What is the basis for Vladimir Putin’s “recognition” of two Ukrainian provinces and his dispatch of “peacekeepers” to invade the country? Or: why is Russia invading Ukraine? He laid it out in an extensive and angry speech overnight before his formal “recognition” of the separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk:
Ukraine is part of Russia
“Ukraine for us is not just a neighbouring country. It is an integral part of our own history, culture, spiritual space. These are our comrades, relatives, among whom are not only colleagues, friends, former colleagues, but also relatives, people connected with us by blood and relatives. For a long time, the inhabitants of the historical lands of the south-west of ancient Russia called themselves Russians and Orthodox. This was the case until the 17th century, when part of these territories were reunified with the Russian state, and after.”
Ukraine now ‘a colony with puppets at its helm’
“Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia, more precisely, Bolshevik, communist Russia … Even today it can with good reason be called ‘Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s Ukraine’. He is its author and architect. This is fully confirmed by archive documents … And now grateful descendants have demolished monuments to Lenin in Ukraine. This is what they call decommunisation. Do you want decommunisation? Well that suits us just fine. But it is unnecessary, as they say, to stop halfway. We are ready to show you what real decommunisation means for Ukraine … Ukraine never had a tradition of genuine statehood … Ukrainians squandered not only everything we gave them during the USSR, but even everything they inherited from the Russian empire. Even the work created by Catherine the Great.”
NATO is an aggressive alliance
“They try to convince us over and over again that NATO is a peace-loving and purely defensive alliance, saying that there are no threats to Russia. Again they propose that we take them at their word. But we know the real value of such words.”
Ukraine can never join NATO
“We know the position and words of the US leadership that active hostilities in eastern Ukraine do not exclude the possibility of this country joining NATO if it can meet the criteria of the North Atlantic alliance and defeat corruption … If Ukraine was to join NATO it would serve as a direct threat to the security of Russia … US strategic planning documents contain the possibility of a so-called pre-emptive strike against enemy missile systems. And who is the main enemy for the US and NATO? We know that too. It’s Russia. In NATO documents, our country is officially and directly declared the main threat to North Atlantic security. And Ukraine will serve as a forward springboard for the strike.”
The real goal of the West
“There is only one goal: to restrain the development of Russia. And they will do it, as they did before. Even without any formal pretext at all. Just because we exist, and we will never compromise our sovereignty, national interests and our values.”
Other claims
Russia claims Ukraine engaged in torturing people, including women and children, is guilty of genocide, is seeing neo-Nazism on the rise, is developing nuclear weapons, is planning to attack the Russian Orthodox church, and is preparing a military attack on Russia.
Bernard, I speak Russian and Ukrainian, and I did not hear any anger in Putin’s voice. Nor any rage. Why do you have to invent rage and anger?
What is your reason?
the crikey lies are building up.
stick to your hidden behind paywall murdoch echo chambers
Yep a couple of articles by Bernard today definitely taking up sides with the “West”, basically calling anything that Putin says is propaganda, whilst ignoring the bluster, and propaganda of the USA.
I would suggest there’s plenty of propaganda to go around on both sides.
On that point, I have just read an interesting article by Gregory Clarke ‘Ukraine on the Boil’ on the Pearls and Irritations website which talks about Ukraine’s constant bombardment of the two Russian-dominated territories, Donetsk and Luhansk, and which puts a bit of a different complexion on things.
Tells you all you should know
https://youtu.be/OisJkpGYpAo
There have been various European and UK reports, inc. the MSM, of the whole media show Putin put on yesterday at the Kremlin (with Russian analysis); if he wasn’t angry then why (although allegedly recorded hours earlier) were some of his cronies and inner circle i.e. senior soldiers quaking in their boots? Described as looking not very confident…. although I hope Putin is confident that some of his senior soldier do not have conflicting views of their boss?
More than anger, one thinks he crossed a line years ago (like other contemporaries e.g Erdogan, Lukashenko, Orban et al.) and is actually quite fearful because he can no longer quietly go into retirement (because previously and now there is no one to tap him on the shoulder…); NATO, EU, US, the ‘west’ etc. are simply proxies of the fear he has of open society, liberal democracy, rule of law etc.
Meanwhile both Ukrainians and Russians, especially the latter, look to emigrate and/or settle full time in the EU, US or Londongrad…..
Drew, why all people should be aspiring liberal democracy? How long did it take from Western countries to have liberal democracy? Do you think, that in one thousand years from now people on Earth will go to polls to vote?
