Ukraine – About Things That Matter

What Yet Another U.S. Surrender Looks Like — This Time in Ukraine

Since February 2022, Americans have been fed a fairy tale about the war in Ukraine — a story so uniform across NPR, PBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, CNN, MSNBC, and even Democracy Now that it reveals less about Russian aggression and more about the collapse of critical journalism in the United States.

In that fairy tale, Russia “unprovoked” invaded an innocent neighbor. Ukraine, noble and outgunned, somehow fought the Russian behemoth to a heroic standstill while inflicting catastrophic losses on Moscow. The United States, we are told, has been the grown-up in the room — always seeking peace — while a stubborn, irrational Vladimir Putin refuses compromise.

None of that matches what has actually happened.

I don’t come to that conclusion lightly. Since the start of Russia’s “Special Military Operation,” I’ve written more than a dozen articles on Ukraine — most of them here and for OpEdNews. (See below.) Across those pieces, I’ve argued five things:

By long-established U.S. standards and precedents, Russia had ample cause to defend itself against NATO’s relentless march to its borders.
The war has never been simply Russia vs. Ukraine; it has always been a proxy war between Moscow and the United States/NATO.
Despite the vast imbalance in money, weaponry, and propaganda, Russia has prevailed militarily and strategically at nearly every turn.
Moscow has largely refrained from U.S.-style “Shock and Awe” tactics that deliberately terrorize civilian populations.
Whether one admires him or not, Putin has been the most restrained and predictable major leader in this war.

Those are strong claims. So let me explain how I arrived at them — and what they mean now that Washington and NATO are quietly negotiating terms of capitulation they once declared impossible.

Rejecting Scripted Narratives

From day one, I made a conscious decision to eschew mainstream narratives about Ukraine. I’ve watched this movie too many times: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria. In each case, official “experts” and prestige media gave us a clean story of good intentions and necessary wars — until reality, corpses, and classified documents told another story.

Instead of relying on that machinery, I turned to analysts with actual experience and memory:

Realist scholars like John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs,
Former intelligence and security professionals like Ray McGovern and Scott Ritter,
Military strategists like Col. Douglas MacGregor,
Independent geopolitical commentators like Alexander Mercouris, Alex Christoforou, Brian Berletic, Garland Nixon, Jimmy Dore, and Robert Barnes.

These aren’t saints. They disagree with one another. But they share three qualities utterly missing from mainstream coverage:

They know how wars actually work.
They remember U.S. foreign-policy history.
They are willing to analyze “designated enemies” rather than demonize them.

In particular, I’ve followed Alexander Mercouris’ daily 90-minute briefings, where he methodically tracks changes along the 1,000-kilometer line of contact. Through that lens I watched:

The slow, grinding fall of key Ukrainian strongholds,
The complete failure of Ukraine’s much-hyped 2023 “summer offensive,”
The steady Russian advance westward in an attrition campaign the mainstream never honestly described.

On paper, NATO’s side had nearly everything: money, high-tech weapons, satellites, intelligence, media power. Russia had geography, industrial capacity, and patience. Patience won.

NATO Expansion: The Forgotten Red Line

To understand why this war happened and why Russia was prepared to fight it, we have to step back.

For decades, Russian leaders of every stripe — including those favored in the West — warned that NATO expansion to Russia’s border was a red line. This wasn’t just Putin’s obsession. It was echoed by George Kennan (the architect of containment), Henry Kissinger, Jack Matlock (Reagan’s ambassador to Moscow), and even CIA Director William Burns.

From the 1990s onward, successive U.S. administrations broke informal and formal assurances, pushed NATO eastward, armed and trained Ukrainian forces, and treated Russia as a defeated colony rather than a major power. The 2014 Maidan coup, the subsequent civil war in the Donbass, and eight years of Ukrainian shelling of Russian-speaking regions only deepened the crisis.

By the time Moscow launched its operation in 2022, Russia believed — rightly or wrongly — that it was fighting not for “land,” but for survival as a sovereign state.

That doesn’t make everything Russia has done morally pure. But it does make the word “unprovoked” dishonest.

De-Nazification: Propaganda or Inconvenient Fact?

One of Moscow’s stated objectives was “de-Nazification.” Western commentators mocked this as propaganda. Yet the facts are not really in dispute.

Units like the Azov Battalion, Aidar Battalion, and Right Sector have been documented — by Western journalists, Israeli media, and human rights organizations — as harboring neo-Nazi symbols, ideologies, and networks. After 2014, these formations were incorporated into Ukraine’s security structures and presented to the West as heroic defenders.

To acknowledge this is not to demonize all Ukrainians or deny their suffering. It is simply to say that Russia’s reference to Nazi influence was not conjured from thin air. It was rooted in something Western media chose to minimize or forget.

What Surrender Looks Like in a Suit

Today, the battlefield reality is grim for Kyiv:

Ukraine’s pre-war army has been largely destroyed.
Manpower is so depleted that men well into their 50s and 60s are being conscripted.
Western arsenals are drained.
Russia controls key logistical hubs and enjoys overwhelming artillery superiority.

In such a context, the word “stalemate” is a euphemism. Ukraine is no longer capable of decisive offensive action. NATO has no credible conventional path to “defeating” Russia in Ukraine.

So we hear whispers of “peace plans,” “ceasefires,” and “negotiations” — often framed as Donald Trump inexplicably “giving in” to Putin, as though Putin “has something on him.” That story continues the tired Russiagate myth and saves face for a Washington establishment that promised victory.

The truth is less dramatic and more humiliating: Washington and NATO lost their proxy war. The winner, as always, sets conditions.

And here is the irony: those “outrageous” conditions widely described as Putin’s “maximalist demands” are essentially the same objectives Russia articulated before the war began:

Ukrainian neutrality — no NATO membership.
Demilitarization — no NATO missile systems on Russia’s border.
De-Nazification — removal of Nazi-linked formations from state structures.
Recognition of Crimea and breakaway regions as Russian.
Security guarantees that NATO expansion stops.

In April 2022, at Istanbul, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators initialed a draft agreement along those lines. The war could have ended then. Instead, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson rushed to Kyiv and reportedly urged Zelensky to abandon the deal and “fight on” with Western backing.

Tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives were sacrificed on the altar of that decision.

Now, after two and a half years of bloodshed, we are back to those same basic terms — except Russia controls more territory, Ukraine is weaker, and NATO is more divided.

This is what surrender looks like in a suit: euphemisms in press conferences, face-saving language in communiqués, and the quiet acceptance of terms from a side the West swore it would defeat.

The fairy tale said Russia was isolated, collapsing, and on the brink of defeat.
Reality shows something else: NATO marched to Russia’s border, lit a proxy war in Ukraine, and lost.

The Pattern: Who’s Been Right All Along?

Ukraine is not a one-off mistake. It is part of a pattern.

Time and again, the voices that proved right were not the Pentagon spokespersons or network generals. They were the dissidents, the whistleblowers, the realists, the people willing to challenge the mythology of American innocence:

On Vietnam, they were right.
On Iraq’s non-existent WMD, they were right.
On Afghanistan as an unwinnable quagmire, they were right.
On Libya and Syria, they were right.
On Gaza today, they are right again.

And on Ukraine, the “alternative” analysts I’ve followed — Sachs, Mearsheimer, McGovern, Ritter, MacGregor, Mercouris, and others — have been consistently correct where mainstream pundits have repeatedly failed.

