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Senior U.S. diplomats, journalists, academics and Secretaries of Defense say: The U.S. provoked Russia in Ukraine [1]

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Date: 2024-04

It took some years for Americans to realize they'd been lied to about the war in Vietnam. Thanks to the publication of the Pentagon Papers, and thanks to the antiwar movement, Americans eventually learned about the injustices and failures of that war. Likewise, it took several years after the starts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for Americans to realize they'd been lied to about those wars as well. Americans are just now starting to realize that they've been lied to about the war in Ukraine. (The propaganda effort has been quite effective, with the New York Times, in particular, acting as a mouthpiece for the government's position.) More and more mainstream publications are exposing the lies, and a majority of Americans now oppose further arming of Ukraine. This essay is a summary of what the U.S. government has been hiding about the war in Ukraine, with links to sources for further information.

According to Brown University's Costs of War project, U.S. military actions since 9/11 directly killed over 900,000 people, with an additional 3.5 million people dying from indirect effects. The wars cost Americans at least $8 trillion and displaced over 38 million people from their homes. The U.S. spends over a trillion dollars a year on its military, if you count all expenditures.

If we go back to the 1960s, the number killed by U.S. wars includes the several million killed in the Vietnam war, the approximately 1 million killed by U.S. support for Indonesian military's attacks on left wing groups, and the hundreds of thousands, at least, killed in proxy wars and government overthrows in Latin America.

The wars, overthrows, and associated sanctions caused mass migrations worldwide -- particularly in Europe and at the southern U.S. border -- and destabilized politics. Yet almost nobody (except for whistleblowers) was held accountable for these disasters; indeed, many of the same people are in Congress or work for the government or the weapons industry.

Moreover, the U.S. government lied about almost all the wars -- in particular, about the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, but also about the war in Yugoslovia, as documented in Harper's Magazine and here. (In short, the Kosovo Liberation Army that the U.S. supported was, basically, a terrorist organization funded by the CIA, and U.S. propaganda greatly overstated the nobility of the U.S. intervention.)

So, it should come as no surprise that our government is lying now about the war in Ukraine. Specifically, claims by President Biden and others that the Russian invasion was "unprovoked" are greatly exaggerated.

Read what these diplomats, secretaries of Defense, journalists, academics, and politicians have to say:

The 2019 RAND Corporation study Overextending and Unbalancing Russia “examines nonviolent, cost-imposing options that the United States and its allies could pursue across economic, political, and military areas to stress – overextend and unbalance – Russia’s economy and armed forces and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad." It includes the paragraph:

"Providing lethal aid to Ukraine would exploit Russia’s greatest point of external vulnerability. But any increase in US military arms and advice to Ukraine would need to be carefully calibrated to increase the costs to Russia of sustaining its existing commitment without provoking a much wider conflict in which Russia, by reason of proximity, would have significant advantages."

The highlighted words indicate that the authors were quite aware that US provocations would cause Russia to respond militarily.

The New Yorker’s Is the F.B.I. Truly Biased Against Trump? contains a telling paragraph on the U.S. government’s efforts to suppress information about exactly what happened in Ukraine:

According to [FBI agent] Buma’s statement, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, on February 24, 2022, he was told to terminate relations with one of his most valuable sources in that field, Dynamo. The order came from both his supervisors and the F.B.I.’s Foreign Influence Task Force, and, per Buma, superiors told him that the shutdown of Dynamo was based on “highly classified information from the National Security Agency” which he could not access. They also said that it was part of a broader effort, around the time of the invasion, to close off many “sources related to Russia/Ukraine matters.”

After the collapse of the USSR, Russia wanted desperately to be integrated into the West and, up to the end of 2021, pleaded with D.C. to come to an equitable peace in Ukraine, but the U.S. wanted to weaken Russia, and NATO needed an enemy to justify its existence. The expansion of NATO provoked the war that is now touted as showing the need for NATO.

According to the LA Times's Russia feels threatened by NATO. There's history behind that, "some of Russia's security concerns are real. Offering to discuss them doesn't qualify as appeasement; Thirty years ago, Russia had a buffer zone of satellite states to its west. Now it has only the unimpressive presence of Belarus." The essay quotes Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine: "There are some concerns on the Russian side that are legitimate."

