Did We Provoke Putin’s War in Ukraine?
Whatever we may think of Putin, he is no Stalin. He has not murdered millions or created a gulag archipelago. Nor is he “irrational,” as some pundits rail. He does not want a war with us, which would be worse than ruinous to us both. Putin is a Russian nationalist, patriot, traditionalist and a cold and ruthless realist looking out to preserve Russia as the great and respected power it once was and he believes it can be again.
When Russia’s Vladimir Putin demanded that the U.S. rule out Ukraine as a future member of the NATO alliance, the U.S. archly replied: NATO has an open-door policy. Any nation, including Ukraine, may apply for membership and be admitted. We’re not changing that.
In the Bucharest declaration of 2008, NATO had put Ukraine and Georgia, ever farther east in the Caucasus, on a path to membership in NATO and coverage under Article 5 of the treaty, which declares that an attack on any one member is an attack on all.
Unable to get a satisfactory answer to his demand, Putin invaded and settled the issue. Neither Ukraine nor Georgia will become members of NATO. To prevent that, Russia will go to war, as Russia did last night.
Putin did exactly what he had warned us he would do.
Whatever the character of the Russian president, now being hotly debated here in the USA, he has established his credibility.
When Putin warns that he will do something, he does it.
Thirty-six hours into this Russia-Ukraine war, potentially the worst in Europe since 1945, two questions need to be answered:
How did we get here? And where do we go from here?
How did we get to where Russia — believing its back is against a wall and the United States, by moving NATO ever closer, put it there — reached a point where it chose war with Ukraine rather than accepting the fate and future it believes the West has in store for Mother Russia?
Consider. Between 1989 and 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev let the Berlin Wall be pulled down, Germany be reunited and all the “captive nations” of Eastern Europe go free.
Having collapsed the Soviet empire, Gorbachev allowed the Soviet Union to dissolve itself into 15 independent nations. Communism was allowed to expire as the ruling ideology of Russia, the land where Leninism and Bolshevism first took root in 1917.
Gorbachev called off the Cold War in Europe by removing all of the causes on Moscow’s side of the historic divide.
Putin, a former KGB colonel, came to power in 1999 after the disastrous decadelong rule of Boris Yeltsin, who ran Russia into the ground.
In that year, 1999, Putin watched as America conducted a 78-day bombing campaign on Serbia, the Balkan nation that had historically been a protectorate of Mother Russia.
That year, also, three former Warsaw Pact nations, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, were brought into NATO.
Against whom were these countries to be protected by U.S. arms and the NATO alliance, the question was fairly asked.
The question seemed to be answered fully in 2004, when Slovenia, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania and Bulgaria were admitted into NATO, a grouping that included three former republics of the USSR itself, as well as three more former Warsaw Pact nations.
Then, in 2008, came the Bucharest declaration that put Georgia and Ukraine, both bordering on Russia, on a path to NATO membership.
Georgia, the same year, attacked its seceded province of South Ossetia, where Russian troops were acting as peacekeepers, killing some.
This triggered a Putin counterattack through the Roki Tunnel in North Ossetia that liberated South Ossetia and moved into Georgia all the way to Gori, the birthplace of Stalin. George W. Bush, who had pledged “to end tyranny in our world,” did nothing. After briefly occupying part of Georgia, the Russians departed but stayed as protectors of the South Ossetians.
The U.S. establishment has declared this to have been a Russian war of aggression, but an EU investigation blamed Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili for starting the war.
In 2014, a democratically elected pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, was overthrown in Kyiv and replaced by a pro-Western regime. Rather than lose Sevastopol, Russia’s historic naval base in Crimea, Putin seized the peninsula and declared it Russian territory.
Teddy Roosevelt stole Panama with similar remorse.
Which brings us to today.
Whatever we may think of Putin, he is no Stalin. He has not murdered millions or created a gulag archipelago.
Nor is he “irrational,” as some pundits rail. He does not want a war with us, which would be worse than ruinous to us both.
