ukraine, the Biden administration is scrambling to save face by keeping the war going until the end of the year, or at least until Election Day in November.
No matter (to US leadership) that Ukraine will lose another 100,000 soldiers unnecessarily and it will lose more territory as well. There is absolutely nothing humanitarian about pushing for this war to drag on, using outright lies about the “inevitability of a Ukrainian victory” to eke out a few more months or possibly a year of this “meat grinder”.(9) In fact it would be more appropriate to call these Western leaders’ behavior anti-humanitarian, at this point.
Ukrainian Lives Have Always Been a Secondary Concern to US Leadership
All of this raises a question: Has the US ever cared about the lives of the people in Ukraine at all? Or was the plan always, starting well before 2022, to use Ukrainian bodies as cannon fodder in a war of attrition that the US knew all along would most likely end with the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians?
Three years before the current phase of the war began in February of 2022, plans regarding how to use the Ukrainian military in a proxy war to damage Russia were already being drawn up. In a 2019 RAND Corporation memo entitled “Extending Russia From Advantageous Ground” that was funded by the G7 and the US government, a whole series of geopolitical, economic and ideological factors were being weighed regarding how to draw Russia into a proxy conflict with Ukraine.(9) The goal of which would be to bleed Russia economically and militarily.
In fact, different aspects of the plan to bleed Russia were being conceived and implemented during the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations. For instance, in 2019, the same year the RAND memo was written, the Trump administration OK’d the sale of weapons to Ukraine.(10) The floodgates were now open. This was almost certainly one of the key provocations that led to Russia’s special military operation.
In the portion of the above-mentioned 2019 memo entitled “Providing Lethal Aid to Ukraine”, there is a section entitled “Benefits” that reads as follows, “Expanding US assistance to Ukraine, including lethal military assistance, would likely increase the costs to Russia, in both blood and treasure, of holding the Donbass region. The following section entitled “Risks” reads as follows, “Such escalation might extend Russia. Eastern Ukraine is already a drain… However, such a move might come at a significant cost to Ukraine and to US prestige and credibility. This could produce disproportionately large Ukrainian casualties, territorial losses and refugee flows. It might even lead Ukraine into a ‘disadvantageous peace’”, ie; military defeat.
*You can download the 2019 RAND Corp. memo at the link in the citations section below.(11)
The US’ Main Aim All Along
Note, the aforementioned possible “risks” were mortally dangerous for Ukraine’s population, not for the US. Note also, that all of the possible impending disasters that were listed as “risks” in the memo ended up coming to pass, resulting in the destruction of Ukraine and the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives.
In other words, the US’ main aim in generating the proxy war in Ukraine, has always been, to overextend and bleed Russia. The idea that the US’ twenty years of interventions in Ukrainian politics, its arming and training of Ukraine’s military and the 200 Billion dollars of assistance given to Ukraine over the course of the last 2 and 1/2 years were all fueled by a humanitarian aim is absurd. There were a few pundits and politicians like Lindsey Graham who “said the quiet part out loud”, illustrating just how little the lives of those dying in Ukraine meant to most US government higher-ups, who did nothing but push for escalation for over two plus years.(12)
It should be noted that the US tried to overthrow the Ukrainian government as far back as twenty years ago during the Bush Jr. years. There was a US generated campaign behind the turmoil that ensued in Kiev in 2004. “The orange-bedecked ‘chestnut revolution’ was an American creation… Funded and organized by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, etc..” (15) The Maidan Revolution in 2014 was also heavily backed by the US. “The extent of the Obama administration’s meddling in Ukraine’s politics was breathtaking.” (16)
The Underestimation and the Failed Signal
When Russia’s army first entered Ukraine they went in with only 90,000 troops. This was done to send a signal to the US and Ukraine that Russia absolutely wasn’t bluffing when it came to having yet another NATO affiliate on her border. Especially a country like Ukraine, that was being armed to the teeth and trained by US/NATO forces. On top of this, Joe Biden had been doubling down throughout the first year of his presidency on his complete disregard for Russia’s (very) well known redline regarding Ukraine. Sending signals of this nature is not uncommon in military circles. They are sent usually for preventative purposes, in an attempt to both warn and to educate the enemy or the prospective enemy. We had an example of this sort of signal sending via Iran to the US this past April.(17)
The fact of the matter is, Russia didn’t want this war. Vladimir Putin gambled that the US and Ukraine would opt to negotiate, seeing on one hand that Russia was serious and on the other hand that they had not initially entered Ukraine in a manner that indicated they were there, at that point, to fight a full-on war. If they had wanted, initially, to fight the war of attrition that they’ve ended up fighting they’d have entered with at least 500,000 troops. This was pointed out in mid 2022 by John Mearsheimer as well as by several other military experts.(18)
Putin underestimated both the strength and resolve of Ukraine’s formidable army and the extent of the US’ determination to make a full-on proxy war happen in Ukraine, come hell or high-water. Putin also underestimated the effectiveness of a decade’s worth of cartoonishly ghoulish anti-Russian propaganda that painted him and Russia as crazed anti-Western imperialist madmen whose aim was to take over all of Europe. In actuality, Putin has been, up until fairly recently for obvious reasons, quite pro-West. In fact, he made several bids, much to the chagrin of the old Russian guard, to integrate Russia into NATO. The fact that most Americans don’t know this is a testament to the regional ubiquitousness of the neocons’ absurd depiction of Putin as a long-time enemy of the West. This is simply not true. The record, if looked at in good faith, clearly shows otherwise.(19)
Whatever one’s opinion is of Vladimir Putin and Russia, there is a visible paper trail spanning over a decade that shows that the neocons deciding US’ foreign policy had intentions all along to use Ukraine as a proxy in a conflict with Russia.
Lastly, none of these facts are a justification for the destruction that Russia has caused in Ukraine. What these facts make clear though, is that this war was sought after, provoked and escalated by the US in an attempt to use Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia.(20)
CITATIONS:
2- https://responsiblestatecraft.org/ukraine-peace-talks-poll/
4- https://time.com/6695261/ukraine-forever-war-danger/
6- https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/15/world/europe/ukraine-russia-ceasefire-deal.html
7- https://www.voanews.com/a/russia-strikes-more-ukraine-energy-infrastructure-/7567104.html
8- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNZkgRPDO1E
9- https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3063.html
11- https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3063.html
12- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/06/01/wrzv-j01.html
14- https://jacobin.com/2018/08/enver-hoxha-humanitarian-intervention-kosovo-serbia
16- https://www.cato.org/commentary/americas-ukraine-hypocrisy
18- https://unherd.com/2022/11/john-mearsheimer-were-playing-russian-roulette/
