The Russian Ukraine war is now is over a week long and for many who are trying to understand what it is all about that is proving difficult. The sheer scale of the relentless propaganda is astounding and the hate that is being encouraged and fueled for all things Russian is frightening. Once again as with the Covid scamdemic the way in which people have lapped up the fear porn and refused to carry out any level of critical thinking is scary.
One thing that is obvious to those who stop and think for a moment is the complete absence of any kind of context and background to the whole thing. We are just being relentlessly push to believe that Putin in Hitler 2.0 and it all hinges on him and that he is evil. There is also outright hate and racism being whipped up and there are many reports of Russian students being booted off their course and various Russians being cancelled. The aim here is to rebalance things a bit and provide that context so that a more informed view can be made of the situation
In short the origins of this war go back to the promises and legal agreements at the end of the Cold War that NATO would not expand Eastward. Hint. It did.
This is basically a rerun of the Cuba missile crisis where after the US placed nuclear missiles in Turkey which was approximately 15 mins flight time to Moscow, that the Soviet Union then decided to retaliate and place missiles in Cuba on the US doorstep. During the resolution of the crisis it was agreed the US would remove the missiles from Turkey if the Russians removed them from Cuba but nobody was to mention the Turkey side of the bargain in public and so they didn't for 30 years.
Today Ukraine had been trying desperately to join NATO and much of the military infrastructure was being integrated into the NATO network. The next step would have been placement of missiles -purely for defense of course. Except, they would have been about 5 mins flight time to Moscow. Whilst flight time of a missile from Russia to the USA would be a good deal longer and this is why the Russians have a strong nuclear sub capability so they can pop up anywhere. Either way, this advantage to the US side would surely tempt some to think a quick first strike on Moscow could mean a nuclear war was winnable.
Whether you believe that was true or legit is irrelevant because the Russians believed it and saw it as an existential problem.
They had been asking nicely for decades now not to do this but they went ahead and did it.
Then you have the neo-nazi coup in Kiev in 2014 which was openly supported by the US & EU and the two separate wars against the newly recognized Eastern republics. And so on it goes. So for those really interested you might want to continue reading at some of these links for background and for daily updates
On the 2014 US initiated Maidan coup in 2014, Ukrainian billionaire oligarch and opposition leader, Petro Porochenko (who later became president), said quite clearly that the plan was to subvert the nation’s constitution and install an unelected, antiRussian government that would deep-six the deal with Moscow:
“From the beginning, I was one of the organizers of the Maidan. My television channel—Channel 5—played a tremendously important role. …On the 11th of December, when we had U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and E.U. diplomat Catherine Ashton in Kyiv, during the night they started to storm the Maidan.”
“One glorious day in Sevastopol 12 years ago, I saw what was coming. That’s why I won’t join this carnival of hypocrisy ”
“I know that Ukraine’s current government, now treated as if it was almost holy, was brought into being by a mob putsch openly backed by the USA in 2014.”
“I know that the much-admired President Zelensky in February 2021 closed down three opposition TV stations on the grounds of ‘national security’. They went dark that night. I know that the opposition politician Viktor Medvedchuk was put under house arrest last year on a charge of treason. Isn’t this the sort of thing Putin does?”
“I know that Ukraine’s army has used severe force against Russian civilians in the Don Basin since 2014.”
“I tire of being told that Nato is purely defensive alliance when we know it bombed Serbia in 1999, incidentally killing civilians, when Serbia had not attacked a Nato member. ”
“I also don’t recall Libya attacking a Nato member before that ‘defensive’ alliance launched the air war on Tripoli which also killed civilians, children included, and turned that country into a cauldron of chaos, benefiting nobody.”