Do you think that US democracy, where if you want to be a president, you need to have at least a billion dollars in donations is a real democracy, which needs to be protected?
Who is using the US as an example?
Most EYU nations, though disappeared by Oz media, manage to be attractive for many from Central Eastern Europe, Russia, Turkey etc., plus many Americans, international students and immigrants.
I understand Australian media subjects everyone to only US/UK content and perceptions but there are other nations with which we compare with e.g. why are Canada, Ireland/EU, NZ and Asia disappeared by legacy media?
AUKUS, AUKUS, aukus!!
Agree re: US democracy not genuinely existing, but one reason is it seems preferable is anti-war protesters aren’t imprisoned.
The Duma was pushing for this to happen weeks ago, it wasn’t all of a sudden on Putin’s part. No trouble in Georgia today when Russia did exactly the same thing.
If you understood the history of NATO and Russia, you would clearly see that all Putin’s claims are actually true.
Yes, the present regime in Ukraine was installed by the US, with the obvious purpose of installing NATO a little later, and weaning Ukraine and the EU itself off Russia’s gas.
What an incredible statement to make, basically writing off Ukrainian people as puppets. What an imperialist mindset.
The people in the Donbass are Ukrainians, the US and its thugs took away their President. The government of Ukraine are illegal puppets, that’s why Vladimir Zelenskiy approval rating is in the teens.
Facts have a habit of appearing like that. And who said anything about the people, most of whom just want to get on with life without international politics f**king their lives up.
An excellent point and perfectly true. The problem is that the general public here know nothing about Ukrainian history and the agreements made and broken (by the USA) since 1990 about preventing Russia being surrounded by NATO. If there was a much better historical understanding, then the sabre rattling from Biden (Blinken and Sullivan), Johnson and Morrison might have been more restrained. Given that each of those three is facing political problems of their own, the Ukrainian situation is a godsend for them. They know how little the general public knows about the situation, magnified by the fact that Russia always gets a bad press, and in the case of Morrison and Johnson, these leaders don’t care whether hesitation is resolved diplomatically or not.
Sigh, to the extent their was a guarantee about NATO, and it was never solid, it was with Gorbachev and the Soviet Union. Which ceased to exist on 31 December 1991.
Yes, true. But there was also the Minsk Agreement of 2015.
That is true but that was basically a ceasefire. Moreover, the two sides can’t agree on interpretation of the articles. It says nothing about NATO, not surprisingly. Arguably Putin just broke it by sending “peacekeepers” into Donbas.
A key disagreement is the extent of Ukraine’s sovereignty. Ukraine claims it, Putin says it must be limited. There are echoes of the US imperialist Monroe doctrine in his position. To my mind it also looks like the Oslo peace accords, which were really just Israel forcing an unworkable solution on the Palestinians that would make them dependent and subjugated forever.
As an aside, Putin’s policy on Donbas has been interesting. His clients there, and possibly even a majority of the population, would like to join Russia. That would be costly because the place is an economic basket case. Putin has not moved to incorporate them up to now. One suspects they are more useful as proxies. He can shrug his shoulders and walk away when they (purportedly) do things like shooting down a civilian airliner or shell a kindergarten.
Some sensible and informed analysis.
You know the Donbass rebels bombed the kindergarten because our media tells you. Yet the OSC says otherwise. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSC) has served for years as a credible conflict zone reporting agency. It attended the kindergarten bombing site but was prevented from approaching the impact zone by Kiev officials. the OSC was not able to perform its experts to assess the impact zone as it usually does. So they left in protest. We only have Kiev, the US and NATO telling us it was the rebels. The US has withdrawn its own members from the OSC, a sure sign the propaganda fix is in.
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/02/ukraine-who-is-firing-at-whom-and-who-is-lying-about-it.html
Your certainty about MH17 is also open to challenge.
Oh deary me. Trying to pass off that hoary old far right ‘media outlet’ MOA as a credible source. Tut.
Far right?
Are you a rabid Trotskysk?
Bernard’s articles are usually on the button, far more so than dreary old msm…..
The last poll in LDNR showed only 40% wanted to join Russia. The rest were happy to be in an autonomous state in a Ukraine that wasn’t trying to kill them.
Also that present day Russia is neither the Czarist nor Soviet Union but more a reduced European or western Russian ‘state’ that is suffering severe demographic etc. decline, while keeping an authoritarian eye on its neighbours i.e. former Soviet Republics, not just Ukraine.
