Illustrative Image
Written by Eric Zuesse
On May 12th, Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock accused the Government of South Africa by saying, “Anyone who supplies weapons to the aggressor in a war is doing the opposite of ending the war.” But who is the aggressor in the war that is being waged in the battlefields of Ukraine?
To answer that question, the act that STARTED the war must first be identified.
On May 9th, Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary General of NATO, said, “Remember the war didn’t start in 2022. The war started in 2014. And since then, NATO has implemented the biggest reinforcement of our collective defense since the end of the Cold War. … Until 2014, NATO allies were reducing defense budgets. Since 2014, all allies across Europe and Canada have significantly increased their defense spending.”
What happened that started this war in 2014? I covered this question extensively in my 18 April 2022 article, “History of the Ukrainian War”, and, after describing there what had led up to it during the prior years, wrote that what started the war was a coup which had been hidden behind the popular Maidan Square anti-corruption demonstrations in Kiev in late 2013 and into February 2014, which overthrew the elected President of Ukraine and installed a rabidly anti-Russian government which had been selected by the U.S. Government:
The first time that this fact about the coup became publicly known was in an internet-uploaded telephone conversation, a phone-call on 26 February 2014, between the foreign-affairs chief of the European Union, Catherine Ashton, and her investigator, Urmas Paet, who informed her that the new Government in Ukraine was not actually the result of what the democratically elected Government (the one that had just been overthrown) had done, but was instead a coup by “the new coalition” government that overthrew the elected Government. This is from that transcript:
“What was quite disturbing, the same oligarch [Petro Poroshenko — and so when he soon thereafter became Ukraine’s President three months later, he already knew this] told that well, all the evidence shows that the people who were killed by snipers, from both sides, among policemen and people from the streets, [this will shock Ashton, who thought that Yanukovych had masterminded the killings] that they were the same snipers, killing people from both sides [so, Poroshenko himself knew that his regime was based on a false-flag U.S.-controlled coup d’etat against his predecessor, Yanukovych — and he even said as much to Ashton’s investigator]
Well, that’s yes, …
So that and then she [Dr. Olga Bolgomets] also showed me some photos, she said that as medical doctor, she can, you know, say that it’s the same handwriting, the same type of bullets, and it’s really disturbing that now the new coalition that they don’t want to investigate what exactly happened; so that now there is stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new coalition.”
Notice here that Paet had tactfully avoided saying that Ashton’s assumption that it had been Yanukovych was false; instead, he totally ignored her having suggested that, and he here simply said that the evidence went totally in the opposite direction, the direction that the man who would subsequently win the Presidency in Ukraine’s 25 May 2014 election — the ‘peace’ candidate in that ‘election’, the oligarch Petro Poroshenko himself — knew to be true: that the guilty party was “the new coalition” of which he was a part. Paet said nothing about this, and Ashton asked him no questions about it, nor about what country had actually organized the coup. Ashton responded:
“I think that we do want to investigate.”
That sentiment on her part lasted, however, only about one second.
“I mean I didn’t pick that up, that’s interesting. Gosh?”
Ashton here seemed to have felt outright embarrassed, and she thus ended in a “Gosh” that was almost inaudible, as if a question, and then she immediately proceeded simply to ignore this crucial matter entirely. All of the evidence suggests that she was exceedingly reluctant to believe that in the overthrow, the bad guys had actually been on the anti-Yanukovych side. The overthrow of Yanukovych has since been called “the most blatant coup in history”.
The classic news-report about the U.S. coup that took place in Ukraine during February 2014 appeared as an independently produced ten-minute compilation video that was uploaded to youtube on 12 March 2014 — just weeks after the event — which made clear that it had been a U.S. coup, NOT a ‘democratic revolution’ as the press allege it to have been. The video placed into context the smoking-gun piece of evidence, which was the 4 February 2014 youtube recording of Victoria Nuland telling Geoffrey Pyatt whom to get appointed to run Ukraine after the coup would be over (which then happened three weeks later). Obviously, the U.S.-and-allied media lied about all of this and still do lie about it, in order to carry on the U.S. regime’s war to conquer Russia.
Then, on 15 February 2015, the German Government’s ARD TV network headlined “Maidan Snipers. German TV expose. ARD Monitor. Eng Subs”, and, independently of the Paet-Ashton phone call, verified Paet’s key findings, by their own investigative news reporting and interviewing people who had had direct access to the evidence. That TV news report supplies overwhelming evidence that the ‘democratic revolution’ of Ukraine’s February 2014 governmental overthrow had actually been anything but, and was instead another U.S. coup — perhaps the most impactful one in all of the world’s history, because that coup in Ukraine might likely bring on WW 3.
