1. Even "Discredited serial liars" like Boris Johnson usually end up telling on themselves because they relish being contemptible. When they do, I tend to believe them.
2. It's most definitely a proxy war. Anti-Russia sentiment is extremely strong in the American political establishment. Politicians routinely talk more about destroying/crushing Russia and Putin than they do about defending Ukraine. As journalist Glenn Greenwald put it, "The purpose of the NATO war in Ukraine was never to defend Ukrainians. That was the childish fairy tale fed to Western populations to get them to support yet another proxy war. It was to sacrifice Ukraine to enrich the Raytheons and weaken Russia."
3. Putin has said he has no interest in Poland, and would only invade if Poland attacked Russia first.
4. My second bullet point covers why the US is really "supporting" Ukraine. It's about weapons deals in the hundreds of billions, as well as targeting our enemy Russia.
5. There is reporting to suggest that Boris Johnson did indeed tell Zelensky not to accept a peace deal on behalf of the West:
Diplomacy Watch: Did Boris Johnson help stop a peace deal in Ukraine? | Responsible Statecraft
6. I've never been one to say that Putin was "justified" in his invasion of Ukraine, but I understand the provocation involved. To say that NATO
didn't make any promises not to expand "is plain wrong." Here's some reporting from Salon on the subject:
The most critical events that have been airbrushed out of the West's political narrative are the violation of
agreements made by Western leaders at the end of the Cold War not to expand NATO into Eastern Europe, and the
U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in February 2014. Western mainstream media accounts date the crisis in Ukraine back to Russia's
2014 reintegration of Crimea, and the decision by ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine to secede from Ukraine as the
Luhansk and
Donetsk People's Republics.
But these were not unprovoked actions. They were responses to the U.S.-backed coup, in which an armed mob led by the neo-Nazi Right Sector militia
stormed the Ukrainian parliament, forcing elected President Viktor Yanukovych and members of his party to flee for their lives. After the events of Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, that scenario should now be easier for Americans to understand.
Source:
https://www.salon.com/2022/02/02/in...asco-the-us-is-reaping-exactly-what-it-sowed/
Here's a lengthier excerpt from another Salon article detailing how several government officials expressed their concerns about NATO expansion:
Putin's central demand is that NATO remove troops from countries that joined the group of U.S.-allied nations after 1997. In 1990, under George H.W. Bush, Secretary of State James Baker repeatedly promised Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders that if the USSR let the Warsaw Pact nations leave, NATO would not "move one inch eastward." As is
detailed in declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents released in 2017, Bush and the leaders of West Germany, the U.K. and France gave similar assurances.
When the German magazine Der Spiegel examined these documents and interviewed those involved,
its reporters concluded that "there was no doubt that the West did everything it could to give the Soviets the impression that NATO membership was out of the question for countries like Poland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia."
Today, those three former Warsaw Pact countries and two others, in addition to the three former Baltic Soviet republics and several formerly neutral countries, are members of NATO.
Putin and other Russian leaders have complained bitterly about this Western duplicity, complaints echoed by Gorbachev. Numerous others have made similar criticisms, including former CIA Director Robert Gates, Cold War diplomat and historian George Kennan, and Jack Matlock, the last U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union.
In 1995, 18 retired U.S. foreign service and State and Defense Department officers
signed a letter denouncing these NATO recruitments, saying they would convince Russians that the U.S. was seeking to "isolate, encircle, and subordinate them." It is this NATO penetration into Russia's sphere that is the root cause of the current conflict.
Some justify NATO's expansion by claiming Russia was a threat to its neighbors. Yet in the decade after the fall of the USSR, the Russian economy and military were in catastrophic condition.
Source:
https://www.salon.com/2022/01/30/ye...nt-mean-his-ukraine-demands-are-unreasonable/
