Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine in 2022, the White House and the entire American press have been fighting that this is an "unprovoked war" launched by a single man, Vladimir Putin, on February 24, 2022. The _expression_ "without provocation" appears very frequently in the descriptions of the war in the American media. The Washington Post, the New York Times, and television news, have used the _expression_ hundreds of times.
In an opinion article published last Wednesday, Thomas Friedman, the main stenographer of the CIA intelligence reports of the New York Times, wrote: "Since the beginning of the war, there has been only one place to understand its chronology and direction, and this place is Vladimir Putin's leader... that's where this war comes from". The mantra of the "unprovoked war" in Ukraine played the same role as "weapons of mass destruction" in the war in Iraq or "Remember Maine" in the Spanish-American war.
The idea behind the endless repetition of this story is the thesis that "the bigger the lie, the easier it will be to believe". The public is expected to accept that this is the first war in history without historical origins or economic motives, a first war entirely based on the psychology of a single man.
However, last week, the Washington Post published an interview with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who said that the war in Ukraine "does not begin in 2022. The war began in 2014." Stoltenberg continued: "And since then, NATO has implemented the greatest strengthening of our collective defense since the end of the Cold War... Until 2014, NATO allies were reduced defence budgets. Since 2014, all allies in Europe and Canada have significantly increased their defence spending... it is a huge NATO transformation that began in 2014. ”
The war did not begin in February 2022, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but in 2014, eight years earlier...
According to Stoltenberg, the war did not begin in February 2022, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but in 2014, eight years earlier. This admission confirms two points that the World Socialist Web Site has repeated several times since the outbreak of the war. First, that the conflict has a historical background. Second, that the 2022 invasion was a desperate response to NATO's attempts to integrate Ukraine into its orbit. Stoltenberg says that the war began in 2014, but he does not explain what really happened. The year 2014 began with the U.S.-supported regime change operation in Ukraine, which resulted in overthrowing the government of President Viktor Yanukovych, who had opposed measures to integrate a westernized Ukraine into a political association and trade pact with the EU, and which, in turn, was preparing to join NATO. The coup was financed with "more than $5 billion", according to alleged U.S. Under-Secretary of State Victoria Nuland herself.
The overthrow of the Yanukovych government was led by fiercely anti-Russian and fascist organizations such as the right sector and the Svoboda party. In the following years, Petro Poroshenko's post-coup government carried out acts of violence and repression against the Russian-speaking population of eastern Ukraine, killing nearly 14,000 people between 2014 and 2022. The regime change operation supported by the United States and NATO, as noted by the WWS in 2014, was "intended to provoke a confrontation with Russia". The coup provoked a response from the Kremlin, which understood that it would be a question of handing over the Crimean peninsula, where the Russian Black Sea fleet is actually located, to NATO. This would have allowed the United States to park its own fleet in the port of Sevastopol, giving it military domination of the Black Sea.
In response, Russia annexed Crimea after a referendum in which the overwhelming majority of the population of the enclave supported the departure of Ukraine.
Although they publicly stated that they would support a ceasefire under the "Minsk agreements", NATO powers systematically sent billions of dollars in weapons to Ukraine in preparation for a war whose objective was to reconquer eastern Ukraine and the Crimean peninsula.
In 2021, the Ukrainian government approved a strategy for the military reconquest of the Crimean peninsula, which was then de facto integrated into the U.S.-Ukrainian strategic partnership of November 2021. Asking for guarantees before the outbreak of the war that Ukraine would not join NATO, Putin explained that if Ukraine became a member of NATO, the entire alliance would commit to supporting Ukraine in a war to retake Crimea. This would lead, he said, to a nuclear war between NATO and Russia...
A Russian reaction to an American-Western provocation?
The invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was the reaction of the Putin government, as a representative of a faction of the Russian oligarchy, to defend its interests while hoping to reach a kind of agreement with the imperialist powers. The United States and NATO, however, are determined to use war to achieve the objectives that motivated the 2014 coup d'état. In the Washington Post interview, Stoltenberg later said that "all NATO allies agree that Ukraine should become a member of the alliance", thus contradicting the omnipresence of the American media and political elite's claims that the Russian government's concerns about Ukraine's accession to NATO were only pure invention. Stoltenberg's statement is a promise to plunge NATO into a direct conflict with Russia. The lie of the "unprovoked war" was not only accepted and promoted by the political elite and state-controlled media in the United States, but also, shamefully, by the vast majority of academics. Apart from the meetings organized by the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (JEIIS or IYSSE), there was no serious attempt on the American campus to explain the context and underlying causes of the war. The fierce position of the pro-war and pro-imperialist current, adopted by nominally "socialist" organizations, which in fact represent privileged sectors of the upper middle class, is particularly significant. They fully approved the propaganda story.
In other words, in this logic of justification for the war in favor of Ukraine and against Russia, everything happens as if it were the task of the "left" to support the military actions of the American powers and NATO, because the opposite would be to serve as the "instrument of the aggressor": Russia. Stoltenberg's statement ends with a call to "increase arms transfers to Ukraine that will allow it to return to its annexed territories". In all respects, International Viewpoint only echoes Stoltenberg's own statements. All these social forces that defended Washington's story were exposed by the war. Far from taking "defensive" measures to save Ukrainian lives from Russian attacks, the United States is determined to fight to the last Ukrainian to achieve its objectives of reconquering the Crimean peninsula and imposing a strategic defeat on Russia. The more the war continues and spreads, the more its imperialist character is exposed. It is becoming increasingly clear that American imperialism, dissatisfied with the simple dissolution of the USSR, seeks military defeat, dismemberment and the conquest of Russia, as a prelude to an attempt to enslave China. This day has not yet come...