Putin is a Russian nationalist, patriot, traditionalist and a cold and ruthless realist looking out to preserve Russia as the great and respected power it once was and he believes it can be again.
But it cannot be that if NATO expansion does not stop or if its sister state of Ukraine becomes part of a military alliance whose proudest boast is that it won the Cold War against the nation Putin has served all his life.
President Joe Biden almost hourly promises, “We are not going to war in Ukraine.” Why would he then not readily rule out NATO membership for Ukraine, which would require us to do something Biden himself says we Americans, for our own survival, should never do: go to war with Russia?
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever. To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2022 CREATORS.COM
It’s not surprising that Mr. Buchanan does not completely understand Russian history. The West constantly berates Stalin for the Gulag, never asking why Stalin created it in the first place. But having said that, this article on Putin and Russia is a good counter to the MSM and US government view that the world belongs to the US.
Stalin created the Gulag to exterminate his enemies (which included anyone opposed to communism).
Russia had the Warsaw Pact and all the Captive Nations (the republics) for seven decades under its thumb.
They were *forced in* by Russia.
Now, eastern European countries and others look to the West for security and independence, and they are joining the West *voluntarily* in many cases.
There is nothing wrong with this, and it’s very easy to understand.
Russia does not get to have veto power over what these countries formerly and even presently under the Russia boot choose to do.
Russia and Putin don’t like it?
That’s unfortunate.
Why does the USA have veto power when the UN sanctions IsRaHell?
“Now, eastern European countries and others look to the West for security and independence, and they are joining the West *voluntarily* in many cases” … if you believe this, I have a bridge for sale. It should be quite apparent to any idiot that ‘The West’ is controlled by greedy psychopaths, who believe in nothing other than total world-hegemony. The US, and to a lesser extent, the UK/Israel have economies which are totally dependent on War and conflict. It should not take an Einstein to work out that The West, NEEDS conflict and the leaders of Russia and China have now reluctantly resolved to stand-their-ground. Putin and Xi KNOW that they have targets on their backs.
They have the same veto power the US has and the US vetoed the USSR putting nuclear missiles in Cuba at that countries request in 1962. The Americans threatened nuclear war if the Soviets did not pull their missiles out of Cuba, which the Soviets did. Furthermore, the Americans lied when they promised Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand into eastern Europe and invite former Warsaw Pact countries or parts of the USSR to join it. That means Russia does have veto power and President Putin is making that clear.
The fact that Americans have called Ukrainians “NAZIS” since the end of WW II and that both Ukraine’s presidents since the American supported coup in 2014 were Jewish, should tell Ukrainians not to expect help from the USA, which calls Israel its closest ally, not some European country, and that goes double for Ukraine.
Heinrich. Perhaps you’ve never heard of the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine has been used by the US government as a declaration of hegemony and a right of unilateral intervention over the Americas. It regards any intervention by a foreign power in the Western Hemisphere as a hostile act against the US. Cuba as a sovereign state looked to Russia in 1962 for its security and independence. Clearly, this was unacceptable to the US, thus the Cuban crisis. Ukraine and Georgia etc becoming NATO members are of equal concern to Russia and its security.
I always opposed NATO expansion. But who cares about some Russian Monroe Doctrine? Russia is not in the right in its Ukraine invasion. At most, they would have been justified in sending in troops to secure any Eastern Ukrainian secessionist vote from an attempted nullification by Western Ukrainian military force.
Not “Russia”.
It was the Soviet Union.
Different animal.
Agree. Some of these people don’t know it’s the Russian Federation now. They live in the past and think the Cold War is still on.
I am well aware it was the Soviet Union at the time … it was an oversight while typing. It occurred to me immediately after the comment was posted.
I’m usually an admirer of Pat Buchanan’s articles, but I think he’s got this badly wrong.
Putin has demonstrated in recent days that he is indeed a despot who has become irrational. Even the stopped clock in Biden’s brain is right twice a day.
