The Ukraine War Was Provoked
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Bill Totten
May 31, 2023, 9:00:11 AM5/31/23
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The Ukraine War Was Provoked
The Biden administration's insistence on Nato enlargement has made
Ukraine a victim of misconceived and unachievable US military
aspirations.
by Jeffrey D Sachs
https://consortiumnews.com (May 24 2023)
https://www.zerohedge.com (May 25 2023)
https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/48990422142_e315b2ee03_k.jpg
Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, left, and Ukraine's President
Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev, October 31 2019. (Nato, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
George Orwell wrote in 1984 (1949):
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present
controls the past.
Governments work relentlessly to distort public perceptions of the
past. Regarding the Ukraine War, the Biden administration has
repeatedly and falsely claimed that the Ukraine War started with an
unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine on February 24 2022.
In fact, the war was provoked by the US in ways that leading US
diplomats anticipated for decades in the lead-up to the war, meaning
that the war could have been avoided and should now be stopped through
negotiations.
Recognizing that the war was provoked helps us to understand how to
stop it. It doesn't justify Russia's invasion. A far better approach
for Russia might have been to step up diplomacy with Europe and with
the non-Western world to explain and oppose US militarism and
unilateralism.
In fact, the relentless US push to expand Nato is widely opposed
throughout the world, so Russian diplomacy rather than war would
likely have been effective.
Two Main Provocations
The Biden team uses the word "unprovoked" incessantly, most recently
in Biden's major speech on the first-year anniversary of the war, in a
recent Nato statement, and in the most recent G7 statement.
Mainstream media friendly to Biden simply parrot the White House. The
New York Times is the lead culprit, describing the invasion as
"unprovoked" no fewer than 26 times, in five editorials, 14 opinion
columns by New York Times writers, and seven guest op-eds.
Related: https://consortiumnews.com/2023/01/08/caitlin-johnstone-unprovoked/
There were in fact two main US provocations.
The first was the US intention to expand Nato to Ukraine and Georgia
in order to surround Russia in the Black Sea region by Nato countries
(Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria Turkey, and Georgia, in counterclockwise
order).
The second was the US role in installing a Russophobic regime in
Ukraine through the violent overthrow of Ukraine's pro-Russian
president, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014. The shooting war in
Ukraine began with Yanukovych's overthrow nine years ago, not in
February 2022 as the US government, Nato, and the G7 leaders would
have us believe.
Biden and his foreign policy team refuse to discuss the roots of the
war. To recognize them would undermine the administration in three
ways.
https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/23006033603_0b151e45f2_k.jpg
December 07 2015: US Vice President Biden meets with Ukrainian
President Petro Poroshenko in Kiev. (US Embassy Kyiv, Flickr)
First, it would expose how the war could have been avoided, or stopped
early, sparing Ukraine its current devastation and the US more than
$100 billion in outlays to date.
Second, it would expose Biden's personal role in the war as a
participant in the overthrow of Yanukovych, and before that as a
staunch backer of the military-industrial complex and very early
advocate of Nato enlargement.
Third, it would push Biden to the negotiating table, undermining the
administration's continued push for Nato expansion.
Check the Archives
https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Screen-Shot-2022-06-28-at-3.12.08-PM.png
George Kennan in 1966. (Warren Leffler, Library of Congress)
The archives show irrefutably that the US and German governments
repeatedly promised Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that Nato would
not move "one inch eastward" when the Soviet Union disbanded the
Warsaw Pact military alliance.
Nonetheless, US planning for Nato expansion began early in the 1990s,
well before Vladimir Putin was Russia's president. In 1997, national
security expert Zbigniew Brzezinski spelled out the Nato expansion
timeline with remarkable precision.
US diplomats and Ukraine's own leaders knew well that Nato enlargement
could lead to war. The US scholar-statesman George Kennan called Nato
enlargement a "fateful error", writing in The New York Times that,
Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic,
anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have
an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore
the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel
Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.
President Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense William Perry considered
resigning in protest against Nato enlargement. In reminiscing about
this crucial moment in the mid-1990s, Perry said the following in
2016:
Our first action that really set us off in a bad direction was when
Nato started to expand, bringing in eastern European nations, some of
them bordering Russia. At that time, we were working closely with
Russia and they were beginning to get used to the idea that Nato could
be a friend rather than an enemy ... but they were very uncomfortable
about having Nato right up on their border and they made a strong
appeal for us not to go ahead with that.
