Foreword

In Britain, the Daily Mail splashed with the headline “48 Hours to War”. In the U.S., the press has retailed every scrap and morsel of intelligence passed to it by unnamed government sources while parachuting in senior correspondents to wait for the sky to fall.

For several weeks we have been hearing that Russia is about to invade Ukraine and that therefore the democratic countries must intervene to prevent this barbaric act.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin stood side by side during the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics this month. Xi backed Russia’s demand that Ukraine should never join NATO.

Their joint appearance delivered not only the most forthright display of Sino-Russian unity in decades, but also what observers saw as the clearest signal yet that the two are intent on shaping a new world order: one in which America’s postwar global dominance is in retreat and autocratic regimes can thrive in the space left behind.

Current situation

Russia’s grievances are clear enough. Moscow is upset at Ukraine’s lack of follow-through with the Minsk agreements, particularly its denial of “special status” to the breakaway regions.

Putin, angry at what Moscow sees as decades of Western encroachment, has drawn a new red line on NATO, rejecting not only the idea that Ukraine would join the alliance but also growing military collaboration among Kyiv and NATO members, which is already happening.

Russia proposes a new European order that would prevent NATO’s further enlargement east and curb its military deployments and activities.

In the past days, as the US and Russia exchanged formal diplomatic letters, Secretary of State Antony Blinken emphasized that “NATO’s door is open, remains open, and that is our commitment.”

But few have been asking why NATO would want to move east in the first place. What was once a Cold War security pact has become a 21st-century organization with global military commitments and ever more member countries from Eastern Europe.

Members of the alliance didn’t always foresee its expansion and, three decades ago, some of America’s most renowned foreign policy thinkers argued that NATO should be nowhere near Ukraine.

Unfortunately, there is a tenacious deep state in Washington (neoconservatives with their imperialistic views) determined to thwart any US attempt to improve relations with Moscow.

The press is helping Putin and hurting Kyiv

Putin didn't blink in the face of resolute U.S. and British threats to mess him up if he dared go to war.  Putin’s feint is dialing down the rhetoric a tiny notch, while making sure that all parties know he can turn it back up whenever he feels like it.

Meanwhile the Western media lather themselves into a state of near-hysteria over how dangerous, unpredictable, aggressive and deadly Russia could be.

For weeks, Western papers and TV have been filled with images of scary Russian tanks, warships and artillery blasting away: most of them provided by Russia’s Ministry of Defense.

Since November, the U.S. and British governments have been issuing increasingly strident warnings that Putin is preparing an imminent and massive attack on Ukraine. Western intelligence agencies and governments talked up supposed plans of attack with rockets falling on Kyiv and puppet regimes being installed at gunpoint.

All that time, Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have been emphatically denying that they will do any such thing.

U.S. Embassy in Kyiv has been emptied and relocated to Lviv, in Ukraine’s west, with frantic diplomatic staff reportedly burning classified or sensitive materials before they go in anticipation of another Saigon, Benghazi or Kabul: a precaution European embassies have not taken.

Putin can already chalk some significant victories on the board.

How about Ukraine?

Polling in Ukraine last December showed a solid, but by no means overwhelming, 54% support for joining NATO. And while it’s not clear whether the latest crisis will boost support or diminish it, it’s clear that a substantial minority of Ukrainians opposes the idea altogether.

The only real loser so far has been Ukraine. Talk of imminent invasion has caused the country’s currency and stock markets to crash and foreign investment to dry up. Aircraft insurers racked up premiums for overflights of Ukraine and thereby effectively cut the country off from a large chunk of its civil aviation.

Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, has repeatedly warned that Western alarmism was unjustified. If the West really wanted to help Ukraine, he told a conference for foreign reporters last month, the U.S. in particular should ease back on the catastrophism.

Meanwhile Russia’s state broadcasters at home and agents of influence abroad rub their hands with glee at Western confusion and contradiction.

How about Russia?

Top priorities for Putin and his regime are: the survival and retention of power; the survival of the Russian state and protecting it from domestic and foreign threats; the preservation and expansion of Russia’s influence in the international arena.

This is why Russia is seeking to regain status as a world power and maintain influence over its neighbors after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Numerous factors influence the ability of Russia’s leaders to pursue these national interests and determine how they do so. Among them are geography, history, cultural heritage, religion, ideology, the power and role of the individual leader and his power structure, societal dynamics and pressures, and the impact of opposing forces, both internal and external.

Does Russia operate in mysterious ways that confuse and confound us in the West? Or can our failure to understand Russia is to be attributed to our own shortcomings, ignorance, and propensity for mirror-imaging?

Considerations

The US and Great Britain, with NATO and the European Union behind them, are putting world peace at risk by carrying out economic, military and political aggression against Russia.

The continuous enlargement of NATO to the east could make Ukraine become the seat of NATO nuclear weapons. U.S. should remember that when Cuba was receiving Soviet atomic missiles, Kennedy came to the brink of nuclear war to prevent it because “he did not want atomic missiles aimed at the house outside his door”.

So why Russia should accept to have nuclear missiles aimed at its territory a few miles from the border?

In recent weeks we have been witnessing an escalation of declarations and politico-military acts that constitute a real strategy of NATO's tension against Russia which is incessantly accused of wanting to invade Ukraine.

While the Ukrainian government claims that there is no imminent threat, the British government instead claims that in fact the invasion has already begun and some Russians are already in the country.

Meanwhile the European Union (US puppet) has taken on new and tougher sanctions against Russia and on the military level NATO is encircling Russia with a massive presence of aircraft, armored vehicles, and ships in the Baltic Sea and the southern flank.

In practice, NATO is insisting on crying wolf and in the meantime is carrying out a war action against Russia. Biden behaves exactly like Blair who in order to invade Iraq in 2003 shamelessly lied to parliament and public opinion.

Russia is accused of wanting to invade and in the meantime alien troops and missiles are concentrated on its borders.

The aim is to arrive at such a dramatization as to justify a local conflict in Western public opinion which, in the logic of the US, could also lead to the division of Ukraine between Russia and NATO. 

For the US, the goal is to move NATO rule as far east as possible, not to build or preserve peace.

Conclusion

There is a further goal in the sights of the American and British governments. It is the European Union, especially Germany. With this operation all dialogue between Germany and Russia is interrupted and prevented. Every ambition of the European Union to have its own foreign policy is nipped in the bud.

We are witnessing a real strategy of tension on the part of Washington, while Europe should resort to democracy to avoid being colonized by the press campaigns of the USA and their friends.

So what if the war doesn’t come, after all this? Or what if it does come but not in the way it has been doomcasted, with a rain of rockets on Kyiv, a blitzkrieg “decapitation” of Ukraine’s government and the occupation of major cities?

What if it takes a stealthier form of coordinated but harder-to-categorize provocations including cyberattacks and “limited” cross-border assaults that end almost as quickly as they begin? In other words, an escalation of the war Ukraine has already been fighting for eight years.

In 2019 ECFR (European Council on Foreign Relations) conducted a pan-European poll that indicated that a large majority of respondents in all surveyed countries wanted to remain neutral (rather than align with Washington) in a conflict between the US and China or Russia. European citizens are smarter and wiser than their governments. European lawmakers should be well aware of this and avoid to cowardly fall into line behind America's imperialistic policy.