{"id":1513540,"date":"2024-02-22T06:54:26","date_gmt":"2024-02-22T06:54:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/?p=314073"},"modified":"2024-02-22T06:54:26","modified_gmt":"2024-02-22T06:54:26","slug":"500000-dead-and-maimed-in-ukraine-enough-already","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2024\/02\/22\/500000-dead-and-maimed-in-ukraine-enough-already\/","title":{"rendered":"500,000 Dead and Maimed in Ukraine, Enough Already"},"content":{"rendered":"\"\"<\/a>\n
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Image by Jade Koroliuk.<\/p><\/div>\n

As we approach the second anniversary of Vladimir Putin\u2019s invasion of Ukraine, it\u2019s worth reflecting on\u00a0who bears the main responsibility<\/em>\u00a0for the subsequent \u201cinter-imperialist US-Russia proxy war,\u201d an epic slaughter that produced 500,000 deaths and injuries<\/a> so far and more than 300,000 fatalities (exact figures are hard to come by).<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not Russia.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was an unmitigated humanitarian disaster marred by unspeakable atrocities.<\/p>\n

Putin said a bunch of Russian imperial, anti-Lenin, and Peter the Great shit in the speech he gave announcing the invasion.<\/p>\n

I do not doubt that the post-Soviet capitalist Russian oligarchy had and has imperialist designs on Ukrainian resources. Or that a fully successful Russian invasion would have involved the systemic exploitation of Ukrainian resources by Russian state and capitalist interests.<\/p>\n

I have nothing but contempt for the authoritarianism and corruption of Russia\u2019s fascistic strongman \u00a0Putin, a hero and agent of the fascist right across the world. (He just\u00a0granted an interview<\/a>\u00a0to the leading United States neofascist propagandist Tucker Carlson.)<\/p>\n

He\u2019s a blood-soaked war criminal responsible for mass slaughter in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and Africa, and for brutal repression in his heavily policed home country.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s a loathsome tyrant running a crooked and revanchist oligarchy atop a savagely oppressive classist, racist and patriarchal sociopolitical order that ought to be overthrown in a new Russian socialist revolution.<\/p>\n

The Russian coffins that have come back from Ukraine have been disproportionately filled by oppressed ethnic minorities, especially Mongol Buryats (from southeastern Siberia) and Tuvans (Turkic ethnic group indigenous to Siberia ) and soldiers from economically disadvantaged regions in Siberia and the Russian Far East. Soldiers from favored Moscow and St. Petersburg have been largely spared the role of cannon fodder in Putin\u2019s invasion.<\/p>\n

All of which is quite terrible.<\/p>\n

Geopolitical \u201cleftists\u201d who think that there\u2019s something radical and noble about post-Soviet Russia are despicable buffoons.<\/p>\n

Still, Russia really doesn\u2019t bear anything remotely close to primary responsibility for the immense butchery in Ukraine over the last two years \u2013 carnage that has helped push the world closer to nuclear than any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.<\/p>\n

The Ukraine War could have been averted if Ukraine\u2019s Western tool of a president Volodymyr Zelensky had said just five words after being elected in 2019: \u00a0\u201cUkraine will not join NATO.\u201d<\/p>\n

Five words versus 500,000 casualties.<\/p>\n

Think about that.<\/p>\n

As Benjamin Abelow pointed out in his short, expertly crafted, and Noam Chomsky-endorsed 2022 book\u00a0<\/em>How the West Brought War to Ukraine<\/em><\/a>, the standard Western narrative claiming that Putin is \u201can insatiable, Hitler-like expansionist who invaded Ukraine in an unprovoked land grab\u201d is complete nonsense. The real cause of the February 2022 invasion that led to the war was the misguided and reckless policy direction taken by Washington and its imperial tool NATO over the last three decades.<\/p>\n

Without making excuses for Putin\u2019s butchery or claiming to know Putin\u2019s inner mind, Abelow rightly fixes leading blame where it belongs \u2013 on Washington and its European NATO allies.\u00a0 Here is his apt summary of the top US led Western provocations:<\/p>\n

During the past three decades, the United States, sometimes alone, sometimes with its European allies, has done the following:<\/p>\n

+\u00a0\u00a0 Expanded NATO over a thousand miles eastward, pressing it toward Russia\u2019s borders, in disregard of assurances previously given to Moscow<\/p>\n

+\u00a0 Withdrawn unilaterally from the antiballistic missile (ABM) treaty and placed antiballistic launch systems in newly joined NATO countries. These launchers can also accommodate and fire offensive nuclear weapons at Russia, such as nuclear-tipped Tomahawk cruise missiles<\/p>\n

+\u00a0 Helped lay the groundwork for, and may have directly instigated, an armed, far-right coup in Ukraine. This coup replaced a democratically elected pro-Russian government with an unelected pro-Western one<\/p>\n

+\u00a0 Conducted countless NATO military exercises near Russia\u2019s border. These have included, for example, live-fire rocket exercises whose goal was to simulate attacks on air-defense systems inside Russia<\/p>\n

+\u00a0 Asserted, without pressing strategic need, and in disregard of the great threat such a move would pose for Russia, that Ukraine would become a NATO member. NATO then refused to renounce this open-door policy even when doing so might have averted war<\/p>\n

+\u00a0\u00a0 Withdrawn unilaterally from the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty, increasing Russian vulnerability to a U.S. first strike<\/p>\n

+ Armed and trained the Ukrainian military through bilateral agreements and held regular joint military training exercises inside Ukraine. The goal has been to produce NATO-level military interoperability even before formally admitting Ukraine into NATO<\/p>\n