In 1998, William Burns, then the US ambassador to Russia and now the
CIA director, sent a cable to Washington warning at length of the
grave risks of Nato enlargement:
Ukraine and Georgia's Nato aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in
Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for
stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement,
and efforts to undermine Russia's influence in the region, but it also
fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would
seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that
Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine
over Nato membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community
against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or
at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide
whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.
https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/OSCE_SMM_monitoring_the_movement_of_heavy_weaponry_in_eastern_Ukraine_16730574682-2048x1367.jpg
OSCE monitoring the movement of heavy weaponry in Eastern Ukraine,
March 2015. (OSCE, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Ukraine's leaders knew clearly that pressing for Nato enlargement to
Ukraine would mean war. Former Zelensky adviser Oleksiy Arestovych
declared in a 2019 interview "that our price for joining Nato is a big
war with Russia".
During 2010~2013, Yanukovych pushed for neutrality, in line with
Ukrainian public opinion. The US worked covertly to overthrow
Yanukovych, as captured vividly in the tape of then US Assistant
Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt
planning the post-Yanukovych government weeks before the violent
overthrow of Yanukovych.
Nuland makes clear on the call that she was coordinating closely with
then Vice President Biden and his national security adviser, Jake
Sullivan, the same Biden-Nuland-Sullivan team now at the center of US
policy vis-a-vis Ukraine.
https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/51171739565_06320917f8_k.jpg
Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Secretary of State Antony
Blinken meeting with members of Ukraine's Rada in Kiev, May 06 2021.
(State Department/Ron Przysucha)
After Yanukovych's overthrow, war broke out in the Donbas, while
Russia claimed Crimea. The new Ukrainian government appealed for Nato
membership, and the US armed and helped restructure the Ukrainian army
to make it interoperable with Nato. In 2021, Nato and the Biden
administration strongly recommitted to Ukraine's future in Nato.
In the immediate lead-up to Russia's invasion, Nato enlargement was
center stage. Putin's draft Nato-Russia Treaty (December 17 2021)
called for a halt to Nato enlargement.
Russia's leaders put Nato enlargement as the cause of war in Russia's
National Security Council meeting on February 21 2022. In his address
to the nation that day, Putin declared Nato enlargement to be a
central reason for the invasion.
Historian Geoffrey Roberts recently wrote:
Could war have been prevented by a Russian-Western deal that halted
Nato expansion and neutralised Ukraine in return for solid guarantees
of Ukrainian independence and sovereignty? Quite possibly.
In March 2022, Russia and Ukraine reported progress towards a quick
negotiated end to the war based on Ukraine's neutrality. According to
Naftali Bennett, former prime minister of Israel, who was a mediator,
an agreement was close to being reached before the US, UK, and France
blocked it.
While the Biden administration declares Russia's invasion to be
unprovoked, Russia pursued diplomatic options in 2021 to avoid war,
while Biden rejected diplomacy, insisting that Russia had no say
whatsoever on the question of Nato enlargement. And Russia pushed
diplomacy in March 2022, while the Biden team again blocked a
diplomatic end to the war.
By recognizing that the question of Nato enlargement is at the center
of this war, we understand why US weaponry will not end this war.
Russia will escalate as necessary to prevent Nato enlargement to
Ukraine. The key to peace in Ukraine is through negotiations based on
Ukraine's neutrality and Nato non-enlargement.
The Biden administration's insistence on Nato enlargement to Ukraine
has made Ukraine a victim of misconceived and unachievable US military
aspirations. It's time for the provocations to stop and for
negotiations to restore peace to Ukraine.
_____
Jeffrey D Sachs is a university professor and director of the Center
for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed
The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also president of the
UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the
UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been an adviser to
three United Nations secretaries-general and currently serves as an
SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the
author, most recently, of A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American
Exceptionalism (2020). Other books include: Building the New American
Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable (2017) and The Age of
Sustainable Development (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.
This article is from https://www.commondreams.org.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not
reflect those of Consortium News.
