The first stage of the West’s new world war against Russia is complete. Ukraine can now serve as an outpost for launching media, digital, cultural and other attacks eastward – another example of the new kind of war that the global hegemon is waging around the world.
This year we celebrated the anniversary of the Soviet people’s victory in the Great Patriotic War in a radically different international environment. The ongoing developments in Ukraine are directly linked to fundamental geopolitical shifts of recent years. Not only did these changes disrupt the global balance of power, they altered the very foundations of the world order and undermined international law. These changes were set in motion by the West’s dubious interpretation of the causes and the very meaning of the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington. Twelve years have passed since Western elites embarked on an effort to reshape the world by sending US secret services and NATO forces to Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Syria and the like to stage military operations. The masterminds of this “new world order” have now closed in on Russia.
As a pretext for bringing NATO military bases closer to Russian borders, Ukraine was offered membership in the Eastern Partnership project. The West started by openly supporting the coup in Ukraine before unleashing a new kind of war in which disinformation and various IT and media attacks are the main weapons.
This is more than just virtual warfare against media outlets and journalists in Russia and beyond, blocking Russian broadcasters in European countries, or seizing and destroying broadcast towers in Ukraine’s South and East. Far from just silencing opponents, these efforts – collecting data on political opponents, banning travel to Western Europe, using the media to back political provocations, etc. – are about creating a global digital iron curtain. The cynical and extensive coverage by Western media of atrocities committed by Maidan militants in Odessa is telling, featuring the absurd claim that fully armed Right Sector activists were attacked by their unarmed victims, who took refuge inside the Trade Union building and set it on fire.
The cynical and relentless propaganda offensive on Western audiences has been effective. Even the “experts” in most European countries are now guided by propaganda-induced stereotypes, not objective information, logic or impartial analysis.
It is becoming increasingly evident that the main purpose of the Kiev junta is to promote genocide against Russian people and culture as part of a new kind of geopolitical war waged by the West first against Yugoslavia (the anti-Orthodox project), then dissenting Arab regimes (the Sunni project), and now Russia (the anti-Russian project). Just a couple of weeks ago most Western “experts” argued that the fascist tendencies on display in Kiev’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, and Ukrainian law enforcement agencies are merely side effects of the “revolution” that the regime will be able to get under control in the near future. However, in the wake of the punitive operations in Ukraine’s South and East, it has become clear to all but the most unscrupulous commentator that Ukraine’s new regime is in the hands of openly Nazi criminals and killers.
No reasonable observer can deny that followers of Ukraine’s nationalist icon Stepan Bandera have started a war to wipe out anyone who opposes genocide. They use snipers to shoot at Slavyansk and Kramatorsk residents, employ tanks to break through human chains in Donbass and throw Molotov cocktails at unarmed civilians in Odessa. They are the aggressors in this punitive campaign – the vanguard of a new civilizational war unleashed against Russia and the Russian world.
The question is, how could Ukraine buy into this? How could the sincere, anti-oligarchy sentiments of the so-called euro-romantics be so easily exploited by outright criminals and euronazis?
I believe that Ukrainians have been living in a distorted reality for quite a while, not just since the first or second protest movements on Kiev’s Maidan Square. It appears that their mindsets were being reshaped for many years, if not decades. We can now congratulate Yanukovich, as well as his predecessors Kravchuk, Kuchma and Yushchenko, on almost succeeding – with encouragement from the EU, of course – to create an aggressive and increasingly depressive crowd brainwashed by Euro-Atlantic propaganda in place of the great Ukrainian people which produced Bohdan Khmelnitsky, Taras Shevchenko, Nikolai Gogol, Vladimir Vernadsky, Ivan Kozhedub and many other prominent sons and daughters of Kiev, Lviv, Zaporozhye, Odessa, etc.
Celebrating and glorifying national achievements and merits is one way of affirming national identity; another is to diminish and denigrate a neighbor’s achievements and merits. Unfortunately, all predecessors of the current regime in Kiev went the second route, taking every opportunity to denigrate and reject all things Russian and Soviet: far from being limited to the Russian language, these efforts encompassed our shared history of the Great Patriotic War, which is now referred to only as the Second World War in Ukrainian textbooks. In my opinion, by promoting a new perspective on 1941-1945, Ukrainian leaders starting with Kravchuk have laid an ideological foundation for replacing a Ukrainian-Russian mindset (Orthodox and pan-Slavic) with a Ukrainian-Galician (Greek Catholic and pro-European) one. What we are currently witnessing in Kiev is the result of this shift.
The main outcome of this model is that Ukrainian elites have failed to create a functioning democracy, an efficient economy, or interethnic or interreligious peace after twenty years of trying to forge a national identity separate from Ukraine’s shared history with Russia. Russia has supported all Ukrainian presidents over the last two decades for the sole reason that it respects Ukraine’s right to choose for itself. Russia has done its outmost to ensure that Ukraine is an independent country with a developed economy that remains friendly to Russia. If Russia can be blamed for anything, it’s not getting more involved in Ukrainian affairs. For a long time Russia could have been more insistent on the need to respect the Russian language in Ukraine. It is possible that among the causes of the Maidan protest and its consequences was Russia’s passive, tolerant and indifferent stand on the dealings of Ukrainian elites with nationalists.
The euronazis have become the de facto masters in Kiev despite the fact that only a small fraction of the Ukrainian population (no more than 3%) supports their ideas. Furthermore, instead of promoting dialogue, the new Ukrainian regime turned to the Right Sector for help in its crackdown on an important part of its people. This is precisely how Nazis come power: they usually start by “giving a hand” to revolutionary romantics and total idiots, and later become the backbone of revolutionary regimes that ultimately morph into Nazi-style dictatorships.
The Kiev junta is clearly more interested in drawing Ukraine into NATO than the European Union. It has sworn allegiance to Washington, not Brussels, thereby buying indulgence for all its crimes against Ukrainians and especially ethnic Russians. The first stage of the West’s new world war against Russia is complete. Ukraine can now serve as an outpost for launching media, digital, cultural and other attacks eastward – another example of the new kind of war that the global hegemon is waging around the world.
Vladimir Lepekhin is Director of the EurAsEc Institute.
Views expressed are of individual Members and Contributors, rather than the Club's, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