That doesn’t make them infallible. It does mean that those who analyze “designated enemies” instead of demonizing them gain access to reality sooner.

Conclusion: A Chance for Humility

The war in Ukraine is ending as sober observers said it would: not with a triumphant Ukrainian flag over Crimea, but with Washington and Brussels quietly negotiating limits they once called unimaginable.

Ukraine did not “stand up” to Russia and win.
NATO did not “stop Putin.”
The West lost its proxy war and is searching for a way to disguise capitulation as diplomacy.

The deeper question now is not whether Russia learns humility, but whether we do. Will we continue to wage unwinnable wars, believe narratives nobody questions, and call that “defending democracy”? Or will we finally listen to the voices who have been right all along — not because they are smarter, but because they refused to confuse propaganda with truth?

For my part, I know where I stand. I stand with those who insist on seeing clearly, even — especially — when it’s our own leaders and our own narratives that must be questioned.

My Previous OpEdNews Articles on Ukraine (Chronological Order)

(2/26/22)
“20 Reasons Why The United States and Europe Bear Ultimate Responsibility for the Ukrainian Crisis”

(3/4/22)
“12 Potentially Good Outcomes of the Ukraine War”

(3/7/22)
“20 Principles for Making Sense of the Ukraine War”

(3/26/22)
“In Ukraine the ‘Gangsters of Capitalism’ Have Gone to the Matrasses Again”

(5/8/22)
“O.K. I’m A Putin Apologist: Here’s Why”

(7/15/22)
“Russia in Ukraine: Champion and Proxy for the World’s Oppressed”

(2/26/23)
“About Ukraine Even Marianne Williamson Has Sold Out to Imperialism and Conventional Thinking”

(4/23/23)
“Are We Meeting the Risen Christ in Russia and China?”

(8/24/23)
“Putin’s a Killer Who’s Guilty Until (Impossibly) Proven Innocent”

(3/26/24)
“Even for ‘Democracy Now,’ Putin’s to Blame for the Rock Concert Massacre”

(12/5/24)
“Neocons Quake as Trump Threatens Peace in Ukraine”

So Far, The World Is Better Off with Trump!

I never thought I would find myself writing these words. But I think the world is far better off with Trump as our president than with Genocide Joe Biden.

There I said it. I do so under the threat of great personal detriment. I mean, I can hardly voice such opinion in polite progressive company. I can’t even say so in my own family.

So, at the risk of complete isolation, let me try to explain myself.

I think the world’s better off with Trump because a head of state should at least be sui compos mentis. Clearly, Joe Biden was not. By most accounts, Jake Sullivan has been running the country for the last four years. Secondly, Trump is better because he’s backing us off from nuclear war with the Russians. Joe wouldn’t even talk with them. Thirdly, whatever we might think of his words about real estate in Gaza, the Donald has introduced a cease fire there. It seems to be holding. Fourthly, President Trump shows promise of dismantling the CIA and FBI. That has no downside as far as I can see. And finally, and perhaps most surprisingly, he’s unifying the country around the issue of truth-telling. I mean it. Let me explain.

Trump’s Not Senile

I can hardly believe the Democrats knew Joe Biden was mentally over the hill from the first day of his administration. And yet after four years, they were willing to run him out there for a second term, when everybody knew he could scarcely tell up from down.

How cynical is that? How disrespectful to voters! How anti-democratic!

Thank God for the first presidential debate that showed the old man mired in an advanced condition of senility.

As such, his defining issues became:

Billions and billions and billions for Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine. (Trump stopped that right quick.)
His inability to do anything about a ceasefire in Gaza. (Trump turned that around even before he was sworn in.)
Unstinting cooperation in the genocide of Palestinians. (We have yet to see Trump’s final policy here, though his words and supply of 2000 pound bombs are not promising.)
Maintaining U.S. hegemony at all costs.

Those are the issues that obsessed and defined Genocide Joe – Ukraine, Gaza, genocide itself, and refusal to recognize that we live in a multipolar world. Little else he did really counts.

Trump Talks Russian

In sharp contrast to Biden’s foolishness, Donald Trump has agreed to peace talks with our proxy adversary in Ukraine. That war could have been entirely avoided had Biden even acknowledged reading and had he responded to Mr. Putin’s peace proposal in December of 2021. However, preferring war to diplomacy, he chose not to.

Shortly afterwards, the war could have been stopped in its tracks had Biden not (through Boris Johnson’s nefarious graces) effectively voided the peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine initialed by both belligerents in March of 2022. Instead, the old man again chose war that so far has exacted more than a million casualties.

In other words, Biden’s version of diplomacy was refusal to even talk with Putin.

Donald Trump has reversed all of that. Simple man that he is, Trump evidently realizes what all of us teach our children – make up with those you’ve been fighting with. Talk with your “enemies.” Try to see things from their point of view. No good parent would instruct them otherwise.

Diplomacy is as simple as that. Its exercise under Donald Trump has made the world a safer place.

Ceasefire in Gaza

So far, Trump’s policy in Gaza has made Palestinians safer as well.

The whole sequence of events since Trump’s diplomatic intervention illustrates the point. Since then, the whole world has witnessed:

Thousands upon thousands of Palestinians returning “home.”
The Zionist-caused rubble of their homes, schools, hospitals, libraries, mosques, and churches.
The uncovering of untold numbers of friends, relatives, doctors, nurses, and teachers buried and uncounted under the rubble raising the number of Palestinians indiscriminately killed to well over 100.000 – more than half women, children, and the elderly.
The survival of Hamas fighters still proud, well-armed, and undefeated by Israel’s genocidal attacks.
The testimony of Hamas prisoners about humane treatment on the part of their captors.
The contrasting emaciated and evidently tortured bodies of Zionist prisoners released by the Zionists.

None of this has been good for Israel’s image in the world. Instead, it’s made the world aware of the justice of the Palestinian cause.

To repeat, all of that makes Palestinians safer. It has also shown President Trump’s policy in Israel to be better than Mr. Biden’s, at least so far.

Today, Palestinians are better off under Trump.

Dismantling the CIA

And then there’s Mr. Trump’s appointment of Tulsi Gabbard to oversee the country’s 18 spy organizations. Those agencies spy on us! They engage in regime change operations. According to ex-CIA director, Mike Pompeo, they lie, they cheat, they steal all the time. They take entire courses on how to do so. Pompeo was proud of that. He thought it was a big joke.

But ask Julian Assange. Ask Chelsea Manning. Ask Edward Snowden. It’s not a joke.

Tulsi Gabbard realizes all of that. In Senate testimony, she refused to identify Snowden as a traitor.

Clearly, she has the “intelligence” establishment quaking in their boots.

That makes all of us better off.

Conclusion Bringing Us All Together

Recently, I saw a YouTube discussion between leftist comedian Jimmy Dore and progressive journalist Matt Taibbi. Dore raised a question about climate change. He confessed that in view of all the lies that have infected the scientific community (and American public life in general) he was for the first time having doubts about climate change. Was its threat being overblown?

In response, Taibbi admitted that the exposure of so many lies conveyed by politicians, clergymen, journalists, and university researchers had him wondering too. “I’m ashamed to say so,” he said in effect, “but all of that has me wondering about beliefs I’ve taken for granted over the last 30 years of my life.”

