The following was taken in complete form from American Thinker.com. American Thinker is a quality website sharing news and analysis from the Conservative perspective. The information in this article has all been explained before, none of it is new info for me. However, if the general consensus of the American Public is weighed regarding this conflict, it's clear that this history is an inconvenient one and a real historical accounting of the causes for Russian aggression in Ukraine. American Eagles seemingly, are turned to vultures.
I am responding to "Ukraine and the Unlearned Lesson of History," by Jacob Fraden. published in AT 1/31/23.
I’ll start with the author’s contention
that Russia’s war against Napoleonic France was one of its wars “of
aggression.” On June 24, 1812, Napoleon invaded Russia with an army of
650,000, approximately the 12th European county to receive the French
tyrant’s military attention. Who was the aggressor here? Tsar Alexander
I was a hero at the Congress of Vienna, for crushing that invasion and
breaking the French chronic aggressor’s back once and for all.
And
most of Christian Europe had the sense to be grateful to Russia for
driving the hated Turkish muslim conqueror and oppressor out of the
Balkans and other parts of Europe. As to Russia’s wars with the Swedes,
Lithuanians, Poles and Germans (13th through early 17th centuries), for
much of that time those four, not Russia, were the aggressors. In fact,
the Poles and Lithuanians burned Moscow in the early 17th century. And
yes, in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries Russia expanded eastward
through Siberia and Asia, absorbing territory thinly populated by
backward peoples. Who, of all people, are we Americans to fault Russia
for THAT? Go to the blackboard, and write MANIFEST DESTINY 100 times.
It’s not merely this writer’s logic about the present that’s flawed - he’s terminally confused about the past.
More pertinently to the ongoing tragedy
in Ukraine, after the Soviet collapse in 1991, Russia wanted peaceful
integration into the European economic, political and security system.
No knowledgeable person at the time doubted the sincerity of this wish;
and no one in the 1990’s saw prostrate Russia as a threat to anyone. It
was we, rather, the US military industrial complex (“MIC”) and neocon
hegemonists, who rejected this desire, fervently and repeatedly
expressed by both Gorbachev and Yeltsin.
The
promises of no eastward expansion of NATO by Secretary of State James
Baker (and no doubt other Western leaders) were promptly ignored by
Clinton and his gang. NATO expanded successively in two major tranches
-1999 and 2004 - and thereafter the well of the West’s relations with
Russia was poisoned. But that poisoning, no doubt, was the neocon object
of the NATO expansions.
The eastward expansion of NATO was
condemned at the time of its first occurrence by no less an authority,
and American patriot, than George Kennan, former ambassador to Russia
and arguably the author of America’s Cold War policy of containing
Soviet expansion.
In the 90’s Russia could do nothing about this
massive breach of faith by the West. But object it did, and repeatedly.
By Vladimir Putin’s assumption of power in 2000, no significant Russian
leader could have been found who saw the West’s expansion of NATO as
anything but threatening, or Gorbachev’s failure to prevent that
expansion by formal treaty as anything but naive and incompetent.
Without
firing a shot, in the period 1989-1991 the Soviet Union gave up an
empire, more accurately, a cordon sanitaire, in Eastern Europe; and by
1994 it had withdrawn all of its troops from the region. At the same
time, believing the West’s assurances that there would be no NATO
eastward expansion and that Russia would be economically and politically
integrated into Europe, Russia disbanded the Warsaw pact.
For
all of these historically unique concessions Russia got no thanks, no
integration into Europe, and successive gratuitous and - from its
standpoint, threatening - eastward expansions of NATO.
By
2004 the US neocons had Ukraine in their sights as the next Western
military base to be constructed on Russia’s doorstep - Ukraine, the
eastern half of whose population was ethnically Russian, Russian
speaking or pro Russian (or all three), and which for about 300 out of
the last 350 years had been part of either Russia or the Soviet Union.
In
2007, in Vladimir Putin’s Munich speech, the Russian government made it
plain that Ukraine was the reddest of red lines. Russia would never
tolerate a Ukraine militarily aligned with NATO, stuffed with
sophisticated American weaponry, on its front porch. In fact, that
reality had been clear since America’s open and obvious support for the
2004 so-called “color revolution.”
This plainly and repeatedly communicated
position was nothing more than Russia’s iteration of the same policy
that President Kennedy announced in 1962 - that no great power would be
permitted to establish a threatening military presence in America’s part
of the world. Does America have a better right to a militarily
nonthreatening Cuba than Russia has to a similarly benign Ukraine?
But
nothing changed the attitude if the US neocons and MIC. In 2008 that
deep thinker, George W. Bush, successfully twisted NATO’s arm (over
German and French objections) into promising that Ukraine and Georgia
would “eventually” be offered NATO membership. Russia was further
enraged. And the clueless President of Georgia took the promise as a
signal that he could, with impunity, move militarily against Russian
ethnics living in the northern part of Georgia. In the event, Russian
protective military action put a quick stop to that.
The final
straw was US support for the violent, anti-democratic riots in Ukraine
in 2014, which resulted in the the deposing of freely elected,
pro-Russian Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovic. The pro-West,
democratically illegitimate regime that replaced Yanukovic threatened to
ban the use of Russian as an official language, and to take other steps
perceived as highly adverse to the overwhelmingly pro-Russian Donbas
population; in consequence, demands came from the Donbas for some form
of guaranteed autonomy within Ukraine. The new Kiev government’s
response was to wage a war against its own Donbas population, which, by
2022, had cost the lives of 15-20,000 Donbas residents.
Also
shortly after its installation in 2014, the newly, non-democratically
installed Kiev regime hinted that Russia’s long term Sevastopol naval
lease would not be renewed. Russia responded by reincorporating Crimea -
to the relief of the vast majority of Crimea’s population. With the
exception of Nikita Khrushchev’s purely internal administrative change,
Crimea had been part of Russia since 1793 when Catherine the Great had
defeated the Turks.
When
the Biden administration took power in 2021 it immediately began
treating Ukraine as a defacto member of NATO. NATO troops paraded with
Ukrainian in Kiev, the supply of Western weaponry to Ukraine
dramatically increased, and, generally, there was every indication of an
impending move by Kiev, assisted by US weaponry, to crush the pro
Russian Donbas population once and for all.
Throughout 2021 Russia
repeatedly requested talks with the Biden administration the object of
which would be to assure Ukrainian neutrality and non-NATO membership
and some form of protective guarantees for the the Donbas population.
These pleas were ignored.
And the war came.
This is a brief, hurriedly written summary of Russia’s “wholly unprovoked” war in Ukraine.
Much more could be written about every topic touched on.
But
that this tragic, needless war was in fact provoked by the West’s
low-grade war against Russia over the last 30 years is indisputably
clear simply by reciting the pertinent history. This does not excuse or
justify the Russian invasion. But it shows that it was the West, led by
American neocon hegemonists, that created Russia’s accumulating
perception of threat, which in turn made the war all but inevitable.
We,
successive governments of the United States of America, bear a large
share of the responsibility for creating the conditions in which the
Ukraine war occurred. If our self image of America as a uniquely humane
and benign force in the world has any merit, it is we who have a moral
duty to assist in bringing this ruinous, and highly dangerous, conflict
to an end.
The flow of ever more destructive Western weaponry to
Ukraine should stop. The mindless, anti-historical demonization of
Russia should stop. Negotiations to bring about a conclusion to the war
should begin.
Map credit: Basque Mapping CC BY-SA 4.0 license
