Four Years Ago

It has now been 4 years since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24^th, 2022.

This brutal war continues while the great majority within the West remain completely oblivious to the most basic background behind this tragedy.

When people have no solid foundation upon which to even start a real conversation, then real peace can never be found.

Now, nothing I am going to say here is intended to keep anyone from continuing to love or hate Putin and/or Russia as much as they choose.

What follows is simply my attempt to highlight the biggest missing pieces of background behind this war. Background whose absence in our cultural conversation allows this horrible tragedy to not only grind on, but continue to escalate.

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Here’s the 1st piece of missing background behind the Russia/ Ukraine war:

If one was able to somehow separate out the fighting on just the Eastern Front during WWII, (so separating out all of the fighting on the Western Front, in Southern Europe, in North Africa, in the Middle East, and in the Pacific) – the fighting between Germany and Russia on the Eastern Front during WWII all by itself would have been the biggest war in human history. By far.

It is said that the Nazis killed 6 million Jews during WWII. Well, it is also said that the Nazis killed 26 million Russians. One out of every six Russians died in order to defeat the Nazis. One out of six. Take a moment, look around and imagine what that would be like.

The Battle for Stalingrad was the most significant turning point in WWII. Stalingrad is where the Nazi advance was finally stopped, and where the Nazis began to get pushed all the way back to Berlin. This turning point was won well before we initiated D-Day.

Take a moment and look at where Stalingrad is on a map (it’s now called Volgograd). It is over two hundred miles to the East of Ukraine’s easternmost border.

The Nazis had three thrusts of attack. The first to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). The second to Moscow. But the third and main thrust of the Nazi attack into Russia was through Ukraine. Why?

Well, if all had gone to Hitler’s plan, and the Nazis had won Stalingrad and secured the route to Baku and its rich oil supplies on the Caspian Sea, the Nazis could have won WWII. The Nazis were starving for oil. In the first half of the 20^th Century, Baku was one of the world’s preeminent oil production facilities, bankrolled by the Rothschilds and Nobels before the fall of the Czar.

Hitler’s Wehrmacht never made it to Baku. The Russians lost one out of six people to prevent the Nazi’s access to Baku’s oil prize.

We in the West may no longer remember this history. But Russia does. When Russia says they will not allow Ukraine to become part of NATO, I am pretty sure they mean it.

Right after the war, everyone knew that the Russians did the lion’s share of work to defeat the Nazis. But through the decades since, the West has memory-holed this understanding.

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Here’s the 2^nd huge piece of missing background behind the Russia/ Ukraine war:

Ukraine is a patchwork country. In the Northwest of Ukraine, Lvov is primarily a Polish City. In the West of Ukraine, there is an entire province that is primarily Hungarian.

Whereas the Polish and Hungarian populations within Ukraine are rather small, ethnic Russians make up almost half the residents overall within the entire country of Ukraine.

Draw a diagonal line through Ukraine from Kharkov in the Northeast to Odessa in the Southwest. Anywhere to the Southeast of this line has a significant ethnic Russian population. The further to the Southeast, the higher the percentage. Crimea is almost 80% ethnic Russian. The Southeastern-most corner of Ukraine, called the Donbass, is almost 90% ethnic Russian.

After the fall of Soviet Union, Ukraine was left with a contradiction right through its heart. Although the Ukrainian and Russian people share so much in common, from aspects of their languages to the Orthodox Church, they also have a huge amount of trauma embedded in their long relationship. Over time, they both have suffered greatly at the hands of the other. And now even more so.

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Now that we have reviewed these most basic of backgrounds, now we can start to argue over the war between Russia and Ukraine. But that’s just it: people think you’re arguing about something, when really all you’re doing is trying to get to a shared common understanding of the history and background of a situation that is required before two adults could even start to actually argue about a subject.

This is classic mind-fuckery. Yet again, the win goes to whoever can memory-hole the most.

