EYE ON UKRAINE:
ALTERNATIVE VIEWS ON THE WAR
ALTERNATIVE VIEWS ON THE PURPOSE OF THE WAR:
"The purpose of this operation is to protect people who for eight years now
have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime,.........
To this end, we will seek to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine,
as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians,
including against citizens of the Russian Federation."
Vladimir Putin
“This is not a war with Ukraine.
This is a confrontation with globalization…on all levels,
including geopolitical and ideological..... When we win, everybody benefits from it,....
.....Russia has set a path to building its world, its civilization. And now the first step has been done. But sovereign in the face of globalism can only be a large space, a continent-state, a civilization-state. No country can withstand long a complete disconnect......
......Russia is out to defend Tradition values against the modern world. It's just that "revert against the modern world". Didn't you learn? And Europe must break up with the West, and the United States must also follow those who reject globalism. Then everyone will understand the meaning of the modern war in Ukraine.
A lot of people in Ukraine understood this.
But the terrible liberal-nazist rabid propaganda
has left nothing to do in the minds of the Ukrainians.
They will return to themselves and fight together with us
for the kingdom of light,
for tradition
and a true European Christian identity. ”
Aleksandr Dugin
Far-Right Russian Philosopher
ALTERNATIVE VIEWS ON THE ROOTS AND CAUSE OF THE WAR:
"I think all the trouble in this case really started in April 2008, at the NATO Summit in Bucharest, where afterward Nato issued a statement that said Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO. The Russians made it unequivocally clear at the time that they viewed this as an existential threat, and they drew a line in the sand. Nevertheless, what has happened with the passage of time is that we have moved forward to include Ukraine in the West to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border... NATO expansion is the heart of the strategy, but it includes E.U. expansion as well, and it includes turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy, and, from a Russian perspective, this is an existential threat."
John J. Mearsheimer
American political scientist
ALTERNATIVE VIEWS ON ASSIGNING BLAME FOR THE WAR:
"The war in Ukraine is the most dangerous international conflict since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Understanding its root causes is essential if we are to prevent it from getting worse and, instead, to find a way to bring it to a close.With Ukraine, it’s very important to understand that, up until 2014, we did not envision NATO expansion and E.U. expansion as a policy that was aimed at containing Russia. Nobody seriously thought that Russia was a threat before February 22, 2014.
We invented this story that Russia was bent on aggression in Eastern Europe.... This is a story that we invented so that we could blame him (Vladimir Putin). My argument is that the West, especially the United States, is principally responsible for this disaster. ......My argument is that... {Vladimir Putin]... not going to re-create the Soviet Union or try to build a greater Russia, that he’s not interested in conquering and integrating Ukraine into Russia......
One need only consider the Soviet and U.S. experiences in Afghanistan, the U.S. experiences in Vietnam and Iraq, and the Russian experience in Chechnya to be reminded that military occupations usually end badly. Putin surely understands that trying to subdue Ukraine would be like swallowing a porcupine. His response to events there has been defensive, not offensive.
....... The strategically wise strategy for Ukraine is to break off its close relations with the West, especially with the United States, and try to accommodate the Russians. .........Putin’s actions should be easy to comprehend. A huge expanse of open land that Napoleonic France, imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany all crossed to strike at Russia itself, Ukraine serves as a buffer state of enormous strategic importance to Russia. No Russian leader would tolerate a military alliance that was Moscow’s mortal enemy until recently moving into Ukraine. Nor would any Russian leader stand idly by while the West helped install a government there that was determined to integrate Ukraine into the West.
In essence, the two sides have been operating with different playbooks: Putin and his compatriots have been thinking and acting according to realist dictates, whereas their Western counterparts have been adhering to liberal ideas about international politics. The result is that the United States and its allies unknowingly provoked a major crisis over Ukraine.
....most Western officials have portrayed Putin as the real culprit in the Ukraine predicament. In March, according to The New York Times, German Chancellor Angela Merkel implied that Putin was irrational, telling Obama that he was “in another world.” Although Putin no doubt has autocratic tendencies, no evidence supports the charge that he is mentally unbalanced. On the contrary: he is a first-class strategist who should be feared and respected by anyone challenging him on foreign policy.
