Provoking a war

The world may have dodged an immediate bullet when the US intelligence agencies warned, this week, that by giving in to Ukraine’s pleading for long range missiles that could attack targets deep into Russia, we would be poking the Russian bear beyond its patience without even influencing the outcome of the war in Ukraine’s favor.

There had been a sense of waiting with bated breath in the wake of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent announcement that he would lower the threshold for Russia’s use of nuclear weapons, as the US and its NATO allies broadcasted their plans to ignore a repeated “red line” articulated by US President Joe Biden not to provide arms to Ukraine which could be launched deep inside Russia.

Britain is playing its usual provocative role by sending clear messages that it would welcome US approval to let Ukraine use its “Storm Shadow” long-range missiles. We just got a short breather, in light of this recently issued public US intelligence evaluation.

Despite repeated requests to the US from Putin to honor US promises made to Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin that the US would not expand NATO east of a unified Germany, when the wall came down and Gorbachev ended the Warsaw Pact and Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe without a shot, the US, driven by visions of Empire, steadily expanded NATO eastward.

It began with former US President Bill Clinton’s annexation of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999; followed by Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004; and Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia between 2009 and 2017. At one point Putin was so dismayed at this expansion, he asked the Clinton administration if Russia could join NATO, but he was denied membership.

Putin made it very clear to the US and NATO that Russia, which shares a long border with Ukraine, would not tolerate Ukraine becoming a member of NATO. After the US supported a 2014 coup d’état replacing the pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, with Petro Poroshenko who immediately announced that only the Ukrainian language would be recognized in Ukraine, a civil war broke out in the eastern part of the country where the majority of the people were Russian and Russian speaking. More than 14,000 people were killed in that war before Russia invaded Ukraine.

Putin provided a draft agreement in 2021 to the US proposing that Ukraine remain neutral and that the Donbass region, undergoing the civil war, remain in Ukraine as a federation and have the right to speak Russian. The US completely ignored the proposal, and Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Putin was negotiating for a cease-fire with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy six months after the invasion, but Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister came to Ukraine and told Zelenskyy not to make the deal! And the slaughter continues, with more than 20,000 civilians and 100,000 soldiers killed.

Thanks to the brief respite we just received from imminent nuclear annihilation, thanks to the sensible US intelligence services who took Putin’s recent warnings as a reason for caution in pursuing a headlong and heedless expansion of military aid to Ukraine, it is time to change the conversation with bold new proposals.

Excerpted: ‘Bold New Proposals for Peace on Earth’. Courtesy: Commondreams.org