Support CN's Spring Fund Drive Today:
https://consortiumnews.salsalabs.org/ClassicDonationPage1/index.html
Links: The original version of this article, at the URLs below,
contains several links to further information not included here:
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/05/24/the-war-in-ukraine-was-provoked/
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/jeffrey-sachs-war-ukraine-was-provoked-why-matters-achieve-peace
TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
the appropriate link at the top or bottom of
https://billtotten.wpcomstaging.com/2023/05/31/the-ukraine-war-was-provoked/
The Biden administration's insistence on Nato enlargement has made
Ukraine a victim of misconceived and unachievable US military
aspirations.
by Jeffrey D Sachs
https://consortiumnews.com (May 24 2023)
https://www.zerohedge.com (May 25 2023)
https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/48990422142_e315b2ee03_k.jpg
Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, left, and Ukraine's President
Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev, October 31 2019. (Nato, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
George Orwell wrote in 1984 (1949):
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present
controls the past.
Governments work relentlessly to distort public perceptions of the
past. Regarding the Ukraine War, the Biden administration has
repeatedly and falsely claimed that the Ukraine War started with an
unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine on February 24 2022.
In fact, the war was provoked by the US in ways that leading US
diplomats anticipated for decades in the lead-up to the war, meaning
that the war could have been avoided and should now be stopped through
negotiations.
Recognizing that the war was provoked helps us to understand how to
stop it. It doesn't justify Russia's invasion. A far better approach
for Russia might have been to step up diplomacy with Europe and with
the non-Western world to explain and oppose US militarism and
unilateralism.
In fact, the relentless US push to expand Nato is widely opposed
throughout the world, so Russian diplomacy rather than war would
likely have been effective.
Two Main Provocations
The Biden team uses the word "unprovoked" incessantly, most recently
in Biden's major speech on the first-year anniversary of the war, in a
recent Nato statement, and in the most recent G7 statement.
Mainstream media friendly to Biden simply parrot the White House. The
New York Times is the lead culprit, describing the invasion as
"unprovoked" no fewer than 26 times, in five editorials, 14 opinion
columns by New York Times writers, and seven guest op-eds.
Related: https://consortiumnews.com/2023/01/08/caitlin-johnstone-unprovoked/
There were in fact two main US provocations.
The first was the US intention to expand Nato to Ukraine and Georgia
in order to surround Russia in the Black Sea region by Nato countries
(Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria Turkey, and Georgia, in counterclockwise
order).
The second was the US role in installing a Russophobic regime in
Ukraine through the violent overthrow of Ukraine's pro-Russian
president, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014. The shooting war in
Ukraine began with Yanukovych's overthrow nine years ago, not in
February 2022 as the US government, Nato, and the G7 leaders would
have us believe.
Biden and his foreign policy team refuse to discuss the roots of the
war. To recognize them would undermine the administration in three
ways.
https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/23006033603_0b151e45f2_k.jpg
December 07 2015: US Vice President Biden meets with Ukrainian
President Petro Poroshenko in Kiev. (US Embassy Kyiv, Flickr)
First, it would expose how the war could have been avoided, or stopped
early, sparing Ukraine its current devastation and the US more than
$100 billion in outlays to date.
Second, it would expose Biden's personal role in the war as a
participant in the overthrow of Yanukovych, and before that as a
staunch backer of the military-industrial complex and very early
advocate of Nato enlargement.
Third, it would push Biden to the negotiating table, undermining the
administration's continued push for Nato expansion.
Check the Archives
https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Screen-Shot-2022-06-28-at-3.12.08-PM.png
George Kennan in 1966. (Warren Leffler, Library of Congress)
The archives show irrefutably that the US and German governments
repeatedly promised Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that Nato would
not move "one inch eastward" when the Soviet Union disbanded the
Warsaw Pact military alliance.
Nonetheless, US planning for Nato expansion began early in the 1990s,
well before Vladimir Putin was Russia's president. In 1997, national
security expert Zbigniew Brzezinski spelled out the Nato expansion
timeline with remarkable precision.
US diplomats and Ukraine's own leaders knew well that Nato enlargement
could lead to war. The US scholar-statesman George Kennan called Nato
enlargement a "fateful error", writing in The New York Times that,
Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic,
anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have
an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore
the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel
Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.
President Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense William Perry considered
resigning in protest against Nato enlargement. In reminiscing about
this crucial moment in the mid-1990s, Perry said the following in
2016:
Our first action that really set us off in a bad direction was when
Nato started to expand, bringing in eastern European nations, some of
them bordering Russia. At that time, we were working closely with
Russia and they were beginning to get used to the idea that Nato could
be a friend rather than an enemy ... but they were very uncomfortable
about having Nato right up on their border and they made a strong
appeal for us not to go ahead with that.
