Putin Blamed For Everything, U.S. Imperialism Nothing

To anyone who still has any doubts, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is not a defensive alliance (Memo: Ukraine is NOT in the North Atlantic), but a global police force doing the bidding of Washington. Once the Warsaw Pact dissolved over thirty years ago, NATO lost even its ostensible reason for existing, which was that Western Europe supposedly needed protection against the threat of Soviet invasion. But no sensible person ever took that seriously. In any case, NATO's continued existence in 2022 as an attack dog for U.S. imperialism is a permanent invitation to nuclear war. As Diana Johnstone makes clear in her recent interview with Open, excerpts of which follow, we cannot hope to properly judge the situation in Ukraine through the fog of NATO propaganda.

". . . the two causes of the invasion - the plight of the Eastern Ukrainians and the ongoing encirclement of Russia by NATO - have been ignored or downplayed by Western Media as insignificant since the United States-backed overthrow of the elected Ukrainian government in 2014."

"Ukraine is not simply a neighboring country. Much of the country is historically and organically part of Russia . . . .The United States' insistence that Ukraine 'has a right' - indeed that it must - join a military alliance openly hostile to Russia is a provocation that has unfortunately produced its predictable effect. I say predictable because top Russian experts in the United States warned against NATO expansion after the collapse of the Soviet Union, foreseeing that it would have such results."

"The case of Ukraine is special. 'Belonging to the West' is the aggressive ambition of the nationalists in the West of the country, for whom membership in NATO and the European Union would confirm their ideological denial of the historic kinship with Russia. The United States has actively promoted these aims, first in supporting the so-called 'Orange Revolution' of 2004 and then the coup in 2014 which gave power to the Western Nationalists."

"In contrast to Poland or Romania, the desire of Westernized elites in Ukraine to join NATO has had a strong domestic political significance: aggressive defiance of the large part of the population that still relates to Russia. This has been primarily an Identity Politics issue. Even worse, there seem to exist in Ukraine a small minority of anti-Russia fanatics who would not object to participating in NATO military action against Russia."

"The UN-endorsed Minsk agreements were supposed to settle the problem of secessionist Lugansk and Donetsk by the end of 2015. The so-called 'Normandy format' implied that Germany and France would put pressure on the pro-Western Kiev government to apply them: by taking measures to grant autonomy to the rebellious provinces. French diplomats were still trying to promote the Minsk accords on the eve of the Russian invasion, but seven years had passed and Ukrainian leaders were still obstinately refusing to negotiate with the Eastern secessionists as required, and instead were stepping up military measures and attacks on the long suffering people of Lugansk and Donetsk . . . It was up to Kiev to take steps to carry out the Minsk agreement. Kiev refused. So for all these years there has been no such agreement for Russia to violate. But Putin is blamed for everything."

Source: "Dr. Diana Johnstone: 'NATO not a defensive alliance, but global police taking orders from US,'" March 6, 2022, www.openthemagazine.com