Zenpolitics: January 2023

Please view and read these truly damning accounts of German and French bad-faith ‘diplomacy’ over the Minsk peace and security accords.

They reveal how in 2014/15 and beyond, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande knowingly played along in a pretence peace and regional security deal with Russia and Ukraine, all the while working to a stalling agenda which would allow time for built-up, NATO-backed Ukrainian forces to escalate their war on the Russian-identifying Donbas.

We also learn how then Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko played his own duplicitous part in the sham ‘negotiations’.

Alas, we’re now witnessing the tragic consequences of this dark 'statecraft'. In what will come to be seen as an historic act of betrayal, Europe’s leading figures were now engaged in a complicit strategy not to broker peace, but to prevent it.

Building on decades of US/NATO provocation, and the US-driven coup of 2014, the Minsk subterfuge laid the way open for Russia’s eventual, and arguably inevitable, 2022 invasion. Instead of cultivating this vital opportunity to settle the Donbas issue and avert further conflict - as Zelensky himself was elected on an overwhelming mandate to do in 2019 - we’re now watching the calamitous spectacle of full-scale war and mass, useless loss of life.

Predictably, none of the grand deceit behind these ill-fated accords, or Ukraine's green-light escalation of war on the Donbas from 2014, are being covered by the Western 'mainstream' media. No longer can the same past reporting of Ukraine’s deadly assaults on these regions, and the neo-Nazi forces leading them, be seriously aired, as they no longer fit the US/Western proxy war narrative.

Again, it’s being left to truly independent outlets and journalists to shine a critical light on these vital deceptions and their disastrous fallout.

Aaron Maté: European Leaders ADMIT Ukraine Peace Deal Was A Sham (Youtube video)

Patrick Lawrence: Europe and the Legitimization of Deception

January 2023, and with war in Ukraine now entering its ninth year, the prospects for any realistic resolution and avoidance of many more uselessly sacrificed lives looks continually dim.

Such pessimism is underscored by the reality that so much of the public still wouldn't even know that an armed conflict, with thousands of deaths, has been going on there since 2014, rather than 2022.

Nor, thanks to an almost uniform media war narrative, would they have the slightest comprehension that the present crisis has been over three decades in the making, culminating in Russia's invasion.

How much more convenient to maintain the simplistic demonisation story of 'Putin the crazy', leading his country into an 'impetuous' and 'unprovoked aggression' against an 'innocent bystander' state.

Never have the antecedents of a war, with so much at stake for people and planet, been so resolutely avoided. Never have the core causes of a conflict been so wilfully misrepresented.

As Benjamin Abelow helpfully contextualises it in a recent, essential read:

“The underlying cause of the war lies not in an unbridled expansionism of Mr. Putin, or in paranoid delusions of military planners in the Kremlin, but in a 30-year history of Western provocations, directed at Russia, that began during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and continued to the start of the war.”

Staggeringly, the cost of US 'support', mainly high-end weaponry, to Ukraine has now passed the $100 billion mark, a "cold, hard calculus" by the Washington war machine: "their blood, our bullets."

In a superb new article, Jonathan Cook lays out the epic deceptions behind this media-peddled proxy war narrative, and how the US is funding and pursuing another "forever war":

“Last month, the US Congress approved a mammoth top-up of largely military "support" for Ukraine, bringing the official total to some $100bn in less than a year, with doubtless much more of the costs hidden from public view. That is far in excess of Russia’s total annual military budget of £65bn. Washington and Europe have been pouring weapons, including ever more offensive ones, into Ukraine. Emboldened, Kyiv has been shifting the field of battle ever deeper into Russian territory. US officials, like their Ukrainian counterparts, speak of the fight against Russia continuing until Moscow is "defeated" or Putin toppled, turning this into another "forever war" of the very kind Biden had just forsworn - this one in Europe rather than the Middle East.”

This is an administration intent on leading and prolonging an untenable, expansionist war rather than securing an achievable, enduring peace; a militarist-minded monolith gorging its profits-soaring arms corporations rather than aiding its struggling and destitute citizens with basic food and heat.

Likewise for Washington’s lackey UK and EU states, its populations now facing historic cost of living and energy crises.

Across Europe, citizens are now coming to terms with the harsh realities of disconnected cheap energy supplies from Russia, and their new geo-economic dependency on price-inflated US gas. Rendered a taboo story by the Western media, is there any remaining doubt about the real perpetrators and beneficiaries of the bombed Nord Stream gas pipelines?

In 2023, Britain will match its 2022 £2.3 billion military-related spending to Ukraine. While Johnson before him helped deliver the West's decisive block on any proto-peace deal, Sunak has followed with unwavering support for the war, pledging to sign the cheques for zealot Zelensky's now bombastic demands for increased weaponry.

All told, it's an ongoing political imposition of mass, unnecessary suffering, loftily proclaimed as 'worth it' so that the 'good war' can continue. 'Our great moral sacrifice' paying for 'their noble fight to the death'. Was there ever a more cynical selling of such a mendacious proxy war?

As so many disastrous US/Western 'interventions' and war fundings have shown:

“There is no military solution to the crisis in Ukraine. The policy of flooding Ukraine with weapons will lead to a greater loss of life and destruction.”

Beyond the relentless blanket of Western war propaganda being fed to a duped public sits a veritable wealth of revelatory information and critical analysis helping to reinforce that essential truth.

Rather than the death-sustaining supply of rockets and guns, this output should be viewed as real aid, a truly life-caring and educational form of support, gifted in the actual service of peace and human security against the insatiable lies of war-obsessed leaders, posturing politicians and service media.

As Western publics slowly start to understand the staggering nature and scale of the US/NATO deception, it's only the greater supply and distribution of these resources that will help bring about the necessary pressure for an eventual end to this appalling, nuclear-threatening war, with some hopefully durable resolution, and help avert future escalations of Empire-driven violence.

Please read and disseminate widely.

Jonathan Cook: Russia-Ukraine war: How the US paved the way to Moscow's invasion

Benjamin Abelow: How the West Brought War to Ukraine

Aaron Mate: Urging peace with Russia, top US general challenges DC's proxy war

Branco Marcetic: NATO expansion and the origins of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

Branco Marcetic: Today’s Hawkish Discourse Makes the Cuban Missile Crisis’s Nuclear Brinkmanship Seem Sane

Who Blew Up Nord Stream (YouTube video)

Media Lens: Wicked Leaks – Part 1: How The Media Quarantined Evidence On Nord Stream Sabotage

The United States is Waging a New Cold War: a Socialist Perspective

Jonathan Cook: How the left became cheerleaders for US imperialism

Aaron Mate: "Their blood, our bullets": the cold, hard calculus in Ukraine

Caitlin Johnstone: The McProxy War Continues: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix