Civil Defense Perspectives (vol. 36 #3)
In Russian and all Slavic languages, Ukraine literally means “near the end of the territory” (U=near, Kraina=land, territory) and can be translated into as English “frontier lands.”
In the 9th century, Kiev was the capital of Kievan Rus, the ancestral homeland of Russia, whose rulers came from Scandinavia. In 988, its prince Vladimir was baptized in the old Greek colony of Khersonesos on the Crimean coast. His conversion marked the advent of Orthodox Christianity among the Rus and remains a moment of great nationalist symbolism for Russians.
Successive Mongol invasions beginning in the 13th century led the Russians to migrate north. For several centuries Ukrainian territory was a no man’s land on the margins of competing empires, a region of permanent contest and shifting borders (https://tinyurl.com/bdh98r4t).
The portion east of the Dnieper became Russian in 1686 and the portion west of that river in 1793, according to the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica. Ukraine had experienced a brief period of independence in 1918–20, but portions of western Ukraine were ruled by Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia in the period between the two World Wars.
Inhabitants of this region named Cossacks (“freemen”) are basically a mixture of Poles/Lithuanians and Russians (with some Mongolian/Tatar blood). Yet this ironically named mixed race was enslaved and horribly abused by Poles, Russians, and Tatars, as portrayed in the classic romanticized novel Taras Bulba by Nikolai Gogol. After the fall of the Polish-Lithuanian empire the Russian czarist empire abused its half-brothers and half-sisters, and Soviet Russia abused them the most, especially under Stalin.
Austrian Germans who occupied a small part of Ukraine treated its autochthonous population the best, giving the possibility of Ukrainians/Cossacks aligning with Nazi Germany against Russians and Poles, which happened in the Bandera movement.
Bandera’s fighters committed unspeakable atrocities against Russians, Poles/Lithuanians, and Jews. This was revenge for hundreds years of abuse, but the acts were so atrocious in their animalistic, inhumane cruelty that even the ruthless Nazis were appalled. In the Volhynian slaughter during World War II, Ukrainians killed about 100,000 Poles, Galicians, and Russians in a barbaric and cruel fashion (https://tinyurl.com/ypcpj7yr).
After WWII, Ukraine became part of the Soviet Union as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. An 1897 map shows the Donbass and territories east of the Dnieper and along the northern edge of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov as Novorossiya (“New Russia”). They became “Ukrainian” only by writ of two of history’s greatest evil monsters—Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin (https://tinyurl.com/ymcpfh2r).
“Ukraine is the Poland and Czechoslovakia of the present time—-an artificial state loaded with Russians and with no reason for existence in its present form,” writes Richard Maybury. “Poland had disappeared from the maps of Europe in 1795 and had no reason to come back in the fulsome extent provided by the Versailles Treaty except for Wilson’s courting of the Polish vote…. Similarly, the mongrel state of Czechoslovakia with its linguistic, religious and ethnic concoction had no historical basis or reason for existence at all” (ibid.).
After the fall of the Soviet empire, Ukraine was designated as an independent entity. Arguably, the Gorenvolk concept was more real. This was invented by occupying Nazi forces to try to convince inhabitants of the southern Podhale region that they were not Slavs, but descendants of wandering German tribes—in spite of the fact that from the late 19th century onwards, the region had been romanticized by artists as a cradle of Polishness.
The 2014 Maidan Putsch
Ukraine’s 2010 election showed a stark division between the pro-Russian and the Ukrainian nationalist regions of the country, but there was a tolerable electoral balance. Pro-Russian president Yanukovych won by a margin of 3.6%. The country was going bankrupt, and was making a deal with Moscow in preference to the EU and the extremely harsh conditions of an IMF loan.
To scuttle the deal with Moscow, a “regime change” was engineered, which David Stockman describes as a “$5 billion all-hands Washington undertaking,” with the cooperation of the U.S. State Department, the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), NGOs, and favored Ukrainian oligarchs (tinyurl.com/bdz8z39v). The Maidan putsch, which deposed the duly elected president, is the subject of a theatrical documentary by Oliver Stone. Ukraine on Fire, quickly censored by YouTube, is available free on rumble (tinyurl.com/nhk57b84). This gives the history of Ukraine since World War I, with focus on how its current state relates to global interests.
Stockman writes that assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland picked the new prime minister and his cabinet; four of 11 were “rabid anti-Russian neo-Nazis.” At the heart of the putsch, he writes, were organizations whose hero is Stepan Bandera, a collaborator with Hitler, who led the liquidation of Poles, Jews, and other minorities as the Wehrmacht headed to Stalingrad.
Before 2014, Ukraine received very little Western aid, but since then has gotten $15 billion, including $3 billion in military aid. The per capita GDP was $4,030 in 2013, $2,125 in 2015, and $3,663 in 2019 (https://tinyurl.com/myvc59x3).
Current president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, an actor who played being president on a TV series, Servant of the People, has reportedly accumulated $1.2 billion in a bank in Costa Rica during his 2.5 years in office (https://tinyurl.com/yk6utxxc).
Ukraine is a money-laundering haven for billionaire global elitists, who are striving to impose the New World Order. What an irony that globalists who intend a worldwide Holodomor should be headquartered in Ukraine! They have demonstrated that they want to destroy agriculture, and in many nations the privatization of waterways is being theorized, for the advantage of multinationals and with the aim of controlling and limiting agriculture activities. The pro-NATO government of Kyiv deprived Crimea of Dnieper River water for 8 years to prevent the irrigation of the fields and starve the people, writes Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò (tinyurl.com/bdhw3krj).
Zelenskyy’s performances in drag are consistent with the LGBTQ ideology, part of the “reform” agenda, along with gender equality, abortion, and the “green” economy, needed to gain the support of the World Economic Forum, Viganò writes.
