Pete Hendrickson (@LostHorizons)

Even Well-Intentioned Commentators Persist In Getting The Ukraine Story Wrong ...and the war-mongers (and Biden supporters) benefit considerably thereby. I AM FREQUENTLY DISAPPOINTED with commentaries critical of US behavior in and about the current conflict in Ukraine. This is true even though I, too, am critical of that behavior-- extremely critical. The problem commentaries do acknowledge correctly that the Russian special operation in Ukraine was provoked. This is good as far as it goes, and is very important in response to propaganda absurdly and falsely characterizing Russia as a naked aggressor (and maybe one trying to recreate the Soviet empire by military conquest, a trope calculated to garner support for a militaristic NATO response). But these commentaries mistakenly confine their articulation of that provocation to the matter of NATO expansion toward Russian borders (and its declared intent to include Ukraine in that expansion). See this one-- by a writer whom I otherwise hold in high esteem-- as a recent example. It is certainly true that NATO's aggressive expansion-- especially coupled with the US abrogation of the IMF treaty-- is reason enough for Russia to have drawn a serious red-line and reacted to its arrogant disregard. But the threat of NATO expansion to Ukraine was not the proximate cause provocation of the Russian actions in February of 2022. THE ACTUAL PROXIMATE CAUSE of Russia's February, 2022, entry into Donetsk and Luhansk-- the two eastern regions comprising the Donbas-- was the amassing of ~150,000 troops by the US-fomented coup government in Kiev in preparation for an invasion and ethnic cleansing of that territory. The Kiev regime had been shelling the Donbas, home to the majority which had duly-elected ousted president Viktor Yanukovich, for all of the 8 years since the coup (in illegal disregard of the 2014 Minsk Accords to which it was a signatory). Beginning in early February, the neo-Nazi coup regime had escalated that shelling dramatically, telegraphing its intention to commence the genocide at any moment. When the coup-plotters consolidated their hold on Kiev and its governmental apparatus in the spring of 2014, the populations of Donetsk and Luhansk-- seeing the writing on the walls and facing edicts such as the banning of the Russian language historically prevalent in eastern Ukraine-- declared their independence (as had Crimea in just the latest of its many attempts to free itself from Kiev since the breakup of the USSR). Like Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk had applied for annexation by Russia, but while the former was accepted, the latter were not. In fact, Russia even declined to simply recognize Donetsk and Luhansk independence. But when Russia saw the accelerated shelling in February, 2022 and the massing of coup-regime troops on the Donbas border, and recognized the atrocities about to commence if nothing was done to stop them, Vladimir Putin announced Russian recognition of the Donbas states as independent and honored their request to assist in their defense. All of the foregoing summarizes the real provocation to which Russia was responding in its February, 2022 entry (not invasion) of the Donbas, and its related efforts to denazify and demilitarize coup-regime Ukraine. Continued: https://losthorizons.com/N/242.htm#1