In 1998, William Burns, then the US ambassador to Russia and now the
CIA director, sent a cable to Washington warning at length of the
grave risks of Nato enlargement:
Ukraine and Georgia's Nato aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in
Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for
stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement,
and efforts to undermine Russia's influence in the region, but it also
fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would
seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that
Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine
over Nato membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community
against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or
at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide
whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.
https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/OSCE_SMM_monitoring_the_movement_of_heavy_weaponry_in_eastern_Ukraine_16730574682-2048x1367.jpg
OSCE monitoring the movement of heavy weaponry in Eastern Ukraine,
March 2015. (OSCE, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Ukraine's leaders knew clearly that pressing for Nato enlargement to
Ukraine would mean war. Former Zelensky adviser Oleksiy Arestovych
declared in a 2019 interview "that our price for joining Nato is a big
war with Russia".
During 2010~2013, Yanukovych pushed for neutrality, in line with
Ukrainian public opinion. The US worked covertly to overthrow
Yanukovych, as captured vividly in the tape of then US Assistant
Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt
planning the post-Yanukovych government weeks before the violent
overthrow of Yanukovych.
Nuland makes clear on the call that she was coordinating closely with
then Vice President Biden and his national security adviser, Jake
Sullivan, the same Biden-Nuland-Sullivan team now at the center of US
policy vis-a-vis Ukraine.
https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/51171739565_06320917f8_k.jpg
Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Secretary of State Antony
Blinken meeting with members of Ukraine's Rada in Kiev, May 06 2021.
(State Department/Ron Przysucha)
After Yanukovych's overthrow, war broke out in the Donbas, while
Russia claimed Crimea. The new Ukrainian government appealed for Nato
membership, and the US armed and helped restructure the Ukrainian army
to make it interoperable with Nato. In 2021, Nato and the Biden
administration strongly recommitted to Ukraine's future in Nato.
In the immediate lead-up to Russia's invasion, Nato enlargement was
center stage. Putin's draft Nato-Russia Treaty (December 17 2021)
called for a halt to Nato enlargement.
Russia's leaders put Nato enlargement as the cause of war in Russia's
National Security Council meeting on February 21 2022. In his address
to the nation that day, Putin declared Nato enlargement to be a
central reason for the invasion.
Historian Geoffrey Roberts recently wrote:
Could war have been prevented by a Russian-Western deal that halted
Nato expansion and neutralised Ukraine in return for solid guarantees
of Ukrainian independence and sovereignty? Quite possibly.
In March 2022, Russia and Ukraine reported progress towards a quick
negotiated end to the war based on Ukraine's neutrality. According to
Naftali Bennett, former prime minister of Israel, who was a mediator,
an agreement was close to being reached before the US, UK, and France
blocked it.
While the Biden administration declares Russia's invasion to be
unprovoked, Russia pursued diplomatic options in 2021 to avoid war,
while Biden rejected diplomacy, insisting that Russia had no say
whatsoever on the question of Nato enlargement. And Russia pushed
diplomacy in March 2022, while the Biden team again blocked a
diplomatic end to the war.
By recognizing that the question of Nato enlargement is at the center
of this war, we understand why US weaponry will not end this war.
Russia will escalate as necessary to prevent Nato enlargement to
Ukraine. The key to peace in Ukraine is through negotiations based on
Ukraine's neutrality and Nato non-enlargement.
The Biden administration's insistence on Nato enlargement to Ukraine
has made Ukraine a victim of misconceived and unachievable US military
aspirations. It's time for the provocations to stop and for
negotiations to restore peace to Ukraine.
_____
Jeffrey D Sachs is a university professor and director of the Center
for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed
The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also president of the
UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the
UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been an adviser to
three United Nations secretaries-general and currently serves as an
SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the
author, most recently, of A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American
Exceptionalism (2020). Other books include: Building the New American
Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable (2017) and The Age of
Sustainable Development (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.
This article is from https://www.commondreams.org.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not
reflect those of Consortium News.
Support CN's Spring Fund Drive Today:
https://consortiumnews.salsalabs.org/ClassicDonationPage1/index.html
Links: The original version of this article, at the URLs below,
contains several links to further information not included here:
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/05/24/the-war-in-ukraine-was-provoked/
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/jeffrey-sachs-war-ukraine-was-provoked-why-matters-achieve-peace
TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
the appropriate link at the top or bottom of
https://billtotten.wpcomstaging.com/2023/05/31/the-ukraine-war-was-provoked/
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