End of the ‘End of History’
In the summer of 1989, Francis Fukuyama wrote the article “The End of History?” for The National Interest. He argued that a remarkable consensus on the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a system of government had emerged throughout the world, as it conquered rival ideologies like hereditary monarchy, fascism, and communism. He also argued that liberal democracy may constitute the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and the “final form of human government” (tinyurl.com/yckwyuat).
But history has had its revenge. At the turn of the millennium, the U.S. was the undisputed economic and military hegemon. American elites were busy shifting the country’s industrial base to China. And the idea that the Western security order could be challenged was unthinkable, writes Malcolm Kyeyune.
“That world is now…truly dead. The economic model of deindustrializing the West while industrializing China has proved to be…suicidal. Globalism has broken down…. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine revealed the West to be incapable of deterrence….
“What has also become clear is that ‘wokeness’ isn’t just some ideology that can, or should, be fought in the marketplace of ideas. Every woke campaign amounts to…a demand for added managerial intermediation—…the constant creation of new positions for experts, consultants, and commissars.”
The new class warfare is between Canadian trucker Gord Magill’s “email caste” and people who deliver tangible goods.
“The official left and right have proved themselves intellectually bankrupt” (https://tinyurl.com/ycktcjv9).
There could still be a “unipolar” world—with the endpoint being a global technocracy replacing the U.S. hegemon.
Flashback
In April 2014, Richard Maybury predicted the crisis in Ukraine that would break out in February 2022; his explanation is reprinted in the April-May 2022 issue of Early Warning Report. He credits John Maynard Keynes for brilliant forecasting in his 1919 book Economic Consequences of the Peace—despite Keynes’s disastrous economics. One of the main insights was the importance of always trying to see something from the other person’s point of view. Keynes saw where the Treaty of Versailles would lead: the Allies were just as responsible for World War II as Hitler. Key points from 2014:
· People in Maybury’s “Chaostan” (much of Africa and Eurasia) do not forget. To them, 100 years ago was just yesterday. The Crimean crisis dates back to 1783 or earlier.
· The good-guys-vs.-bad-guys model leads to serious errors.
· The history of Russia is the history of invasions.
· Since 1990 NATO has been creeping ever closer, despite its promises not to do so.
· Only two of the postwar buffer states are left: Belarus and Ukraine; in 2008 NATO declared its intention to induct Ukraine.
· Russians may tolerate almost any degree of tyranny if they believe it keeps them safe from NATO.
· Washington has been poking a snake with a sharp stick and then howling when it does what snakes do.
Maybury now warns that if Putin is “taken out,” there will be more Putins. Both sides have nuclear arms, and with “dial-a-yield” weapons, there is no clear line between tactical and strategic. Time for the “power junkies” in NATO to dial it down and stop scaring Russians, he says.
The Ukrainian Military
The neo-Nazi Azov Special Operations Regiment is officially a part of the Ukrainian Army. The battalion has been trained by the U.S. Army for 8 years. In 2015 the U.S. House of Representatives passed an amendment banning all aid (including weapons and training) to the battalion because of its neo-Nazi past, but it was revoked under pressure from the CIA, writes Archbishop Viganò. The battalion has been involved in blatant human rights violations and mass killings of Russian-speaking persons in Donbass, states Viganò.
As Lev Golinkin writes in The Nation, post-Maidan Ukraine is the world’s only nation to have a neo-Nazi formation in its armed forces. (https://tinyurl.com/2wrau9k3).
Is NATO in Ukraine even though it is not officially a member? Yavoriv and Zhytomyr are de facto NATO bases, Maybury writes. NATO conducted cyber security training at Zhytomyr in September 2018 and described Ukraine as a “NATO partner.” Yavoriv has been a primary training and logistics center for supplying fighters and weapons.
Solzhenitsyn’s Perspective
Although best known for his exposure of the Soviet Gulag and his staunch anticommunism, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn welcomed Putin’s rise to power in 1999 and praised him for restoring Russia’s national pride. In 2007, Putin visited the ailing Solzhenitsyn at home to award him a state prize for his humanitarian work. In his 1990 essay “Rebuilding Russia,” Solzhenitsyn advocates a “Russian Union” encompassing Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and the ethnic Russian parts of Kazakhstan (https://tinyurl.com/utf4s3ba).
The Soros View
“At the beginning of the 1980s, I embarked on what I call my political philanthropy. First, I set up a foundation in my native Hungary, and then I actively participated in the disintegration of the Soviet empire…. I set up a foundation in Russia, and then did the same in each of the successor states. In Ukraine, I established a foundation even before it became an independent country. I also visited China in 1984, where I was the first foreigner allowed to set up a foundation,” writes Soros.
“Approaching the age of 70, Putin feels that if he is going to make his mark on Russian history, it is now or never.”
“In July 2021, Putin published a long essay arguing that Russians and Ukrainians are really one people, and that the Ukrainians have been misled by neo-Nazi agitators. The first part of his argument is not without some historical justification…. But in the second part, it was Putin who was misled…. Many Ukrainians fought valiantly during the Euromaidan protests in 2014” (https://tinyurl.com/zr7459ur).
In 2015, Russia banned the Soros-funded Open Society Foundations and Open Society Institute Assistance Foundation.
Soros funded the Ukraine Crisis Media Center. In a 2014 interview, Soros described Maidan as “the most important development in this part of the world” in many years and said he was exerting his “utmost efforts” to support Ukraine (tinyurl.com/nhfseszf). Soros’s foundations also were deeply involved in the 2004 Orange Revolution (tinyurl.com/5n9aacyu), protesting the election of Yanukovych, and bringing in a pro-NATO president.