Colin Vaudin’s viewpoint on Ukraine (GEP 14 March) seems to be based on two or three assumptions that I believe are worth questioning. These are:
1. The implication that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is all part of Mr Putin’s plan to re-establish the Russian Empire, (hinting at a Russian threat to Western Europe). Mr Vaudin takes this mainstream media narrative as a given but provides no evidence to substantiate it.
2. Mr Vaudin’s GP article suggested that when Donald Trump recently stopped the supply of arms and intelligence to Ukraine (which was only temporary), the president was reneging on a core tenet of Article 5 of NATO. Unless I misread him, this seemed to imply that Ukraine is a member of NATO.
3. The tacit assumption that the West’s expansion of NATO, east of the German border right up to the Russian border, had no bearing on Russian notions of security and sovereignty, and therefore can not be seen in any way as the provocation that led to Russia’s entirely miscalculated and illegal invasion of Ukraine.
Answering these separately:
1. When Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February in 2022, Putin, militarily, did not have the intention, the manpower or the equipment necessary to conquer the whole of Ukraine, let alone the rest of Eastern Europe. Yet, the Western mainstream media narrative suggested otherwise, portraying Putin as a Hitler-like figure, embarking on a megalomaniacal rampage through Europe.
Putin invaded Ukraine with 150,000 troops. Compare Germany’s invasion of Poland on 1 September, 1939. Hitler deployed 60 divisions of nearly 1.5 million men, using more than 2,000 tanks, 900 bombers and over 400 fighter planes. Hitler meant to conquer Europe, Putin did not.
2. On the second point: ‘Article 5 states that if a NATO country is the victim of an armed attack, each alliance member will consider this act of violence as an attack against all members and will take such measures as it deems necessary, “including the use of armed force,” to come to the aid of the attacked country.’
But while having the carrot of membership dangled before it at the Bucharest Summit of 2008, Ukraine was not, and is presently unlikely ever to become a member of NATO.
Russia had not invaded any other NATO nation, so what had Trump reneged on?
3. It is unarguable that Ukraine has fought for its life, sovereignty and independence from an overbearing Russia but the conflict has been stoked by the geo-political engineering of the USA. Both Russia and the USA have ramped up and exploited the ethnic differences between Ukraine’s western and eastern communities in their efforts to gain political influence and territorial advantage in a crucial area of the world, where Asia meets Europe. Ukraine could have remained a neutral bridge between East and West but it was, as far as Russia was concerned, being bulldozed into partisanship with a militarily aggressive NATO.
John Meersheimer, professor of international relations at the University of Chicago, and Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics and director of the Centre for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, point to NATO’s 1,000 mile eastward creep since the Iron Curtain came down, breaking the USA’s promise not to move NATO an inch to the east of the newly-reunified Germany. This was one of the pre-requisites for former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s withdrawal of 400,000 Soviet troops from the former East Germany.
In the 1990s, US political giants such as Henry Kissinger and George Kennan were two among many other foreign policy experts who warned that the expansion of NATO would be seen by the Russians as a slow act of aggression, which might lead to violent and dangerous outcomes.
In the early part of the conflict, it was the USA which sent in the then prime minister of the UK, Boris Johnson, to persuade Zelensky to pull out of a peace deal with Putin. This was reported by the mainstream media at the time, although the story has been revised since to suit the narrative of Russia as the main aggressor.
In addition to pressure from the West, the Russo-phobic Ukrainian extreme right forced Zelensky into a protracted war with Russia rather than bring about the resolution that Putin had desperately hoped to engineer by his brinkmanship. This followed years of diplomatic effort to resolve Russia’s security issues, which had always fallen on deaf ears.
The USA and NATO weren’t listening. This had devastating consequences. Hundreds of thousands more Ukrainians and Russians were needlessly killed, millions of them were displaced, becoming refugees – all because the USA wanted its Ukrainian proxy to fight on.
Critics said NATO was on a mission to wear Russia’s military down and force regime change without regard for the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives it might take to achieve this.
For the protagonists of any war, truth is not simply the first casualty, but the main impediment to its protagonists aims. In each country the sheer confidence of the media-led public, to point out the propaganda of other nations, is offset by a manufactured obliviousness to the depth of one’s own national propaganda. It is propaganda that stokes patriotic fervour and belligerence, enabling the military industrial complex to keep on marching. We fall for it every time. Follow the money. Question all media.
MARK WINDSOR
