Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

By David Truman

War is terrible and the author understands the almost universal emotional reactions to events in Ukraine. But kneejerk demonizing stereotypes carried over from the Cold War are not helpful. You need to know the history that led to this. The invasion was not unprovoked, nor out of the blue.

The truth is being massively subverted. Remember the last Iraq war? There were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq – but UN and media and politicians pushed that narrative. We live in a post-truth world. Don’t take anything now on trust or bias. Use your critical faculties, look at the historical evidence, study the history.

Some background on the geography and history

European Russia, Ukraine and Belarus is an area of marshes, gentle slopes, plains, forests and grasslands. It has no natural borders. It has been invaded MANY times both before and after the coming of the Slavs. Before the Slavs – by the Cimmerians, Sarmatians, Scythians, Finno-Ugric peoples, Greeks, Goths (Ostrogoths and Visigoths), Huns, Bulgars, Khazars. After the coming of the Slavs – by the Vikings, Pechenegs, Cumans (Polovtsy), Mongols (overlords for 240 years), Teutonic and Livonian knights, Timur of Samarkand, Crimean Tatars, Lithuanians, Poles, Swedes, Turks, French (Napoleon) and British and French again (Crimean War), and Germans (Hitler).

Borders are a CORE SECURITY CONCERN.

The first East Slavic state was a single polity – KIEVAN RUS’ – covering today’s Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. The capital moved from Novgorod to KIEV in 886, then to Vladimir in the northeast from 1169. There were many separate principalities (fiefdoms) , but all the princes were of same bloodline – the Riurik dynasty (up to 1598).

Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev took Eastern Orthodox Christianity from Constantinople in 988. This was a defining moment in the history of civilization, and the genesis of the split between Russia and western Europe. Yaroslav the Wise (Grand Prince of Kiev 1019 – 1054) created a hierarchy of princes with Kiev at the top, and princes moving up as a vacancy occurred.

The Old East Slavic Language covered the whole area, with an intergradation of dialects (as in England).

The fragmentation of Rus’

The Mongol invasion 1237-42 fragmented Rus’ into three areas:
• the Northwest in Novgorod and Pskov,
• the Southwest in Kiev, in what became the Lithuanian-Russian state, then Poland; and
• the Northeast – in Vladimir, then Moscow.

The NE and SW competed to reunite all the Rus’ lands. While all of Rus’ was Eastern Orthodox from 988, Poland and Lithuania were Catholic. Ukraine was in the Kingdom of Poland from 1569 – subjected to Western influences – BUT the Catholic Poles persecuted the Orthodox. The Ukrainian Cossacks persuaded Tsar Aleksei in 1652 to take Eastern Ukraine (E of Dniepr) and Kiev into Muscovy. After a long war, the Treaty of Andrusovo (1667) confirmed the split in Ukraine.

The Crimean Tatars (last independent descendants of the Mongols) were a military and raiding threat for hundreds of years, but Catherine the Great conquered and annexed CRIMEA in 1783. Sevastopol then became the Black Sea naval base for Imperial Russia, later for the USSR.

She added NOVOROSSIYA – New Russia – on land north of the Black Sea, founding Odessa and other towns in today’s southern Ukraine with planted Russian populations.  Odessa today speaks 70% Russian.  Mariupol also speaks mostly Russian.

“Sacrosanct borders” ?

Borders in eastern Europe have been extremely fluid:

And look at the rise and fall of the Swedish empire, once THE major power in northern Europe until it was supplanted by Russia under Peter the Great:

What about Crimea?

After the Bolshevik 1917 Revolution, Crimea was part of the RUSSIAN Soviet Socialist Republic. Khrushchev transferred it to Ukraine in 1954 for geographic convenience.   His son Sergei Khrushchev explains:

“the decision to give Crimea to Ukraine had to do with economics and agriculture – the building of a hydro-electric dam on the Dnieper River which would irrigate Ukraine’s southern regions, including Crimea.   Not a political move,  not an ideological move – just business.”

That was within the ONE COUNTRY, the Soviet Union.   And NOBODY expected that after 1991, the Soviet omelette would be unscrambled! And when it was – the Russian Federation found its key Black Sea naval base IN ANOTHER COUNTRY! Completely unacceptable to national security, all the more so as the US pushed Ukraine toward being an American vassal.

