What riveting telly that meeting between Trump, Vance and Zelenski was. You’ll have seen the five minute spat, but watch the full interview and it will be clear that Zelensky has no interest in peace and told lie after lie, peddling nothing but propaganda, blaming Putin for everything and saying that he will not compromise to achieve peace.
Trump was right to put Zelensky in his place, and JD Vance was impressive. Zelenski was so unreasonable as to seem borderline deranged. Not all agree, and the western MSM went into conniptions, blaming Trump and Vance for telling the truth.
The spat began when Zelensky called Putin a terrorist and began a rant, distorting events since 2014 to which JD Vance rightly objected. What caused the Ukraine war is, therefore, highly relevant to the peace talks.
Ukraine has been wrecked, lost a substantial amount of territory, its economy is in tatters, huge numbers of Ukrainians are displaced or have fled the country, and it has suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties.
The official western position, repeatedly peddled by the MSM, is that Vladimir Putin is wholly responsible for the war. He woke up one morning and decided to conquer Ukraine and make it part of a greater Russian Reich and then re-take the rest of Eastern Europe and, they say, Western Europe after that. Putin, they claim, is a warmongering threat to the world and can only be dealt with by force.
But that is a load of old codswallop. My view, admittedly a minority one, is that the US and its allies provoked the war. Yes, Russia invaded Ukraine, but we need to ask why. The answer is the decision to bring Ukraine into NATO and the EU, followed by the CIA promoting a revolution in Ukraine and a vicious assault on Russian eastern Ukraine. To deal with this threat Russia launched a preventive war on 24 February 2022. Both Donald Trump and Nigel Farage had previously agreed, saying that NATO expansion was the driving force behind the conflict.
Despite all the propaganda there is no evidence that Putin wanted to conquer Ukraine and incorporate it into Russia. None. Some point to Putin’s comments, taken out of context, that Ukraine is an “artificial state.“ But that is merely a statement of fact and does not indicate warlike intentions. Likewise, Putin’s statement that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people “with a common history. Putin saying that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” is frequently quoted. But he also said, “Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain” and that “Of course, we cannot change past events, but we must at least admit them openly and honestly.” All ignored.
Putin recognised Ukraine as an independent country in July 2021, telling Ukrainians “You want to establish a state of your own: you are welcome!” On how Russia should treat Ukraine, he wrote “There is only one answer: with respect” concluding that “what Ukraine will be—it is up to its citizens to decide.” All ignored.
In February 2022 he emphasised that Russia accepts “the new geopolitical reality that took shape after the dissolution of the USSR.” When announcing Russia’s invasion he declared that “It is not our plan to occupy Ukrainian territory”, though qualifying this with “Russia cannot feel safe, develop, and exist while facing a permanent threat from the territory of today’s Ukraine.” That Ukraine is almost certain to lose a substantial amount of land is down entirely to the aggressive response of the US and NATO.
Putin did not – and does not - have enough troops to conquer Ukraine. General Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, estimated Russia’s invasion force at only 100,000, far too few to conquer, occupy, and absorb Ukraine into a greater Russia. Ukraine’s supporters love to draw inaccurate parallels with WW2, but one accurate one is that Russia’s invasion force was 1/15th of the German one that invaded Poland, a country much smaller and less populous than Ukraine. And the Germans still struggled.
The Russian army’s quality initially left much to be desired. The Russians were clearly not expecting a real war and, in my view, made the move into Ukraine expecting to force peace talks. Obviously, they underestimate the US’s appetite for war.
The Russians were well-aware that the US had been arming and training the Ukrainian military since 2014 and that the Ukrainian army was larger than their invasion force and so could not be defeated quickly and decisively. After the Russians initial advance they realised that they did not have sufficient forces even to hold Kharkiv and Kherson, so retreated. That was not the behaviour of an army intent on occupying all of Ukraine.
In the months before the war Putin tried to find a diplomatic solution, contacting Joe Biden and NATO chief Stoltenberg and proposing a solution based on Ukraine staying out of NATO, no offensive weapons stationed near Russia’s borders, and that NATO troops and equipment moved into eastern Europe since 1997 would be removed. The United States refused to negotiate.
Putin arranged for negotiations in Belarus just four days after the invasion. All the evidence indicates that the Russia was negotiating seriously and was only interested in keeping Crimea, and possibly the Donbass. The negotiations were making progress, and Putin agreed to remove Russian troops from around Kiev, which he did on 29 March 2022. The negotiations ended when the Ukrainians, under orders from Britain and the United States, walked away.