The exchange between Dore and Taibbi made me realize that even the falsehoods conveyed by the Liar in Chief currently manning the White House has important benefits.

On all segments of the political spectrum, it has us wondering about truth. We no longer trust those claiming to be truth tellers. We no longer trust the “fact checkers.” They’ve all been shown to be liars.

Regardless of where we stand on politics or climate change, that’s a hugely important point for Americans to realize and agree to. Thank you for bringing us together, Mr. Trump.

Western Neocons Quake as Trump Threatens Peace in Ukraine

Donald Trump’s landslide victory last month and his repeated promise to end war in Ukraine has Washington neocons quaking in their boots. How can they save their beloved Project Ukraine and prevent peace from breaking out on Russia’s border?

That’s the question Foreign Affairs (FA) tackled this week in an article by Elie Tenenbaum and Leo Litra. It’s entitled “Ukraine’s Security Now Depends on Europe.” The piece was marked by significant departure from the familiar “official story” on Ukraine. Yet it retained enough of that story’s elements to virtually render impossible reasoned discussion about ending the Ukrainian debacle.

The Official Story

To begin with, the FA article tells the story that aficionados of Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, and Washington Post have been programmed to accept. Taking its cue from the White House, the story holds that Putin is the aggressor in Ukraine. He cannot be trusted, lies habitually, routinely breaks promises, and remains unconstrained by international law.

Accordingly, everyone knows that his attack on Ukraine was unprovoked, and that Russia had been raining missiles on terrorized Ukrainian armed forces in the Donbas since 2014. It was Putin who backed out of the Minsk Accords as well as voiding the Istanbul peace framework in March of 2022. Putin also obstinately refuses to consider peace negotiations even though his army has suffered casualties by the hundreds of thousands – far more than his Ukrainian opponents. Moreover, Russia’s economy is crumbling while its citizens generally do not support the war effort.

That’s the Official Story. It’s the one largely repeated by Tenenbaum and Litra.

A Competing Narrative

However, the story’s elements are contradicted point by point by highly credible scholars, diplomats, ex-military and CIA officials and independent journalists. A short list of the latter includes John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs, Colonel Douglass MacGregor, Scott Ritter, Ray McGovern, Alexander Mercouris, Brian Berletic, and Chris Hedges.

All these maintain that a U.S.-led NATO provoked the war in Ukraine after completely ignoring Vladimir Putin’s peace proposal advanced in December of 2021. Moreover, Russia’s invasion mirrors what the United States would do – in fact what it has done – in similar circumstances. Recall the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Remember America’s many violent invocations of the Monroe Doctrine to protect its interests in its Latin American “backyard” by direct invasion, proxy wars, and bloody regime changes.

According to the analysts just mentioned, it is the U.S. and NATO that lie habitually and cannot be trusted. In fact, the whole Ukrainian conflict is based on a broken promise by U.S. Secretary of State, James Baker, to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990. It said that NATO would not expand even “one inch” towards Russia.

Then (as admitted by German ex-prime minister Angela Merkel) NATO further tricked Russia into signing the Minsk Accords to provide time for Ukraine to build up its military for confrontation with its neighbor. According to Merkel, NATO had no intention of observing either Minsk I or Minsk II.

Additionally, in December of 2021, when Russia offered NATO those terms to prevent the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. refused to even consider the proposal. Two months later, after only one month of Russia’s “Special Military Operation,” and after Ukraine and Russia had initialed accords to ensure the former’s territorial integrity in exchange for neutrality on Ukraine’s part, NATO persuaded its protégé to fight on rather than finalize the accord.

The result of such deceptions has been complete catastrophe for Ukraine. Russia’s strategy of attrition has claimed more than 600,000 lives and seriously wounded 100,000 more. As a result, Ukraine is running out of men, its economy is in freefall, and Russian troops are moving relentlessly westward by kilometers every day. Meanwhile, Russia’s economy is flourishing despite the war generally supported by its citizens. There is no way Ukraine can bring Project Ukraine to a successful conclusion.

Cracks in the Official Story

Up until recently, NATO’s official story held unmovable sway. However, the FA article considered here exhibits important concessions to the unofficial account. For instance, Tenenbaum and Litra admit that: by all accounts Ukraine is losing the war as Russian troops rapidly move towards Kyiv. In fact, it seems nearly impossible to reverse this desperate situation since Ukraine and its allies have not only run short of weapons but also, of soldiers who are getting killed and wounded at unsustainable rates. Additionally, the Russian air force and air defense mechanisms are unmatched by Ukraine. Kremlin’s troops also far outnumber the Ukrainians while using and replacing their weapons at a scale Ukrainian allies cannot match.

In this dire situation, it is time for negotiations on terms NATO (not Russia) must dictate to possibly include: (1) vastly increased and decades-long economic and military aid to Ukraine, (2) a ceasefire that temporarily freezes current positions of both the Russian and Ukrainian front lines, (3) granting Ukraine NATO membership before hostilities cease or postponing the country’s entry into NATO for 10 to 20 years, (4) the deployment of a NATO peacekeeping force to ensure the frozen hostilities, and/or (5) more extensive intervention by multinational NATO land, sea, and air forces to act as a Security Shield or Guarantor Force against future Russian threats.

The problem is however (even for Tanenbaum and Litra) that absent a “significant military defeat or internal political change,” Moscow will never accept such terms, but is likely to insist instead on settling the war on the battlefield.

Nonetheless the authors hold that the Russian president may come to the negotiation table because: his Special Military Operation is unpopular at home. His army has suffered tremendous battlefield losses. His stockpile of Soviet Era weapons is rapidly diminishing. The Russian economy is overheating while public spending, inflation, and interest rates are exploding.

Conclusion

Do you see how the Official Story is weakening and now finds itself on the shakiest of grounds? It has finally made important concessions to its unofficial counterpart. It admits that Ukraine is losing the war, that it is getting weaker, and Russia is getting stronger.

On the other hand, FA’s insistence on the remnants of the Official Story render virtually impossible intelligent discussion of Ukraine’s future. Depending on one’s source of information – mainstream or alternative – it becomes a kind of “he said, she said” debate over details that are becoming increasingly irrelevant. Practically speaking, it matters little now who started the war, who backed out of agreements first, who’s lying, and who’s telling the truth. What matters now are facts on the ground. And all of them favor Russia.

So, given new agreement on the conflict’s inevitable direction, and given the promises of Mr. Trump, it remains unclear why Ukraine would continue sacrificing its soldiers for no good end.

After all, Ukraine lacks leverage in any negotiations that include proposals for Ukrainian inclusion in NATO. Membership now or ten years from now is a non-starter as far as the more powerful Russians are concerned. Russians are in the driver’s seat now and it must be remembered that a major purpose of their SMO was to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO.

Also, it is unclear why Tanenbaum and Litra think that a NATO peacekeeping force would be acceptable to Mr. Putin. Why not China and North Korea?

An Objection to Yesterday’s Post: My Response

Yesterday’s posting evoked a very thoughtful response from a faithful and highly valued reader of this blog. He apparently read my remarks as endorsing the use of nuclear weapons by Russia in response to attacks against that country — attacks supported and directed by the U.S.

I sincerely apologize for giving that impression.

