So what are Americans to believe about the rising tensions over Ukraine? The United States and Russia both claim their escalations are defensive responding to threats and escalations by the other side but the resulting spiral of escalation can only make war more likely.
Ukrainian President Zelensky is warning that "panic" by U.S. and Western leaders is already causing economic destabilization in Ukraine.
U.S. allies do not all support the current U.S. policy. Germany is wisely refusing to funnel more weapons into Ukraine in keeping with its long-standing policy of not sending weapons into conflict zones. Ralf Stegner, a senior Member of Parliament for Germany's ruling Social Democrats, told the BBC on January 25th that the Minsk-Normandy process agreed to by France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine in 2015, is still the right framework for ending the civil war.
"The Minsk Agreement hasn't been applied by both sides," Stegner explained, "and it just doesn't make any sense to think that forcing up the military possibilities would make it better. Rather, I think it's the hour of diplomacy."
By contrast, most American politicians and corporate media have fallen in line with a one-sided narrative that paints Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine and support sending more and more weapons to Ukrainian government forces. After decades of U.S. military disasters based on such one-sided narratives, Americans should know better by now. But what is it that our leaders and the corporate media are not telling us this time?
The most critical events that have been airbrushed out of the West's political narrative are the violation of agreements Western leaders made at the end of the Cold War not to expand NATO into Eastern Europe and the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in February 2014.
Western mainstream media accounts date the crisis in Ukraine back to Russia's 2014 reintegration of Crimea and the decision by ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine to secede from Ukraine as the Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republics.
But these were not unprovoked actions. They were responses to the U.S.-backed coup in which an armed mob led by the neo-Nazi Right Sector militia stormed the Ukrainian parliament forcing the elected President Yanukovich and members of his party to flee for their lives. After the events of January 6, 2021, in Washington, that should now be easier for Americans to understand.
The remaining members of parliament voted to form a new government, subverting the political transition and plans for a new election that Yanukovich had publicly agreed to the day before after meetings with the foreign ministers of France, Germany, and Poland.
The U.S. role in managing the coup was exposed by a leaked 2014 audio recording of Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt working on their plans which included sidelining the European Union ("f*ck the EU," as Nuland put it) and shoehorning in U.S. protege Arseniy Yatsenyuk ("Yats") as Prime Minister.
At the end of the call, Ambassador Pyatt told Nuland, "we want to try to get somebody with an international personality to come out here and help to midwife this thing."
Nuland replied (verbatim),
"So on that piece Geoff, when I wrote the note, [Biden's National Security Advisor Jake] Sullivan's come back to me VFR [very quickly?], saying you need [Vice President] Biden and I said probably tomorrow for an atta-boy and to get the deets [details?] to stick. So Biden's willing."
It has never been explained why two senior State Department officials who were plotting a regime change in Ukraine looked to Vice President Biden to "midwife this thing" instead of to their own boss Secretary of State John Kerry.
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