For the first months of the Russian invasion and war in Ukraine, Western politicians, propagandists, and government apparatchiks never, ever, said "Russia's invasion" or "Russia's war" without preceding those words with the adjective "brutal." As if other wars are NOT brutal. Just THIS one. A war BY RUSSIA is special, because it's a brutal war, unlike the NICE wars waged by the U.S. and its European lackeys, most of which were ruthless colonizing empires. [1]
But lately there's been an organized, and perhaps orchestrated, change in the propaganda jargon. Instead of "Russia's brutal war," now it's Russia's unprovoked war." (CNN's hyper-Zionist hack Wolf Blitzer gilded the lily, calling the war "totally unprovoked." Methinks thou doth protest too much, Bearded One!)
The timing is rather odd. The time to screech "unprovoked" would have been when the war was launched, back in February, not seven months later, starting in September!
Why the inappropriate timing? Why now?
Perhaps because more and more people are hearing dissidents describe how indeed there was provocation. In fact, a lot of it.
I DIDN'T SAY JUSTIFICATION. Hold your horses! Provocation doesn't automatically justify a particular response or reaction. In this case I don't think it did. Indeed, Putin's decision to invade is the most disastrous decision he's ever made. It is causing the U.S. empire to wreck Russia's economy. It is costing the lives of Russians. The U.S. and its lackeys have stolen roughly a trillion dollars of Russia's money, which it will certainly hand over to its Ukrainian client regime to rebuild and as "reparations." Russia's strategic position is weakened, and its access to the Black Sea is in peril, as Kyiv regime president Zelensky has announced his intention to seize Crimea. And of course many Ukrainians have suffered, and died. (But this war has been great for at least one Ukrainian, namely Volodymyr Zelensky. He's built himself up into a Hero Of Western Democracy (so-called).
Before now, Putin played a weak hand deftly. But emotion apparently overcame better judgment.
Maybe he didn't realize how weak his army actually was. On paper it may look strong, but in reality it is poorly trained, badly organized, and terribly led. And now Putin is conscripting 300,000 mostly untrained men to throw into the meatgrinder, to be senselessly killed and maimed. Which will achieve nothing militarily.
And make no mistake: This is a proxy war by the U.S. against Russia, using Ukraine to do the dirty work. The U.S. has been preparing for this war since the violent U.S. coup in 2014 that overthrew the elected Ukrainian government and replaced it with one that had (and has) neo-Nazis at its core. (Dishonestly, Western propagandists dismiss that fact as Russian propaganda.) For example, U.S. Special Operations Forces have been secretly training Ukrainian troops since 2014. [2]
But what were the provocations? you might ask. A fair question, and one that would require another essay to do justice to. So let me touch on some of the high points.
Overthrowing the Ukrainian government and installing an anti-Russian regime in its place, a regime SO anti-Russian that it subjected Russian-speaking Ukrainians to violence and persecution, resulting in the secession of two eastern districts. The new U.S.-created regime then proceeded to wage war on those districts, with an emphasis on bombing apartment buildings. This terrorist war was waged with full U.S. backing, and people like Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain went to Ukraine to exhort Kyiv regime troops to attack and crush the secessionists.
Russia has been very restrained until this year. While providing military support for the seceded Republics, it did not recognize their independence until this year, after the invasion. Meanwhile a truce agreement and possible path for reintegration of the Republics into the rest of Ukraine, the Minsk accords of 2015, was ignored from the outset by the U.S. client regime, even though it had agreed to them.
Now a thought experiment. Say China arranged a coup in Canada, and installed an anti-U.S. regime there. Do you think the U.S. would wait eight years to invade? It would invade in a fucking WEEK!
So really, by U.S. standards, Russia has been extraordinarily restrained. Contrary to Western propaganda that portrays Russia as relentlessly expansive. But Putin should have resisted U.S. provocation. The truth is, Ukraine is a divided nation, and the just and natural solution IS (or was) for the east to become separate. But I surmise that many easterners who were formerly pro-Russian have changed their attitude, now that Russia has brought death and destruction upon them with its very ill-advised war.
The U.S. creation of a hostile state right on Russia's border was extremely provocative. Worse, there is the threat to bring that hostile state into NATO. NATO was created by the U.S. as an anti-USSR military alliance. When cracks started appearing in the Soviet empire, the U.S. made a deal with the last Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev would allow East Germany to cease to exist and be absorbed into West Germany, on the promise that NATO would not expand "one inch to the east." The U.S. didn't keep its word, and never intended to. When Gorbachev complained, he was told with a sneer that he should have gotten it in writing. Meanwhile, in public, U.S. imperialist elites and their European lackeys lied through their teeth and denied any such promise had ever been made. (Gorbachev recently died, and Western media saluted him as a man of peace, a great statesman. The man they stabbed in the back. There are truly no limits to the cynicism of the Western ruling class.)
