This is just an excerpt from By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, who always makes interesting and fresh points.
This is not to be taken as support of Russia. Of course the invasion of Ukraine is horrendous and to be strongly condemned. But if we really want to reduce such conflict we need to understand the wider context and the complicated reasons why they happen:
“Russia could have prevented the invasion of Ukraine by not invading Ukraine. Europe could have prevented the invasion of Ukraine by telling the U.S. and Russia to mind their own business. The United States could almost certainly have prevented the invasion of Ukraine by any of the following steps, which U.S. experts warned were needed to avoid war with Russia:
Abolishing NATO when the Warsaw Pact was abolished.
Refraining from expanding NATO.
Refraining from supporting color revolutions and coups.
Supporting nonviolent action, training in unarmed resistance, and neutrality.
Transitioning from fossil fuels.
Refraining from arming Ukraine, weaponizing Eastern Europe, and conducting war rehearsals in Eastern Europe.
Accepting Russia’s perfectly reasonable demands in December 2021.
In 2014, Russia proposed that Ukraine align with neither the West nor the East but work with both. The U.S. rejected that idea and supported a military coup that installed a pro-West government.
According to Ted Snider:
“In 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky was elected on a platform that featured making peace with Russia and signing the Minsk Agreement. The Minsk Agreement offered autonomy to the Donetsk and Lugansk regions of the Donbas that had voted for independence from Ukraine after the coup. It offered the most promising diplomatic solution. Facing domestic pressure, though, Zelensky would need U.S. support. He did not get it and, in the words of Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent, he was ‘thwarted by the nationalists.’ Zelensky stepped off the road of diplomacy and refused to talk to the leaders of the Donbas and implement the Minsk Agreements.
“Having failed to support Zelensky on a diplomatic solution with Russia, Washington then failed to pressure him to return to the implementation of the Minsk Agreement. Sakwa told this writer that, ‘as for Minsk, neither the U.S. nor the EU put serious pressure on Kyiv to fulfill its part of the agreement.’ Though the U.S. officially endorsed Minsk, Anatol Lieven, senior research fellow on Russia and Europe at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told this writer, ‘they did nothing to push Ukraine into actually implementing it.’ The Ukrainians gave Zelensky a mandate for a diplomatic solution. Washington did not support or encourage it.”
See more here:
https://worldbeyondwar.org/learning-the-wrong-lessons-from-ukraine/
Ukraine and Russia: how it could have been avoided.
Very interesting, Sean. It makes you think.