Now that even the Council on Foreign Relations is admitting Ukraine can’t and won’t win its war against Russia, there might be some serious cognitive dissonance for people who’ve not been paying much attention and bought into the official narrative on the war.
If you find yourself faced with the proverbial ignorant uncle at Thanksgiving this year and want to appear fact-based rather than conspiratorial, maybe the following round up of links and sources about the beginnings of the war will help.
It’s bad enough that hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in a losing and pointless effort, but it’s important to rebut the narrative that Russia was the aggressor and not NATO and the US.
- The Nation had an excellent history of the US/UK’s decades long backing of Ukrainian nationalists (not-sees) throughout the Cold War
- The late John Pilger’s work for The Guardian from 2014 stands up well
The work of researcher Ivan Katchanovski is definitive and completely debunks the official US narrative on the Maidan Revolution:
- The Maidan Massacre Trial and Investigation Revelations: Implications for the Ukraine-Russia War and Relations
- The Maidan Massacre Trial Verdict, and Cover-up, Stonewalling, and Evidence Tampering
His work was vindicated in a Ukrainian court in 2024.
Uncle Ignorance should also familiarize himself with the names Stephan Bandera & Yaroslav Hunka. Bandera has been regarded as the “Father of Ukraine” since 2014. Hunka is a Ukrainian SS veteran who received a standing ovation at a session of the Canadian Parliament last year.
That’s not to even get into the consensus reality that NATO expansion backed Putin into a corner and that US foreign policy legend George Kennan called it “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”
The Brookings Institute 1999 history of the post-Cold War efforts to enlarge NATO will read like “Russian propaganda” to anyone whose knowledge of the war came from MSNBC starting from a blank slate in 2022.
Also, your Uncle will want to be beaten about the head and shoulder with this 2008 confidential cable from current head of the CIA and then US ambassador to Russia, William Burns who strongly opposed Bush & Cheney’s offer to invite Ukraine into NATO (revealed by Wikileaks.)
Also the story of the Ukrainian Civil War from 2014 to 2022 has been systematically mistold.
- The ICG has a good corrective in their “visual explainer” of the Donbas War.
Key graphic which shows how Ukraine dramatically upped their shelling of civilians in the independent republics just prior to Russia’s invasion — forcing Putin’s hand.
Source:The Special Monitoring Mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE SMM)
Uncle “Ukraine Is Heroically Resisting Aggression” will also want to learn all about the horrific mass murder of anti-Maidan counter-protestors in Odessa in 2014 that is VERY well known in Russia and Ukraine and almost completely unknown in the US.
Norwegian Professor Glenn Dieson has a fine piece explaining “How the Strategy of Fighting to the Last Ukrainian Was Sold to the Public as Morally Righteous..”
Here’s a sample quote from his piece:
For almost three years, NATO countries have boycotted diplomatic contacts with Russia, even as hundreds of thousands of men have died on the battlefield. The decision by diplomats to reject diplomacy is morally repugnant as diplomacy could have reduced the excess of violence, prevented escalation, and even resulted in a path to peace. However, the political-media elites skilfully sold the rejection of diplomacy to the public as evidence of their moral righteousness.
This article will first outline how NATO planned for a long war to exhaust Russia and knock it out from the ranks of great powers. Second, this article will demonstrate how the political-media elites communicated that diplomacy is treasonous and war is virtuous.
This is just scratching the surface but essentially for those who been exclusively following US & UK media, everything they know about Ukraine is wrong.
Enjoy those awkward conversations around the table!
bruce wilder
As much as I love rich and accurate history as a foundation for roughly accurate narratives, I find myself opposing people whose entire view is based not on the past but on a projected future. They can discard a history they never knew or appreciated in a moment. They then turn to variations on appeasement theory: we cannot let Putin win or he will just keep repeating the tactic, they say.
Putin cannot win until America gives in and gives up and Putin winning is unthinkable. So, we must stay the course. Keep supporting brave Ukraine.
What I really want to say is, “you made a terrible mistake and we as a country have to admit you were wrong and start cleaning up your mess.” But, I never get to say that to anyone who may have contributed in any substantial way to creating the war. Victoria Nuland will not be joining me for Thanksgiving. More’s the pity.