The Russian army is even now not big enough to take Ukraine, still less NATO members the Baltic states, Poland, and Romania. Nobody called Putin an imperialist between him taking power in 2000 and the Ukraine crisis in 2014, when he suddenly became an evil aggressor. He had even been invited to the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, where he was enraged by announcement that Ukraine and Georgia would soon become members. Washington ignored him as they thought Russia was too weak to do anything about it, as in previous NATO expansions in 1999 and 2004.
If, as is evident, NATO thought Russia militarily and economically weak, what was the point of the NATO expansions? Moscow saw them as aggressive, hostile moves against Russia. Michael McFaul, an avidly pro-Ukraine and anti-Putin former US ambassador to Moscow has said that Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 was an impromptu defensive move in response to the CIA-engineered coup that overthrew Ukraine’s pro-Russian leader; a desperate last resort partly carried out as a warning.
Russia had always said that Ukrainian membership of NATO was unacceptable, like Soviet missiles in Cuba, socialist governments in Granada or Nicaragua were unacceptable to the US, which would never have tolerated Mexico or Canada joining the Warsaw Pact or a Chinese -led alliance. That is the reality of great power politics. The US ignored this because it wanted a Russo-Ukrainian war, to weaken Russia.
William Burns, now the CIA’s boss but US ambassador to Moscow at the time of the NATO summit in Bucharest, wrote that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” A NATO move into Ukraine, he said, “would be seen … as throwing down the strategic gauntlet. Today’s Russia will respond”. He was ignored.
Putin warned in December 2021 that “what they are doing, or trying or planning to do in Ukraine, is not happening thousands of kilometres away from our national border. It is on the doorstep of our house. They must understand that we simply have nowhere further to retreat to. Do they really think we do not see these threats? Or do they think that we will just stand idly watching threats to Russia emerge?” He was ignored. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made the key point at a press conference in January 2022: “The key to everything is the guarantee that NATO will not expand eastward.”
Russia was not only ignored but also given further reason to fear NATO expansion when, after 2014 NATO began training the Ukrainian military. Even Trump gave Ukraine “defensive weapons”, which largely explains why it did so well in the first year of the war. Strangely, Zelensky, who had not previously shown much enthusiasm for bringing Ukraine into NATO, and who was elected in March 2019 to seek a settlement with Russia, suddenly adopted a hardline approach toward Moscow. Some say that is why he became so rich, reputedly a billionaire. Biden, heavily invested in Ukraine, was vehemently anti-Russian and intent on meeting what he called “Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations” – in reality US Globalist’s aspirations.
In November 2021 Antony Blinken signed the “US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership”, underlining the commitment to Ukraine’s “full integration into European and Euro-Atlantic institutions”, bringing Ukraine ever closer to becoming a NATO member. No responsible person could have had any doubts that Moscow would see this an intolerable existential threat. Even arch-Globalists Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy opposed NATO membership for Ukraine, with Merkel later saying that “I was very sure … that Putin is not going to just let that happen. From his perspective, that would be a declaration of war."
Many US policymakers agreed, including establishment figures like George Kennan, Clinton’s Secretary of Defence, William Perry, and his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Shalikashvili, as well as Nitze, Robert Gates and Robert McNamara. These proponents of the US’s Monroe Doctrine, which stipulates that no great power is allowed to form an alliance with a country in the Western Hemisphere or locate its military forces there, understood and sympathised with Putin’s position.
The rest of the US Establishment ignored them, but Zelensky evidently agreed. During the Istanbul negotiations immediately after the invasion began, he accepted Russia’s demand for “permanent neutrality”. However, puppet-brained Boris Johnson was despatched to tell Zelensky that ‘we are not ready for peace’. Hundreds of thousands of dead Ukrainians later, Russia’s main demand for peace is that Kiev “officially” states “that it abandons its plans to join NATO.”
That is the reality. Ukraine has lost the war, and without US support has no cards to play – despite what the pathetic, posturing European leaders say, and Zelensky knows it.
Ukraine desperately needs peace, and to accept that Crimea and most of Donbass will revert to Russia, which is what most of the people there want. The world needs peace, and trade with both what is left of Ukraine and with Russia. Britain has thrown billions away on Ukraine, all for nothing. Russia is no threat to us – unless our dangerously deluded leaders make him one.
For all our sakes, let’s hope Trump gets the peace deal he wants and restores normal relations with Putin.
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