On the same day as the peak of the coup, 20 February 2014, was “The Anti-Crimean Pogrom that Sparked Crimea’s Breakaway”. Donetsk broke away from Ukraine on 7 April 2014, and U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media were immediately calling it part of a Russian ‘invasion of Ukraine’, and even calling it ‘Russian roulette’, though it was an authentic response by Donetsk residents to Obama’s anti-Russian coup in Ukraine, and the aggression there was by America’s stooges, not by any Russians or stooges of or from Russia. On 12 April 2014, the anti-Russia U.S.-backed newspaper Kyiv Post bannered “Armed pro-Russian extremists launch coordinated attacks in Donetsk Oblast, seize regional police headquarters, set up checkpoints”, and the reporter, who was from Chicago, portrayed the anti-coup movement as non-local, a foreign invasion from Russia. However, that ‘journalist’ gave away that it was actually a popular uprising when he noted that “One of the masked armed gunmen — among 70 who took part in the takeover of the Sloviansk police station — called the target a strategic building with a weapons arsenal that the militants began handing out to protesters.” Then, on 9-12 April 2014, were the new Ukrainian government’s massacres of people in Sloviansk and in Kramatorsk, two major cities that likewise had voted overwhelmingly for the President whom Obama’s bloody coup had overthrown. The locals were terrified of the coup-regime. On 16 April 2014, the Kyiv Post reported about the rebellions the prior day in Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Donetsk and Lugansk, headlining “A day of humiliation as Ukrainian military offensive stalls, six armored vehicles seized”. On 27 April 2014, Lugansk joined with Donetsk and likewise broke away from Ukraine. All of the rebelling cities were being bombed and shelled by the Obama-installed government. As Seumas Milne well documented in the Guardian on 30 April 2014, “It’s not Russia that’s pushed Ukraine to the brink of war”, it’s the U.S. regime that did it, and Milne mentioned both the Right Sector and the Svoboda Party as the key behind-the-scenes agents, enforcers, for the U.S. regime there. Next up was the massacre in Odessa on 2 May 2014, trapping and burning people to death. Those people had been preparing flyers against the coup-imposed regime. And, then, Mariupol outright rebelled, starting on 9 May 2014, and the Obama-installed Ukrainian junta crushed them within three months. However, Lugansk and Donetsk never surrendered, and that part of the civil war has continued till this day. France, Germany, and Russia established in February 2015 the Minsk II cease-fire agreement that Lugansk and Donetsk willingly signed, and that Ukraine was compelled to sign in order to keep alive the U.S.-installed regime’s chances for admission to the EU. But Ukraine never complied with Minsk II, and just continued its shelling into those two breakaway republics. The U.S. regime was determined to get Ukraine as a base from which to invade Russia. On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in order to prevent that. But now it appears that instead of shrinking NATO, it’s likely to increase even faster on account of media having successfully portrayed the aggression as being by Russia instead of by America. The war is successfully portrayed as being between Ukraine and Russia, but it is instead actually between America and Russia, and Ukraine is only the hottest battlefield of it at this stage.
So: although Baerbock is correct that “Anyone who supplies weapons to the aggressor in a war is doing the opposite of ending the war,” she is wrong — violating the clearly documented history — to be alleging that Russia started this war, and that the United States did not. It was and totally is U.S.-and-allied aggression against Russia.
Ukraine has the nearest of all of Russia’s borders to Russia’s central command, which is in Moscow, only 317 miles, or five minutes flying time for a missile, away. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis concerned America’s insistence that the Soviet Union not place its nuclear missiles just 1,131 miles, or 30 minutes flying time, away from what might become a Soviet blitz nuclear attack. This is why Russia presented to America and to NATO on 17 December 2021 a demand that Ukraine never be allowed into NATO. On 7 January 2022, the U.S. and its NATO simultaneously said no and that they wouldn’t even negotiate about it. Russia then was left with only the military option: to invade Ukraine on 24 February 2022, which they did. But that was far from having started this war. It had started in 2014, just as Stoltenberg said. That was an honest statement from him, but Baerbock lied, as the German Government’s own 15 February 2015 “Maidan Snipers. German TV expose. ARD Monitor. Eng Subs” had already documented. She is functioning there as an agent of the U.S. Government, not of the German people.
This isn’t Russian aggression against Ukraine, but American aggression against Russia, and Ukraine is simply America’s chosen battlefield in which to start its war between America and Russia, with Ukraine’s army and all of NATO as being America’s proxy forces. It is the U.S. regime’s war to conquer Russia.
Any allegation that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 started this war is a blatant lie.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