There are quite a few on social media, who just enjoy watching war from afar and opining on it, rooting for one team perhaps. It is a pastime. The immense moral weight of a “losing and pointless effort” is lost on many of them. Of course, you have to know some of the history to realize that the purposes and goals of the extreme Ukrainian nationalists from way back were never defensible as adopted goals and “values” (never mind interests) of their Western patrons. But, if you refuse to know any history, the goal and interest is Russia defeated and humiliated because of course it is.
Revelo
You’re getting lost in a quagmire of details and missing the big picture. *He who once dons the ring of power becomes attached to his precious and will not surrender it without struggle.” We’ve all seen this played out in personal life when domineering parents react furiously to independence of their teenager children, when domineering old-school husbands react furiously to their former stay-at-home wife getting a job outside the house, etc.
USA deep state got attached to hegemony (supreme world power) after 1991 and reacted furiously when Putin first rebelled in 2008, then USA reacted again and continues to react furiously to the rise of China. Ukraine-Russia war is ultimately a proxy but asymmetric USA-China struggle. China does not want war, because it is destined to become USA peer without war. Russia doesn’t want war either, because it is destined to be kingmaker without war, meaning Russia puts its hand on the scales to keep USA and China evenly balanced and extract maximum concessions from each.
USA deep state hated the idea of losing hegemony and provoked the war as a desperate “hail mary pass”, based on the theory that Russia would collapse like a house of cards as soon as it was cut off from SWIFT, after which USA could install a comprador leader in Russia who would allow USA to put military bases north of China, so as to encircle and thereby contain China. Very dubious plan, which is failing. Furthermore, combination of attacking Russia with long range missiles, alienating Muslim world by allowing Israel to commit genocide, picking fights with Iran and China, plus other bad moves, means USA can look forwards to having its Mediterranean, Indian Ocean and Pacific fleets all sunk eventually, which will then cause USA asset bubbles to collapse. Recent USA foreign policy is an unbelievable shit show of incompetence, in other words.
Only mystery is how ordinary Ukrainians were convinced to become kamikaze pilots. Bribing comprador elite is easy: just throw money at them and CIA has unlimited money. Convincing starry eyed idealist types is also easy, because it’s just another type of bribery: simple minded young people with useless university degrees in general business or humanities are given nice jobs (by Ukrainian standards) working for CIA sponsored NGOs whose ostensible purpose is promoting “English language and friendship with America”, “democracy and rule of law”, “anti-corruption” , “LGBT+ rights”, etc, though real purpose boils down to promoting war with Russia. Regardless, desk job at CIA funded NGO beats unemployment or working at manual labor under Ukrainian working conditions. But how to get the Ukrainian manual laborers to swallow the poison pill? Because it’s mostly those guys who do the dying in those trenches. I’m not exactly sure, but somehow CIA pulled it off. Proving once again that, whatever weaknesses USA may have, propaganda skill is not one of them. Nor is former media star Zelensky a slacker when it comes to bamboozlement.
As for ordinary Americans and Europeans, they are merely giving utterance to the fears of their deep states that failure to beat Russia means end of USA hegemony, and thus end to higher USA and European living standards compared to rest of world. Your Thanksgiving uncle is thus perhaps not so much ignorant as worried this might be his last Thanksgiving with real turkey, and next year he’ll be eating some cheap soybean imitation meat.
Nate Wilcox
@Revelo Your comment was better than my post. I’m kind of proud that I inspired you to write it with my misnamed post. Thank you.
I should probably have called it a “round-up of links and sources about the beginnings of the war in Ukraine” but I went for the sexier headline.
Interestingly enough, the question that you posed: “Only mystery is how ordinary Ukrainians were convinced to become kamikaze pilots”?
Interestingly enough the very first bullet-pointed link in the post goes a long way toward answering your question, or at least runs down some of the dirty tricks of the CIA (you left out MI6) over the last 70 years.
My point with a post like this is to provide a curated resource for learning about the history of the war, not to write a persuasive essay. Apologies if the headline misled.