To clarify, let me say the following:

Nuclear weapons are categorically immoral.
No human being (Not Biden, Trump, Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken, Rob Bauer, Vladimir Putin, or Xi Jing Ping) has the right to use (or threaten the use of) nuclear weapons that will cause the end of humanity.
This means that the reigning deterrence agreement between nuclear powers involving “mutually assured destruction” (MAD) is also unquestionably immoral.
Yet unbelievably, many academicians, politicians, moralists, and military leaders praise such deterrence (coupled with disarmament agreements and pacts limiting the number and explosive force of nuclear weapons) as the most effective way of avoiding nuclear war.
As a result (and quite irrationally), MAD represents the status quo that politicians of all the world’s nuclear powers have endorsed. It embodies the tragically accepted “rules of the game.”
Shamefully, NO ONE among world “leaders” speaks (or apparently thinks) beyond the parameters of MAD.
Nor do they evidence a willingness to engage in nuclear disarmament talks or to sign pacts limiting weapons design or deployment. (In fact, the U.S. has unilaterally withdrawn from several previously signed pacts.)
This means that provocations of one nuclear power against another are completely reckless, irresponsible, and insane, since (according to the “rules” of the MAD game) such provocations can easily lead to nuclear response.
More specifically, though the present conflict in Ukraine ostensibly involves a war between Russia and Ukraine, it is clearly a proxy war between the United States and Russia.
Yet U.S. insistence on provoking the nuclear power, Russia, with missile attacks that are impossible without direct logistical, targeting, and ordnance supplied by the United States and other NATO members exposes a level of insanity that would be unprecedented
If it weren’t for the fact that the United States is the only country in the history of the world that has ever actually used nuclear weapons (twice).
In these circumstances, it is Russia led by Vladimir Putin that has shown restraint.
And it is the Biden administration that is engaged in irresponsible escalation.
It is the world’s acceptance of its MAD “leaders” that makes it all (im)possible.

Waiting for Trump with Bated Breath

I never ever thought I’d write these words. But I find myself desperately wishing for the arrival of the Donald Trump presidency. My driving force here is my love for my children and grandchildren. For their sake, Trump’s advent can’t come soon enough. I don’t want them to die in nuclear war.

As I’ve written elsewhere, my hope is not founded in admiration for Mr. Trump. Far from it. I consider the man a moron unfit for the U.S. presidency.

But he seems to be our only hope of avoiding World War III and the end of humanity – an agenda recklessly pursued by the lame duck Biden administration so recently and so decisively rejected by the American electorate.

Have you seen what that old fool is doing? Do you realize the threat his utter stupidity poses to our children and grandchildren?

He’s trying to “Trump-proof” his insane and ill-fated Project Ukraine.

After having repeatedly rejected Russian attempts to resolve the project’s underlying issues (even before Mr. Putin’s invasion), and after more than a million casualties resulting from such obstinacy, Genocide Joe is trying to transform his failed project into World War III.

His “reasoning” seems to be that such transformation would tie Donald Trump’s hands. That is, despite his repeated promises to end the Ukraine War 24 hours after assuming office, the new old fool would find himself obliged to see it through to its suicidal end, thus dooming ourselves, our children and grandchildren.

That’s the problem. The “End” of World War III will be THE END of us all!

For Ukraine!!

It’s all so insane.

To implement the insanity, the senile old man with one foot already in the grave has:

Allowed Ukraine to invade Russia’s Kursk Region
Given Zelensky “permission” to attack targets deep within Russia.
Directly involved the U.S. and its NATO allies in targeting those attacks.
Permitted U.S. military brass to speak of the possibility of direct U.S. “preemptive” strikes against Russian targets.
Allows NATO “allies” to threaten fielding “boots on the ground” in Ukraine which remains the most corrupt government in Europe.

None of this is even remotely necessary.

Imagine U.S. reaction to similar events on our border. Imagine if Russia or China struck an alliance with Mexico or Canada, poured in arms and trained their allies specifically for conflict with the United States. Would the U.S. stand by idly?

Of course it wouldn’t. Of course it didn’t during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

This is not complicated. It’s simply crazy. It represents complete insanity on the part of “leaders” who should be put in jail for even considering such hypocrisy and mass murder. I can’t wait for January 20^th.

Hell, I’m hoping we’ll make it to Christmas!

Post-Election Thoughts on Trump Pro & Con

I’m not yet sure what to think about last Tuesday’s election results. Surprisingly, I find myself ambivalent and guardedly hopeful.

On the one hand, I feel strong foreboding about the Trump victory. I have nothing but painful memories of his last term. It was tough to wake up each day to the crudity, mendacity, stupidity, self-promotion, and sheer ignorance of the man. As a result, like many others, especially at the beginning, I experienced great relief returning to a kind of normalcy under Joe Biden.

But then as that “normalcy” kicked in, I found that horrifying too. Distressingly, there are those billions and billions and billions spent on a war in Ukraine whose reasons were impossible for me to understand. How was Ukraine our concern? I mean, most Americans can’t even find it on the map. Additionally, by all accounts its government is incredibly corrupt. Historically, it has been consistently associated with Nazism. Ukraine seemed far from our business, especially when we have so many problems at home.

I’m referring to huge income gaps between rich and poor, to decaying cities, roads and bridges, low minimum wage, lack of universal health care, college loan indebtedness, rampant homelessness, and incoherent immigration policy. Why did the Biden administration find it so easy to find billions for Ukraine, but not for us and our problems?

Then came the genocide in Gaza! At the very least, it revealed the hypocrisy of Democrats ostensibly concerned with women’s rights, and racism, but supplying weapons to kill mothers and their children in Gaza. Clearly the administration felt differently about Palestinian women and children than about their American or Ukrainian counterparts. Isn’t that sexism? Isn’t that racism? Isn’t it politically suicidal?

Mrs. Harris promised more of the same. During her ineffective campaign she repeatedly refused to distance herself from anything Genocide Joe continues to implement in the Middle East. Doesn’t that make her a genocider too? Of course it does!

But won’t Trump just give us more of the same as well? Probably. But maybe not.

So, to clarify my own ambivalence about Tuesday’s election results, I decided to make a list of Trump’s pros and cons. Here’s how it came out:

Trump’s Negatives

There are so many! But here’s the short list:

In general, he’s crude, superficial, and uninformed.
He’s a pathological liar, e.g., about immigrant crime rates and their eating pets.
His only true accomplishment during his first term was to give gratuitous tax breaks to the world’s richest people.
He totally mishandled the COVID 19 outbreak. As a result, more Americans died than citizens of any other developed country.
His punitive policies against Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba have increased the immigration situation he decries.
More specifically, he repeatedly tried to overthrow the Venezuelan government ridiculously installing U.S. puppet Juan Guaido to replace Nicolas Maduro.
He’s a climate change denier
He’s a champion of the fossil fuel industry’s super polluters.
He exhibits no understanding of the dangers of nuclear war. (Remember his wondering “If we have nuclear weapons, why can’t we use them.”)
Like Biden and Harris, he’s anti-Palestinian and an enthusiastic supporter of Israel’s genocide.
He blames U.S. unemployment and low wages on immigrants and the Chinese rather than on the decisions of his capitalist friends to offshore American jobs.
He thinks that tariffs hurt the Chinese, when they are covert taxes on American consumers, while increasing inflation and funneling the surcharged money to Washington.
He’s disrespectful of women and has been convicted of rape by a jury of his peers
He was a friend of Jeffrey Epstein.
He encouraged the January 6, 2021, assault on our nation’s capital.
He’s likely to incorporate into his administration neanderthals like Mike Pompeo and Marco Rubio.