A New York Times exposé The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin, dated February 25, 2024, revealed that the CIA had been coordinating with the Ukrainian intelligence since at least 2014 and that the Ukrainians had been launching assasinations and other kinetic actions in Crimea and Russia. As Mark Episkopos writes in Responsible Statecraft, CIA in Ukraine: Why is this not seen as provocation?: "An explosive new NYT report shows how Washington needlessly fed into Russia’s worst fears and precipitated the invasion, justified or not."

From 2018, in Medium's American Lethal Weapons Could Already Be on the Ukrainian Front Line: "Two weeks ago, the Trump administration announced it will allow the sale of some lethal weapons to Ukraine, including the Javelin anti-tank missile....Butusov identified the [Nazi] Azov Battalion as a recipient of the PSRL-1 [grenade launcher] systems."

The U.S. repeatedly squashed peace deals that could have prevented or ended the war. After 2014, the U.S. shipped arms to Ukraine, encouraging it not to implement the Minsk Agreements meant to keep the peace in Ukraine. Reuters reported: "In an interview published in Germany's Zeit magazine on Wednesday, former German chancellor Angela Merkel said that the Minsk agreements had been an attempt to 'give Ukraine time' to build up its defences." Zelensky apparently admitted the same thing. In December of 2021, the Biden administration refused to negotiate concerning Ukrainian entry to NATO. And the U.S. prevented a peace deal even after Russia's invasion, as reported here: "Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said in an interview posted to his YouTube channel on Saturday that the US and its Western allies 'blocked' his efforts of mediating between Russia and Ukraine to bring an end to the war in its early days."

Likewise, the American Conservative published Why Peace Talks, But No Peace? (The U.S. has prevented earnest negotiations and prolonged the war in Ukraine.):

Three separate times in the early weeks of the war, negotiations produced the real possibility of peace. The third even yielded a tentative agreement that was, according to Putin, signed. Both sides made “huge concessions,” including Ukraine promising each time not to join NATO. But each time, the U.S. put a stop to the promise of a diplomatic solution and peace, allowing the war to go on and to escalate, seemingly in the pursuit of U.S., not Ukrainian, interests.

In fact, according to Ukrainian Official Confirms Russia Was Ready to End War in March 2022 If Kyiv Agreed to Neutrality:

David Arakhamia, a high-ranking member of Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People political party, said that Kyiv could have ended the war with Russia after a month if it agreed not to join NATO. The official said that Moscow was not concerned about other issues, such as “denazification,” but only wanted Kyiv to agree to neutrality.



In an interview with TV channel 1+1, a Ukrainian network, Arakhamia confirmed previous reporting that Moscow and Kyiv had nearly agreed to end the war in March 2022. Still, Ukraine’s Western backers pushed it to try to win the war against Russia

The Washington Post recently exposed that "Since 2015, the CIA has spent tens of millions of dollars to transform Ukraine’s Soviet-formed services into potent allies against Moscow, officials said.... The extent of the CIA’s involvement with Ukraine’s security services has not previously been disclosed."

An WSJ/NORC poll taken in June of 2022 showed that 58% of Ukrainians polled thought that the U.S. bears a great deal or some responsibility for the war. They knew what the U.S. did.

As Dennis Kucinich said, the U.S. government used "the good, courageous people of Ukraine as pawns in a vicious and deadly geo-political chess game which began well before the illegal Russian invasion. And it is now planning to do for the people of Taiwan what it has done for the people of Ukraine, portraying China as the aggressor while surrounding China with about 200 military bases."

Douglas MacKinnon, a former writer in the White House for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and special assistant for policy and communications at the Pentagon, says a similar thing in Raise your privileged hand if you’re willing to ‘fight to the last Ukrainian’:

If the rationale by our government, the United Kingdom and others in Europe (along with much of the media, academia and various defense contractors) was to use Ukraine and its people as cheap disposable pawns to be sacrificed in a proxy war against Vladimir Putin and Russia, then they are succeeding at a certain macabre level. However, if the idea of supporting the Ukraine war with Russia was to “save the people of Ukraine” and the country’s infrastructure, then those who advocated for that course of action have failed miserably.