None of the history Mr Buchanan outlines either justifies Putin’s actions, or makes them the act of a rational statesman. All we can hope is that when Putin loses (either by his overthrow or by settling into a sullen and weakened state as permanent Eastern bogeyman), he does not drag down his ‘Alt Right’ and/or racial nationalist fan club with him.
The Ukranian nationalists have,to my understanding have been shelling either of those two areas that are disputed by Russia as wanting to secede to Russia.Two to tango.The west and Ukraine are not innocent.
“None of the history Mr Buchanan outlines either justifies Putin’s actions,”
Well, I suppose you are partly correct. What Buchanan did not mention was gthat NATO bombed Yugoslavia in violation of its own Charter, and the promises made to Gorbachev that in return for German re-unification, NATO would not expand “one inch to the East”. NATO also stated they wouldn’t put troops and military installations in the new member states – another broken promise. Similarly, the Bucharest declaration stated that Georgia and Ukraine would be neutral and nuclear free. Zelensky declared that he intended to take Ukraine nuclear.
When are people going to understand Solzhenitsyn’s “These people were not Russians. They hated Russians”? The tribe, whose name must not be spoken were responsible for the devastation in Eastern Europe, not Russians..
Living in northern Ontario, you may remember a former, retired, upper middle official of Germany’s Bundesnachrichtendienst, their CIA, stating on non-CBC TV, that NATO attacked Yugoslavia in order to force it into the West’s financial system.
Requiring a rekindling of old religious, ethnic and political differences, costing thousands of fatalities. But at least Wall Street got its Hanukah present on time.
Sorry Charlie, but Zelensky’s idiotic public requests of NATO that they make Ukraine a nuclear power while the Ukrainians fire shells into the Donbass with 14,000 already dead is indefensible and unprecendented. The West has been threatening Russia with NATO nukes since the moment they defeated it 1989-1991 and then flogged the dying body with economic shock treatment manifested as national looting by the oligarchs. That Putin is an authoritarian, autocratic maniac after three decades of radical abuse by the West says more about the psychological projections of his accusers than of Putin himself.
Look into Operation Gladio and how it’s manifested into the the current situation we find ourselves in regarding Russian-NATO relations.
This is 180 degrees wrong; both historically in post Soviet Russian and reference to a commonly accepted spectrum of state authoritarianism and a government with little or no relationship to its people. This reminds me of “Know Littles” who characterized Lee Kwan Yew as a dictator, when in fact he enjoyed sky high approval ratings from the polity and was elected. As with Lee, so Putin.
This invasion was the result of many years of NATO expanding Eastward to the borders of Russia, in an attempt to isolate, intimidate, and neutralize Russian volition and self-determination. Further, the Western Nations promised Russia, in writing, that NATO-a defensive organization-would not expand eastward.
ZOG International, with its tentacles embedded in the JUSA Deep State, is in total control of Ukraine, which-like Russia under Yeltsin-has been plundered and controlled from the time of its independence. It is this context, and within Minsk II agreement that the Donbass territories were granted autonomy, as 90% of the population is Russian speaking and does not want to be part of Ukraine. These territories have been shelled and attacked for 8 years illegally by Ukraine, causing 14,000 deaths and widespread destruction.
To understand what is going on in the World, due to the worldwide media being corporate and government controlled, one must apply oneself to research and study to cut through the layers of narratives masking truth. The vast majority of people in the West are simply incapable, lacking critical thinking skills, intellectual independence, personal courage, and a dearth of logic and rationality.
My opinions are based on many hours of reading of various sources, sifting through and correlating opinion and evidence. Here are some helpful links. (Unz.com has several first class articles as does RT, http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk, etc, etc.
https://www.unz.com/article/ukraine-the-new-american-war-for-righteousness/
https://www.unz.com/article/the-land-where-history-died-part-1/
https://www.unz.com/pescobar/from-the-black-sea-to-the-east-med-dont-poke-the-russian-bear/
https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/history-points-to-the-us-as-perpetrator-of-crisis-in-ukraine/
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2022/02/james-howard-kunstler/the-party-of-chaos-blows-its-cover/
To most readers here, this is a familiar theme of the ZIO New World Order, whose main operator is the JUSA.
