It goes without saying that the Donald can never get enough of the limelight. But last Friday in a live Oval Office broadcast seen around the world that thirst for public attention may have actually changed the course of history. And very much for the good—even if the trigger was pulled by a third rate actor who couldn’t even figure out how to properly brown-nose one of the most capacious egos on the planet.
For all practical purposes, therefore, Washington’s sick adventure in the destruction of a fake nation—along with the hideously unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of real people who inhabit the Ukrainian territory—is now over.
Zelensky will soon be gone to a hideaway in such as Costa Rica or an unmarked grave, as the case may be. Thereafter a caretaker regent for the rump of what is now the Potemkin State that Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev built with Bolshevik blood and guns will sign-up to a Trump/Putin ceasefire and partition deal—the latter having been in the making ever since the yoke of communism was lifted in 1991.
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Indeed, Friday’s final splintering of “Ukraine” in the Oval Office itself will surely soon unmask the rationality-defying farce that has been the Washington/NATO proxy war against Russia in its own “borderlands”. The latter term, of course, being the meaning of the word “ukraine” in Russian.
And we do mean monumental farce. As the most recent desultory chapter has unfolded since February 2022, in fact, the US and EU combined have spent the staggering sum of nearly $400 billion to conduct a Demolition Derby on Russia’s doorstep in order for what?
Apparently, to pleasure the arms merchants of the US and Europe with a grand occasion for the sale of beaucoup new weapons to replenish depleted NATO arsenals. And all in the name of more of the same old baloney about collective security and a “rules based international order”.
But that’s all just beltway bullshit. There has not been an iota of America’s homeland security implicated in the fate of the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic after it split off from the expired corpse of the Soviet Union in 1991. And since “Ukraine” was a communist-built simulacrum of a nation, it was not destined to last, anyway—nor would its demise have been even a little bit noted or briefly remembered by the world at large.
That is to say, the wholly artificial state of “Ukraine” embodies the very historical metaphor associated with the borderland territories that Russia had acquired, conquered, populated and developed in the late 18th century under the stewardship of Grigory Potemkin. The latter was the nation’s chief minister, who literally had an intimate relationship with the Russian Empress, Catherine the Great.
After the Catherine’s 1783 acquisition of Crimea from the Ottoman Empire and the liquidation of a small Cossack principality on the lower Dnieper River called the Zaporozhian Sich, which had governed the adjacent territories for upwards of 200 years, Potemkin became governor of the region. He promptly named these new territories Novorossiya or “New Russia” in honor of his paramour/ruler. At length, Russian people, capital and commerce poured into the theretofore largely empty steppes.
Potemkin’s major tasks were to pacify and rebuild what had been a war-torn region by bringing in Russian settlers and laying the ground work for a new flourishing of farms, industry, towns and trade. In 1787, as renewed war was about to break out between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, Catherine II, with her court and several ambassadors, made an unprecedented six month tour of New Russia, navigating down the Dnieper River (blue thread on the map) to inspect her new colonies.
One purpose of this trip was to impress Russia’s allies prior to the war. To help accomplish this, Potemkin was said to have set up “mobile villages” on the banks of the Dnieper River. As soon as the barge carrying the Empress and ambassadors arrived, Potemkin’s men, dressed as peasants, would populate the village. Once the barge left, the village was disassembled, then rebuilt downstream overnight.
Whatever the degree to which the story is apocryphal, the underlying metaphor could not be more apt. To wit, the entire territory from Lugansk and Donetsk (i.e. the Donbass) down through Mariupol on the Sea of Azov and on both banks of he Dnieper, to Odessa on the Black Sea coast, was henceforth known as New Russia and was labeled as such per the 1897 map depicted below.
Moreover, search other maps of the pre-1917 era as you may, but you will find no country called Ukraine because the latter was place name, not a state. And the place name came to life as a organized modern society only as the expanding border region of the Czarist Empire.
Novorossiya As Of The End of The Nineteenth Century
Ukraine became a state, therefore, only upon the WWI induced collapse of the Russian Empire and the seizure of power by Lenin and his brutal heirs. As shown in the map below, the communist administrative unit that became known as the Ukrainian SSR was cobbled together from New Russia (blue area) and other parts and pieces of the Czarist Empire wrested from various neighbors (yellow area)—along with historic Galicia (green area) centered in Lviv, which was seized by Stalin when Poland was dismembered in WWII.
At length, Crimea (purple area), which was thoroughly Russian from the time of its purchase by Catherine the Great in 1783, was seconded to Khrushchev’s Ukrainian compatriots in 1954 as a door prize in return for their support in the struggle for succession after Stalin.
The last thing that can be said about the Ukrainian “borders” which outline the five color-coded components shown above, therefore, is that they were sacrosanct in any meaningful sense of the term. They did not represent the organic evolution of peoples, national identities and states, but the iron-fist of the Soviet politburo and the blood-thirsty tyrants who ruled it.
In turn, this meant that when the Soviet Union collapsed into the dustbin of history in 1991, Ukraine’s days as a unitary state were numbered.
