PHILIP GIRALDI  Courtesy The Unz Review

US and Israel will prevent the sale of Iranian drones to Russia

In spite of an overwhelming flood of disinformation coming from the Western mainstream media and governments, there continue to be obviously widely divergent views on the current war between Ukraine and Russia. The official and media supported narrative is that Moscow attacked its neighbor in violation of rule based” principles of international relations, whereby an attack on any nation by a neighbor with the intent to seize territory is always and unambiguously wrong. That line of thinking, summed up in the media by the endlessly repeated phrase Russia’s unprovoked war of aggression” has provided justification for the US/NATO intervention to support the Volodymyr Zelensky government’s effort to fight back against the Russians. It has also fed into the line that Ukraine and its supporters are standing up for freedom,” democracy” and even good against evil.”

Flipping the argument to the Russian point of view, the Kremlin has argued that it has repeatedly sought to negotiate a settlement with Ukraine based on two fundamental issues that it claims threaten its own national security and identity. First is the failure of Ukraine to comply with the Minsk Accords of 2014-5 which conceded a large measure of autonomy to the Donbas region, an area indisputably inhabited by ethnic Russians, as is Crimea. Since that agreement however, Ukrainian militias and other armed elements have been using artillery to shell the Donbas, killing an estimated 15,000 mostly Russian residents. Second, Russia has balked at plans for NATO to offer membership to Ukraine, which would place a possibly superior hostile military alliance at its doorstep. Russian President Vladimir Putin has observed that the issues were both negotiable and that Zelensky only had to agree to maintain his country as neutral,” i.e. not linked to any military alliance. Reportedly it was the United States and Britain that pushed Ukraine into rejecting any and all of the Russian demands in a bid to initiate a war of attrition using Ukrainian lives to destabilize Putin’s government and reduce its ability to oppose US and Western dominance.

Full Storey

Ukraine War Spills Over Into the Middle East, by Philip Giraldi – The Unz Review