Neocon jews are the cause of the problem.
Hillary, you could well be right that Jews are behind it all and that Putin understands this.
I think you have a point.
So let Putin spell it all out in terms the world can understand. What is he afraid of? Jews? Let him name names.
I think, however, that there are a lot of Jews in Putin’s upper echelons, are there not?
Mickhail Fradkov’s father was Jewish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Fradkov. He has been Russia’s intelligence chief.
I don’t see Putin doing much about Israel’s attacks on Syria, Putin’s partner, either.
When Israeli armed Azerbaijan and helped it and Turkey beat Armenia (Russia’s ally) in 2020, we didn’t see Putin call out Israel on that.
Putin is under so much pressure that he has cracked and become irrational in my opinion.
Please understand, I am not defending US or NATO policy one bit.
Non sequitur. There were Jews who fought with Hitler and National Socialism. There are Jews who are pro White Interests-in various degrees of usefulness. Paul Gottfried, Michael J. Hoffman, Lew Rockwell, James Howard Kunstler, Gilad Atzmon, to name a few. One of my doctors is an Orthodox Jew who embraces Christians who are not stupid; totally inward looking.
This statement is of course the Fallacy of Composition. “All Muslims aren’t terrorists”. Unless this statement is quantified, it is meaningless. The fact is, that there are enough people who call themselves Jews, that are leading the destruction of nations, history, culture, and individual thought and Native, i.e., God Given, rights. Then there are a majority of Jews who do not condemn or criticize, whose silence is deafening. The overwhelming majority are not suitable for inclusion in a formed White autonomous republic.
Lew Rockwell is not now a Jew, nor has he ever been one. He was a very close friend of Murray Rothbard and remains a Rothbardian/Misesian in economics and political outlook, but however diseased Jewishness may be, it is not a contagion that is necessarily transmissible via conversation or the odd handshake.
Good to hear from you again. Someone living in NYC should collect all the Ukraine essays published here and leave several copies, each addressed to one of their former iconoclasts at FOX HQ, to get them off their current, uncommon shtik.
Even the arch-clever Trey Gowdy found it necessary today to mildly criticize retired Colonel Mc Cormick, who shares our opinions.
See ya !
Well said , Pierre .
It is surely past time to separate atheist ,racially self – identifying Hebrews from nominally observant Judaic religionists.
However , I suspect , this may may be for Aryan purposes , as the philosopher said , a
distinction without a difference.
As ever, Charles, your comments bring gratification and edification. However silent I may be, I read them attentively.
____________
For shame, Al, for shame!* I’ve made many mistakes in my life, and in whatever time remains to me, I expect to make at least a few more—on some of which you will doubtless call me out. But one mistake I’ve never made is to confuse Judaism with a religion.
__________
*[wink]
Bingo. They’ve never forgiven Putin for putting an end to their financial gang-rape of post-Soviet Russia. And that photo of Khodorkovsky on trial behind bars (as defendents are in Russians courtrooms) still haunts them. And of course they hate hate hate the revival of Orthodoxy. They’re gifted haters.
Putin is playing chess while the west is playing checkers. Blind fools are running the government and media in America.
K’s sentence was commuted, along with dozen of others. prior to their Olympics, to lighten the mood.
Just google K’s name. He is pontificating on Putin all over the place.
CBC, on its weekly hour long series of FIFTH ESTATE, featured him at the end of January, but I forgot what year. Being the leftwing, essentially ignorant idiots they are, they of course mollycoddled him and made him the victim.
Given our previous exchange on this gangster, I thought this might be of interest to you. Hope you found the facts on the Flight Termination System by Systems Planning Corporation.
A classic case of choosing the proper time and manner of sending a message.
Smashing points, which give me renewed respect for PB.