Needless to say, there was no common linguistic and religious identity at all. Even 40 years after the Soviet rulers had finished assembling “Ukraine” this 1991 map of language usage tells you all you need to know. That is to say, there were overwhelming Russian-speaking majorities in the Donbass and Black Sea rim (red areas), which in some oblasts including Crimea were more that 75% Russian-speaking. By contrast, the center and west was populated by Ukrainians, Poles, Bulgarians, Hungarians and others, where Russian speakers accounted for as little as 5% of the population.
1990s Linguistic Map Of Ukraine By Percentage of Russian Speakers
And, no, once the communist-ruled entity known as the Ukrainian SSR split away from the corpse of the defunct Soviet Union the happenstance borders it inherited were not “guaranteed” by the US in the so-called Budapest Memorandum of 1994 in return for giving up it nuclear weapons.
In fact, Ukraine never had any nukes! These weapons had been stock-piled on its territory by the Soviets and were still under Moscow’s control when the latter signed the Memorandum along with the US and the United Kingdom. But no borders were “guaranteed” because that would have been a treaty requiring Senate confirmation and support of the American people—something Bill Clinton and his operatives were unwilling to test.
Instead, the new Ukrainian government was given “assurances”. But whatever rubbery definition that term implied was soon made clear enough by Deep State operatives at State, NED and the CIA, who busied themselves fomenting color revolutions in Ukraine not long after Putin ascended to power on January 1, 2000.
In any event, once the machinery of elections and democracy was established after 1991, the resulting electoral maps make one thing abundantly clear: People voted as they spoke.
This is clearly evident in the three maps below. Ukrainian democracy began, matured and ended on the same note. Namely, with an electorate far more sharply divided than even the Red State v. Blue State politics of the US in recent decades.
In 1994 Leonid Kuchma, a former industrial manager from the heavily industrialized, Russian-speaking east (Dnipropetrovsk), campaigned on a platform emphasizing economic ties with Russia and appealed strongly to the Russian-speaking populations in eastern Ukraine and Crimea.
In the second round of that election, Kuchma won about two-thirds of the vote in eastern Ukraine, where ethnic Russians and Russian speakers predominated, and nearly 90% in Crimea, a region with a 70% ethnic Russian population.
On the other side, Leonid Kravchuk, the first president and the incumbent in 1994, was a key figure in Ukraine’s independence movement. He had positioned himself as a guarantor of Ukrainian sovereignty and national identity. He drew his strongest support from western Ukraine, where Ukrainian speakers and nationalist sentiments were dominant, earning 70% to 80% of the vote in those regions.
This cavernous split in the electorate never changed. Except unlike the US where a GOP gubernatorial candidate actually made a 47% showing in the deep blue state of New York in 2022, the vote split in the most hard core of the respective regions (dark red and dark blue) was upwards of 90/10 in many localities.
Thus, in the 2004 election the pro-Russian candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, narrowly lost the overall count, even as he dominated overwhelmingly in the east and south with 70% to 90% margins.
2004 Election Results in Ukraine
By contrast, in 2010 Yanukovych retraced the same massive domination of his own Russian-speaking regions in the east and south while striking out in the west. But this time he had sophisticated campaign help from Washington-based election consultants (i.e. the infamous Paul Manafort, who temporarily managed Donald Trump’s red versus blue state campaign in 2016 until he got nailed by the Russophobes in the Deep State). Consequently, the pro-Russian Yanukovych managed to accumulate enough incremental votes to come out on top of the perennial Ukrainian nationalist, Yulia Tymoshenko, in the nation-wide tally.
2010 Election Results in Ukraine
Needless to say, by Washington’s lights the Ukraine election of 2010 had nothing sacrosanct about it because, well, the voters elected the wrong candidate!
In short order, therefore, the neocons led by the detestable Victoria Nuland, who surrounded then Vice-President Joe Biden, fomented the coup against Yanukovych in February 2014. Yet even as they drove him from power and forced him to flee to Moscow, they had no clue as to the tenuous political balance they were upending.
But it didn’t take long to strike the match. In short order the followers of the WWII Hitler ally, Stephan Bandera, who dominated the unelected, Washington-installed government in Kiev, made two destructive moves that amounted to a signal to “let the partition begin”.
The first of these was to abolish Russian as an official language in the Donbass and elsewhere. And the second was the massacre by fire of upwards of 50 pro-Russian trade unionists in a building in Odessa by supporters of the Kiev government.
It was only a matter of time, therefore, before most of the red-colored territories on the maps above declared their independence. It was also in short order that the people of what had been the Russian province of Crimea voted overwhelmingly (80%+) to re-join the Russian Federation. That ended their brief sojourn in the Ukrainian state, which had been Khrushchev’s 1954 gift to the communist thugs in Kiev who had helped him seize power after Stalin’s death.
Also, in short order the new proto-Fascist government in Kiev moved to deeply antagonize its historic neighbor and former fealty overlord in Moscow by seeking to join NATO and launching a brutal, unrelenting war on the breakaway Republics of the Donbas. This onslaught ended up killing upwards of 15,000 civilians during the eight year run-up to Russia’s invasion in February 2022.