Other analysts allege, more plausibly, that Putin regrets the demise of the Soviet Union and is determined to reverse it by expanding Russia’s borders. According to this interpretation, Putin, having taken Crimea, is now testing the waters to see if the time is right to conquer Ukraine, or at least its eastern part, and he will eventually behave aggressively toward other countries in Russia’s neighborhood. For some in this camp, Putin represents a modern-day Adolf Hitler, and striking any kind of deal with him would repeat the mistake of Munich. ........
....The United States and its allies should abandon their plan to westernize Ukraine and instead aim to make it a neutral buffer between NATO and Russia, akin to Austria’s position during the Cold War. Western leaders should acknowledge that Ukraine matters so much to Putin that they cannot support an anti-Russian regime there. .....
The United States and its European allies now face a choice on Ukraine. They can continue their current policy, which will exacerbate hostilities with Russia and devastate Ukraine in the process—a scenario in which everyone would come out a loser. Or they can switch gears and work to create a prosperous but neutral Ukraine, one that does not threaten Russia and allows the West to repair its relations with Moscow. With that approach, all sides would win.
John J. Mearsheimer
American political scientist
"Vladimir Putin has shown tremendous restraint while watching NATO’s long march eastward towards his borders. The U.S. government has dismissed his concerns as those of the leader of a “secondary power.” His last diplomatic effort was made in late 2021, asking for what any objective observer would describe as very reasonable assurances..."
Tom Mullen
published on The Ron Paul Institute Website
March 15, 2022
"The U.S., by contrast, wants a long, proxy war of attrition, openly and covertly supplying Ukrainian forces – indifferent as to whether they are “nice ones” or neo-Nazis – to bog Russia down in years of difficult guerrilla warfare and counter-insurgency. The bloodshed will feed the hostility (and unthinking racism) of Western publics towards Russia and Russians, providing the pretext for Washington to sustain the West’s parallel economic war on Russia.
What, really, is the point of demanding Westerners denounce Putin unequivocally when the entire Western media and political class is directing our gaze exclusively at Russia’s crimes precisely so Westerners don’t look at equivalent Western crimes? The truth is that, in power politics, unequivocal denunciations are for politicians and diplomats – and virtue-signalers. Condemnations may be emotionally satisfying, but the rest of us can put our energies to far better use.
For most of us, the better course would be to blow away the immediate fog of war and instead analyze our – meaning the West’s – role in the unfolding events. Even a cursory glance shows that the West’s hands are not clean in Ukraine. Not at all. The meddling – and hypocrisy – have occurred in two stages, first from politicians and then from the media....
.....It was the choices made by Western politicians that provoked the invasion. Russian troops are in Ukraine not because Putin is “Hitler,” “mad,” or a “megalomaniac” – ...... The Putin as “madman” or “Hitler” script deflects attention away from the very obvious fact that Western leaders willfully played fast and loose with the security of Ukraine and the safety of its population.....
Every death in the current war – Ukrainian and Russian – could almost certainly have been averted had the U.S. and its NATO allies not led Ukraine up the garden path. Had Ukrainians not believed that with enough pressure they could force NATO’s hand in their favor, they would have had to accommodate Russian concerns well before any invasion, such as by committing to neutrality......the blood of the victims of this war is most certainly on the West’s hands, just as it is in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Gaza, Yemen and elsewhere."
Jonathan Cook
Independent Journalist
Writing in Consortium News
In order to understand what’s going on in Ukraine from Vladimir Putin’s point of view, you have to go back to 1990 when the Soviet Union was collapsing. Talks were proceeding about the pending unification of Germany, which the Soviets could have vetoed. There is no question that the U.S. and NATO — President George Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker — made a deal in early February 1990 with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. According to documents declassified in 2017, the deal essentially was that the Soviets would allow German unification with the written “ironclad guarantees”, that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward”,....
