Not Unprovoked

When talking about the current Ukraine war, it is hard to know where to start.  

Each side has its own spin.  

The biggest piece of BS that our government is feeding us here in the US is the “unprovoked” part.  

To listen to all the ex-CIA hacks, retired state department hawks and military analysts talking as pundits in our media, NATO, the US and the EU are all a bunch of clean-handed angels while Russia is acting crazy under the leadership of madman dictator Putin.  

Funny how we do not hear much from anyone outside of the narrow band of NATO supporters. The reporting should remind us all of the babies in the incubator story and the clear assurances of an earlier secretary of state about weapons of mass destruction.  The same western allies all fell in line then too. 

It would be nice to hear more from China and India, for example, not to mention the Russians themselves.  Why don't any of them get interviews, but any American journalist who stands around Moscow in a Dan Rather jacket is treated like an expert? It would be better to interview their translators.  

Our western alliance governments are using this crisis to sweep a lot of their own actions under the rug. 

The eastern expansion of NATO is real, and it has been upsetting every government in Russia since the end of the cold war.  It comes with the United States pulling out of established arms control agreements and NATO holding exercises in eastern Europe that are dress rehearsals for an invasion of Russia. 

You will hear a lot of downplay, evasion and change of subject on NATO expansion from our media.  

Things in the Ukraine are not as cut and dried as Mr. Blinken and company like to pretend.  

The overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014 was sketchy.  Our government was involved but exactly how is not clear.  Just because a bunch of telegenic people storm a building it does not mean that some kind of liberation took place, or that it was democratic, or even that popular.  

The political parties that formed the prior government were outlawed and a for a quick minute, so was the Russian language, which is the first language of about a quarte of Ukrainians.  A fascist political party was very involved and that is not some Putin fantasy.  

The situation was bad enough that two the Russian speaking areas broke away and we have had around 15,000 deaths in eastern Ukraine in the following years, none of which seem to warrant a tear-jerking report from NPR or any credence from think tank spin doctors.  There was little reporting on the oligarch paid private army that initiated the Ukrainian suppression of that Russian speaking revolt.  

So, yes, Russia was hiding the fact that their troops were involved, but they did not create the situation.  There is no talk of any of the Russian speaking side of this tragedy now as the west spins up a new past for this old conflict. The problems of the Dombas is described only as a Russian aggression by our press.

Since 2014 a steady flow of weapons has entered Ukraine.  All the purr words about the Ukrainians and all the snarl words about Putin and Russia don’t change the fact that there has been anti-Russian military buildup based in Kiev and that the Russian government has been asking for it to stop.  

Russia has its own lies and dirty deeds in this conflict and our media has been doing its best to underline an exaggerated misrepresentation of them to fit the needs of the hawks.  

For example, we are being told that this aggression against Ukraine is one of a long list.  On that list is Georgia. Think what you may of the two regions involved, there is no doubt that Georgia started that war.  Look it if up you don’t believe me.  Now we are being told the opposite.  

And there is certainly more we do not know.  Are there weapons in Ukraine that both sides do not want to talk about in public?  

Russia is clearly the aggressor here.  

Being for a Russian withdrawal is justified. 

But becoming pro-Ukrainian in this war is not.

There needs to be a negotiated settlement.

Both sides have legitimate concerns.    

And to understand this war, we Americans have to stop believing that this war was unprovoked.