As talks between Russia and Ukraine continue in 'upbeat' mood, Ukrainian president Zelensky is, reportedly, intimating that his country will not now seek to join NATO. He is also said to be 'open to compromise' on the issue of Donetsk and Lugansk, the two breakaway regions in the east.
If true, these crucial concessions would resolve the two key Russian demands. And with Russia now firmly in control of the Donbas, anyway, it looks like Ukraine would come out of any negotiations having conceded on both major counts.
All of which leaves us wondering whether this disastrous invasion, war and mass killing could all have been avoided had Zelensky and his Western patrons acted to settle these issues beforehand.
Alongside the call for Russian troops out of Ukraine, the case for Ukrainian neutrality is precisely the position taken by Stop the War and other such voices. So why have Western politicians, military leaders and 'mainstream' media failed to make that same peace-seeking case?
As John Rees observes:
"There is no sense in which Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine can be justified. But there are also no grounds for eradicating the historical fact of Ukraine’s de facto alliance with NATO. What is unconscionable is that NATO led Ukraine to believe it could join with NATO in close collaboration without a Russian reaction, even though it knew this to be untrue from at least 2009. And what is beyond acceptable is that it did not tell Ukraine that when such a reaction took place NATO had no intention of coming to Ukraine’s aid. This is how we have arrived at a Russian invasion of Ukraine with no military response from the West. And this war fever without war explains the tsunami of unhinged chauvinism coming from the British establishment and its international counterparts."
Yet, contradicting his 'readiness to compromise', Zelensky is still making lofty pleas to the US Congress for greater Western weaponry and the imposition of a 'no-fly zone', risking an even greater global conflagration and Dr Strangelove-type nuclear showdown.
While Biden has, so far, ruled out any such direct NATO move into Ukraine, the US-led 'international community' continue to pile in armaments, urging Zelensky on. As Rees, succinctly puts it:
"The West are willing to fight Putin to the last drop of Ukrainian blood. Rhetoric is cheap and plentiful in exactly the opposite proportions to actual military deployment."
Having walked Ukraine along this "primrose path", pushing it into a fight with Russia they knew it could never win, and which they would never directly intervene in, the West are still lauding Zelensky - for the moment.
But the cooling effect may soon come as he moves from 'heroic defiance' to realistic accommodation and matters of political survival.
Alas, any hopeful ceasefire and settlement will come too late for dead and suffering Ukrainians, and for the many Russian lives lost too.
Nor, as the killing continues, are Ukrainian voices more critical of Zelensky and his Western promoters being given an ample airing.
There can be no complete hiding the West's calamitous interference, manipulations and provocations in Ukraine's affairs, past, present and ongoing, as this deeply insightful account by Ukrainian writer Yuliy Dubovyk explains:
"You see, the US government has meddled in Ukraine for decades. And the Ukrainian people have suffered because of this. The overwhelming support that Western governments and media outlets have poured out for Ukraine since Russia invaded on February 24 is not actually motivated by concern for the Ukrainian people. They are using us to advance their political and economic interests. We know this because Washington overthrew our government twice in a decade, imposed neoliberal economic policies that made our country the poorest in Europe, and has fueled a devastating civil war that in the past eight years took the lives of 14,000 Ukrainians and wounded and displaced many more."
Yet very little of this key context is ever permitted into Western media reporting or discussion of the conflict.
And with the West's propaganda war and mass censorship preventing any widespread comprehension of the background to the crisis, a hyped-up public are left with no ready perspective on how the 'other side' see it, or how it might yet be resolved.
As Diana Johnstone, in a penetrating account of the historical and present issues, points out:
"For Russian leaders, their military “operation” is intended to prevent the Western invasion they fear. They still want to negotiate Ukrainian neutrality. For the Americans, whose strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski boasted of having lured the Russians into the Afghanistan trap (giving them “their Vietnam”), this is a psychological victory in their endless war. The Western world is united as never before in hating Putin. Propaganda and censorship surpass even World War levels. The Russians surely want this “operation” to end soon, as it is costly to them in many ways. The Americans rejected any effort to prevent it, did everything to provoke it, and will extract whatever advantages they can from its continuation."
The whole 'attack on the civilized West', and 'stand with Ukraine' playbook has, thus, been cynically pushed by the US-led corporate war machine, drawing the public into NATO's 'security' narrative, raising the temperature with China as well as Russia, and normalising the madness of continued nuclear weaponry.
Whatever the immediate developments on talks, or other outcome, laments Chris Hedges, incalculable damage has now been done, driving up Western militarism, causing massive economic dislocation, immense human suffering, and deepening the environmental emergency:
"Putin played into the hands of the war industry. He gave the warmongers what they wanted. He fulfilled their wildest fantasies. There will be no impediments now on the march to Armageddon. Military budgets will soar. The oil will gush from the ground. The climate crisis will accelerate. China and Russia will form the new axis of evil. The poor will be abandoned. The roads across the earth will be clogged with desperate refugees. All dissent will be treason. The young will be sacrificed for the tired tropes of glory, honor and country. The vulnerable will suffer and die. The only true patriots will be generals, war profiteers, opportunists, courtiers in the media and demagogues braying for more and more blood. The merchants of death rule like Olympian gods. And we, cowed by fear, intoxicated by war, swept up in the collective hysteria, clamor for our own annihilation."
Further required reading on how we reached this grim point, and the dangerous fallout yet to come:
Diana Johnstone: For Washington, War Never Ends
John Rees: Russian aggression is real, but so is NATO duplicity in Ukraine
Chris Hedges: Waltzing to Armageddon
1 comment:
The continuous propaganda assault the Public have received throughout this 2022 Ukraine War compared to 28 February 1998 - 11 June 1999 Kosovo War, is shamefully, and hypocritically revealing.
As the sadly departed Stephen F Cohen feared, they - 'the West' - are guilty of deliberately "criminalizing diplomacy".
Since 1945 the USA has got away with its massively 'overwhelming military'[and economic] bullying , until it came up against someone with an equally devastating military power.
Not one mention of an attempted negotiated diplomatic solution like an international conference in an agreed neutral country, with US,UK,France,Russia,China, Japan,India,Pakistan,Brazil,Germany,North Korea,Canada,South Korea,Australia, and others, to not only resolve this Ukraine war, but *more importantly* formulate a new security structure for the entire world, to be signed by them all and legally binding on them all.
A new security structure will have be ironed out eventually anyway, if peace is to be ever reached, and maintained. [ Taiwan? Yemen? Israel-Palestine? Syria-Golan Heights? Spratly Islands? etc ]
If this is achieved, the necessary attempts to resolve the environmental devastation, and climate change, will at least have some credibility.
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