....to the great humiliation of Boris Yeltsin and the Russian people, (the US) would not allow Russia to join NATO, but it started a process which would lead to 14 other former Warsaw Pact members joining what was an anti-Soviet military alliance. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, joined first and were eventually followed by Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia. Russian journalists felt that America had taken advantage of a weakened Russia to impose a new world order that did not include them or their historical need for a buffer zone.
......The shame that NATO’s expansion bred in Russia was critical in fueling Putin’s 2000 rise to power after Boris Yeltsin moved on. Russia’s crumbling economy, with millions dying from malnutrition, also helped doom the decade of Glasnost, democracy, and capitalism from taking root. The Russians were desperate, and Putin exploited their desperation by promising a return to greatness. He also turned away from the hard-fought reforms of democracy and free speech. which didn’t seem to be making life better for the Russian people. ......utin thinks that America is lying and has broken promises over the last 30 years. Vladimir Putin is no saint. He is ruthless and brutish, intolerant of free speech, democratic elections or an unbiased judicial system. Clearly an autocratic leader.........But most rational people would say Russia has somewhat of a point. Would the US permit Russia to send military assets to Cuba or Venezuela? Of course not. Nor should we.
Blake Fleetwood
Journalist
Formerly with The New York Times
ALTERNATIVE VIEWS FROM THE POLITICAL LEFT:
The Hypocrisy of the United States?
"If we demand justice for Ukrainians, as we should, we must also demand justice for the one million people killed — 400,000 of whom were noncombatants — by our invasions, occupations and aerial assaults in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan. We must demand justice for those who were wounded, became sick or died because we destroyed hospitals and infrastructure. We must demand justice for the thousands of soldiers and marines who were killed, and many more who were wounded and are living with lifelong disabilities, in wars launched and sustained on lies. We must demand justice for the 38 million people who have been displaced or become refugees in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya, and Syria, ......If Ukrainians are heroic resistance fighters, what about Iraqis and Afghans, who fought as valiantly and as doggedly against a foreign power that was every bit as savage as Russia? Why weren’t they lionized? Why weren’t sanctions imposed on the United States? Why weren’t those who defended their countries from foreign invasion in the Middle East, including Palestinians under Israeli occupation, also provided with thousands of anti-tank weapons, anti-armor weapons, anti-aircraft weapons, helicopters, Switchblade or “Kamikaze” drones, hundreds of Stinger anti-aircraft systems, Javelin anti-tank missiles, machine guns and millions of rounds of ammunition? Why didn’t Congress rush through a $13.6 billion package to provide military and humanitarian assistance, on top of the $1.2 billion already provided to the Ukrainian military, for them?...."
Chris Hedges
Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, best-selling author & activist
March 20, 2022
"Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former US presidential national security advisor, said not long before he died that Ukraine should have a policy of “non-involvement with NATO”—as Finland practices and did during all the years of the Cold War. Finland kept its geopolitical distance from the West while, at the same time, forging a strong democracy and close Western economic links.....
....... How can the US dare to preach lawful international practice when it itself made an unprovoked invasion and occupation of Iraq, fought in Afghanistan for two decades, makes hundreds of lethal drone strikes across the Islamic world, made an illegal bombing campaign in Serbia, has a history that ended not long ago of supporting Third World dictators and withdraws from the jurisdiction of the World Court when it loses a case brought by Nicaragua over the mining of its harbour? Britain has fought more foreign wars than any other nation. By the standards of the UN Charter most were illegal."
Jonathan Power
Foreign Affairs Columnist
New York Times
"What Russia is doing militarily in Ukraine, at least up to now, was more than matched by our own savagery in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Vietnam. This is an inconvenient fact the press, awash in moral posturing, will not address.
No one has mastered the art of technowar and wholesale slaughter like the US military. When atrocities leak out, such as the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians or the prisoners in Abu Ghraib, the press does its duty by branding them aberrations. The truth is that these killings and abuse are deliberate. They are orchestrated at the senior levels of the military. Infantry units, assisted by long ranger artillery, fighter jets, heavy bombers, missiles, drones, and helicopters level vast swaths of “enemy” territory killing most of the inhabitants. The US military during the invasion of Iraq from Kuwait created a six-mile-wide free-fire zone that killed hundreds if not thousands of Iraqis. The indiscriminate killing ignited the Iraqi insurgency...........