Russia took on all Soviet obligations after the fall, it paid back all of the Soviet debt by itself. All Soviet treaties became Russian treaties.
That’s the problem here in AUS isn’t it Gregory? And in Britain too. We have two leaders in deep crap with their electorate who are so enamoured of power that they are prepared to ADD TO WAR, as a freaking distraction from their own incompetence. WAR for Gods’s sake. Where innocent people die horrible deaths and have their lives tortured by pain and loss. If THAT doesn’t show that Morrison shouldn’t be allowed near anything more powerful than the steam in his kitchen kettle, I don’t know what else could demonstrate it so dramatically.
Given his welding idiocy, what odds that Jen would trust him with a hot kettle?
I don’t know much about Ukranian or Russian history but I do know that Biden and Johnson (and to a lesser extent Morrison) have been crying out for a war to sweep all their troubles under. You could hear it in their public “condemnation” of Putin over the last couple of weeks.
No they are mostly confected nonsense based on 19th century Great Russian chauvinism and following the same sorts of propagandistic essential nationalist and ethnicities stories that were used by ultra nationalist Serb and Croat politicians to support atrocities in the eighties and nineties. Also of a kind that you find in right wing Zionism as well. There are facts in the narrative but the historical narrative itself is a series of self-serving distortions.
I wrote an earlier comment on the history and Putin’s abuse of it but it’s lost in awaiting moderation (sigh).
As an aside, re creating pretexts for war, Putin is quite capable of staging a “terrorist” provocation on Russian soil that kills hundreds of Russians, see the start of the second Chechen war where “Chechens” apparently suddenly thought bombing residential apartments was a good tactic. Though they never actually made any claims about them. And it was something they hadn’t done before or did again after the war started. The only people actually found planting explosives in the basement of an apartment building were Russian security services. That wouldn’t come out now, the media and law enforcement is much more under control.
Yeah Putin isn’t blameless either.
Agree absolutely, if people actually knew/understood history, and stopped spruiking Kremlin agitprop, but focused instead on Putin and his historical track record, they might pause for thought and reflect; seems like a mix of hero worship or ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’, both ageing left and right, while falling for some clever agitprop.
What about Western “agitprop”?
As far back as 2014 a coalition of Russian regime change experts were working against Russia, just as they did for Syria, and just as they continue now.
On Oct 30 2014 Michael Weiss, who wrote copiously at The Atlantic Council on the necessity for Russian and Syrian regime-change, attended a conference run by the Legatum Institute, a Right wing UK think-tank with links to the US defense Department and Radio Free Europe. The financial backers of Legatum were Christopher and Richard Chandler, two oligarch capitalists who were the single biggest foreign beneficiaries of one of the greatest privatization scams in history: Russia’s voucher program in the early 1990s, when each Russian citizen was given a voucher that represented a share in a state concern to be privatized . . . and most naïve Russians were fooled or coerced into dumping their vouchers for next to nothing. Putin shut them down and Legatum was their way of striking back.
The conference was held in association with the NATO-aligned Atlantic Council. The theme was “The Menace of Unreality: Combatting Russian Disinformation in the 21st Century” and had the backing of the US State Department. The participants included: Geoffrey Pyatt, US Ambassador to Kiev, active supporter of the 2014 Ukraine coup; Oleksander Scherba, Ambassador-at-Large for the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Michael Weiss; Peter Pomerantsev, author of Revolutionary Tactics: Insights from Police and Justice Reform in Georgia; John Herbst, Director of the Atlantic Council’s Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Centre; and Anne Applebaum, journalist and former board member of The Washington Post and Russian regime change advocate.
John Herbst, an attendee at the Oct 2014 Legatum conference, was also a senior member of the Atlantic Council, NATOs supposedly civilian think tank. On Feb 1 2015, Herbst was a coauthor of an article published at the Brookings Institution on “Preserving Ukraine’s Independence, Resisting Russian Aggression: What the United States and NATO Must Do”. The coauthors included Strobe Talbott (Hillary Clinton’s likely choice for US Sec.State), Jan Lodal, Admiral James Stavridis (NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander 2009-2013) and General Charles Wald ( former Deputy Commander of United States European Command). In effect, that’s the full NATO establishment backing limits on Russia. And it was that John Herbst attending a Legatum conference calling for an official Western policy of censorship on political views originating in or sympathetic to Russia.