Trump’s Positives

Believe it or not, there are a few. Here’s the longest list I can think of:

Trump’s disliked and vilified by the Washington establishment and the mainstream media. (Indicating that he can’t be all that bad).
His landslide election has exposed widespread discontent with the economic and political status quo.
He’s a loose cannon. He and his MAGA followers form the closest thing to the third party that America requires.
His “party” has succeeded in uniting large swaths of previously hopelessly polarized population segments who somehow realize that they have more in common with each other than what drives them apart – including women, African Americans, and Hispanics.
He promises to incorporate into his administration anti-big-pharma, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., war critic, Tulsi Gabbard, and Putin interviewer Tucker Carlson.
He’s willing to negotiate an end to the Ukrainian war.
He’s highly skeptical of NATO.
His vice-president is J.D. Vance has been described by Robert Barnes as “the most war skeptical and pro-labor Republican office holder in the last 50 years.”
Beyond that and unlike the Biden administration, he’s proven willing to dialog and “deal” with America’s designated enemies including North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
He promises to open sealed government documents (and their can of worms) on the JFK assassination.
And (most importantly) his election may drive neo-con Democrats to repudiate their efforts to out-Republican Republicans and to reappropriate their identity as Roosevelt New Dealers.

Conclusion

Well, there you have it – the pros and cons of Trump’s triumph as I see it. What do you think? Am I being naïve and too optimistic? Am I whistling past the graveyard? Can you add to my lists? Do you care to refute my reasoning?

The Elections, the Assassination Attempt: Such a Joke!

As they say, if it weren’t so tragic, it would be laughable. I mean, they’re trying to make us believe that the upcoming election is (once again!) “the most important in our lifetime.”

What a joke! Yesterday morning New York Times editors wrote about how “centrism works,” and how important it is to avoid “radicalisms” of both the left and the right – as if in this country ANY politician represents left radicalism.

Truth is, they’re all either center right or extreme right. There is no “left” in this country.

None at all.

Face it: we’re governed by a Uni-Party. Everybody knows that. There’s hardly a sliver of daylight between Trump and (I guess) Harris. Certainly not between Biden and Trump. They’re all perpetrators of genocide. They’re all warmongers. All of them!

Oh, I suppose there’s some separation on the irrelevancies our system identifies as important: abortion, gay rights, immigration, and “wokeness” (whatever that means). Yes, in the face of genocide all those issues are trivial! Genocide eclipses everything else.

But the candidates won’t touch the real matter. Check out yesterday’s Times. They listed the issues facing Ms. Harris. Not a mention of the genocide in Gaza. Nothing about the war in Ukraine and why there are billions and billions and billions and billions and billions for that, but no money for what Americans really care about: higher wages, inflation reduction, universal healthcare, free college tuition, debt cancellation, climate change, low-cost public housing, or elimination of nuclear weapons. Not a word.

Neither does anyone explain why Joe Biden is not up to campaigning, but he’s still president. It seems the old man’s still somehow “in charge,” though everyone knows that’s never been the case. Obviously, they’ve been lying about his mental capacities for years. (They didn’t just discover it during the Trump debate.) But they continued to lie about it till a few days ago!

And now they expect us to believe they’re telling the truth. Don’t worry: they really do care about us. And Genocide Joe is really a nice grandfatherly humanitarian. And that Kamala. You go, girl!!

Of course Biden’s a liar; always has been. He’s a murderer straight up. And so is Harris. – and all those old white men who repeatedly jumped to applaud Benjamin Netanyahu when he addressed Congress last week. It’s all disgraceful.

I can’t vote for any perpetrators of genocide. Which means I can’t participate in the upcoming election.

And as for assassination attempt on Donald Trump? Do you see the hypocrisy as the whole thing is swept under the rug?

I mean, Imagine if a major political opponent of Vladimir Putin were shot and wounded while campaigning on stage. There is no doubt that the IMMEDIATE conclusion of “our” MSM would be PUTIN DID IT.

No wait and see. No waiting for an independent investigation. Just ridicule of any call for an inquiry especially if it were carried out under the aegis of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB).

Such inquiry would be dismissed as a joke, since like its predecessor, the KGB, the FSB could never be trusted to reach truthful conclusions.

You KNOW that’s true, don’t you?

In fact, that’s what happened when a minor Russian political figure called Alexy Navalny (who in no way threatened Putin’s continued presidency) died in prison last February. No sooner was his death announced than a firm conclusion was drawn, Putin did it.

The same thing happened last August, when another of Putin’s opponents, Yevgeny Prigozhin died in a helicopter crash. The wreckage was still smoldering when the press identified President Putin as the one responsible.

But why do I bring that up?

It’s because over here, any public expressions of suspicions involving the Biden administration around the Trump shooting are automatically dismissed as conspiratorial – if they’re even mentioned.

Yes, we’re told, there were inexplicable lapses on the part of the Secret Service surrounding Mr. Trump. But virtually no one even hints that the Biden administration, the CIA, the FBI, or the Secret Service was behind it.

Do you think those agencies are somehow above and beyond such assassination attempts? Do you think we can trust them to investigate themselves? Remember what ex-CIA chief Mike Pompeo confessed (and laughed about it): “We lie; we cheat; we steal; we take entire courses about how to do it.”

But no, after every assassination attempt (John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, George Wallace, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Ronald Reagan, Martin Luther King . . .) it’s the same story. No conspiracy or government involvement. Nothing to see here. Just a lone wolf and all kinds of unanswered questions in documents that won’t be released for another 50 years.

“But trust us: our three-letter agencies will get to the bottom of it. Just don’t worry your pretty little head about that.”

It’s all so corrupt. Such a joke. I just can’t take it seriously.

The Fundamental Difference between the U.S. and China

Why is the United States so anti-Chinese? Why all this Sinophobia?

It’s because of the basic difference between China and the U.S. that virtually none of our basically ignorant “leaders” — much less the mainstream media — seems to understand. Let me explain.

On the one hand, you have the United States. It’s leading a coalition of overwhelmingly white European colonialists who with less than 25% of the world’s population think they somehow have the right to control the entire world. In this context, the U.S. with 4.2% of the population considers itself the leader that can dictate terms to the other 95.8% of the world, including those Europeans whom it has successfully and surprisingly reduced to the status of obedient and subservient vassals.

In its position as world hegemon that alone emerged unscathed from the ravages of World War II (aka the second Intercapitalist war) the U.S. has decided to maintain control the world militarily. As a result, it annually invests more of its national treasure in war and preparation for war than the next nine countries combined (including China and Russia). A huge proportion of that treasure is spent on maintaining more than 750 military bases in more than 80 countries across the planet.

U.S. bases represent a key element in our country’s neo-colonial strategy aimed at controlling the Global Majority (i.e. former colonies) by regime-change interventions. These interventions have the United States removing from office any governments seeking to directly improve the lives of their citizens by redistributing income, or by providing healthcare, education, or other benefits and laws directly benefitting working classes rather than the wealthy and corporate interests. Since the 1950s, the world has witnessed such interventions in Iran, Guatemala, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua, Iraq, Venezuela, Libya, and other locations too numerous to list here.

Yes, regime changes benefit the rich and powerful. However, in terms of directly benefitting you and me, those operations and the bases that support them contribute virtually nothing. Yes, they keep millions of military personnel off the streets as well as providing jobs for those working in weapons manufacturing plants. However, the bases and forever wars they stimulate are otherwise completely counterproductive.