I’d say that paragraph three, re the Bucharest Declaration of 2008, basically explains why Putin feels bellicose.
Yes, I tend to agree that the West’s omitting to say, categorically, “No NATO membership for Ukraine,” underlies this war more than anything. Credulous U.S. “patriots,” condemning Putin for being so touchy about his borders, would be all for invading Canada or Mexico if either might join a Russian-led anti-USA alliance.
Well, the Marxist traitors in DC aren’t sorry that NATO is an abiding thorn in Russia’s side. Among other things, trouble from Putin is a welcome distraction from the devastation, including an invasion, of America. This is how I see it, expressed more expansively: https://theeuropeanfamily.com/f/a-manufactured-crisis
The Marxist traitors, whose figurehead is that appalling senile mediocrity, have succeeded in doing what I’d feared. Witness all the attention given to that remote conflict–attention diverted from the dismayingly numerous ways Euroamerica is now assailed…. The one consolation, I guess, is that if Dementia Joe comes off as weak and so looks even worse than before the war, the Conservative pendulum-swing will be all the more pronounced. Conservatives are probably doing well to depict the trouble as due to his weakness.
I must qualify that last sentence in my comment. I hope that the Conservatives don’t go too far in accusing Dementia Joe’s weakness. He, or his handlers, might resort to risky moves to limit the domestic political damage of appearing weak.
I fear the world is frightfully close to World War and nuclear catastrophe. We’re accustomed to thinking of White eclipse in terms of demographic dilution; but in a matter of days a nuclear war could decimate the Caucasians, as Euroamerica, Russia and Western Europe will bear the brunt, not the non-Whites outside China.
Things are moving fast….While I was posting that reply to my own comment, the American Marxists have spoken with Poland about being an air base for military jets for Ukrainian use…. If those jets do significant damage to Russian forces, won’t the Russians retaliate against Poland, and won’t that be an attack on a NATO member, triggering war between the USA and Russia (and China)?
Poland is among the more politically intelligent countries of Europe. Witness its stance on Third-World invasion and globo-homoism. For Pantheos’ sake, may it be too wise to be the flashpoint for another World War!!! Think, Polska, THINK!
I just read that Ukraine is asking for Israeli volunteers to fight for Ukraine. The situation grows curiouser and curiouser as Alice would say.
Russia and the West are engaged in a war over the narrative.
If you want a correct, factual and easily traceable account of the US Russia relationship, then consult the net for: FAILED CRUSADE THE NEW YORK TIMES !
Not their usual garbage but a book review by them.
Mr. Buchanan’s article was spot on. I am surprised at some of the comments by otherwise very erudite people who seem to forget who controls our mainstream media.
I have a working knowledge of Russian and have access to their news, as well as that of Ukraine. Russia is simply attacking globo-homo at its front door, and the vast majority of Ukrainians support Putin and Russia.
It might be beneficial for those who are anti-Putin or anti-Russian to check out the ethnicity of Ukraine’s President. For the rest of us, it is no surprise.
When the Soviet Union fell, it immediately went into the hands of the Jewish oligarchs who spent a decade plundering the wealth of that great nation and impoverishing its native peoples. When Putin finally came along, he began the arduous process of weeding out these eternal nation wreckers and rebuilding Mother Russia starting with the erection of Christian churches. He abhors the homosexual and trans agenda. For these reasons, the (((people))) who rule the West hate him. Were our nations governed by Christian men of their founding stocks, Russia would have been welcomed as a brother in free nation states. Instead, the old stigma of “those evil Reds” has stuck in the minds and subconscious of most decadent Western people. NATO should have been disbanded with the fall of the USSR, but sadly, continues to threaten Russia with its expansion. Look at any military map and you’ll see how Russia is surrounded by American bases. How many Russian bases surround the United States? The aggressor is us… not Vlad.