So the current conflict does not occur in a vacuum but in a context of Russian regime change backed by the highest level of NATO and the US government.
A bit wordy, but also a classic conservative response, Russia and Putin are victims of what, words from those who sympathise? Sure you have not been hoodwinked, they have been accused of links to Putin….?
Are you seriously trying to claim that Legatum Institute is central in this conspiracy when many in its ecosystem worship Putin, supported Brexit, authoritarian leaders, anti-EU and libertarian approach to the rule of law, finances and transparency?
“Are you seriously trying to claim that Legatum Institute is central in this conspiracy?” No. But there has been a firm coalition of senior NATO and US officials, right wing media and think tanks who have evidenced by their behaviour a commitment to Russian regime change. They did the same for Syria and the effects of their sustained propaganda has made it easy to sell the current series of lies about Russian “aggression,” lies I might add that don’t stand up to the facts.
“many in its ecosystem worship Putin, supported Brexit, authoritarian leaders, anti-EU and libertarian approach to the rule of law, finances and transparency.” Many in the West have financial and political objectives of their own that damage their economies and society. They make “excuses” for Putin to achieve these ends. But they make these excuses against a backdrop of continuous threats against Russia from the conservative forces that matter — a US dominated NATO, the US State Dept and a raft of Russia haters. Rapprochement and diplomacy to achieve a common peace are simply not on their agenda with these groups. They never gave a fig leaf about Syrians, Libyans, Yemenis, Iraqis and now Russians. The Ukrainians will find out to their cost that the US doesn’t give a fig leaf about them either.
Think one would like to see credible sources for quotes and Legatum is not one of them….
I wonder how USA would react if Canada or Mexico decided to ally with Russia. Having seen how they treat little Cuba possibly answers that question.
Whataboutery, and they are not…..
The only people holding Russia back are Russian oligarchs and Putin himself.
Where should Russia go, should it sell out its natural recourses to multinationals. Should it dispose of its military to appease Washington. Where should it be today remembering it was a communist nation only 25 years ago. I think it did pretty well to switch from communism to a free market
None of the actors in this story are good people. They are all power-hungry narcissists, hiding behind a nationalist front. As is always the case, it will be the common people – of all the nations involved – who end up paying the price.
Except Putin is doing what all good leaders do.
He is protecting the country and the people.
It is astonishing how quickly some of our nosey politicians forget history and/or overlook how fervent is Russian attachment to their country.
The European ‘leaders’ are like children playing with fire.
Only Macron knows what has to be done.
Putin is protecting his people the way a Godfather ‘protects’ his neighbourhood.
True, and very effectively.
No that’s not fair, modest Putin is a very modest owner of some modest assets like any normal middle class in Russia, although some of his friends and apparatchiks have become incredibly wealthy in the past decade i.e. billionaires on low salaries?
Why is Putin so popular in Russia, and don’t say its fabricated, I have kids living there.
Most of Putin’s words right out the nationalist wing of the Communist party in the 1980s. Also a familiar (reactionary) modern style of appealing to history and invented history in the name of some “essential” fixed national identity. Used by Serb and Croatian nationalists to justify war and atrocities in the eighties and nineties. Style often invoked by right wing zionists and of alt rights found everywhere else.
if we want to go back in history we arrive at Kievan Rus, a Viking conquered territory where the local Slavs absorbed their conquerors and of which Muscovy (the seed of modern Russia) was just an minor outlier. I bring this up not to make an argument for Ukraine but to point out how superfluous such arguments are.
What matters is that currently there are over 50 million free people who consider themselves Ukrainian, share culture and diversities within that culture and have democratic government. There is no right to claim or force Russian sovereignty over them. The same logic applies to Hong Kong, Taiwan and the West Bank.
Putin’s posturings are part cynical KGB propaganda and part a revival of the Great Russian chauvinism that was an ideological underpinning of the Russian empire, Tsar, church and fatherland. The first two were inadequate, arrogant and cruel and the Russian people more generally refer to the motherland. It is extremely doubtful Russian people want war either but civil society there is so stifled, and the media propaganda is at least one notch above Murdoch, so neither we nor they will likely know what they think.
At bottom what Putin most fears is uncontrolled social solidarities forming. Hence his fear of Ukraine for its possible demonstration effects.
Correction, Ukraine’s population has declined since I last looked at it properly. Massive emigration and a falling birth rate since 1992 means it now has a population of 41 million.