April 17, 2023
I have written several pieces on the causes of the NATO-Russian Ukrainian War. In them, I focused on the long-term as well as the immediate causes in the run-up to Putin’s decision to invade. However, all this needs to be put together with new revelations in order to understand the mood in the Kremlin in late January-early February (most likely mid-February) when Putin decided to pull the trigger.
We have the background causes:
• decades of NATO expansion;
• NATO’s attack on Serbia,
• Western recognition of Kosovo’s independence from Serbia despite a UN resolution it sponsored stipulating Serbia’s territorial inviolability;
• ‘democracy promotion’ colour revolutionism in Ukraine and other states neighbouring Russia;
• Western financial and moral support for a colour revolution in Russia;
• the Western-backed February 2014 Maidan color revolution;
• the cover-up of the Maidan ultranationalist, neofascist wing’s snipers’ flag terrorist attack that sparked the ultimate overthrow of Yanukovych, which the West to this day still ‘fakes’ as carried out by Yanukovych’s security forces;
• Western support for Maidan Kiev’s anti-terrorist operation targeting the civilian population in Donbas as well as the rebels who were merely repeating the Western-backed Maidan method of an illegal seizure of power;
• the certain loss for Russia of its Black Sea Fleet naval base as a result of the Maidan putsch;
• Kiev’s failure to fulfil the Minsk 2 accord’s stipulations that it negotiate with the Donbas rebels directly and adopt legislation granting the region autonomy;
• NATO’s buildup of the Ukrainian army into the second largest force in Europe and as a de facto member of world history’s most powerful military alliance, and much more (e.g., abandonment and violations of arms control treaties).
The more immediate causes I have demonstrated include the following:
• Zelenskiy’s threat to develop nuclear weapons a week before Putin’s invasion;
• a deployment of Ukrainian forces to the contact line, perhaps in a posture that signalled an imminent attack on Donbas, and a sharp escalation in fighting initiated and ratcheted up by Kiev’s forces (regular and neofascist ‘national battalions), who frequently targeted civilians, along the Donbas line of contact days before Putin’s invasion and precisely he decided to invade.
Now we can add to the immediate causes
• US President Joe Biden’s and Victoria’s Nuland threats to destroy Russo-European Nord Stream gas pipelines delivering Russian natural gas to Germany;
• and the fact that as a result of their provocative incitements, Russian intelligence most certainly would have concluded that there was a grave threat that the US planned to destroy the pipelines. This would be true, even if Russia had no other intelligence regarding the internal discussions and planning for the attacks by the US government, intelligence, and military.
Seymour Hersh’s article, citing unnamed sources inside the administration, shows that with few to no caveats, would have determined and reported to Putin that the US plans to destroy Nord Stream placed the pipelines and Russian gas sales to Europe under threat.
This is so regardless of the fact that the US threat to attack Nord Stream was delivered in an implied, veiled manner and as a response to any Russian invasion of Ukraine.
For the Kremlin the danger of an attack on the Nord Stream pipelines would have represented not just a threat to those particular pipelines but an emerging general Western threat to any and all Russian pipelines outside of the Ukrainian context.
The irresponsibility of the Biden administration’s loose talk about what was, as a source in Hersh’s report notes, “an act of war” could only have piqued Russian angst and constituted another weight tipping the scales in favour of a decision by Putin to invade. If, moreover, Russia had the intelligence or concluded based solely on the verbal threats that planning and organization for the attack were already underway, then the threat to Russia’s pipelines becomes that much greater and that much more provoking of Russia’s invasion.
Like him or not, when asking why Putin decided to invade, the reasons were legion to undertake a preemptive measure obviating the need for a larger future war that could face the country in a less advantageous correlation of forces between Russia and the West.
Why did Putin invade? Zelinskiy’s nuclear threat, Biden’s NordStream threat, Ukraine’s increasingly powerful NATOized military, the substantial and growing ultranationalist and neofascist nature of Ukraine’s state ideology and political culture?
Take your pick or take them altogether.
The American Democrat Party-state’s arrogance, hubris, ideologization, and simple inability to listen and take into account real Russian national security concerns over the course of three decades have had their consequences. So too have: the American mass media’s corruption; their allied police organs’ politicization, authoritarianization, and lack of restraint; and the resulting cluelessness of the American public regarding the outside world and America’s increasingly malignant role internationally.
Hersh’s article will have no effect on US public opinion, no less on the conceited and perverted elites. Correspondingly, the impending military clash between the globalist, American-led, and increasingly authoritarian empire of the West and the authoritarian-led Sino-Russian challenge of the rest draws ever closer.