To understand the Russian Federation, imagine the USA, but with each state having far more autonomy and with many having their own ethnic, religious and linguistic identities, (there’s even a Jewish one – in the east – Birobidjan). Communism was not popular with these states as it largely sought to obliterate these identities – often through mass extermination. Putin is popular among them, because he generally leaves them to do their own thing – a sort of hands-off paternalistic approach. This is why some Russian nationalists refer to him as ‘a Russian Federation Nationalist’, rather than a ‘Russian (Racial) Nationalist’ per se. As regards Ukraine, I would thus expect the great Dnieper River to form a future dividing line between a religiously Uniate Church (close to Catholicism) ethnic Ukrainian state to the west and an Orthodox ethnically Russian state to the east. Russian military movements would seem to confirm this.
“democratically elected pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych” was constitutionally removed by a vote from a democratically elected parliament.
Putin’s swift kick in the butt to world Jewry’s plans for a Great Reset has really brought all the (((democracy votaries))) out of the woodwork. Perhaps william frederick and the (((like-minded others))) higher up on the page should be thanked for bringing TOO’s threads something that’s been in short supply of late: an energetic hasbara presence.
I found an article at al jazeera which stated what you say, sneering that Russians, i.e., Putin, still refer to the change in Ukraine’s government as a “coup”. I don’t know how to find out the real story. It is possible that, technically speaking, a vote in Parliament did the job, but maybe there’s a back story there, i.e., some big time jiggery pokery prior to the vote. I would not rule that out, inasmuch as Nuland, without shame, later bragged about how much money the US State Dept spent to destabilize the political system in Ukr. If I recall right, it was in the billions.
Democratic presidents, whether more or less elected (Clinton, Obama) or installed via stolen election (Brandon), have demonstrated a real knack for finding proudly and defiantly bloodthirsty women—e.g., Reno, Albright, now Nuland—to fill posts where they can kill people with impunity. None of these women, I think, has been the sort to rest easy knowing that Robert McNamara generated more corpses than she has.
You forgot Hillary, as SOS, who cackled in her nauseating fashion on national TV : WE CAME – WE SAW – HE DIED ! ” to gloss over her unavailability at 3 am, as promised; with her Benghazi screw up, costing initially four US lives and thereafter hundreds more.
Also turning a lawless Libya into a favorite and profitable point of departure for migrants. Hundreds of blacks were forced onto planes at Tel Aviv AP and sent, by agreement, to Rwanda. Their genocidal president, in turn, got an exclusive quarter hour appearance on stage, at the following AIPAC Conference in Washington. Hosted by Frank Cesno of NBC fame and professor of journalism at Georgetown.
Her hubby, in turn, was introduced to the Black Forest Bilderberger Conclave in May 1991, by a black power-broker lawyer of an influential DC law firm, then immediately visited Moscow to confer with their Minister of the Interior Vladimir Bakatin [KGB] who gave him two hours, though himself in the middle of his own campaign, running low in the poles for the Presidency of the RSFSR.
Unless Bakatin intended to buy a MacDonald’s franchise in Little Rock, I suspect Clinton was inveighing on him to refrain from publishing any and all material he undoubtedly had on Bill; not least of all the Princeton campus photograph showing Bill with beard and a placard, emblazoned with DOWN WITH AMERICA !
Is it a handful or two handfuls who nominate the Presidents. MANUS MANUM LAVAT – Latin for ONE HAND WASHES THE OTHER is quite demonstrably the entire world’s mo and applied wholesale in the Ukraine.
see ya !
“You forgot Hillary …” Guilty as charged. Mea culpa.
Thanks too, Charles, for the information about the Bilderberger conclave and Bakatin, of which I was ignorant.
I think Russia should apply for NATO membership. That could put a lot of this BS to an end.
LOL! But seriously, maybe they ought to give it a try. On what grounds could they possibly refuse to even consider such an application for membership?
It’s good to see Pat in the pages of TOO, I agree with him here and nearly always.
War agreements with countries bordering Russia is a threat to that state. Russia is not our enemy, and we should not try to make power moves against them. It’s just another slippery slope for Unnecessary War.