More provocations, indeed hostile acts: There is the relentless NATO expansion right up to Russia's borders, now with 30 plus members, including the 3 Baltic states on Russia's border, and soon Finland too, also on the border. There is the U.S. basing offensive weapons closer and closer to Russia. There is the U.S. withdrawing from all the arms control treaties with Russia PRIOR to this invasion of Ukraine. And there is the takeover of Ukraine by the U.S. and the 8 year long preparation for war, which has now come to fruition. With the ultimate goal of overthrowing Vladimir Putin, as the then-head of the so-called National Endowment for Democracy, (created by the Reagan regime to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly, namely subvert and destabilize governments disliked by the U.S.), as Carl Gershman, threatened in a Washington Post op-ed in 2013. [3]
But the U.S. is thrilled that its Ukrainian proxies are winning. And it is willing to risk nuclear war, as it refuses to back down and call for a truce even after repeated threats by Putin to use tactical nuclear weapons. (He never says that explicitly, but it is clearly understood that is what he means.) The U.S. could force its Ukrainian client regime to negotiate any time simply by not sending any more advanced weaponry and ordnance, especially the HIMARS multiple rocket system. [M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System.]
The reckless bastards did this before, more than once, but especially during the "Cuban Missile Crisis," when the U.S. decided to dictate to Cuba what weapons it was allowed to base on its own soil, and was willing to start a nuclear war to get its way. Now U.S. propagandists have the nerve to invoke that deadly crisis as if the U.S. wasn't the guilty party!
Some people are just too dangerous to be allowed to be in power.
Vladimir Putin: Not as crafty as Western propagandists habitually portrayed him, before now.
1] U.S. propagandists and I assume European ones too, never referred to the Vietnam War as "brutal." Consider the following: the U.S. dropped six MILLION tons of bombs on Vietnam, THREE TIMES the tonnage it dropped in World War II, according to U.S. Air Force statistics. It murdered between 3,000,000 and 4,000,000 Vietnamese- there will never be a precise count. For good measure, the U.S. slaughtered 500,000 Cambodians, and half a million Laotians. Vietnam was poisoned with dioxins from defoliants like Agent Orange, as the U.S. attempted to erase the forests of Vietnam, resulting in devastating birth defects to this day, cancers, and other diseases. The U.S. military routinely massacred defenseless Vietnamese peasants. And committed horrible atrocities, as we learned from veterans of that war, such as tying Vietnamese women to the ground and setting off flares in their vaginas.
Committing atrocities is a habit the U.S. military just can't break itself of, from its genocidal wars against the Native Americans to the last act it did when leaving Afghanistan, assassinating an aid worker who worked for a foreign NGO and 7 children in his driveway in Kabul, by drone, and then lying about it until even the New York Times called them on it.
So yes, the Russian army is committing atrocities in Ukraine. And the fact that the U.S. has committed many more in recent decades can in no way justify those Russian atrocities. This is merely to expose the grotesque hyper-hypocrisy of the U.S. and its lackeys. But the U.S. bourgeoisie have cooked up a move to brush aside exposures of their hypocrisy. It's a single word: "whataboutism." Cute, huh? So easy, no need to assemble facts, or arguments, or engage in debate, much less justify their own crimes or why they are RIGHTEOUS when they hypocritically attack their enemies for doing what they themselves do relentlessly and refuse to acknowledge. Just say "whataboutism" and brush the ugly truth aside. Way to go, U.S. power elites!
2] The New York Times let the cat out of the bag, perhaps inadvertently: Quote: "The decision by Ukraine to tout its counteroffensive in the south before striking in the northeast is a standard technique for misdirection used by the American Special Operation troops, who have been training the Ukrainians since the annexation of Crimea in 2014." {Or to put it another way, since the U.S. coup of 2014. And "annexation" is a distortion of reality, as are the even more overheated propaganda terms "seizure" and "Russia's invasion of Crimea," which have also been used in Western propaganda. See my explanation below.]
The Times continued:
"'These guys have been trained for eight years by Special Ops,' said [U.S. imperialist apparatchik] Evelyn Farkas, the top Pentagon official for Ukraine and Russia in the Obama administration. 'They've been taught irregular warfare. They've been taught by our intelligence operators [i.e. CIA etc.] about deception and psychological operations." [And what a victory for Feminism and Women's Rights that a female got to occupy that post! See what a difference having women in power makes?]
And those "psychological operations" have been visibly aimed at Western publics using a very cooperative Western media. Every single day. Zelensky's pronouncements are treated as if he's president of the U.S., UK, Germany, etc.
The article also mentions that the Russian military's secure communications don't work. That is, the NSA is intercepting, decrypting, and passing on to the Ukrainians all the Russians military messages- a huge advantage for the Ukrainians. The U.S. has also enabled the Ukrainians to assassinate Russian generals by locating them in real time.
"Ukrainian Officials Drew On U.S. Intelligence to Plan Counteroffensive," New York Times, Sunday, September 11, 2022, page 10, paragraphs 11 and 12.
