THE TOTALLY AVOIDABLE TRAGEDY
In 2014, then U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, and then U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, with the approval of then Vice President of the United States Joe Biden, orchestrated the violent coup that overthrew the democratically elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, because Yanukovych wanted to keep Ukraine neutral, out of NATO, and on friendly terms with Russia.
The following 5-minute video is the intercepted phone call between Nuland and Pyatt as they plan and choose the people to replace Yanukovych after he is overthrown. Nuland’s profanity clearly displays her contempt for the European Union:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV9J6sxCs5k
The real war in Ukraine began in 2014 and it was deliberately instigated by the United States. Soon after the coup the U.S. began arming Ukraine. Just as the U.S. could not and would not tolerate Russian arms on its borders with Mexico or Canada, or Russian missiles in Cuba, Russia could not tolerate U.S. arms and missiles on its borders with Ukraine. Unlike the wisdom and morality displayed by President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, the current Biden Administration and State Department, ignorantly and immorally sacrifice the people of Ukraine in pursuit of U.S. imperialism.
The following excerpt from a conversation between Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges, and globally respected Professor of Economics at Columbia University, Jeffrey Sachs, speaks to the tragedy caused by the U.S. neocon drive for world hegemony:
Chris Hedges: So how, especially having worked in Russia, how do you characterize the Russian invasion of Ukraine?
Jeffrey Sachs: I characterize it as occurring in the eighth year of a war that started with the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych and escalated after that as totally avoidable. Because if Biden had negotiated with Putin in December 2021, the war would’ve been avoided.
I regard it as an attempt at the beginning to force Ukraine to the negotiating table. And within a few days of the launch of the so-called special military operation, which was not an invasion at the scale to take over Ukraine, it was a military operation to push Ukraine to the negotiating table. Within a few days, Zelenskyy said, we can negotiate. A few more days, he said, we can be neutral. We need security guarantees, but we can be neutral. I know because I’ve spoken to the people that were involved in the negotiations in March 2022 that these negotiations were making tremendous progress on the basis of Ukrainian neutrality and non-enlargement of NATO.
And we know that one day the negotiations stopped. The Ukrainians walked in to the Turkish mediators and said, we’re not negotiating now. We’re taking a break from negotiating. They stopped. Why? The United States told them, you don’t need to negotiate. You need to defeat Russia. You don’t need to accept neutrality. We’ve got your back.
And the United States pushed Ukraine into an escalating war thinking that the combination of economic sanctions and HIMARS and other wonder weapons would force Putin to back down. Putin didn’t back down. In fact, he mobilized in the summer of 2022. So America’s game of chicken didn’t exactly work. It led to another round of escalation.
And it’s especially led to a bloodbath, completely predictable, because Americans have refused, and by Americans, I mean Biden, our president who’s responsible and his team, have rejected negotiations at every turn. And they tell us, which is a lie, that there’s no one to negotiate with and that Russia’s not interested in negotiating, and that’s a lie.
The difference is Russia’s interested in negotiating an end to NATO enlargement, and the United States is interested in going wherever it pleases. No other country, even not even a nuclear superpower allowed to have a red line on their side in their neighborhood. Whereas we are in the 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine. So we said 200 years ago, no one in the Western atmosphere should meddle, and Russia’s not allowed to say we don’t want your military on our border. No, that’s not Russia’s business. So this is a massive, colossal failure of US diplomacy.