So many have just accepted the war raging in Ukraine…..few bother or even care that there was some sanity in the madness….
About here I need to add a disclaimer to avoid any confusion accusations.
I am by NO means trying to justify the brutality and barbarity of the invasion of Ukraine….just that there is always more to a story than is known or covered by the media in its rush to break news.
Another lingering question is ‘why Ukraine’? There have been other horrific events in the period since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, including Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Palestine yet no comparable clamor for criminal justice and punitive action. Certainly, a part of the explanation is that the Ukrainian victims of abuse are white and European, and global media was mobilized effectively by the West and by the related international prominence accorded to Zelensky, the embattled Ukrainian leader given unprecedented access to the most influential venues on the global stages of world opinion. It is not that the empathy for Ukraine or support for Zelensky’s national resistance is misplaced, but that it has the appearance of being orchestrated in ways that other desperate national situations were not, and thus give rise to suspicions about other, darker motives.
This is a concern because these magnified concerns have acted as a principal way that the NATO West has gone out of its way to make the Ukrainian War about more than Ukraine. The wider war is best understood as occurring on two levels: a traditional war between the invading forces of Russia and the resisting forces of Ukraine coupled with a geopolitical war between the U.S. and Russia. It is the prosecution of this latter war that presents the more profound danger to world peace, a danger that has been largely obscured or assessed as a mere dimension of the Russia/Ukraine confrontation. Biden has consistently struck a militarist and confrontational note in the geopolitical war, demonizing Putin while neglecting diplomacy as a way to stop the killing, and atrocities, in effect, allowing the war on the ground to continue because of the higher stakes of grand strategy. If this two-level perception is correct in appreciation of the different actors with different priorities, then it becomes crucial to understand that in the geopolitical war the U.S. is the aggressor as much as in the traditional war Russia is the aggressor.
Why Ukraine?
Is NATO the culprit?
George Kennan, the intellectual father of America’s containment policy during the cold war, perceptively warned in a May 1998 New York Times interview about what the Senate’s ratification of Nato’s first round of expansion would set in motion. “I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” Kennan stated. ”I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.”
He was right, but US and Nato leaders proceeded with new rounds of expansion, including the provocative step of adding the three Baltic republics. Those countries not only had been part of the Soviet Union, but they had also been part of Russia’s empire during the Czarist era. That wave of expansion now had Nato perched on the border of the Russian Federation.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/28/nato-expansion-war-russia-ukraine
Further reading…..
I was there: NATO and the origins of the Ukraine crisis
https://www.vox.com/22900113/nato-ukraine-russia-crisis-clinton-expansion
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