The divide between west and east Ukraine could not be more stark. They not only speak different languages but now belong to two separate branches of the Christian church. Those in the east, the Russian-speaking population were happy to live in peace with their Ukrainian-speaking neighbours. The heart of the problem is that the ultra-nationalist ethnic Ukrainians who live live predominantly in western Ukraine set out on a mission from 2014 onward to eliminate the Russian language and if necessary the Russian-speaking population, from Ukraine.
It was in 2014 that a large mob of insurrectionists comprising extremely violent nationalists overthrew the democratically-elected president and government of Ukraine. The authorities that dominated Ukraine from that moment on were essentially illegal and featured some of the most extreme figures from the nationalist political elites. These extremists were massively helped into power with $5,000,000,000 of U.S. taxpayers’ money via the NGO, ‘National Endowment for Democracy’. A leaked phone call between the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and the Assistant Secretary of State was published at the time. In it they were heard discussing who they would allow to be in the illegal government to come.
From 2014 onward the ultranationalists were to rule Ukraine by one means or another. The primary factor which gave them power was not their numbers as they were a force of ten to twenty thousand active members led by a few dozen politicians. Several of those politicians however were to become ministers in the new government. The main factor which provided those who took over and those on the streets who enforced their will, was fear. Just as Hitler and his brownshirts started as a small group of largely ignored thugs by one means or another they managed to gain powers. Just as the small number of swastika-bearing nationalists have in Ukraine.
As police were being killed by rioters bearing revolvers, hunting rifles, clubs, heavy chains, bricks, Molotov cocktails and toxic sprays in Kiev, the Russian=speaking population in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine looked on in both disgust and fear. The country they shared with the ethnic Ukrainians was being torn apart. Yet the Ukrainians in the west of the country who had taken over the government had no wish or intent to allow the Russian-speaking population to live in peace. They were now to be forced to abandon their language, their affiliation with their neighbours directly across the border, the Russians (with whome they had intermarried for generations) and the essentially Russian culture that was an inherent feature of their everyday lives. Added to all of this was the respect and thanks which generation after generation in that part of Ukraine had felt toward Russia for liberating them from the Nazis during WWII.
In the western lands of Ukraine there was no such feeling for Russia and the Russians that those in the east felt so strongly. In fact during WWII many thousands of them had joined Nazi divisions in order to take part in Operation Barbarossa to fight and kill Russians. It is said that the Nazis feared these divisions especially as they were even more ruthless and bloodthirsty than themselves. Those who fought with the Nazis during this time generated a cult of Nazism and ultranationalist barbarity that exists in western Ukraine to this day. Hence the fear among the Russian-speaking population in the east when it became clear that their democratic right to choose the president and government of their choice had been wrenched from them in a coup.
The real fear for their lives, language, culture and history within eastern Ukraine on seeing the mass ultra-violence with which the rioters took power, generated the movement in the east that led to demands for autonomy there in order to safeguard and protect all of these. With an absolute minimum of violence local administrative offices were taken over and ultimately led to the establishment of two republics in eastern Ukraine, the Donetsk Peoples Republic and the Lugansk Peoples Republic (DPR & LPR). In the face of torch-bearing modern day Nazis whose chants sent a direct message to them that there world was to be destroyed and replaced the Russian-speaking majority in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine HAD to take matters into their hands. In truth any other option would have meant the extinction of all they loved and quite possibly, through ethnic cleansing or mass murder their disappearance altogether from their homeland.
Vladimir Putin saw all this in 2014 but due to the relative weakness of a Russian Federation that was still recovering from the catastrophic fall of the Soviet Union he was only able to save the Russian-speaking people of the Crimean peninsula at that time. Though he had every sympathy with the plight of those in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, the best he was able to do was send convoys of humanitarian aid. That and initiating the process which became known as the Minsk Accords where discussions took place in a forum consisting of the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany. Regular meetings were held from 2015 to late 2021. In 2021 however, it became clear that neither the Ukrainian regime, nor the leaders of France and Germany had any intention of adhering to their commitments. The Minsk Accords, which were meant to bring a safeguarding level of autonomy to the Donbass, and lead to reconciliation and peace, had been used merely as a stalling technique by those determined to find their solution through warfare.
Thus, in February 2022, left with no good options to gain a peaceful settlement through negotiations Vladimir Putin sought to intimidate the Ukrainian president Zelensky into living up to his presidential campaign promises to seek peace. Despite having built the Ukrainian army to NATO standards and readied massive fortifications to engage in war, Vladimir Putin sought one last route to peace, not war. Sending troops to Kiev and various other strategic locations Putin hoped he could stave off the necessity for outright war. He hoped Zeensky would realise his position was hopeless and so agree to providing the Russian-speakers of the Donbass the security, safety through autonomy that Minsk had been designed to bring about. In those early days of what was named the ‘Special Military Operation’ negotiations began first in Belarus then in Istanbul in Turkey. An agreement was very close where Ukraine would agree not to join NATO and all other issues would be discussed by the leaders of the two nations. Just as the negotiations should every sign that they would ultimately deliver peace, Boris Johnson, the then British prime minister, arrived in Kiev to persuade Zelensky that war, not peace was the best option.
The intervention of Boris Johnson with his offers of virtually unlimited financial and military support for the Kiev regime caused Zelensky to end the negotiations that had appeared so close to a successful conclusion. We all know what has taken place from those fateful moments to these. A figure in excess of 600,000 casualties, dead and wounded, massive destruction and a divide between the two nations of Ukraine that could never, ever be mended. Once the West-assisted insurrection in Ukraine’s capital to take down its president and government succeeded, all else was essentially inevitable. The two nations of Ukraine that had lived virtually in almost constant peace and harmony in modern times was broken, though still forced to stay together by a regime in Kiev that through the sponsorship of the West believed it could take back the Donbass by force.
From February 24th 2022 the Russian president and the Russian military set out to find a way to the peace that could only come to the east that remained possible. All other routes had been closed by the Kiev regime and the western powers. Russia set out to do the only thing that remained possible in the circumstances, face down a regime and military that had embraced a new Nazism backed by western powers determined to use the Ukrainians as tools with which to weaken Russia. The West is waging a war of many facets against the rising nations of Eurasia, Asia, the Middle East and Far East that threaten the dictatorial global power they assert as their god-given right. That a war torn nation of two different nationalities would be sacrificed in the process was of little concern. Two ethnic peoples, one who looked west, the other east were subjects of sacrifice for ignoble ends. Two peoples, two nations that deserved so much better than the travesty of nationalism that breeds hatred there, tearing them ever further apart.
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