This is not the one-year anniversary of the war, as Western governments and media claim. This is the nine-year anniversary of the war. That makes a big difference.
The Ukraine war began with the violent overthrow of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, a coup that was overtly and covertly backed by the US government. Since 2008, the US has pushed NATO enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia. The 2014 coup of Yanukovych was in the service of NATO expansion.
The relentless drive toward NATO expansion must be kept in context. The US and Germany explicitly and repeatedly promised former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not enlarge “one inch eastward” after he disbanded the Soviet military alliance known as the Warsaw Pact. The entire premise of NATO enlargement was a violation of agreements made with the Soviet Union, and therefore with the continuation state of Russia.
Neoconservatives have pushed NATO enlargement because they seek to surround Russia in the Black Sea region, akin to the aims of the UK and France during the Crimean War — from 1853 to 1856.
US strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski described Ukraine as the “geographical pivot” of Eurasia. If the US could surround Russia in the Black Sea region, and incorporate Ukraine into the US military alliance, Russia’s ability to project power in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East and globally would disappear.
Russia saw this not only as a general threat, but as a specific threat to put advanced armaments right up to Russia’s border. This was especially ominous after the US unilaterally abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, which, according to Russia, posed a direct threat to Russian national security.
During his presidency — from 2010 to 2014 — Yanukovych sought military neutrality, precisely to avoid a civil war or proxy war in Ukraine. This was a wise and prudent choice for Ukraine, but it stood in the way of the US’ neoconservative obsession with NATO enlargement.
When protests broke out against Yanukovych at the end of 2013 upon the delay of the signing of an accession road map with the EU, the US took the opportunity to escalate the protests into a coup, which culminated in Yanukovych’s overthrow in February 2014.
The US meddled relentlessly and covertly in the protests, urging them on even as right-wing Ukrainian nationalist paramilitaries entered the scene. US non-governmental organizations spent vast sums to finance the protests and the eventual overthrow. This financing has never come to light.
Three people intimately involved in the US effort to overthrow Yanukovych were then-US assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland, who is now the US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs; then-US vice president Joe Biden; and Jake Sullivan, who was and still is Biden’s security advisor.
Nuland was famously caught planning the next government in Ukraine on the telephone with then-US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, without allowing any second thoughts from the Europeans.
“Fuck the EU,” a tape caught her saying.
The intercepted conversation reveals the depth of the Biden-Nuland-Sullivan planning.
“So on that piece Geoff, when I wrote the note Sullivan’s come back to me VFR [direct to me], saying you need Biden, and I said probably tomorrow for an attaboy and to get the deets [details] to stick. So, Biden’s willing,” Nuland said on the tape.
US film director Oliver Stone helps elucidate the US involvement in the coup in his 2016 documentary Ukraine on Fire.
I urge everyone to watch it, and to learn what a US-regime change operation looks like. I also urge people to read the powerful academic studies by University of Ottawa professor Ivan Katchanovski, who has laboriously reviewed all of the evidence of the 2014 Maidan Massacre, finding that most of the violence and killing originated not from Yanukovych’s security detail, as alleged, but from coup leaders who fired into crowds, killing police officers and demonstrators.
These truths remain obscured by US secrecy and European obsequiousness to US power. A US-orchestrated coup occurred in the heart of Europe, and no European leader dared to speak the truth. Brutal consequences have followed, but still no European leader has honestly told the facts.
The coup was the start of the war nine years ago. An extra-constitutional, anti-Russian, right-wing and ultra-nationalist government came to power in Kyiv. After the coup, Russia quickly retook Crimea following a quick referendum, while war broke out in the Donbas as Russians in the Ukraine army switched sides to oppose the post-coup government in Kyiv.
NATO almost immediately began to provide billions of US dollars worth of weaponry to Ukraine, escalating the war. The Minsk I and Minsk II peace agreements, in which France and Germany were to be co-guarantors, did not function.
First, because the nationalist Ukrainian government in Kyiv refused to implement them, and second, because Germany and France did not press for their implementation, as recently admitted by former German chancellor Angela Merkel.
At the end of 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin made very clear that the three red lines for Russia were: NATO enlargement to Ukraine as unacceptable; Russia would maintain control of Crimea; and that war in the Donbas should be settled by implementation of Minsk II.
The Biden administration refused to negotiate on the issue of NATO enlargement.
The Russian invasion tragically and wrongly took place in February last year, eight years after the Yanukovych coup. The US has poured in tens of billions of US dollars worth of armaments and cash since then, doubling down on the US attempt to expand its military alliance into Ukraine and Georgia. The deaths and destruction in this escalating battlefield are horrific.
In March last year, Ukraine said that it would negotiate on the basis of neutrality. The war seemed close to an end. Positive statements were made by Ukrainian and Russian officials, as well as by Turkish mediators.
Former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett has said that the US blocked those negotiations, instead favoring an escalation of war to “weaken Russia.”
In September last year, the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up. Overwhelming evidence points to the US leading the destruction of those pipelines. US journalist Seymour Hersh’s account is highly credible and has not been refuted on a single major point — although it has been heatedly denied by the US government. It points to the Biden-Nuland-Sullivan team as leading the Nord Stream destruction.
Much of the mainstream US and European media are on a path of dire escalation, lies or silence. The narrative that this is the first anniversary of war is a falsehood that hides the reasons the war began and obstructs the ways to end it.
This is a war that began because of a reckless US neoconservative push for NATO enlargement, followed by the US neoconservative participation in Ukraine’s 2014 regime-change operation. Since then, there has been massive escalation of armaments, death and destruction.
This is a war that needs to stop before it engulfs the world in nuclear Armageddon. The peace movement should be praised for its valiant efforts, especially in the face of brazen lies and propaganda by the US government and craven silence by European governments, which are subservient to US neoconservatives.
Truth must be spoken. Both sides have lied, cheated and committed violence. Both sides need to back off. NATO must stop the attempt to expand to Ukraine and Georgia. Russia must withdraw from Ukraine. The red lines of both sides must be understood for the world to survive.
Jeffrey D. Sachs, a professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, is president of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. The views expressed in this column are his own.
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