Crimea had never historically been part of Ukraine or of Kievan Rus’.   Crimea speaks overwhelmingly Russian, and its population wanted to rejoin Russia, and did by referendum in March 2014.

The Language Situation in Ukraine

While Ukrainian and Russian are now separate languages, Russian predominates in the east and the south, and very many people in Ukraine and Russia have extended family in the other country. This is a gutwrenching war for millions. Both Russia and Ukraine (which means “borderland”) share not only closely related languages but also Eastern Orthodox Christianity and the Christian civilization that Kievan Rus’ inherited from Byzantium. The West’s intervention against Russia is a violent attempt to prise apart two very close kin, with the aim of damaging Russia – POST-communist Russia – and with preparedness to fight Russia, using Ukraine as a proxy, to the last Ukrainian. For Russia, the war is an existential issue and it will defend what it sees as its vital security interests to the end. The West, including the United States, Britain and the EU, have NO national security interests at stake.

Now: to the CURRENT CRISIS

As already covered, BORDER SECURITY is very important to Russia.

Gorbachev was persuaded in 1990 to agree to reunification of Germany on promise that “NATO will not expand one inch to the east.” NATO could have been disbanded.  Instead, the US and NATO treated post-communist Russia as an enemy to be contained and suppressed.   They destroyed the opportunity to build constructive cooperation.

•  NATO membership has grown by 14 (plus Finland and Sweden now to join too).   Its Bucharest Declaration of 2008 affirmed an “open door” toward Ukraine.

•  NATO put bases all around Russia’s periphery – interpreted by Russia as aggressive and hostile.  Putin made this very clear, from back in 2008, saying categorically “Ukraine and Georgia are not going to join NATO.”

Putin was asked in an interview: Why do you react so vehemently to NATO’s expansion? His answer was:
* A country in NATO can’t resist pressure from USA
* A country may get missile defence systems and other potentially hostile institutions – new bases, new missile strike systems.

Consider this:

So … a very few minutes’ flying time for hypersonic missiles to Moscow, right? An undeniably major threat to Russia’s national security.

There’s more. 1. Biological Weapons Laboratories

On 23 April 2021 the US Embassy in Ukraine acknowledged that there are BIOLOGICAL LABORATORIES in Ukraine under the control of the Pentagon.   At least 15 – exclusively American, financed by the US Department of Defence, because they’re biological WEAPONS laboratories. They are located in Odessa, Vinnytsia, Uzhgorod, Lviv (three), Kiev (three), Kherson, Ternopol,  and near Crimea and Luhansk.

These started during the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko and the premiership of Yuliya Tymoshenko – August 29th, 2005.

The US has more than 400 bacteriological laboratories around the world, and Fauci has funded the one in WUHAN, China.

After Zelensky became President of Ukraine in May 2019, Ukrainian parliamentary deputies Medvedchuk and Kuzmin wrote to him and other heads saying: 

“The Scientific and Technical Center in Ukraine, an international organization funded by the American authorities and whose staff have diplomatic immunity … is engaged in financing projects for the creation of weapons of mass destruction.”

The Americans say the scientific work is being carried out for exclusively peaceful purposes, and talk of dangers is “Russian disinformation.”  SPECULATION:   Were new coronavirus variants being developed – to be blamed on Russia?

2. Use of Ukraine as a proxy to fight Russia

The US has been using Ukraine as a tool to fight Russia “over there” and not in the US.    A mad view reflecting US determination to be the single world hegemon, seeing Russia as permanent enemy, and seeking to constrict Russia politically and economically.

Russia firmly rejects this view:  it does not seek to be another  hegemon, but asserts its independence   (whereas China’s Xi does see China as future world hegemon).

The US wants Ukraine to be an instrument of US dominance. It has also taken the opportunity to plunder Ukraine through massive corruption – already endemic in Ukraine, but mirrored in the US Democrat Administration.

3. The coup engineered by the US in Ukraine

Viktor Yanukovych was elected President of Ukraine in 2010.  In 2013, he rejected an IMF loan and EU association agreement because the loan would hand over control of Ukraine’s natural resources and increase the cost of living for the Ukrainian people. Instead, he accepted a more favourable offer from Russia.

