Excellent rundown of ukraine situation and history

Posted on: March 19, 2022 at 07:04:19 CT

By David stockman of the Reagan administration

https://original.antiwar.com/David_Stockman/2022/03/18/pearl-harbor-my-eye/

We were already getting sick and tired of this Zelensky clown, but the sheer chutzpah of comparing Ukraine’s predicament with Pearl Harbor or 9/11 is just fricking outrageous. To paraphrase Senator Lloyd Bensten’s famous retort to Dan Quayle in the 1992 VP debate: We knew the United States of America and Ukraine isn’t any United States.

To the contrary, it is a cesspool of corruption, mal-governance and rank stupidity on the foreign policy front. For crying out loud, its situation is comparable to the drug cartels taking over Mexico, demanding the return of the Gadsden Purchase and then seeking to join a Russian-led anti-American treaty organization.

That is to say, Ukraine brought the Russian attack on itself by poking the bear in its eyes repeatedly since the 2014 coup. Yet now its leader has the gall to petition the US Congress to start WWII via standing-up a No Fly Zone in lieu of the obvious solution: Namely, Zelensky should resign and make way for a collaborationist government that will sue for peace on the following basis:

Recognize that Crimea is Russian territory and always has been since it was purchased by Catherine the Great in 1783;
Permit the separation of the Donbass Republics from Ukraine because the overwhelmingly Russian speaking populations there has been part of “New Russia” for more than 300 years and do not wish to be ruled by the anti-Russian fascists and oligarchs who control Kiev;
Amend the constitution of the rump state of Ukraine to prohibit its joining NATO or any similar western alliance, while reducing its military to a domestic law enforcement agency.
Those terms may seem harsh, but it’s the only alternative to the complete destruction of Ukraine and an eventual Russian win anyway. The fact is, the NATO cavalry simply ain’t coming no matter how many standing ovations are stumped up by the armchair warriors of the US Congress.

That’s because even the bully boys of Washington and Brussels aren’t ready to trigger WWIII over the broken remnants of a country that never had been a country historically until Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev made it an administrative district of the Soviet Empire – the latter being a stain on mankind that thankfully disappeared into the dustbin of history 31 years ago.

Yet without direct US/NATO engagement with the Russian military forces now occupying growing segments of Ukrainian territory the expedient of sending arms – even highly advanced lethal anti-air and anti-tank weapons – is futile. Russia now has total air superiority over Ukraine’s skies, meaning that incoming NATO weapons (and the so-called “foreign legion” fighters, too) will be destroyed long before they can make a difference.

So for god’s sake Washington needs to stop standing on ceremony and leading the hapless Ukrainian government down the primrose path to national destruction. There is no way out of the current catastrophe except for Washington to:

concede that recruiting Ukraine to join NATO and potentially putting NATO missile bases within one minute’s cruise missile flight time from Moscow was an egregious mistake; and
that its demonization of Putin as a modern day Hitler on a quest to revive the Soviet Empire is just plain War Party hogwash and is no justification for its sweeping Sanctions War, most especially if Kiev capitulates to Moscow’s terms.
The truth, in fact, is more nearly the opposite. That is, there really are not two distinct nations there, one invading the other. Russia and Ukraine have never been neighboring independent states like Germany and France or Spain and Portugal or Columbia and Peru. To the contrary, they have been an intermingled territory and peoples for the last 1300 years with borders, governing arrangements episodic external invasions all over the lot.

The Ukrainian language itself is testimony to that history and geography. The dialects spoken in the Donbas (brown and yellow areas) are a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian; the old Galician territories of Western Ukraine centered in Lviv (red areas) are heavily influenced by Polish, Slovakian and Rumanian vocabularies.; and the blue areas of the North present dialects heavily influenced by Belarusian.

What is also true is that these segmented populations have never been united under a common polity except by communist arms between 1922 and 1991; then between 1991 and 2014 by tenuous and continuously shifting electoral balances after the Ukrainian administrative entity was arbitrarily disgorged from the old Soviet Union; and finally after the February 2014 coup by dint of a Kiev government based on central and western Ukraine that essentially declared a civil war on Crimea (which seceded) and the eastern, Russian-speaking Donbas regions that have tried to do the same.

So again, what’s wrong with partition? At the end of the day, Zelensky stood before Congress and had the gall to demand WWIII in behalf of an abortion of a nation that has virtually no chance of long-term survival in its present form. Yet the knuckleheads from both parties are in such war heat that they vociferously applauded the unctuous rantings of a clown who should have stuck to the comedy business.

Edited by El-ahrairah at 07:27:35 on 03/19/22