˃˃˃A disclaimer at the beginning. I am a friend of Europe and the US, but not necessarily of their ruling political class and policy decisions. None of my criticism is meant malicious or adversarial. It is only intended to enlighten the discourse, extend horizons, and improve political relations and decisions˂˂˂
Although Western political elites and their media unanimously condemn President Putin's decision to recognize the breakaway regions of Donetsk (DPR) and Lugansk (LPR) in eastern Ukraine as autonomous people's republics, Putin's strategic maneuver can be seen as one of the last resort.
Donetsk and Lugansk broke away from Kiev after the Western-backed Maidan coup in 2014. They did not tolerate the deposition of incumbent President Yanukovych and the installation of the Washington and Berlin henchman Poroshenko, who opened Ukraine to the political, military and economic imposition of the US and the West. Since then, the Ukrainian leadership has rejected – in disregard of the provisions of the Minsk I and Minsk II agreements – concrete considerations for its eastern territories and even tried to forcibly reintegrate the republics in a civil war-like conflict.
In 2014, in the wake of the Maidan revolution, it also became immediately clear that Putin would not accept without resistance the attempt to admit Ukraine into NATO and possibly expel Russia from its Black Sea ports in Crimea. For the first time, he was confronted with an anti-Russian regime in Kiev, which is why he annexed the peninsula and began to support the separatists in the Donbass, who refused to accept the transformation of Ukrainian territory into an anti-Russian NATO base. The predominantly Russian population in these areas also resisted the Ukrainian regime's attempts to destroy Russian traditions, language, and culture.
The annexation of Crimea and support for the eastern territories would have been easily predictable if the US and Europe had only considered the legitimate strategic claims of the Russian Federation and decided to make a long overdue intelligent assessment of the overall security situation in the region. How would the United States react if, for example, Mexico allied itself with Russia and Putin tried to deploy massive troops on the southern border with the United States?
Western political elites have not taken a single step to address Putin's legitimate security concerns. Instead, they asserted their ruthless regional and global dominance policies, with which they had shaped international relations and, above all, relations with Russia for more than a quarter of a century.
Resolving the crisis in Ukraine would have required only a revision of the misguided strategic calculations of Washington, Brussels and Berlin and respect for Russia's legitimate security concerns. Unfortunately, the amateurish political governments that currently call the shots in the centers of power in the US and Europe have not been able to muster the minimum restraint to resolve the conflict peacefully.
For example, neither the weeks-long Russian troop build-up on the border with Ukraine nor Russia's demands, which were reiterated in a letter to Western leaders before the start of the military action, prompted the US/EU/NATO leadership to recognize Russia's national security interests. They didn't give Putin a chance. The blame for the collapse of diplomacy and the first step towards Russian aggression and the use of military force lies solely with the West.
While the public and international discourse on this issue focuses on the Kremlin and the White House, there is little mention of Ukrainian President Zelensky's contribution to this predicament. If he had wisely and sensibly defined the national security interests of his country in the context of geopolitical and strategic factors in the region and in relation to Russia, he could have avoided the conflict and the loss of part of his country's territory. Instead, pushed by his Western backers and arguably megalomaniacal ambitions, he pushed national self-determination beyond the reasonable limits of an adequate security strategy and even advocated full membership in NATO and the stationing of nuclear weapons on Ukrainian territory.
Here is a relevant historical example for Mr. Zelensky to learn from. What would have happened in 1955, a decade after the end of World War II and after ten years of Allied occupation, if Austria had insisted on joining NATO instead of accepting the neutrality status demanded by the Soviet Union as a prerequisite for regaining Austria's national sovereignty? By this time, the Soviets had already pushed their defensive alliance, the Warsaw Pact, to the border with Austria in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and if Austria had rejected the promise of neutrality and joined NATO, this would have been considered a threat to the security interests of the Warsaw Pact and a violation of the 1955 State Treaty. The Soviet Union would inevitably have responded with threats and military action.
