War in Ukraine

It appears to me that nobody planned to live up to these Minsk agreements… They [the participants] lied to us, and the only reason for these processes was to pump Ukraine up with weapons and get it ready for military action. Well, we can see that. Maybe we were too late to realize what was happening. Maybe this [the war] should have been started earlier," Putin, Putin disappointed by Merkel’s words about Minsk agreements, Yahoo News

What the former German leader stated tears down the last remaining bit of the “friendly” mask some Western countries put on with Russia. […] Merkel’s confession about the Minsk agreements also showed that some Western countries, particularly the US, do not honor contractual obligations at all. They can go back on their words so easily, Real intention behind Minsk agreements further destroys credibility of the West, Global Times.

CAUSES

Whether you agree or not, there is not a Russian's unprovoked and unjustified attack on Ukraine, there are always reasons behind everything. The main reasons are as follows:

• NATO expansion to the east despite having signed an agreement in the 90s that NATO will not expand an inch to the East.

  Since 1949, NATO’s membership has increased from 12 to 32 countries through 10 rounds of enlargement. Sweden became the latest country to join the Alliance on 7 March 2024, NATO’s Webpage.

   
• Ukraine’s refusal to implement the Minsk agreements. German ex-chancellor Angela Merkel’s revelation that the Minsk agreements were only signed to give Ukraine time to muster up military strength is clearly seen by Russia and its allies as a clear confirmation that Western power deals are not worth the paper they're written on: “The 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give Ukraine time”, German’s former Chancellor of Germany, Merkel told the weekly Die Zeit. “Since 2014, Ukraine has strengthened its military posture. It is the merit of the Minsk Agreements to have given the Ukrainian Army this opportunity,” France’s former president, Francois Hollande.
• The 2014 far-right coup d’état in Kiev, Ukraine. It overthrew the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych and installed a puppet pro-Western regime on the borders of Russia. It marked the beginning of the systematic transformation of Ukraine’s military into what is essentially a proxy army of the NATO alliance.
• All empires have a sphere of influence. As for the USA, the Monroe Doctrine dictates that the western hemisphere is “our backyard” and warns other world powers from meddling in the Western Hemisphere. The Cuban missile crisis was a confrontation that brought the United States and the Soviet Union very close to war when American deployments of missiles in Italy and Turkey were matched by Soviet deployments of similar ballistic missiles in Cuba.

  To defuse the worsening crisis, the Kennedy administration agreed to dismantle the U.S. missile sites in Turkey but at a later date to safe face.

  
   
• NATO’s arming of Ukraine to the teeth, Zelenskyy’s campaign against “Russian agents in Ukraine”, and the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO.

The state of the art

1. Anyone who suggests that NATO expansion could have been a contributing factor to the current Ukraine crisis, or that the sanctions imposed on Russia are not working and have backfired on a soon-to-be-shivering Europe, or even that the U.S. must prioritize avoiding a world war with a nuclear-armed Russia, is denounced as a Putin stooge, Woke War III - The Deadly Neocon-Left Alliance, ZeroHedge.
2. European Officials Find No Evidence Russia Sabotaged Nord Stream Pipelines, Democracy Now!.
3. FBI says it routinely notifies social media companies of “potential threats.”
4. “It is almost surely Ukraine is shelling the (Zaporizhzhia) power plant and we can’t bring ourselves to express a simple truth and that hurts because they continue to shell the power plant with impunity,” Jeffrey Sachs.

   Burning tires at Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant? It cannot be more ridiculous than that!

5. A completely distorted vision of reality where there is a lack of understanding of today’s multipolar world, e.g., China and India are buying sweet heavily discounted Russian crude oil and natural gas, so a G-7 price cap is not going to work; BRICS is becoming a defining force shaping the new international political and economic order; and China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other countries are threatening the petrodollar hegemony by trading using their own currencies.
6. High inflation, unemployment, debt/GDP ratios and asset prices, and a large public sector.
7. A systematic de-industrialization of Europe. Futhermore, the decline is accelerating as competitiveness is eroding. Persistently high energy prices, initially triggered by failed energy policies and amplified by the war in Ukraine, an over-regulated economy, disrupted supply chains, increasing geopolitical tensions between the West and China, and a demographic cliff that will leave their companies without the engineers, scientists, and other highly skilled workers they need to stay competitive.
8. The destruction of national identity, the undermining of traditional values. High, persistent, and scandalous inequality, and specially broken families and societies. The rate of divorce and broken homes is always rising in a world where materialism, hedonism, nihilism, moral relativism, individualism, and violence are spreading like wildfire.
9. Russia is not weak. It is not losing either. Russia is not running out of troops or weapons. This assertion is nothing but a gross fraud. It may be pleasurable to indulge in this delusion, but reality is a stubborn thing. “Instead of a decisive battle achieved through rapid manoeuvre, attritional war focuses on destroying enemy forces and their ability to regenerate combat power, while preserving one’s own,” Rusi.org.
10. Propaganda and censorship are running wild, e.g., Julian Assange, RT (YouTube), arresting Durov (Telegram), EU menacing letter to Musk, Tulsi under flight surveillance, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s ‘prebunking’ proposal (an attempt to police legitimate speech), and West narratives, e.g., Russia’s war in Ukraine was “unprovoked”.
11. The West is in an economic death spiral. An expanding BRICS marks The Global South’s Coming of Age.
12. The risk of miscalculation is constantly increasing: “Biden secretly gave Ukraine permission to strike inside Russia with U.S. weapons,” Politico. China and Russia declared a “no limits” partnership in February 2022. Russia and North Korea commit to mutual military treaty.

Bibliography

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