Except for the neoconservatives whose agenda it is, I sometimes wonder if I am the only other person who understands what the Ukraine conflict is about.

In 2007 Washington declared war on Russia without announcing it. Putin provoked Washington’s secret declaration of war when he rejected Washington’s uni-polar hegemony at the Munich Security Conference.

Washington’s first attack was a year later when, while Putin was distracted at the Beijing Olympics, Washington sent a US trained and equipped Georgian army into South Ossetia. The purpose was not to defeat Russia militarily. Instead, it was a calculated risk that Putin might stand down and to avoid a military conflict that the West could misrepresent as restoring the Soviet Empire, and allow the Russian protectorate to be absorbed into Georgia. The American neoconservatives were gambling with lives not their own that Putin and thereby Russia would be weakened by giving in, thus opening more paths of aggression against Russia.

The neoconservatives’ plot against Putin might have worked except the Georgian invaders killed Russian peace-keepers. In 2008 Putin was trying to resurrect Russian pride, which was lost with the Soviet collapse 1991, and could not turn his back on dead Russian soldiers in South Ossetia. He returned from China, sent in an army, and smashed the US trained and equipped Georgian army in 5 days.

All of Georgia, a province of the Soviet Union until 1991, was in Putin’s hands. The Western propaganda is that Putin is dangerous because he intends to recover the Soviet empire. Obviously, this is a lie, because Putin pulled the Russian army out and left Georgia an independent state.

Following the US neoconservative’s failure in South Ossetia, which they mischaracterized as a “Russian invasion of Georgia,” the neoconservatives began pouring billions of dollars into Ukraine in order to create cadres, NGOs, and purchased politicians that would support the “Maidan Revolution,” which was Washington’s overthrow of the democratically elected government of Ukraine that was living in profitable peace with Russia.

Again Putin was inattentive, this time distracted by the Sochi Olympics, and this time he did nothing. It is unclear why Putin allowed Ukraine to become Washington’s puppet state hostile to Russia and a candidate for NATO.

The neo-Nazi state that Washington created began a number of operations against the Russian population in Donbas. The use of the Russian language was banned. Russians were accosted and killed in the streets by bands of Stepan Bandera’s followers. (Bandara fought for Nazi Germany against Russia during World War II.)

The Russian parts of Ukraine, Donbas and Crimea, which were separated from Russia by Lenin and Khrushchev, asked Putin to protect them by re-admitting them to Russia. Putin accepted Crimea’s request as the Russian Black Sea naval base is in Crimea, but Putin refused the requests from Donbas, which had formed into two independent republics to protect themselves from slaughter by the Ukrainian army. Putin, always cautious, was advised that if he accepted Donbass he would give credence to Western propaganda that Russia was restoring the Soviet Empire.

Nevertheless, Putin knew he had to do something to protect the Donbas Russians. He concocted the Minsk Agreement. The Minsk Agreement kept Donbas as part of Ukraine, but gave the territory some autonomy, such as its own police and courts, to prevent persecution by Washington’s puppet in Kiev.

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The leaders of Belarus, Russia, Germany, France, and Ukraine at the 11–12 February 2015 summit in Minsk, Belarus (Licensed under CC BY 4.0)

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Kiev and the two Donbas republics signed the Minsk agreement, and Germany and France promised to enforce it. Believing that the West had integrity, Putin was taken for a ride. Both the German Chancellor and French President later publicly admitted that they deceived Putin for eight years while Washington built and equipped a strong Ukrainian Army capable of conquering the two break-away republics in Donbas.

When during December 2021 and February 2022 Putin and Lavrov’s efforts to secure a mutual defense agreement between Russia and the West were met with extremely cold shoulders from Washington, NATO, and the European Union, Putin was faced with a large Ukrainian army about to invade the Donbas republics. Putin’s false hopes and mistaken belief in the West’s integrity left him unprepared, but he was forced to intervene and Russia, due to unpreparedness was forced to rely on a small private military force, the Wagner Group. As Putin had not prepared for the obvious conflict staring him in the face, he limited his intervention to Donbas to clearing out the Ukrainian forces, not to quickly prevailing in the conflict. The long conflict has given the West two years and eight months to involve itself and widen the conflict.