No country in a geopolitically precarious situation would be well advised to use its political resolve to satisfy power-hungry ambitions and notions of hubris. In the case of Ukraine, a withdrawal from joining NATO, the freezing of all further armaments-related support by the US and its allies, and the transfer of Ukraine to a certain position of neutrality would have created the conditions for a diplomatic solution. If President Zelensky had acted in this direction, he would go down in history as a statesman. So, he will only be remembered as the comedian he was before his election. A role to which he has remained faithful even as president.
In truth, Zelensky and his predecessor Poroshenko, as well as their
American-European masters, have been ruining the nation since the Euro-Maidan
coup of 2014. It took them only eight years. According to the Ptukha Institute
for Demography and Social Studies, economic failure, drastic militarization
(Ukraine's defense budget at the beginning of the war was six times higher than
in 2013) and the termination of energy contracts with Russia led the country
into a deep recession. Agricultural, industrial and energy crises as well as
significant demographic changes were the result. Between 2014 and 2021, more
than one million Ukrainians took Russian citizenship and over six hundred
thousand received work permits for the European Union. One in four Ukrainians
wants to leave the country, and almost two-thirds believe that the country is
on the wrong track. Not a word about it in the Western media.
Putin never intended to go to war with Ukraine and NATO, nor is he driven by a desire to restore the borders of the old Soviet Union. These are all ridiculous accusations that are repeatedly made by the American president and subservient European governments under pressure from the arms lobby and other warmongering and irrational-Russophobe forces. The bottom line is that Western leaders have missed their chances and now have to foot the bill for their folly and imprudence. They have tormented the Russian bear for far too long, neglecting its needs. Now he has taken the strategic initiative.
The senile Biden, the neoconservative warmongers in the US State Department, the subservient EU leadership, the naïve NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg – who is desperately looking for an enemy image to justify NATO's existence – they all now stand there like the doused poodles that they are. In their helpless desperation, they also hurt themselves by imposing a new sanctions regime on Russia that further alienated Russia from the West, drove it into the arms of China, and accelerated the economic destruction of large parts of Central and Western Europe. In addition, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who obeys US control compliantly, to the detriment of his country and neighboring states, immediately stopped the ratification of the Nordstrom-2 pipeline, which was supposed to ensure a low-cost and much-needed supply of natural gas to Central and Western Europe.
The amateurish circles of American and European policy consultancy – the so-called national security experts in the US State Department and the European Commission – still insist on the correctness of their failed strategic paradigm. They call Vladimir Putin an imperialist invader and a violator of international law because he recognized the breakaway provinces in eastern Ukraine as sovereign republics and came to their aid. In doing so, they forgot that the US and its transatlantic partners have often violated international law provisions in recent decades. Indeed, they explicitly based a significant part of their policymaking in the field of international relations on the deliberate negation of international law, in particular its principle of non-intervention. While they had no legitimate reasons for their interventions and regime-change operations, for example in Libya (https://www.edwinseditorial.com/2011/03/ us-and-european-foreign-policy-blunder.html) and Syria (https://www.edwinseditorial.com/ 2013/05/disastrous-foreign-policy-failures.html), they demonize Putin for a strategic move to which they cornered him and for which the Russian leader in the interests of the He had legitimate reasons for the survival of his own nation.
The true causalities for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, as briefly outlined here, remain completely ignored in the public discourse on this topic. Western governments, led by the United States, refuse to acknowledge their misconduct in the malaise.
If the news does not soon spread in Western foreign policy circles that any approach to shaping international relations – be it bilateral, multilateral, or global – that ignores geopolitical and geostrategic aspects and the legitimate national interests of other members of the international community is doomed to failure, there will be even worse consequences for European and global security.
For the time being, it is important that the transatlantic political centers of power keep a cool head, admit their guilt for the escalation and do not plunge the world into something like a Third World War.
