By Ángel Guerra Cabrera on February 23, 2022
This article, written just prior to the Russian military intervention into Ukraine, provides some important background of recent history leading up to the crisis – Editorial
Looking at it in strict terms, one could say that Russia’s recognition of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics violates international law; as it was with the reincorporation of Crimea into the Slavic country in 2014 that I wrote about. But this serious situation today has come about because the other side, led by the United States has not tired of incurring what it now reproaches Moscow for, in Ukraine itself.
This is the case of the 2014 coup d’état in Kiev, which has been proven to have been directed, organized and financed by the US, which established there a vassal gangster state full of weapons and rampaging gangs, often composed of Hitler admirers. Were not NATO’s operations in the former Yugoslavia, the merciless bombing of Serbia and the blatant proclamation of the independence of Kosovo, then an autonomous republic of the Balkan country, also a flagrant violation of international law? It would be impossible to enumerate in this space the violations perpetrated by the US of international law, against the sovereignty and independence of peoples. To start with it would take the meticulous and dedicated Argentine researcher Gregorio Selser’s four volumes just to compile chronologically their interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The US, the United Kingdom and the European Union (EU) are playing with fire in Ukraine and by assuming a provocative, arrogant and adventurous attitude towards an offended and threatened Russia, they could push the world into a conflict with an unknown conclusion. It is hard to believe, but the growing unpopularity of U.S. President Joseph Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is acting as a major driver and catalyst for this conflict. Both seek to boost their popularity by escalating the hair-raising tension with Moscow and, blinded by banality, have underestimated President Vladimir Putin and the imperative need to pay attention to the security guarantees for Russia that he and the Kremlin’s diplomacy have been insistently demanding from the US-NATO for years, but in particular since November 2021. Biden and Johnson, followed by the EU’s servile and mediocre sidekicks, are opportunistically resorting in Ukraine to the old ploy of escaping serious domestic problems by exacerbating a foreign policy conflict to the maximum.
Biden’s leadership crisis is such that the Democratic defeat in the November elections and the return of Trumpism to the White House in the 2024 presidential elections, with or without Trump on the ballot, are already taken for granted. Johnson was living a terminal crisis due to the scandals over the parties at his official residence during the coronavirus quarantine and the remodeling of his luxurious apartment with Conservative Party funds until he saw in Ukraine the way to get rid of the impeachment by his own followers. Saving Kiev from an alleged Russian threat and an imminent invasion announced three months ago for the next day is the mantra with which the inhabitant of the White House and that of 10 Downing Street try to divert attention from their internal political crisis. From almost nothing political to the appearance of leaders of the “West”, strong statesmen capable of uniting in the face of the Russian bear an EU and an EU that -except in the hegemonic media spaces- are in the lowest hours of their entire history in terms of leadership and hegemony.
There is a root cause behind this conflict and it is the policy of destabilization, balkanization and harassment pursued by Washington against Moscow since shortly after the collapse of the USSR. We have already explained in this space the advance of NATO towards the East back in 2012 in total opposition to the promise made by word of mouth by then US Secretary of State James Baker and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to Mikhail Gorbachev, prior to the reunification of Germany and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from the German Democratic Republic in 1989. Only those who promised to reform the USSR, but instead destroyed it, could be so astonishingly naïve as not to demand the signing of a treaty embodying the commitment of Washington and Berlin in such an important matter. They lied to Russia and since then they have added to the warmongering Atlantic alliance the great majority of the former socialist countries of Europe and several former Soviet republics, such as Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia to expand its encirclement of Russia. Thus, the distance and flight time of US nuclear missiles to their eventual targets in Russia have been successively shortened to a point already intolerable for Moscow. It is imperative to negotiate seriously with Russia, not to apply electoral sanctions that continue to increase tension.
Source: La Pupila Insomne translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English