As Putin never enforced any of the announced red lines, he has no credibility in the West. Recently, the NATO Secretary-General said NATO does not pay any attention to Putin, because he talks but never does anything.

Consequently, the world has reached the precise point I said would be reached. Putin has backed up so much that he has no more room. His back is to the wall. NATO, the British Prime Minister, and the neoconservatives are lobbying Washington to give a green light to US/NATO firing missiles into Russia from Ukraine territory.

Understand, Ukraine hasn’t the capability and satellite targeting systems to fire the missiles. A missile attack on Russia can no longer be characterized as a “proxy war.” Putin himself has made this clear. Putin said that missiles fired into Russia means the US and NATO are at war with Russia and that Russia reserves the right to respond with nuclear weapons.

A crisis is upon us. The only relevant decision in the world at this time is whether Washington decides that Putin means what he says or that Putin is so averse to war that he will stand down from his threat in order to avoid a wider conflict involving nuclear weapons.

What is the agenda behind this crisis? The neoconservatives believe that Putin is so averse to war that he will stand down and sacrifice some of his declared goals of his Special Military Operation for peace in order to avoid the wider war that would result from Russia’s response to missile attacks on Russia.

Such a response from Putin, the neoconservatives believe, would undermine Putin in Russia both with the people and the military. The people would ask the meaning of the sacrifices and lives lost for the sake of surrendering the goals. The military would say, as Admiral Avakyant already has, that if Putin stands down “the pressure on Russia from its historical opponents will only increase, and the escalation process will enter an irreversible phase. The enormous resources currently invested in the indirect hot war of the collective West against our country will be redirected to finance all destructive and anti-state forces (regional separatism, ‘the fight against the rotten corrupt regime’, ‘the promotion of universal freedoms and values’, etc.). Various states ‘historically offended’ by our country will begin to make territorial claims against Russia from all sides.”

In other words, Putin could lose support and the Russian government could become less stable.

The neoconservative’s aim is to destabilize Putin and Russia. The neoconservatives would take advantage of destabilization to encourage the various ethnicities that comprise the Russian Federation to break apart. Washington’s goal is a dismembered Russian Federation into its constituent parts with many countries in the place of Russia.

The breakup of Russia by Washington began in 1991 with the Soviet collapse. Vast areas of Russia were taken from her: Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Central Asia extending from the Caspian Sea in the West to the borders of China, an enormous area encompassing Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. Only the Russian Federation remained, itself a collection of ethnicities. Like the Western world, Russia itself is a tower of babel, only unlike in the West, in Russia the emphasis is on unity instead of division.

The neoconservatives believe that if Putin, in order to avoid wider war, reduces his demands on Ukraine, he can be painted as a loser, discredited, undermined, and Russia with him.

There is one and only one issue and one and only one decision: Does Washington believe Putin or not. If Washington believes Putin, Washington will not send missiles into Russia. If Washington does not believe Putin, World War III is about to happen unless Putin stands down.

I suspect a delayed decision as the can is kicked down the road. The Middle East is another avenue of attack on Russia. The absence of a mutual defense treaty between Russia, China, and Iran leaves Iran subject to a US/Israeli attack. The possibility exists of Israel’s war with Hezbollah leading into a joint attack of Israel and the US on Iran. This could hurt Russia’s prestige, and Western propaganda would present it as a Russian defeat.

As Washington and Russia are not talking, little can be done to ease the tension. The neoconservatives’ agenda of hegemony has produced a more dangerous situation than the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Washington has not acted to defuse the crisis.

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War 

Paul Craig Roberts is a renowned author and academic, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy where this article was originally published. Dr. Roberts was previously associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during the Reagan Administration. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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