If Russia should be crippled with sanctions for invading Ukraine, which I believe it should, the United States should have been crippled with sanctions for invading Iraq, a war launched on the basis of lies and fabricated evidence..... Imagine if America’s largest banks, J.P Morgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America and Wells Fargo were cut off from the international banking system. Imagine if our oligarchs, Jeff Bezos, Jamie Diamond, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk, as venal as Russian oligarchs, had their assets frozen and estates and luxury yachts seized. (Bezos’ yacht is the largest in the world, cost an estimated $500 million and is about 57 feet longer than a football field.) Imagine if leading political figures, such as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and US “oligarchs” were blocked from traveling under visa restrictions. Imagine if the world’s biggest shipping lines suspended shipments to and from the United States. Imagine if US international media news outlets were forced off the air. Imagine if we were blocked from purchasing spare parts for our commercial airlines and our airliners were banned from European air space. Imagine if our athletes were barred from hosting or participating in international sporting events. Imagine if our symphony conductors and opera stars were forbidden from performing unless they denounced the Iraq war and, in a kind of perverted loyalty oath, condemned George W. Bush.....The rank hypocrisy is stunning. "
Chris Hedges
Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, best-selling author & activist
March 7, 2022
ALTERNATIVE VIEWS FROM THE POLICTICAL RIGHT:
Should the United States Leave NATO?
NATO should have disbanded after the Cold War, just as the Warsaw Pact did. Instead of disbanding, NATO proceeded to gobble up Eastern European countries that were formerly a part of the Warsaw Pact. The "regime change" and absorption of Ukraine into NATO would put them right on Russia's border!.....NATO is not a friend of peace. We don't need it. Just as the British decided to leave the EU, so should the U.S. leave NATO.
Ron Paul
Republican Senator
2016
Support for Putin and Russia:
"Why is it disloyal to side with Russia but loyal to side with Ukraine?......
They now dutifully hate Vladimir Putin. Maybe you're one of them. Hating Putin has become the central purpose of America's foreign policy. It's the main thing that we talk about. Entire cable channels are now devoted to it.
Very soon, that hatred of Vladimir Putin could bring the United States into a conflict in Eastern Europe. Before that happens, it might be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious:
What is this really about?
Why do I hate Putin so much? ....
...The point here is to defend democracy, not that Ukraine is a democracy. It is not a democracy. Ukraine's president has arrested his main political opponent. He has shut down newspapers and television stations that have dared to criticize him.
So in American terms, you would call Ukraine a tyranny......
Tucker Carlson,
February 22, 2022
Fox News Commentator
Bio-Labs, Global Cabal, Deep State, Child Sex Trafficking ... within Ukraine ?
There have been several efforts to re-frame the narrative of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Many conservative commentators openly criticized the nation of Ukraine and offered implicit or tacit support for the Russian cause in the days and weeks leading up to the invasion of Ukraine.
Some have spread the narrative that the war is a covert operation to attack U.S. biolabs located in Ukraine.
Q-Anon is spreading a current round of conspiracies claiming that Putin is waging a war on the globalist cabal of elites who are the forces of darkness and who are trafficking children around the world for sex.
Many on the far-right in the United States (and in other countries) justify the invasion of Ukraine not as an attack on a sovereign nation by an authoritarian leader, but as part of an operation to root out the “deep state" and the "global cabal" once and for all.
Putin and The GOP ?
For a number of years, certain conservative politicians in the United States have moved in a pro-Putin direction, seeking to weaken NATO and the United Nations while building stronger U.S./Russian ties. Some believe that these efforts helped embolden Vladimir Putin to take stronger and bolder actions against his perceived enemies throughout the globe. Dana Rohrbacher, a former Republican congressmen from California, was viewed as one of the most pro-Putin members of Congress for many years.