For instance, over the past two years, Washington has spent $175 billion on its proxy war in Ukraine which according to Lloyd Austin is aimed at regime change in Russia. That means $175 billion not spent on universal healthcare, not funding college tuition, not providing improvements in infrastructure, not spent on highspeed rail or on mitigating the effects of climate change. All of us can see the results in our decaying urban centers with homeless beggars sleeping on sidewalks and in tents under our bridges.

In other words, overseas military bases are completely parasitic. They live off the rest of us devouring the nutrients that would otherwise sustain and improve our quality of life. Internationally, their purpose is to maintain “stability” in a world where power and wealth have since WWII been concentrated in the U.S. and Europe – the imperial countries that have controlled the world for the past half-millennium. It’s a world of billionaires on the one hand and grinding poverty on the other – especially in the former colonies.

Contrast this U.S. parasitism with the policies of China. As indicated above, China spends far less than the United States on its military. China maintains but a single military base outside its borders. It hasn’t fired a bullet beyond those confines over the last 40 years.

Instead of investing in bloodsucking military bases, China maintains what might be described as development nodes across the planet. Over the past decade and more, its “Belt and Road Initiative” has constructed highways, ports, electrical grids, and highspeed rail systems across Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America from Beijing to Tierra del Fuego. And those installations have vastly improved the lives of ordinary people wherever they appear – including those of the Chinese people themselves. As everyone knows, China was recently recognized by the United Nations as successfully raising more than 800,000 of its own citizens from extreme poverty.

What I’m describing here is the rebalancing of the world. Led by China, the planet’s majority is asserting the power that belongs to it in terms of population, which by the way is not white. China has about 18.5% of the world’s population; Africa has about the same; India has slightly more. All those non-white people are rebelling against the humiliation of control by the whites who have drawn completely arbitrary borders. That’s legendary in Africa and the Mid-East where colonizers in their tents drew lines on maps arbitrarily cutting up Africa and all that Mid-East desert land floating on a sea of oil. And they did so with virtually no knowledge of the countries, cultures, and populations they were dividing.

Accordingly, the non-white victims of such ignorance are currently refusing to honor such geographical restrictions. Under pressures from climate change (induced by the colonizers) and by the absolute decimation of western regime-change wars, the victims of such policies are relocating massively. And they won’t be stopped by walls, laws, or border patrols – and much less by ignorant nativist arguments. Yes, people of color are here to stay. Get used to it. Trump or no Trump, they will not be denied.

It’s a new multi-polar world. It’s time has come. It is long overdue. My only fear is that the “leaders” of the collective west might find the loss of hegemony so threatening that they’ll decide to end the world by initiating a nuclear war. They’ve thought about this before. Remember “It’s better to be dead than red?”

Their new line seems to be: “It’s better to be dead than not in complete control.”

God help us!

U.S. Divide & Rule Strategy vs. China’s Unifying Belt & Road Initiative

Readings for Pentecost Sunday: Genesis 11: 1-9; Psalm 104: 1-2, 24, 35, 27-30; Romans 8: 22-27; Acts 2: 1-11.

Last week Russia’s Vladimir Putin got the red-carpet treatment when he and virtually his entire government leadership met with Xi Jingping and his governing counterparts for a two-day summit in Beijing.

The collective west was apoplectic in response.

What were these two villains up to? Surely, they’re conspiring to take over the world.

The Washington Post fretted about connections between Russia and China on the one hand and with Iran and North Korea on the other.

But of course, what transpired last week in China is far bigger than any of that. It’s not just a worrisome alliance between the countries just mentioned. Ultimately, it’s a question of pacts between China, Russia, and the entire Global South (aka the Global Majority) that’s now taking practical form in BRICS+. And the threat there is not primarily military. It’s economic.

It’s the fearful (to the west) specter of a world order of cooperation, mutual benefit, and majority rule replacing that of western neocolonial empire with its ancient “divide and rule” tactics.

In the context of this Pentecost Sunday homily, you might even call such replacement “spiritual,” “biblical,” or (yes) “Pentecostal.”

Let me show you what I mean by elucidating what the west can’t understand about Russia and China’s shared project, about the difference between that project and the one favored by the collective west, and finally about the connections between all of that and today’s readings for this Pentecost Sunday.

The Project of the Collective West

What the collective west cannot understand about China is that its worldview is radically different from its own.

Especially since the Reagan-Thatcher era, the west has returned to the Hobbesian and social Darwinian superstition that human beings are primarily individuals constantly at one another’s throats.

They’ve become convinced that humans are basically selfish and locked in a “war of all against all.” Hence, “forever wars” are normal and the best we can do.

Westerners have also come to believe that government is somehow the enemy, that its size must be reduced to such an extent that it (as Grover Norquist said) can be drowned in a bathtub. This means that market regulation and taxation must be reduced to a minimum.

Even more importantly, the prevailing western belief system holds that its somehow natural and divinely ordained that just 4.2% of the world’s population (i.e. the United States) should run the world. White people are exceptional. In traditional terms, the DICTATORSHIP of the collective west’s bourgeoisie (of the G7) is part of the natural order.

As a result, any threat to such hegemony must be crushed.

Westerners take all that as self-evident truth forgetting that IT’S JUST A POINT OF VIEW – that btw happens to perfectly support huge wealth disparities and favorable profit margins of the military industrial complex. They forget that there are alternatives – other viewpoints that happen to be working far better than the positions just listed.

The Project of Russia and China

And that brings us back to Beijing.

China, Russia, and the Global Majority have a different approach to political economy. And virtually no one in the west gets it.

And it is here that China leads the way. It is led by a workers’ party that as such seeks to replace the “divide and rule” dictatorship of the bourgeoisie with the leadership of working classes and their political representatives.

This simply means that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP} aspires to walk a fine line that prioritizes the welfare of the majority over that of corporations, billionaires, and of a state entirely beholden to their interests. The CCP has the final word. It protects local currency. Without stifling private enterprise, it protects its majority from the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

Accordingly, the CCP for example easily exercises eminent domain to advance projects (e.g. high-speed rail) deemed necessary to serve the common good. The CCP recognizes and suppresses as “corruption” egregious exercise of power on the part of the billionaire classes.

In short, Chinese political theory rejects “divide and rule” in favor of common good, multi-polarity, national sovereignties, and international cooperation. It seeks a world with room for everyone, with abundance for all, and where independent nations trade freely for mutual benefit. It is a world governed by international law directed by the United Nations. That’s the vision of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

Pie in the sky, you say?

Not really. Witness China’s success in eliminating extreme poverty in record time. Witness the success of its Belt and Road initiative. Witness all the countries lining up to join BRICS +.

For China, the west’s “divide and rule” gives way to multipolarity and cooperation. In contrast to the United States’ forever wars and its 700 military bases throughout the world, China hasn’t fired a shot outside its borders in more than 40 years and has only one military base outside its borders.

Today’s Readings
And that brings us to the readings for this Pentecost Sunday. They too contrast “divide and rule” strategies with those of mutual understanding.

What follows are my “translations” of the readings. Check out the originals here to see if I’ve got them right.

