LETTER: Ukrainian war began eight years ago

Like Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the mainstream Western media, which regurgitates Ukrainian propaganda and lies, your correspondent Rob Tiffin is living in a deluded “cloud cuckoo land” in his assertion that Russia is already defeated (“Russia is already defeated,” September 6).

The EU and British economies are on the verge of collapse thanks to their ill-considered and self-destructive boycotts of Russian gas and oil, and the US empire is teetering on the brink of a civil war between “blues” and “reds”. Every war is a crime against humanity. Women are raped, children are traumatised.  Young men who do survive are both mentally and physically scarred for life, and then violently take out their frustrations on their families. 

Tiffin repeats the lies that Russia’s intervention in Ukraine was totally unprovoked. Buried in war propaganda is the reality that the Ukrainian war began eight years ago. In fact, it was deliberately instigated by then US vice-president Joe Biden and Victoria Nuland, who is now Biden’s under-secretary for political affairs.

Nuland’s husband, Robert Kagan (not coincidentally) is the cofounder of the Project for the New American Century, a war-mongering lunacy that lobbies for global US military and financial hegemony. Nuland infamously declared “f**k the EU” when EU governments in 2014 objected to US regime change in Ukraine and the Maidan coup d’etat.

For the past eight years the US and UK have been pouring weapons into Ukraine and training the Ukrainian army to Nato standards. Nato’s objective was to destabilise and weaken Russia before launching a war against China. About 70% of those weapons are reported to have been resold on black markets. 

Like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and other countries devastated by Nato wars, Ukraine is now destroyed. Unless a peace is soon negotiated that acknowledges that Crimea and the Donbas regions have seceded, Ukraine will also become a land-locked country without access to its ports on the Black Sea. 

Although it constitutes only 10% of the world’s population, Tiffin revealingly confuses the “civilised world” as the “white world”.  The reality is that 90% of the real world understandably objects to the “forever” wars the US and its Nato satellites have inflicted on the globe for the past 20 years and more.

While Tiffin plays “history quiz” around the barbarism of Joseph Stalin’s 1930s Holodomor famine in Ukraine, let’s not forget the English-instigation of the Irish potato famine or, more recently, the 1943/1944 Bengal famine during which Winston Churchill decreed that India must export wheat to feed British soldiers, even at the cost of millions of Indian lives. 

Terry Crawford-Browne
World Beyond War SA

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