In Rohrabacher’s telling, Americans have gratuitously antagonized Russia instead of seeking common ground against greater threats from China and Islamic terrorism. That worldview has made him a fixture in Russian state media.
"I get pushback whenever I’m asking for an honest assessment of a situation in which Russia is being vilified,........I don’t know where this is all coming from but there’s clearly a herculean effort to push us back into a cold war.”
But perhaps, the War On Ukraine is causing some within the GOP to return to the Reagan Era position of skepticism toward Russia.
Mike Pence, the vice president under former US President Donald Trump, condemned "apologists" in his own Republican party who have used positive language to describe Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"There is no room in this party for apologists for Putin. There is only room for champions of freedom....... Putin only understands strength. As members of the party that won the Cold War, we must send a deafening message: Putin must stop or Putin must pay,"
ALTERNATIVE VIEWS ON UKRAINE BEING CONTROLLED BY NAZIS:
De-nazification of Ukraine?
Putin supporters frequently paint Ukraine's elected leaders as "Nazis and fascists oppressing the local ethnic Russian population"
Russian President Vladimir Putin invoked World War II to justify Russia's invasion of Ukraine, saying in televised remarks last week that his offensive aimed to "denazify" the country — whose democratically elected president is Jewish, and lost relatives in the Holocaust. Ultra-nationalist movements within Ukraine, such as the Azov Battalion, which some purport to be Nazis , operate outside of the mainstream in Ukraine and are estimated to make up about 2% of Ukraine's population.
Regarding the 2014 Russian Invasion of Crimea as a response to Nazism in Ukraine:
"Though most of the Maidan protesters in 2013-14 appeared motivated by anger over political corruption and by a desire to join the European Union, neo-Nazis made up a significant number and surged to the front during the seizure of government buildings and the climatic clashes with police. In the days after the Feb. 22 coup, as the neo-Nazi militias effectively controlled the government, European and U.S. diplomats scrambled to help the shaken parliament put together the semblance of a respectable regime, although at least four ministries, including national security, were awarded to the right-wing extremists in recognition of their crucial role in ousting President Yanukovych.
As extraordinary as it was for a modern European state to hand ministries over to neo-Nazis, virtually the entire U.S. news media cooperated in playing down the neo-Nazi role.....
......In the case of Ukraine, a neo-Nazi-led putsch representing the interests of the western part of the country overthrew the democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who came from the eastern region. Then, under the watchful eye of the neo-Nazi storm troopers in Kiev, a rump parliament voted unanimously or near unanimously to enact a series of draconian laws offensive to the ethnic Russian areas in the east and south.
Having fled Kiev for his life, Yanukovych asked Russia for help, which led to Putin’s request to the Russian parliament for the authority to deploy troops inside Ukraine, essentially taking control of Crimea in the south, an area that has been part of Russia for centuries.
Though the Russian case for intervention in both Georgia and Ukraine is much stronger than the excuses often used by the United States to intervene in other countries...."
Robert Parry
Founder and Editor
Consortium News
A Response From Global Scholars of The Holocaust and Nazism:
"The Russian attack came in the wake of accusations by the Russian president Vladimir Putin of crimes against humanity and genocide, allegedly committed by the Ukrainian government in the Donbas. Russian propaganda regularly presents the elected leaders of Ukraine as Nazis and fascists oppressing the local ethnic Russian population, which it claims needs to be liberated. President Putin stated that one of the goals of his “special military operation” against Ukraine is the “denazification” of the country.
We are scholars of genocide, the Holocaust, and World War II. We spend our careers studying fascism and Nazism, and commemorating their victims. Many of us are actively engaged in combating contemporary heirs to these evil regimes and those who attempt to deny or cast a veil over their crimes.
We strongly reject the Russian government’s cynical abuse of the term genocide, the memory of World War II and the Holocaust, and the equation of the Ukrainian state with the Nazi regime to justify its unprovoked aggression. This rhetoric is factually wrong, morally repugnant and deeply offensive to the memory of millions of victims of Nazism and those who courageously fought against it, including Russian and Ukrainian soldiers of the Red Army.
Read more on the scholarly response in the Jewish Journal