See Harper's Why are We in Ukraine? for a mainstream accounting of U.S. provocations in Ukraine and elsewhere. Jeffrey Sachs' The War in Ukraine Was Provoked—and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace is another excellent essay on the issue, as is Chris Hedges' They Lied About Afghanistan. They Lied About Iraq. And They Are Lying About Ukraine.. Sachs also wrote the useful The Biden-Schumer Plan to Kill More Ukrainians.

'Now or Never': The Immediate Origins of Putin's Preventative War on Ukraine in the Journal of Military and Strategic Studies outlines the reasons for Russia's invasions, as expressed by Vladimir Putin: NATO expansion and the threat Russians felt that posed to their security. It reports increased attacks by Ukrainian troops against separatists in the Donbas right before the invasion.

For copious detail about U.S. provocations see How the U.S. provoked Russia in Ukraine: A Compendium.

The propagandists who continue to push for arming Ukraine say that the people of Ukraine were eager to join the West and that the Maidan Revolution was a grassroots expression of pro-Western sentiment. Instead, there is evidence that the revolution was largely the creation of U.S. regime change meddling, aided by the so-called National Endowment for Democracy (a CIA offshoot); see the Compendium above for documentation. Certainly, most of the people in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea did not want closer ties with the West. (Carnegie Endowment for Peace and Foreign Affairs documented that a majority of the people of Crimea welcomed Russia’s annexation of their territory in 2014: Denis Volkov and Andrei Kolesnikov’s My Country, Right or Wrong: Russian Public Opinion on Ukraine (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, September 7, 2022); John O’Loughlin, Gerad Toal and Kristin M. Bakke’s To Russia With Love: A Majority of Crimeans are Still Glad for Their Annexation (Foreign Affairs, April 3, 2020).) Likewise, in Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Syria, Libya, Chechnya and elsewhere, the U.S. instigated military and interference operations to bring down pro-Russian governments.

So, the U.S. intervened to aid "liberation" movements against Russian allies in Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Libya, and Syria -- allying with Muslim extremists to do so -- but the U.S. condemns Russia for intervening to aid Russian-speaking people along Russia's own borders, in a conflict against Nazi militias supported by the U.S. and driven by aggressive NATO expansion.

Moreover, the U.S. occupies one third of the sovereign nation of Syria, with help from its proxy army, the Syrian Defense Forces. In fact, the U.S. allied with al Qaeda and other extremist groups in Syria, as reported here, here and here.

Likewise, U.S. troops remain in Iraq, despite the opposition of the Iraqi government. So, it's quite hypocritical for the U.S. to reject a ceasefire which allows Russia to occupy Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine which voted overwhelmingly for closer ties with Russia.

These facts and opinions do not justify Russia's brutal invasion, but they certainly give the lie to statements by President Biden and others that the invasion was "unprovoked." Even the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014 was provoked: it occurred after, and partially in response to, the U.S.-backed overthrow of the pro-Russian government of Ukraine.

And the facts expose amazing hyprocrisy. The U.S. launched numerous unjustified wars and proxy wars; surrounded Russia and China with pro-US allies and military bases (about 800 worldwide); exited multiple arms treaties; and increased military spending to about $1 trillion a year despite $34 trillion in debt and dire domestic needs. Yet we accuse Russia and China of being the aggressors.

Both sides can be at fault in a conflict. The U.S. too has blood on its hands.

Finally, the facts are strong reasons why the U.S. should not be arming Ukraine to the teeth and pushing it to fight to the last Ukrainian and risking a nuclear war. Instead, it should push for a negotiated end to the war.

Below is a concise graphic version of the above essay:

See too Why it is so important to expose U.S. provocations in Ukraine.

Donald A. Smith is a writer, a peace activist working with CodePink, a Democratic Precinct Committee Officer, the editor of http://waliberals.org, and the creator of https://progressivememes.org. He lives in Bellevue, Washington and has a PhD in Computer Science.

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