+ Led the Ukrainian leadership to adopt an uncompromising stance toward Russia, further exacerbating the threat to Russia and putting Ukraine in the path of Russian military blowback.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Once the invasion occurred, Abelow might have added in a follow up to his book (which appears to have been completed in April of 2022), the United States quickly saw Putin\u2019s action as an opportunity to \u201cweaken Russia\u201d (the actual language of US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin after a trip to Kyiv in late April of 2022) and poured massive financial and military resources into the monumental bloodbath. Along the way the US and its Western allies, the United Kingdom especially, worked to undermine any chances of a ceasefire and settlement.<\/p>\n

But for all these US-led provocations, the deaths and maiming of half a million human beings in Ukraine over the last two years would not have occurred.<\/p>\n

Abelow rightly conducted the venerable Chomsky practice of \u201cputting the shoe on the other foot,\u201d asking how Washington would have reacted \u201cif Russia or China carried out equivalent steps near U.S. territory?… how would the United States respond if Russia established a military alliance with Canada and then set up rocket installations 70 miles from the U.S. border? What would happen if Russia then used those rocket installations to conduct live-fire training exercises to practice destroying air-defense targets inside America? Would U.S. leaders accept verbal assurances from Russia that its intentions were benign?\u201d<\/p>\n

Good questions! The answer, of course, is that the US would make a forceful response quite possibly leading to \u201ca general war and the possibility of a nuclear exchange,\u201d consistent with the US Monroe Doctrine (which forbids potentially threatening foreign powers from installing military forces in the Western Hemisphere) and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the placement of Soviet nuclear missiles in the Caribbean brought Washington and Moscow to the very edge of World War III. \u00a0Washington would certainly order a massive pre-emptive military assault that it would sell as a necessary act of self-defense.<\/p>\n

As Abelow showed, the last generation of lethal and reckless Russian bear-poking took place in defiance of the advice of senior US foreign policy experts and practitioners, including numerous Russia hawks, who argued that aggressive eastward NATO expansion would needlessly antagonize post-Soviet Moscow and provoke a new Cold War that could bring about a nuclear catastrophe.\u00a0 In 2008, the current CIA director William Burns, then the US ambassador to Russia, cabled Washington that Ukraine was \u201cthe reddest of red lines\u201d \u2013 advice that was ignored as the Bush43 administration openly declared NATO\u2019\u2019s interest in recruiting Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Nine years ago, in the wake of the US-backed anti-Russian right-wing coup in Kyiv, the esteemed University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer warned that Russian security concerns might well lead Moscow to \u201cwreck Ukraine\u201d if the US didn\u2019t stop trying to economically, politically, and militarily integrate the country into the West.\u00a0 How borne-out was that warning?!<\/p>\n

The US-led provocation has been heedless of Russia\u2019s long and painful history of mass casualty Western invasions across its long Ukraine border.\u00a0 The Western imperial \u201celite\u201d has demonstrated little concern for how Russia\u2019s rather understandable historical fear of imperial encirclement and war fuels Russia militarism and authoritarianism.<\/p>\n

Thanks to US-led Western madness, \u00a0Abelow warned in\u00a0How the West Brought War to Ukraine<\/em>, the world stands closer to the brink of nuclear war than at any time in recent memory.<\/p>\n

Leftish sorts who got behind US fueling of this human meat-grinder need to take a long hard look in the mirror.<\/p>\n

I strongly recommend Abelow\u2019s little early 2022 volume as the \u201cGenocide Joe\u201d Biden administration and Zelensky try to preserve a bloodbath that has become an ugly stalemate that top Russian and Ukrainian generals are trying to freeze in territorial place before more lives are ruined.<\/p>\n

Abelow\u2019s book is not without blind spots beyond its April 2022 time stamp. His strange comment that \u201cUkraine is irrelevant to America\u201d (p. 60) shows that he has no understanding of the driving capitalist-imperialist basis for Washington\u2019s interest in integrating Ukraine with the United States and its European allies and in trying to weaken Russia. Ukraine might be irrelevant to most everyday Americans but it\u2019s not irrelevant to the US capitalist-imperialist ruling class.<\/p>\n

Lacking a basic historical-materialist understanding of imperialism (a word that never appears in his discussion of US policy), \u00a0Abelow is left with no deeper explanation of American conduct than the mysterious infection of US \u00a0policymakers\u2019 brains by some strange and stupid Russophobia.<\/p>\n

Abelow\u2019s volume never engaged with the core ideological justification that the US and the West have used to sell the bringing of\u00a0imperialist war\u00a0<\/em>to Ukraine \u2013 the preposterous claim that the West is defending \u201cdemocracy\u201d against \u201cautocracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Abelow\u2019s book failed to call for the overthrow of the imperialist rulers of the world, who have brought the planet to the brink of destruction (ecologically as well as militarily).<\/p>\n

Abel was right of course to conclude that \u201cpolicy makers in Washington and the European capitals\u201d were placing humanity at grave risk.<\/p>\n

Well, yes, that\u2019s what capitalist-imperialist rulers do, Dr. Abelow!<\/p>\n

Revolution anyone?<\/p>\n

This essay originally appeared on<\/em> The Paul Street Report<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

The post 500,000 Dead and Maimed in Ukraine, Enough Already<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

the United States quickly saw Putin\u2019s action as an opportunity to \u201cweaken Russia\u201d (the actual language of US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin after a trip to Kyiv in late April of 2022) and poured massive financial and military resources into the monumental bloodbath. Along the way the US and its Western allies, the United Kingdom especially, worked to undermine any chances of a ceasefire and settlement. More<\/a><\/p>\n

The post 500,000 Dead and Maimed in Ukraine, Enough Already<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":272,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,266],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1513540"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/272"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1513540"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1513540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1513541,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1513540\/revisions\/1513541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1513540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1513540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1513540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}