The War That Russia Thinks It’s Fighting
I’m not a big fan of this war. It’s difficult to be on the side of anyone except the Ukrainian people. But there are complexities of this war that the mainstream press isn’t talking about.
A brief look at the history of NATO and Russia helps…
NATO was formed in 1949 as a collective security counter force against the Warsaw Pact forces of the Russian-led former Soviet Union. But when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, NATO’s raison d’être collapsed too. Though it was not specifically discussed in treaty negotiations, NATO had no business moving eastward after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
For nations such as Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, it’s not unreasonable that both the fear of the past and of the future drove them into NATO’s arms in 1995.
The dynamic that followed this expansion was predictable.
Other former Soviet states also saw the prosperous, open West was much preferrable to a declining, authoritarian thug-state that Russia was then and remains now. By 2008, Georgia had both NATO and EU membership desires. Moscow could see the trend and stopped it by backing pro-Russian separatists in Georgia’s self-proclaimed autonomous republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Those areas reverted to Russian control. In 2014, Russia took back Crimea from Ukraine.
That same year, the US played an instrumental role in ousting Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, elected in 2010, because he was pro-Russian. In 2013, Yanukovych had rejected the European Union’s market reform terms for an association agreement in favor of Russia’s offer. Perhaps it was an offer he couldn’t refuse. In any case, he was corrupt. But he wasn’t the only corrupt politician. Joe Biden boasted in public about how, as Vice President, he strong-armed the firing of Ukraine’s top prosecutor. At the same time, Biden’s multi-talented son Hunter, a whore-mongering, drug-addicted traitor, deviant and pedophile, mysteriously held a seat on the board of Burisma, one of Ukraine's largest independent natural gas companies.
What did Moscow see? Biden and his ilk openly paraded the corrupting influence of the US in what was supposed to be a neutral buffer state between Russia and NATO.
For years, Ukraine’s western tilt had been a thorn in Russia’s side and a threat to their prestige and security. The more arms the U.S. and NATO supplied Ukraine, the greater the threat the Russian’s perceived.
So now, NATO has almost doubled its membership, with more applications coming from the Baltics and even Ukraine itself. But what is NATO’s purpose today?
How has its expansion made the original members–or even more recent ones–safer?
The answer is that it hasn’t. It has proven provocative to Russia, just as Moscow has warned NATO for years. Furthermore, it could be convincingly argued that NATO’s expansion has proved Moscow’s perception of it as as threat and transformed it into an enforcer of the global banking cartel, and by default, an anti-Russian military power.
It may seem to be a clear cut case of bigger country invading a smaller, weaker one; and it is. But that’s not all it’s about. To be clear, I’m not a fan of Russia, and though I don’t fully agree with the rationale for the invasion, I understand it.
But as a nation that has been a repeated victim (as they see it) of the West’s global banking system in the form of sanctions of one form or another, Russia sees itself as standing athwart the globalist ambitions of total financial control over the entire world.
That’s why this war, though it “started” in Ukraine, really began in policy meetings in Washington D.C. and is much bigger than Ukraine now.