My hope was that someone would read some of the links and be inspired to challenge the narrative in a more informed way and have a good fact set of sources at their finger tips.
Jan Wiklund
I would also recommend Prof Glenn Diesen’s short article https://glenndiesen.substack.com/p/how-the-strategy-of-fighting-to-the, where he rely on several highly positioned witnesses, for example the Turkish foreign minister, Zelensky’s chief councillor on foreign affairs, and the retired German Commander-in-chief. Plus, of course several US politicians who have admitted a lot.
Jan Wiklund
@Revelo, Nate Wilcox: it isn’t strange at all that ordinary Ukrainans went to the trenches (they are not willing to do that anymore, though). It was because a foreign army suddenly approached and shelled homes. You don’t need more than that. That would trigger people in all countries.
Then there is of course a long history behind. According to Nikolai Petro: Ukraine in crisis, people in west Ukraine consider themselves central Europeans who don’t want anything to do with Russia and are fed up with it (while on the other hand people in east Ukraine are often Russian themselves…).
All went well, though, until EU/Nato began to look at the country to swallow it, and these two groups suddenly found themselves on different sides of the barricade. People in the west wanted to trade with EU because they thought they could alleviate theeir economic misery, people in the east wanted to trade with Russia as they were used to, but EU decided that they had to choose, EU wouldn’t agree to a contract if Russia wasn’t shut out.
Nato/US/EU money has of course flooded to the West-Ukrainan side the whole time, but it wouldn’t have done any effect at all if the conflict hadn’t been there from the beginning, or at least from about 2000.
Olivier
@Iam I was under the impression that the Odessa pogrom was not some random atrocity but the very spark that lit the fuse in that the Donbass republics seceded the very next day. I just brushed up on the independence timeline on Wikipedia, though, and it doesn’t look that way. Did I imagine it?
When swimming against the current it is important to get even the smallest facts right.
Nate Wilcox
@Olivier I believe your current understanding (not the triggering event for secession) is correct.
Soredemos
The Odessa Trade Union house ‘fire’ was horrific. I say fire in quotes because I’ve seen video of the corpses taken right after. Many were shot. People were herded into the building and Nazi thugs went in and shot and beat them to death, then set the fire as an attempt at covering their tracks. “Oh, people tragically died in a mysterious fire and we’re not quite sure who set it”. Pure gaslighting bullshit. Any ‘journalist’ who reported on it in such vague terms was a kind of accomplice.
Ukraine has Nazis, literal fascists, and lots of them are in the military. They’re in key positions in the government and military and heavily infouence policy. It doesn’t matter if electorally they have very poor results and are just a small minority of the overall population when that much greater number of people allow the far right freaks to control national policy. At a certain point I throw up my hands amd give up. If you allow these monsters to run your country when you so completely outnumber them, you get what you deserve. The smart Ukrianians are the millions who fled because they correctly decided freaking Ukraine is not a place worth dying for.
All of this could have been avoided. Ukraine could have lived high on the hog as a prosperous neutral go-between for western and eastern trade zones. Maybe they’d have to deal with Russian condescension of their country as just a ‘Little Russia’ but oh well. Ukraine could have been raking in the money.
Instead they allowed themselves to be used as proxies and set on this path of madness (how ironic that it’s the ultranationalist mega patriot types that subordinated their country to foreign rule and interests. Certainly not the first time aihc a thing has happened). When all os said and done ‘Ukraine’ is likely to be a tiny rump state around Kiev with no coastline.
Nate Wilcox
@Soredemos great point. I’m trying to bring people along who still think Ukraine’s current extremist puppet regime are “heroically resisting Russian aggression” so baby steps.
@Jan Wiklund also great points. I’ll add the Glenn Dieson link to the main post. thank you
shagggz
Soredemos,
“If you allow these monsters to run your country when you so completely outnumber them, you get what you deserve.”
They did try to not allow it, and got couped, pogromed and all the rest. Do all of America’s victims – I mean grateful recipients of off-books ‘democracy spreading’ – deserve it, by virtue of having let it happen?