Genesis 11: 1-9: So, you think the “divide and rule” principle came from the Romans? If so, you’re wrong. “Divide and rule” came from the mysterious “Powerful Ones” (the biblical Elohim) who once ruled this earth. Where they came from no one knows. Perhaps from another planet or from all those leagues under the sea. In any case, they were terribly threatened by the humans they needed to supply them with the beef, gold and young virgins. (Powerful Ones always seem to require those.) So, when the Elohim saw humans cooperating to build cities with skyscrapers reaching to the heavens, the Powerful Ones intervened. They somehow made it impossible for people to understand each other. Suddenly they were divided into incomprehensible language groups. Ever since, other Powerful Ones (yes, like the Romans and the “Americans”) have aggressively adopted their own “divide and rule” strategies. They invent borders along with cultural, religious, and racial identities to keep humans apart lest they discover the immense power of universal cooperation.

Psalm 104: 1-2, 24, 35, 27-30: Far from dividing humans, Yahweh’s Great Spirit wills a New Earth whose creatures share the same breath and live in complete harmony, not division. Yahweh’s earth provides abundance for all including food and every good thing imaginable. Everything belongs to humans as a gift from Yahweh. She is indeed to be praised.

Romans 8: 22-27: This abundant Spirit of God is on our side as we earthlings struggle to replace the results of the Powerful Ones’ “divide and rule” strategies with God’s New Earth and its abundance for all. That shared plenty is what we’re all hoping for even though it’s hard to see in this purposely divided world. Resist! Be strong! Believe! Hope! God’s New Earth is possible! Another world is on the horizon. It is necessary.

Acts 2: 1-11: Fifty days after Yeshua’s assassination, his Spirit of community replaced the Elohim’s “divide and rule” scheme. With the descent of Yeshua’s Spirit, all language barriers vanished. Parthians, Medes, and Elamites, inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the districts of Libya near Cyrene, as well as travelers from Rome, both Jews and converts to Judaism, Cretans and Arabs, all understood that they shared a single Spirit uniting them all. They vowed to resume building the City of God –TOGETHER.

Conclusion

Yes, today’s readings suggest that China, Russia, and the Global Majority represented by BRICS + are on the right track. The United States and the collective West are not.

If Planet Earth is to survive, something like China’s approach to government, national sovereignty, common good, abundance for all, international cooperation, and multipolarity must replace Hobbes, social darwinism, forever wars, minority dominance, and divide and rule.

Ironically, the CCP is closer to the spirit of Pentecost than the “Christian” west.

Tucker Carlson’s Interview with Vladimir Putin

Last Tuesday, ex-Fox News journalist, Tucker Carlson, interviewed Russian president Vladimir Putin. Their conversation lasted more than two hours.

Predictably, The New Yorker described the exchange as “boring.” Times Radio published a video whose clickbait title promised “Putin’s most insane moments in Tucker Carlson interview.” (See video above.)

For me, there was nothing at all “boring” about the exchange. Quite the opposite. Neither was there even a single moment of insanity during the entire conversation.

Instead, Putin came across as an extremely well-informed, historically conscious, careful, and measured diplomat. There was no name-calling, evasion of questions, talking over, or defensiveness. The Russian president showed himself to be calm, thoughtful, respectful of confidentiality, and willing to negotiate and compromise. As well, he often exhibited a subtle sense of humor.

Those were the same characteristics I found manifested during his four hours of published interviews with award winning filmmaker, Oliver Stone. I reviewed those dialogs just after the war in Ukraine started. I did so on May 8^th, 2022, and entitled the review: “OK, I’m a Putin Apologist: Here’s Why.”

I stand by the judgments expressed there. In fact, I double down on them. I simply can’t imagine ANY of our politicians holding a candle to Mr. Putin. While he’s calm, they are extremely emotional; they call names like “thug” “dictator,” and “useful idiot.” While he’s thoughtful, they speak in pre-rehearsed “talking points.” They evade questions and tell blatant lies. While Putin is respectful of confidentiality, our politicians make up calumnies. While Putin is willing to negotiate and compromise, they’ll have none of it. And they are so deadly serious without a scintilla of humor.

In fact, after listening to Putin, I’m forced to draw the conclusion that our politicians are not serious people. They’re uninformed and have no sense of real history.

Just think of this year’s presidential candidates. One is a doddering old man who can hardly put two coherent sentences together unless read off a teleprompter. (And by the way, he could also easily qualify as an unindicted co-conspirator in a case of genocide. That’s why they call him “genocide Joe.”) The other is a convicted sexual assailant and Know-Nothing who seems proud of both identities.

Again, they’re not serious people. Yet they aspire to lead what they call “the most powerful nation in the world.” Both belong in prison.

So, with all that in mind, allow me to republish what I wrote about President Putin nearly two years ago.

OK, I’m A Putin Apologist: Here’s Why

Recently, on “Democracy Now,” Amy Goodman interviewed a Yale history professor, Timothy Snyder, about the Ukraine War. He was commenting on his New Yorker article“The War in Ukraine is a Colonial War.”

That was his argument: As if we had to guess Putin’s end game in Ukraine, the good professor opined that it probably is to annex Ukraine and afterwards who knows what other country. Putin’s an imperialist, Snyder charged. Like Hitler, he’s after land and soil.

The colonizer must therefore be stopped, Dr. Snyder concluded, and be brought by force of arms to acknowledge Russia’s total defeat. Turning just war theory on its head, Snyder’s point came across as: war is the first resort; negotiation comes only after your enemy has been militarily defeated and is forced to accept the winner’s terms without reservation.

That kind of support for what has prevailed in America as “the official story,” especially coming from a fellow academic who should know better, struck a fraying nerve within me. I mean, to my understanding, it’s not the function of academics (nor for that matter, of news media such as “Democracy Now”) to lend support to the approved narrative. It is rather to test the received account against documented reality.

So, I decided to find out once and for all (1) who Vladimir Putin is, (2) the detailed background of the Ukraine conflict, and (3) what the Russian president’s intention might be in his “special military operation.”

No need, I found, to speculate on any of that. It’s all quite well recorded – for instance (1) in Oliver Stone‘s four interviews (each an hour long) with the Russian president, (2) in the film “Ukraine on Fire” (counterpointed by “Winter on Fire”), and (3) in Putin’s two long pre-war speeches (one delivered last February 21^st, the other just after on February 24^th).

Reviewing that material quite carefully has convinced me that as a national leader, Putin stands head and shoulders above any others I can think of. His reasons for initiating his “special operation” are defensible historically, legally, and according to U.S. precedent.

Putin as Statesman

Before mounting the “Putin Bad” bandwagon, be sure to view Oliver Stone’s “The Putin Interviews” on Showtime. They’re the product of 12 conversations between Stone and Mr. Putin over two and a half years between July 2015 and February 2017.

I found the interviews revealing a man who is difficult to dislike. He is charming and humorous. He drives his own car, is a judo enthusiast, plays hockey, and rides horses. He describes himself as a “cautious optimist” who believes, he says, “there is always hope until the day they put you in the ground.”

Born into a working-class family in 1952, his father was wounded in what Russians call “The Great Patriotic War,” when the United States and the USSR were allies against Nazi Germany.

From an early age, young Vladimir studied judo, whose practice, he says, summarizes his theory of life: be flexible and disciplined; think ahead. (For political leaders, he adds, that means planning 25 to 50 years into the future).

Movies and books made Putin, who studied law in the university, an admirer of the KGB as a patriotic organization. He joined up and was assigned to East Germany. Life there, he remembers, was not dismal, but “frozen in the 1950s.”

