Rubio finally admits Ukraine is just a proxy in America's war against Russia
The pretense that this was Ukraine's fight has been dropped, and that's important
Slowly but surely, the Trump Administration is peeling away layers of illusion that have underpinned US and European narratives about the Ukraine War and the public’s support for it.
On Wednesday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio referred to the Ukraine War as a “proxy war” between the US and Russia, with Ukraine as the proxy. He was slammed for it in the press, just as Trump had been for saying the prospect of NATO expansion had provoked Russia to invade. As is par for the course, they accused Rubio of adopting Russian narratives. But he was right, and his statement was the latest indication that the new Administration intends to call it like it is in Ukraine.
Gone are the days when Joe Biden and his secretary of state Antony Blinken deceitfully trumpeted the conflict as a war only between Russia and Ukraine, with the US merely supplying money and matériel to a democratic ally. Only western Europe’s officials speak that way now, unable to adjust to the new reality in Washington.
Now that the US has cut off intelligence sharing with Zelensky’s regime in a bid to bring him to the negotiating table (and also prohibited the UK from sharing American intelligence with them), it’s becoming clear that Russia was right about a key fact largely unacknowledged before: that Ukrainian missile strikes on Russia were actually American strikes.
When Ukraine received the Biden Administration’s blessing last year to begin launching medium-range missiles, namely American-supplied ATACMS, deep inside Russian territory, the Russians announced they would consider such strikes to be attacks by the United States. The same would be true of British-supplied Storm Shadow missiles.
They said this was so because such launches required satellite-based targeting that Ukraine didn’t possess, and that therefor the Americans were indispensable participants in the selection and targeting of missile strikes deep within Russia.
They announced that this was a grave escalation that risked a direct military confrontation between the US and Russia. To drive home their point, the Russians launched a previously unknown nuclear-capable ballistic missile called “Oreshnik”, targeting a site near Dnipro in Ukraine.
Footage showed the missile’s multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs) piercing the cloud deck and slamming into the ground at hypersonic speeds. Though said to be nuclear-capable, they were apparently equipped with dummy warheads and used only to demonstrate their potential.
At first I thought it was faked video of multiple missile launches sped up and reversed. But the source of the video was Ukrainian, verified by Ukraine, and eventually ended up in Western media.
No other country has an acknowledged missile capability like this. Interception would be next to impossible with current technology. And this is just one part of Russia’s arsenal of recently introduced new missile systems following their more than decade-long weapons modernization program.
Shortly afterwards, Russia announced that they had more Oreshniks and that if the US and Europe caused any more of their medium-range missiles to be targeted inside Russia, Russia would use the weapon again, this time armed, against decision-making centers in Kiev and elsewhere.
But of course the Western strikes continued, because continual escalation and bluff-calling against arguably the world’s preeminent nuclear power had been the name of the game for Biden and the Europeans since the beginning. And not escalation that made any difference militarily — Ukraine was still slowly but surely losing ground — but escalation that risked a nuclear confrontation nonetheless.
Now, Western media is admitting what Russia said all along: that Ukraine is incapable of launching Western-supplied missiles into Russia without American satellite targeting and other support. A missile launch deep into Russia by Ukraine is a missile launch by the US.
So the way it works is this: ordinary Ukrainians (and Russians) do the fighting and dying at the front. America takes money from struggling US taxpayers and sends it to Ukraine, with no real accounting. Ukraine’s elites skim some off the top and then use what’s left to buy expensive American and European weapons, some of which only the US can operate on their behalf, enriching companies like Raytheon, Boeing, and General Dynamics. Those companies, in turn, reward and ensure the reelection of the politicians who steadfastly support the war in Ukraine. Rinse, and repeat.
But, you may say, even if all that is true, we’re defending a democratic country against an unprovoked full-scale invasion by an aggressor that threatens the security of all of Europe, headed by a brutal dictator bent on conquest and restoring the Soviet Union.
Complete rubbish.
If Ukraine was ever a democracy with free and fair elections, it ceased being one when the US and Europe allied with right-wing nationalist forces in Kiev in 2014 to overthrow a Russia-friendly elected Ukrainian president.
That coup was fueled in large part by neo-Nazi paramilitary groups like Right Sektor and Azov Battalion that have since been integrated into the Ukrainian military structure. Ukraine has a complicated history with Nazi sympathizers, called “Banderites” after the World War II Ukrainian Nazi collaborator and nationalist Stepan Bandera, who collaborated with German troops during the war to drive out communists. Many of these sympathizers in the Ukrainian military still wear Nazi insignia.
As I’ve pointed out before, American officials hand-picked the man who would replace the deposed president in 2014, even before the coup was accomplished. Elections were restored thereafter, but the game was rigged at that point, and the people of Donbas didn’t participate in the 2019 elections that brought Zelensky to power on a pledge to improve relations with Russia.
With all this, it’s hard to argue that Ukraine’s battle is for democracy. A sizable minority of Ukrainians are either ethnically Russian or speak Russian and identify with it more than with the EU, especially those in the east that broke away in 2014 or welcomed Russian annexation in 2022. It’s not their voices that Ukraine is fighting for.
When Western politicians and their media surrogates talk about democracy in Ukraine, what they really mean by “democracy” is alignment with the West geopolitically. If they really meant democracy, they would have condemned the 2014 coup rather than sponsor and participate in it.
It’s ironic that it was Barack Obama’s administration that enabled that. Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize shortly after becoming president in 2009. Now, another president far less esteemed in European halls of power appears to be about to bring Obama’s tragic legacy in Ukraine to an end, whether Europe likes it or not.
