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Putin Reminded Everyone That Russia Is Using Force To End The War That The West Started

By Andrew Korybko | February 22, 2023

Those who’ve been manipulated by the Golden Billion’s hypocritical information warfare narratives into thinking that Russia’s special operation is illegal and immoral should reconsider their stance. Had the Kremlin let the West’s grand strategic scheme unfold without interference, then more ethnic cleansing and genocide would have taken place in Donbass. NATO’s gradual erosion of Russia’s national security red lines and nuclear second-strike capabilities would also have turned it into a vassal state.

One of the weaponized information warfare narratives that the US-led West’s Golden Billion is propagating against Russia is that its ongoing special operation in Ukraine is inherently immoral because the use of force is supposedly never an acceptable way to resolve disputes. Putting aside the obvious hypocrisy of the most warmongering civilization in centuries claiming that about another after the West itself is responsible for countless civil wars, coups, hybrid wars, and invasions, the point itself is invalid.

President Putin reminded everyone of this when he said during his annual address on Tuesday that “they were the ones who started this war, while we used force and are using it to stop the war.” This statement of fact builds upon prior such ones that he shared across the past year, most recently during his unexpected press conference in late December. It’s important enough to elaborate upon at this moment in time since many in the West either forgot about it or were never informed in the first place.

The run-up to Russia’s special operation was preceded by the then-Ukrainian Civil War dragging into its eighth year due to Moscow being the only signatory of the Minsk Accords that seriously attempted to implement them. It’s now known from former German Chancellor Merkel that everyone else was just exploiting them to buy time for Kiev’s rearmament ahead of a preplanned NATO-organized “Operation Storm”-like invasion of Donbass for conclusively ending the conflict.

Observers shouldn’t forget that the Ukrainian Civil War broke out in the immediate aftermath of the Western-backed fascist coup in early 2014 that followed months of urban terrorism. The Golden Billion overthrew that country’s international recognized government as part of its grand strategic scheme to gradually erode Russia’s national security with a view towards facilitating their ultimate goal of coercing it into a series of never-ending unilateral concessions aimed at turning it into a vassal state.

Crimea’s democratic reunification with Russia right after that regime change spared the peninsula’s residents from being forced under the fascists’ yoke and also deprived NATO of geostrategic Black Sea bases that could have then threatened all of that targeted country’s southern regions. Donbass wasn’t so fortunate since the Kremlin remained reluctant to recognize its desire to join Russia, however, which was predicated on Moscow’s intentions to peacefully resolve the conflict instead of escalate it.

Russia’s grand strategic goal up to the eve of its special operation last year was to employ the Minsk Accords for that purpose, which was expected to stabilize Ukraine simultaneously with enabling it to function as the geo-economic point of convergence between the EU and the Eurasian Union. That would have in turn advanced Russia’s Greater Eurasian Partnership (GEP), which was envisaged as transforming it into the bridge between Europe/EU and Asia/China and thus accelerating its economic development.

The primary calculation upon which the Kremlin’s expectation of a peaceful resolution to the Ukrainian Civil War was predicated concerned its belief that the US would prefer to wrap up the European front of the New Cold War with Russia in order to more robustly “Pivot to Asia” to “contain” China. This was a strategically sound prediction but didn’t reflect the reality of US decisionmakers being ideologically driven and instead preferring to “contain” Russia first so as to facilitate China’s “containment” after.

The result is that they and their vassals exploited the Minsk Accords for the earlier mentioned purpose of buying time for Kiev’s rearmament ahead of a preplanned NATO-organized “Operation Storm”-like invasion of Donbass for conclusively ending the Ukrainian Civil War that the US itself provoked in 2014. Russia ultimately wised up to these objectively existing military-strategic dynamics in late 2021, ergo why it put forth its security guarantee requests at that time.

To remind the reader since they might either have forgotten or never been fully informed of them to begin with, Russia asked that: 1) Ukraine return to its constitutional neutrality and finally implement the Minsk Accords; 2) NATO stop expanding eastward; 3) strike weapons be removed from Russia’s borders; 4) the 1997 Russian-NATO Founding Act be revived; and 5) serious talks begin on negotiating a truly indivisible security mechanism for Europe. Suffice to say, the US, NATO, EU, and Ukraine rejected them.

In such a situation, Russia had only two courses of action. The first was to let Kiev launch its preplanned NATO-organized “Operation Storm”-like invasion of Donbass for conclusively ending the Ukrainian Civil War, which would have resulted in ethnic cleansing and genocide. Furthermore, NATO’s clandestine expansion into Ukraine would have continued unimpeded, thus further eroding Russia’s national security red lines, especially concerning its second-strike capabilities via more “missile defenses” there.

The second scenario was to preemptively thwart the aforementioned imminent offensive while also expanding the scope of its military operations beyond Donbass in an attempt to advance some of its other national security interests that were previously explained. The first element of this two-pronged strategy would serve to protect lives while the second was expected to create the conditions for improving Russia’s negotiating position regarding those other issues.

As a self-respecting Great Power that will never voluntarily subjugate itself to being anyone else’s vassal, which is precisely what the Golden Billion was aiming to gradually do to it via the clandestine expansion of NATO into Ukraine, Russia understandably decided upon the second scenario via its special operation. Returning to the point mentioned in the introduction to this analysis, it therefore truly is the case that Russia is using force to end the war that the West started, which thus makes its cause legal and moral.

Those who’ve been manipulated by the Golden Billion’s hypocritical information warfare narratives into thinking that Russia’s special operation is illegal and immoral should therefore reconsider their stance. Had the Kremlin let the West’s grand strategic scheme unfold without interference, then more ethnic cleansing and genocide would have taken place in Donbass. NATO’s gradual erosion of Russia’s national security red lines and nuclear second-strike capabilities would also have turned it into a vassal state.

With time, Moscow would have been coerced through nuclear and other forms of blackmail into undertaking a never-ending series of unilateral concessions that might have culminated in the worst-case scenario with its “Balkanization” and/or transformation into an anti-Chinese proxy state. Russia has the UN-enshrined right to defend its national interests, which is the legal basis upon which the special operation was commenced, while its leadership has the moral responsibility to defend its people.

Failing to use force to end the war that the West started would therefore have been an abdication of Russia’s moral responsibility to its people and the voluntary surrendering of its international legal rights. Those folks who’ve been manipulated by the Golden Billion’s information warfare campaign into becoming radical “peaceniks” are thus actually functioning as “useful idiots” of neo-imperialism since Russia would have been submitting to such a scenario by not launching its special operation.

February 22, 2023 - Posted by aletho | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | NATO, Russia, Ukraine