Then came Mikhail Gorbachev‘s presidency (March 1990 – Dec. 25, 1991). Gorbachev’s “reforms” made everything fall apart. (Putin does not particularly admire him.) Social programs were destroyed. Millions lost their previously guaranteed rights and fell into poverty. Oligarchs criminally seized property belonging to the Russian people and became instant billionaires. Overnight, 25 million people lost their nationality and became displaced.

Though opposed to communism, Lenin, and Stalin, Putin recalls that succession of events “one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20^th century.” The country moved towards civil war.

Gorbachev was succeeded by Boris Yeltsin (in office 1991-1999). Before the latter’s resignation, he unexpectedly chose the relatively unknown Vladimir Putin as acting prime minister. Later that year (2000), Putin was elected president with 53% of the vote. He recalls his major accomplishments as bringing the oligarchs more under control and cutting the poverty rate by two-thirds.

As a result, Putin was re-elected in 2004 with 70% of the votes cast. Russia’s constitution forbade his running again in 2008, so he served as prime minister under President Dmitry Medvedev (2008-2012). Putin ran again for president in 20012 and won with 63% of the vote.

As for charges that on his watch, Russia’s system is “authoritarian,” Putin calls for historical perspective. He points out that Russia was a monarchy for 1000 years. Then came what he refers to as “the so-called revolution of 1917” followed by dictatorship under Stalin and his successors until the 1990s. In view of such history, it is unreasonable, Putin observes, to expect Russia’s attempts at democracy to rise to the levels of the United States, Germany, or France in such a short time.

Though a survivor of five assassination attempts and criticized mercilessly by the West’s politicians and press, Putin refuses to respond in kind. For instance, Arizona senator John McCain called him “a killer, butcher, thug, and KGB colonel.” Putin replies, “We could make similar comparisons, but due to the level of our political culture, we abstain from extreme statements.” Instead, Putin consistently refers to the U.S. government at “our friends,” and “our partners,”

“Actually,” he adds, “I admire Senator McCain, because of his patriotism.”

Ukraine

Of course, Oliver Stone’s “Putin Interviews” came long before the present crisis in Ukraine. So, for perspective here, let me turn to President Putin’s speech of February 21, 2022, where he laid out the history of the conflict, as well as to his speech of February 24^th, the day his “special military operation” began.

Both addresses were substantial, each lasting more than an hour. Commentary shows that few in the West have read the speeches. (The earlier-referenced film “Ukraine on Fire,” also contains information mirroring what the Russian president said.)

Here’s the way Vladimir Putin tells the story:

The conflict in Ukraine takes place between people who share a history, culture, and spiritual space. They are comrades, colleagues, friends, relatives, and family members.
Ukraine was always part of Russia. Its modern form as a state was created by the Bolsheviks.
Both the Russian Empire and the USSR always found it difficult to control their colonies and federated states.
Beginning in 1922, Stalin did so by complete repression.
In the 1980s, the nationalist ambitions of local elites resurfaced, supported by some factions of the Communist Party.
By 1989, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) conceded sovereignty to its federated states (including Ukraine).
Russia was then pillaged by its own oligarchs, while it continued to economically support states like Ukraine.
Ukraine suffered similar pillage at the hands of its oligarchs who began allying themselves with western powers.
Those same Ukrainian officials allowed Russophobe Neo-Nazi nationalists to arise who supported terrorists in Chechnya and laid new claims to Russian territories.
They terrorized Russian-speaking Ukrainians including politicians, activists, and journalists (eventually burning alive peaceful protestors in Odessa).
All these events, eventually led to the Maidan Coup (2014) supported by the United States with $1million per day.
With corrupt leaders in charge, Ukraine is now run from western capitals as a neo-colony.
As such, the west threatens to introduce nuclear weapons into Ukraine while flooding it with conventional arms and conducting constant military exercises aimed at Russia.
Ukraine’s application for NATO membership represents a further direct threat to Russia’s national security.
Russia has appealed for dialog, peace talks, and negotiations, but its appeals have been ignored by the United States which refuses to countenance the existence of any independent country, especially one as large as Russia.
Accords between Russia and Ukraine that have been signed (an apparent reference to the Minsk agreements) have been transgressed by Kyiv.
This leaves Moscow with no other choice but to take measures to protect its own interests.
It will begin by coming to the rescue of the Donbass region which has been under constant attack by Kyiv since 2014 (with more than 14,000 lives lost).
Russia therefore recognizes the sovereignty of Donetsk and Lugansk as “People’s Republics.”

Putin’s Justifications

Reviewing the bullet points just noted along with additional justifications advanced three days later in a similar speech, show that at least according to U.S. logic, Vladimir Putin’s action in Ukraine is completely justified.

Together with additional information garnered from the film “Ukraine on Fire,” Putin’s own words show that he clearly recognizes that Ukraine was given sovereignty by the USSR in 1989. He has no intention (pace, Professor Snyder) of refusing to recognize the country’s existence or of colonizing or occupying it militarily.

As affirmed in his speech of February 24^th, the Russian president states his focused intention as protecting his country from a clear, present, and illegal threat represented by NATO’s expansion right up to Russia’s borders despite:

Ukraine’s constitutional prohibition against the establishment of foreign military bases on the country’s soil
The accords of the Organization for Security Interests in Europe (OSCE)
As well as the de-escalating provisions of two Minsk Accords.

Since appeals for negotiation and dialog have been ignored, Putin’s only option, he claims, is military self-defense and rescue of the citizens of Donbass who have appealed to Russia for help in a war which has already taken many thousands of lives.

With all this in mind, Putin declares his intention in Ukraine as restricted to the following goals:

Protecting Donetsk and Luhansk from what he sees as genocide perpetrated there by the Ukrainian Nazi Azov regiment largely responsible for Kyiv’s aggression in Donbass since 2014
Bringing to justice those responsible for the massacres
Denazifying and destroying the Ukrainian army in the process.

To repeat: those goals are clearly limited. The Russian president completely denies an intention or ability to occupy Ukraine which is a sovereign state.

Moreover, all of this is in accord with U.S. doctrine and policy. For instance, just last week when the Solomon Islands (7000 miles distant from the U.S.) announced an intention of signing a security agreement with China, the U.S. threatened military response, on grounds that such agreement threatened its national interests.

Case closed.

Conclusion

According to the word’s definition, an “apologist” is “a person who offers an argument in defense of something controversial.” It refers to one who defends another from what s/he considers an unjust attack. In the name of even handedness, respect for documentary evidence, and historical fact, that’s the role I’ve attempted to assume here.

Considering such factors , I personally have concluded that Alexander Putin has been defamed. He is no Hitler. He is not insane. He is acting according to the “rules based order” long established and acted upon by U.S. presidents in a whole series of wars that have contravened international law and led to the needless deaths of millions of innocent people.

That is to say that Putin no worse than any U.S. president you care to name. As Chomsky points out (see video above), all of them have committed war crimes far worse than Putin’s – mostly without attempting the detailed justifications found in the Russian president’s extended statements. America’s posture towards the Solomon Islands makes the point.

That’s why I’ve turned into a Putin apologist who hopes for Russia’s success in resisting U.S. aggression at its border that (according to Professor Snyder’s logic) will force Biden and NATO to the negotiation table. But don’t hold your breath. There are still Ukrainian proxies available for cannon fodder.