The United States’ transformation of Kiev into an anti-Russian beachhead made conflict inevitable, says one expert.
Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern rejected US President Joe Biden’s claims that Russia is poised to invade Poland and the Baltics after the current conflict in Ukraine in an article posted to the website Consortium News.
“Spoiler Alert: Official Ukrainian sources confirm that Putin did stop in March 2022,” wrote the ex intelligence official, “after Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky agreed to forswear membership in NATO.”
The Russian president repeatedly attempted to maintain peace with Kiev both before and after 2022’s special military operation, McGovern noted, only for negotiations to be sabotaged by the United States.
“This constant harping that you hear not just in the United States, but in European countries as well, is a Cold War relic,” said analyst Mark Sleboda on Sputnik’s The Critical Hour program Wednesday. “‘If we don’t fight Putin over there, we’ll have to fight him over here,’ you know, which was a constant propaganda refrain of the Cold War.”
“This [conflict] is entirely being forced on Russia, because if they don’t take Ukrainian territory now, it’s not even a question, they are directly told we will pump Ukraine full of as many weapons as possible,” he noted.
“‘We will bring it into NATO and the EU, and we will weaponize and turn it into a battle platform against Russia,’ – Russia is left with no alternative.”
Reporting in The New York Times earlier this year revealed the depth of the United States’ interference in Ukraine, where the US has encircled Russia with CIA bases since the consummation of the Maidain coup in 2014.
The development is the culmination of NATO’s attempts to expand towards Moscow after the end of the Cold War, first devouring Eastern Europe before finally attempting to establish itself directly on Russia’s border.
Far from bringing an end to tensions between Moscow and Washington, the fall of the USSR only intensified them, Sleboda noted, as the West continued to expand its sphere of influence despite the end of the ideological threat posed by the former Soviet Union.
“NATO no longer wants any gray zones or gray spaces,” the expert explained. “They no longer want neutral countries. They want to be right up in Russia’s face on their border, implementing what Rand in their grand geopolitical strategy for destroying Russia, overextending Russia, [and] competing for advantageous ground, defined as the pressure cooker.”
“You surround an adversary government by hook or crook, by hostile governments, right? You bring governments that are hostile to that government to power so that you politically, militarily and economically isolate them and increase the pressure to try to make them implode… That’s the geopolitical, zero-sum logic that the West and the US have been operating under since 1991, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.”
Sleboda noted the inherent contradiction in Western neoconservatives’ logic regarding Russia: after arguing that Ukraine must be brought into NATO to prevent an attack by Moscow, they now claim Russia is poised to launch an imminent attack on NATO member states regardless.
“The very same propagandists who are now suggesting that Putin could attack NATO are the same ones who said we have to bring the Kiev regime in Ukraine into NATO as fast as possible because Russia won’t dara attack NATO,” he noted. “Now, the very same people are spinning their own argument on its head.”
By John Miles
Published by Sputnik Globe
Republished by The 21st Century
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