Going for broke
I didn't think Russia would go this far
I’d gotten used to supposedly authoritative sources in the US lying about Russia. They do it all the time. In the Trump years, they did it almost hourly. Day after day, the intelligence agencies and their media machines working to reverse the results of the 2016 election would manufacture some new, anonymously sourced outrage, evidence-free, that would then be repeated and amplified until weeks or sometimes even days later it would turn out that it had no basis in fact. Of course, the news that they were false was never re-tweeted millions of times like the original claims had been. Rachel Maddow never delivered a mea culpa.
This is what happens, not only in the US, but everywhere when a country reports on its geopolitical adversaries. It happens in Chinese media, in Russian media, everywhere. The US is just better at it because media types here are the best in the world at spin.
So when the Biden Administration started flinging accusations that the Russians were planning an invasion under cover of their military exercise, I thought it was another piece of propaganda from the US military and security establishment — they vomit that stuff up all the time. It sells weapons systems and ensures that that $700 billion military budget keeps getting fatter.
And the US has never been straight about its involvement in Ukraine and the role it played in bringing all this about. The evidence that the US sponsored a coup in Ukraine in 2014 to pull the country out of the Russian sphere of influence and prime it for eventual entry into NATO is overwhelming. It happened. Yes, there were many in Ukraine who already wanted to ally with the West and join the EU, but the US pumped billions of dollars into the project, orchestrated events, and hand-picked the people who would take over when the elected president was ousted. Listen to the intercepted 2014 call between US diplomats Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt if you’re not convinced. Or read statements by Nuland bragging about the money the US spent for regime change there.
And so I thought this was more game-playing by the US. Or worse, I thought it was setting the stage for some kind of false flag by the US of the type Jake Sullivan said the Russians might do. I’ve discovered it’s often the case that the best way to know what the US is doing covertly is to listen to what they’re accusing their adversaries of doing. They’re adept at projection.
Then Russia invaded Ukraine. In a big way. In a way I never thought was in the realm of possibility. And it’s a tragedy. And I hope it ends in a negotiated settlement that gives Russia the security guarantees they need, Ukraine the sovereignty they deserve, and results in Ukraine being the neutral, buffer-zone country its circumstances and history dictate that it should be.
I maintain that all that’s happening is the inevitable blowback of US adventurism in Ukraine in 2014 when we financed and “midwifed” (our diplomat’s own term in an intercepted phone call from the time) the coup that deposed an elected president deemed too soft toward Russia and not sufficiently pro-West. The West won the battle, but, eight years later, Russia may just win the war. It’s hard to see an outcome of this in which Ukraine can continue to harbor ambitions of joining NATO. NATO is abandoning them, because they have to.
Another possibility is that Russia loses so much standing in the world that they have to abandon their operation before their objectives are completed — to demilitarize Ukraine and quash any ambition it might have to join a hostile military alliance aimed at Russia, right on its doorstep (something the US would never tolerate either). The raft of new sanctions truly are in a class of their own, and it’s hard to know if they’ll shake the resolve of the Russian public and establishment. They’ve lived with sanctions for years, but these aren’t your father’s sanctions.
To Westerners used to looking at the world through a Western lens, Putin’s actions seem crazy, insane. But if Westerners had responsible media outlets they would have intelligently analyzed Putin’s entreaties over the last decades and realized he was proposing a relationship of mutual respect between nations, with binding treaties that protected the interests of everyone, without enhancing the security of one country, or group of countries, at the expense of another.
But all of that is history. Russia has been rebuffed too many times. They don’t care if the Washington Post or CNN like them. They’ve decided the West wants confrontation, and that therefor confrontation is what they’ll get. Their patience has run out. They won’t let Ukraine become a NATO outpost, regardless of the consequences of ensuring that.
Cruise missiles raining down on a country is a tragedy. It’s a tragedy when Israel does it in Syria, when Saudi Arabia does it in Yemen, and when the US does it in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Serbia, Somalia, and all the other, mostly Muslim, lands we’ve bombed, invaded, occupied. As I write this, US forces continue to illegally occupy the oilfields region of Syria. The US has rebuffed Iraqi parliament requests to end its military presence there. That’s a tragedy. And Ukraine is a tragedy. The difference is the latter gets publicized; the former gets swept under the rug.
I pray for an end to it all, in Ukraine, in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen, everywhere, and by everyone.
Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.