Why the US Should Stop Sending Money to ZelensKY
David Stockman's Contra Corner
July 1, 2023
In his actual clown days, of course, Volodymyr Zelensky was known for the act depicted below. But when it comes to the collective West, the latter seems to enjoy the fact that the Ukrainian president continues to bang away upon it, relentlessly pounding out a melody of me, me and more.
But lately Zelensky has really gone over the top, peddling the hideous canard that if we don’t enable him to fight “them” over there with everything and all that he demands by way of money and weapons, we will soon bleed and die against “them” over here.
That’s the “Putin is going to invade Europe next and maybe America too”, nonsense. It’s actually groundless blithering idiocy, and yet Washington treats him as a brave ally and statesman:
“If any candidate thinks supporting Ukraine is too costly, are they ready to go to war? Are they ready to fight? Send their children? Die?” Zelenskyy said. “They will have to do it anyway if NATO enters this war, and if Ukraine fails and Russia occupies us, they will move on to the Baltics or Poland or some other NATO country. And then the U.S. will have to choose between keeping NATO or entering the war.”
Let’s cut to the chase. No American or NATO soldier is going to be fighting Putin’s army in Poland, Berlin or Belgium because the Russian army ain’t going there. Not in a month of Sundays.
Vlad Putin is no prince of men, but his war aims are limited, rational and clear as a bell. To wit, as he warned for 15 years, he does not want NATO missiles on his doorstep in Ukraine, just as President Kennedy insisted about Khrushchev’s missiles 100 miles away in Cuba 61 years ago.
Likewise, he wants the Russian-speaking populations of the eastern Donbas region and the Black Sea rim, historically known as “Novorossiya” or New Russia, to have self-governing autonomy and protection from military attack by the anti-Russian Kiev government, as per the Minsk agreements. After all, those brutal attacks, which killed upwards of 14,000 mostly civilians, occurred nearly continuously for eight years after the Washington-sponsored Maidan coup of February 2014. The latter had installed hostile proto-Nazi elements in the unelected and illegal government stood up in Kiev by Victoria Nuland and her Washington gaggle of neocon hegemonists.
In other words, what we have here is a Washington-triggered civil war in an area that has been either a Russian vassal or appendage for centuries and where the term “Ukraine” actually means “borderlands” in Russian.
And that’s not even the half of it. The borders of these very “borderlands” do not define a nation or state that was the product of natural development and accretion over centuries. To the contrary, they are a 20th century artifact confected by three of the bloodiest tyrants in all of human history—Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev. The only connection these black-lined borders shown below have to the history of the area is that they were drawn-up for reasons of totalitarian administrative convenience, not as an expression of social, ethnic, religious or economic affinities.
That is to say, Ukraine is a state that was not built to last; and, in fact, it barely outlasted its Soviet rulers after their demise in 1991. For instance, during the 1994 presidential election the pro-Russian candidate, Leonid Kuchma, defeated the incumbent and strident Ukrainian nationalist, Leonid Kravchuk.
As the map below makes clear, however, Kravchuk won overwhelming majorities of 89-95% in the western Ukraine regions (yellow and orange), which had historically been part of Poland or the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. By the same token, the pro-Russian Kuchma won the national election because he racked up the same preponderant majorities (blue areas) in the eastern Donbas and southern Novorossiya regions. In the historic Russian province (since 1783) of Crimea, in fact, Kuchma won 90% of the vote.
Electoral Map of Ukraine’s 1994 Presidential Election
Essentially, the same radical split in the electorate occurred election after election. During the last legitimate election held within the old communist borders of the country during 201o, the above pattern was replicated. This time Kuchma’s protege, Viktor Yanukovich, won the election by a hair by virtue of lop-sided margins in the historic Russian-speaking territories of the east and south (blue areas of the map).
On the other side, the Ukrainian nationalist and former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, garnered 80-90% margins in the center and west (red areas of the map).
Not surprisingly, when the pro-Russian winner of the election from the blue regions was ousted from office by Washington in February 2014, the red area Ukrainian nationalists and their crypto-Nazi allies took control of the Kiev government and proceeded to outlaw the Russian language as its first act of government; and soon thereafter launched armed warfare when the two Donbas provinces declared themselves independent states.
At the end of the day, GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis was exactly right. The war in Ukraine is at bottom a ”territorial dispute” that has absolutely nothing to do with the homeland security of America or Zelensky’s ridiculous lie that Putin is coming after NATO next.
And it most certainly has no bearing whatsoever on absurd abstractions like the rule of law and the sanctity of borders. After all, when it comes to the latter, Washington is far and away the greatest border-violating, regime-changing outlaw in the post-war world.
In some real sense, the post-war peace conference has already been held and the verdict is in. We are referring to the de facto Ukrainian referendums on the illegitimate state that Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev built, and which the Washington neocons and War Party are determined to uphold at any cost, including going to the brink of nuclear war with Russia.
Time and again the Ukrainian electorate effectively voted for partition, as dramatically underscored by the elector maps above.
So send Zelensky packing back to his comedy show and let the blue states of the Ukrainian east and south have their own countries or return to the bosom of Mother Russia, from which these communities emerged during the 18th and 19th centuries.
That would end the carnage in a heart-beat, and would stop the senseless slaughter of Ukrainians and Russians alike—a human catastrophe that is beginning to rival the heinous criminality of World War I trench warfare.
The implicit Peace of the Partition, however, could have an additional silver lining. It would expose the absolute mendacity of the Washington War Party and the fact that it is so desperate to rule the world that it will prop up even utter nincompoops like Zelensky to stay in the business of fighting falsely demonized monsters who are no threat at all to America’s real homeland security.
As we indicated recently, it’s time to get back to a Fortress America defense policy, which could be funded for a fraction of today’s $900 billion defense-a-palooza. And we wouldn’t have to waste our national treasure on un-useful idiots like Zelensky, either.
Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.
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Source
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/07/david-stockman/why-the-us-should-stop-sending-money-to-zelensky/
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