LETTER: Nato’s proxy war a disaster for Ukraine

Contrary to Bernard Benson’s blinkered assumption that “Russia will lose its war with Ukraine and once again SA will be seen to have backed the wrong horse” (“Shame on the ANC for allowing Sergei Lavrov’s visit”, January 23), the US and its Nato vassal states have already lost this war. About eight Ukrainian soldiers (even 15- and 16-year-old boys) are now reported as being killed for every Russian soldier.

Nato’s proxy war is a disaster for the people of Ukraine and the world. The first casualty in any war is invariably the truth. It is totally false propaganda that the Russian intervention was completely unprovoked. The US government and Nato have been deliberately provoking this war since 2008 and earlier. In 1961 US president Dwight Eisenhower warned of the risks to freedom and democracy of the “military-industrial-congressional complex” of which Joe Biden, as a senator, was a congressional driver for decades. The US war business is now totally out of control, hence its war in Ukraine.

In pursuit of global US financial and military hegemony, the objective of the Neocon Project for the New American Century is to weaken Russia before unleashing wars against Iran and China. It is sheer madness, including the risk of nuclear annihilation of the Earth. Nato has poured weapons into Ukraine, which has become a de facto member of Nato. The 2014/2015 Minsk agreements negotiated to provide a semblance of autonomy for the Russian-speaking Donbas region (as now admitted by Germany and France) were simply a ploy to buy time for Nato to train the Ukrainian army to Nato standards. 

The US constitutes only 4% of the world’s population. Add in the Nato countries and it is still only 10%. Unlike the EU, the rest of the global 90%, including SA, is refusing to grovel to US bullying.  Even Saudi Arabia is abandoning the Americans — Saudi oil priced in US dollars having funded the US war machine for the past 50 years — and is apparently applying to join Brics.

Contrary to Western media propaganda, it is not Russia that is economically (or politically) collapsing, but the EU.  The US and Nato war obsession was humiliatingly defeated in Afghanistan just 18 months ago. The world has suffered 20 years of America’s “forever wars”, and the lies (such as Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction”) that drive them.

Calls for negotiations towards peace in Ukraine are tragically a non-starter because the US has a long and hypocritical history of breaking any agreements and/or treaties it signs. Accordingly, Russia now rationally insists on Ukrainian surrender on Russian terms.  The post-war imperative is to disband Nato, and to close down the 850 US military bases in Europe, Asia and Africa that  target Russia and China.

Terry Crawford-Browne
World Beyond War SA

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