So let’s start the argument here: One could argue that, regardless of its patchwork nature, Ukraine is still a single sovereign country. And that it is against international law to invade a sovereign country. And on that point, one would be correct.

However, also under international law, one is allowed to invade a sovereign country in order to protect an ethnic minority population that is under threat by the sovereign country’s government.

This was, in fact, the exact same legal argument used by NATO for invading the Balkans in the 90’s, and also the exact same legal argument for NATO invading Libya in 2011.

When asked directly why he invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Putin answered that he did not invade to start a war, but to stop one. To stop the Ukrainian civil war that began after the Western backed coup in 2014 (the Maidan Revolution). This was the civil war that the Minsk Agreements had attempted to stop by way of compromise. This was a civil war fought primarily between Ukraine and the ethnic Russian residents in the Donbass.

Putin specifically stated that the invasion was an attempt to force Ukraine back to the negotiating table. And it worked, until Western leaders urged Ukrainian leaders to abandon those negotiations, and to instead escalate the war with Russia with Western support and backing.

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I, for one, am sure that the West’s stance on Ukraine has absolutely nothing to do with the 11 time-zones of resources in Russia that would serve as incredible collateral for the West’s black hole of debt, as the West swirls around its debt drain. Oil, natural gas, coal, uranium, gold, nickel, platinum, fertilizer, some of the world’s richest soil, timber and so much water.

The US alone sinks $1 Trillion further into debt every eight months. If someone spent one million dollars every day since Jesus was born, that would equal the amount of debt the US Federal government adds every six months. Europe is in worse shape than the US since Britain’s North Sea oil and gas fields are in decline. Netherlands big gas field declined a while ago. But resources and debt probably have nothing to do with this war. There has never been a plan to balkanize Russia and steal its resources. This time it’s different.

cluelesshonky.blogspot.com/2022/03/one-big-backstory-behind-everything

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Once again, I don’t intend to keep anyone from continuing to love or hate Putin and/or Russia as much as they choose.

But please take a moment and review the two huge missing pieces of background that we in the West memory-holed:

1) The Russians lost one out of six of their people while winning the decisive turning point in WWII against the Nazis, whose main thrust into Russia was through Ukraine.

2) Ethnic Russians are almost half the residents of modern Ukraine, with increasing percentages of the population toward the Southeast of Ukraine.

Let me ask you this: would the last four years in Ukraine have turned out to be so tragic if we had simply started the argument about the Russia/ Ukraine war right here, with this understanding?

How many lives have been lost? How many cities, towns and farms have been destroyed in the bread-basket of the world, in the pivot-point of the World Island?

You do not have to view Putin as a saint. Nor do you have to even agree with him at all, to simply see that he does have some points. And that arguably, his points are at least as valid as those from many of our own political leaders within the West.

When you listen to American Neocons, or European leaders, do they sound like they have even the slightest clue about points 1 & 2 above?

I pray that you can reflect on this question the next time you hear them speak about the Russia/ Ukraine war.

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There truly is so much more to say about all of this. But I’ll finish now with this:

Up until the fall of the Assad regime in Syria (so during the first couple of years after Russia invaded Ukraine in Feb, 2022), the US had invaded and was actively occupying parts of Southeast Syria.

Somehow it was practically never mentioned in Western media that the US had military bases in Southeast Syria. Somehow it was practically never mentioned that the US had soldiers patrolling oil production facilities within Southeast Syria.

My sense is that this makes the ground quite a bit more slippery when the West tries to take the moral high ground, and casts Russia as the epitome of all evil for having invaded Southeast Ukraine.

Putin claims that he invaded Southeast Ukraine to protect the ethnic Russians in the Donbass from attack by the government in Kiev that was out to destroy them. Whether or not you agree with him, heck, what excuse did the US claim for invading Southeast Syria? Did anybody in the US even know that we were there?

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As always, thank you so much for your time and attention.

Have a blessed day in a crazy world.