Another myth that the Trump Administration has busted is that the Russian invasion was unprovoked. For 30 years, America and its European allies have been advancing the frontiers of their military alliance, created to defend against a Soviet Union that ceased to exist a generation ago, toward Russia’s borders.
The Russians repeatedly warned that Ukraine was a red line for them and that they would not allow NATO to gain a foothold in it. You can argue about whether Russia should be able to dictate this, but consider this: if Russia had done in Mexico what the US has done in Ukraine, the US would have invaded Mexico in the blink of an eye, and probably with far more “shock and awe” brazenness than the Russians have shown in Ukraine (see Iraq 2003-2011, for example).
In order to try and avoid the final step of war, Russia presented formal plans for a new European security treaty to the US, EU, and NATO in December 2021. Though some of their demands were unrealistic, such as NATO pulling back to its 1997 frontiers, the terms could have been a starting point for negotiations. They would have made Ukraine a neutral buffer country between NATO and Russia. That part was certainly not unrealistic and may yet come to pass.
But the US and Europe brushed aside these overtures and continued ramping up their arming of Ukraine in late 2021, setting the stage for the invasion that would come in February.
Western officials since that time have talked of inflicting a “strategic defeat” on Russia, saying they must be seen to lose. It’s simply inconceivable to them that Russia could have a geopolitical win at their expense, even given the West’s sordid history in Ukraine.
Western think tanks like the militant Atlantic Council, which serves as a sort of incubator from which foreign policy experts are reared to work in the US government, have explicitly fantasized about regime change in Russia and breaking up the resource-rich Russian Federation.
If you think I exaggerate, just listen to the words of South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham. In a May 2023 meeting with Zelensky, Graham remarked that “the Russians are dying,” and characterized U.S. military assistance to Ukraine as “the best money we’ve ever spent.”
So now that Russia’s demise has failed to materialize and the narrative is beginning to change, European leaders are pretending that the fate of Europe hangs in the balance if the status quo — Ukrainian and Russian young men dying on America’s dime — is not preserved. They claim Russia will invade and take over the rest of Europe, emboldened by their victory.
This is complete nonsense and they know it.
Lacking mobilization on a scale that likely would threaten their economy and stability, Russia has been barely capable of capturing and holding 20% of Ukraine’s former territory in the course of three years. Though their army is now war-tested and more efficient, their progress has been slow and costly. Their true power lies in weapons they can’t realistically use without risking a suicidal global nuclear war.
There’s no evidence that Russia has expansionist ambitions beyond the relatively few areas they’ve captured and annexed from Ukraine after the ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking population there were terrorized for years by the American puppet government in Kiev.
True, Putin regrets the breakup of the Soviet Union and has spoken about that, as have many Russian commentators. But he doesn’t regret the fall of communism or of the totalitarian regime that forcefully bound it together.
Putin had eight years after the coup in Kiev in which he could have formally annexed the rebellious Donbas and he didn’t do it. Instead, he agreed to the Minsk Accords in 2015 that, had it ever been implemented by Kiev, would have kept Donbas as part of Ukraine, but with semi-autonomy.
Russia has said it has no problem with Ukraine joining the EU, but they won’t tolerate it joining NATO. That’s why Russia has said the proposal for British and French peacekeepers to be deployed in what’s left of Ukraine after a peace settlement is a nonstarter. The Russians view that as NATO by the back door.
If you think all of this is just me being a Russian asset mindlessly parroting propaganda, you need to snap out of it. The fact that Putin might agree with something doesn’t make it untrue or merely propaganda. Resist the gaslighting that free thinking provokes from others.
Both America and its self-created enemies use propaganda to try and shape opinions in their favor, but sometimes what the other side says is true, or at least more true than what our government says. To think that only America and its allies tell the truth and that their enemies always lie is to live in a fantasy world that doesn’t exist in reality.
One thing Trump said in his Oval Office dust-up with the comedian from Krivoy Rog that was as true as anything he’s said, among much untruth, was this: Zelensky can talk tough only because he has US backing; without us, he has no cards.
There may be one other reason Zelensky has been able to talk tough. Former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett shed some light on this when he told the story of his interceding on Zelensky’s behalf with Putin at the outset of the war in 2022. Zelensky had been hiding in an underground bunker since the start of the invasion, terrified that Putin would have him personally taken out.
When then-prime minister Bennett met with Putin, he says he extracted a promise that Zelensky would not be personally targeted. Only after Zelensky was informed of this and assured it was true did he emerge from hiding. Per Bennett, “two hours later, Zelensky went to his office, and did a selfie in the office, [in which he said,] ‘I’m not afraid.’”
So, the paper tiger pulled it off for a while, secure in his role as the chief fundraiser for America’s proxy war. But, mercifully, the days of fighting nuclear-armed Russia to the last Ukrainian with American money and weapons appear to be coming to an end.
America tried to turn Ukraine into a NATO garrison and failed. In the end, it became little more than a Democratic Party playground for personal wealth extraction and money laundering, much like Iraq was for the Republicans in the early 2000s.
Russia lost the previous American proxy war against it, in Afghanistan in the 1980s. That war bled them dry and hastened the end of the Soviet Union (while bringing us Osama bin Laden). The Obama and Biden administrations thought they could do it again in Ukraine. But this time it’s a generation of young Ukrainians whose blood has been spilled in vain.
Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.