U.S. government officials immediately deployed a highly organized western-backed revolution against him. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA front, trained activist journalists to use social media, funded TV stations supporting the protest, and bused in many protestors from out of town.   These included neo-Nazi elements [more on them below] who seized weapons, commandeered government buildings, and bloodied Ukraine’s streets in escalating violence. They engineered the COUP against him in February 2014.

The US certainly has form in engineering regime change abroad. Just a few: 1953 – CIA backed coup in Iran; 1961 – Congo; 1965 – Indonesia; 1971 – Bolivia; 1973 – Chile; 1976 – Argentina; 1983 – Grenada; 1989 – Panama; 2002-3 – Iraq; 2011 – Libya … and many others. And of course they still want regime change in Syria and in Iran.

REACTION TO THE COUP OF 2014

Putin reincorporated Crimea on 18 March 2014, following a referendum on 16 March. In the Donbas, Donetsk and Luhansk (heavily Russian-speaking) rebelled in ongoing demonstrations and declared independent republics.   People demanded a status referendum on union with Russia similar to that in Crimea.

4. Neo-Nazis! The Azov Battalion

Putin claimed one of the reasons that Russia invaded Ukraine was to eliminate the Nazis in that country.

The Azov Battalion is a paramilitary unit of the Ukrainian National Guard known for white supremacist neo-Nazi ideology, use of Nazi symbolism and violence against marginal groups and immigrants. The Azov battalion led the post-coup government’s assault on the self-declared republics in Donbas and retook the city of Mariupol from separatist forces.

5. Corruption in Ukraine

Who is Vladimir Putin?

Believes in strong leadership – sees himself as a tsar, custodian of the nation  – and does not like opposition! [Neither did Peter the Great, or Ivan the Terrible, or Catherine the Great, or Nicholas I – strong centralized leadership is the Russian tradition, and most Russians support this.]

Sees collapse of the Soviet Union as a tragedy, not because of the loss of communism, but because Russia lost status as a superpower.
He rejects a unipolar world dominated  by the United States, as predicted by Francis Fukuyama in “the end of history.”
He believes Russia should be a Great Power, but not a spreader of ideology. He’s not a messianic communist, and is also not like the American “manifest destiny” neo-cons who want to “spread democracy.”

Russia must include Ukraine to be a superpower. NOTE: Combined Russia, Ukraine and Belarus population is 200 million.

Putin also sees all the Eastern Slavs – Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians – as one people, who should be in one state – as in Kievan Rus’ 1000 years ago:   separate  principalities  but all under the one Grand Prince. While I certainly understand the apprehensions of the three Baltic republics who were forcibly incorporated in the USSR under Stalin, I don’t believe Putin’s vision includes them. They are NOT SLAVS.

The same idea was advanced by Solzhenitsyn in his 1990 book “Rebuilding Russia.”

SO … Who is Volodymyr Zelensky?

Explosive Video: A Scott Ritter Investigation: AGENT ZELENSKY, Part 1

On 12 July 2023, Scott Ritter, former US Marine Corps intelligence officer, published an explosive 36 minute video called AGENT ZELENSKY – Part 1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLeBb6hPUC8

If you can’t access this (if it’s taken down), you can watch it without restrictions on
https://rumble.com/v2zs3r0-a-scott-ritter-investigation-agent-zelensky-part-1.html

This traces the background of Volodymyr Zelensky, his grooming by Western intelligence, his massive corruption and now colossal wealth, and the mission given him to transform Ukraine from a close kinship relationship with Russia (very many Ukrainians and Russians have extended family in the other country) into a neo-Nazi state used as a Western proxy to hurt and diminish post-communist Russia and if possible destroy it.

The role played by the United States and United Kingdom in this ruinous venture is disgraceful.

Zelensky is no freedom fighter. He is a thoroughly evil, corrupt man prepared to use his own people as endless casualties, to the last Ukrainian.

Our Australian government (present and past) and the governments of other Western countries are grievously WRONG in supporting Ukraine in this war. It is a massive OWN GOAL to have destroyed the golden opportunity from the 1990s onward to build productive and positive relations with post-communist Russia. Utter madness.

But … “Ukraine is a democracy!” [Yeah, right!]

Zelensky will go down in history as the president who intentionally led citizens of his country to a horrible bloodshed, when best option was to propose a negotiated peace agreement. The existing borders of Ukraine are not sustainable, borders in the region have never been sacrosanct, and if Ukraine thinks it will ever take back Crimea, they’re dreaming.