Needless to say, Putin was no more interested in having nuclear missiles planted even closer to his own border than was President John Kennedy in October 1962. Nor was he about to countenance the continued slaughter of Russian speakers in the Donbass after Kiev launched a drastically stepped up shelling and bombing campaign on these beleaguered areas one week before the February 24th (2022) invasion.
That is to say, the history was far from black and white. While the Donald frequently does not do his homework—in this case he did know that the “unprovoked” invasion canard is a Deep State prevarication. So last Friday he was not about to be schooled on the matter by the incompetent song and dance man who was sent into the Oval Office by the crowd of UniParty warmongers and GOP RINO’s depicted below for the purpose of shaking-down the current incumbent for another round of weapons and financial wherewithal.
So in response to Zelensky’s Putin-howling, the Donald did not mind blurting out the truth.
The Ukraine war had actually been provoked by the Washington war machine and its
Senate board of directors pictured below.
Of course, now that the truth was let out of the bag on daytime TV there will surely soon be an end to the pointless killing and utterly elicit NATO proxy war on Russia. And with it will come an even more important repudiation of the entire post-1991 neocon perpetuation of an American Empire that should have never been stood up in the first place.
That is to say, the false Uniparty demonization of Putin and Russia will be repudiated even more decisively. That’s because apart from the impending Trump/Putin partition agreement on Ukraine, the map of eastern Europe will not change any time soon.
The whole idea that Putin means to resurrect the old Soviet Empire and that Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Moldova and destinations west are next in line for invasion was made of whole cloth. Its malign purpose was to give NATO a reason for expanding even further east to Russia’s very doorstep and to justify Washington’s call to war in a territory that makes not one damn bit of difference to America’s homeland security.
For crying out loud. The archives of American post-Soviet diplomacy are also crystal clear on this matter. Bush the Elder and his Secretary of State James Baker explicitly promised Gorbachev that in return for the dismantling of the Warsaw Pact and the unification of Germany that NATO would not move “one inch” to the east.
And that pledge was made for screamingly obvious reasons: The Soviet Empire was gone, and the threat of the massive Red Army had vanished. Its troops weren’t even being paid and its tanks and artillery were being melted down and sold for scrap. So ex-paratrooper George HW Bush should have parachuted into Ramstein Air Base in Germany during 1992, declared victory and consigned NATO to a newly created museum of world peace.
Indeed, at the time the very astute “father” of the containment doctrine and the 1949 NATO alliance, Professor George F. Kennan, warned that the perpetuation and expansion of NATO under these circumstances would be folly. When in 1998 the Senate nevertheless voted to extend NATO to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, he clairvoyantly observed,
“I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home. “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever.” …
“It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course, there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are — but this is just wrong.“
In a word, risking everything to get Ukraine into an obsolete NATO alliance that was and remains long past its “sell-by” date is surely one of the stupidest acts of foreign policy in all of American history.
And now, on the back of the momentous events of this past weekend, the opportunity has finally come. That is, to name, blame, shame and drive from the seats of power the UniParty wreckers of American democracy, prosperity and liberty who brought the nation to its present parlous estate.
So President Trump’s history-changing mission at the present hour is crystal clear. He needs to make War & Peace the preponderant issue on the banks of the Potomac and send the UniParty remnants into spasmodic apoplexy by winning the Nobel Peace Prize for ending this needless war with the same dispatch that Eisenhower did with Korea in 1953.
So doing, he can accomplish the great mission for which is was apparently chosen against all odds by the gods’ of history. That is, to decisively splinter the Uniparty, thereby gathering refugees from both sides of the aisle into a revitalized political force that can enable the the people of Flyover America to reclaim their democracy from the corrupt, self-perpetuating ruling class that arose on the Potomac.
Needless to say, the Donald seems to be on to his mission. When Zelensky issued the following rejoinder to his being cast out of the White House, the Donald was not far behind with a perfectly apt answer.
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Ukraine “will never” recognize any Russian annexation of territory it occupies, even if it is to try to secure a peace deal, Zelensky added, and he repeated that he would only accept a ceasefire if it was followed by robust security guarantees that had the confidence of his country’s people.
Though Russia has said it will insist on incorporating territories that it occupies, for Ukraine it would always be “a temporary occupation”, Zelenskyy insisted, even if his country lacks the military muscle to expel Russia from all of the country at the moment.
Zelenskyy said what he wanted “from partners” – a clear reference to the US White House – was for them to remember that Russia launched the full-scale invasion of his country three years ago. He did not want politicians rewriting history, he said, to suggest “that there are two parties in this war and it is vague who the aggressor is”.
Why, yes, there were two parties to this war and the true aggressor was domiciled on the banks of the Potomac, not the Moskva/Oka/Volga.
Trump warned in response with words that have not been heard from the Oval Office since June 1963, when JFK issued his short-lived call to end the Cold War at American University.
“This is the worst statement that could have been made by Zelensky, and America will not put with it for much longer.” He added in reference to Zelensky that “this guy doesn’t want there to be Peace as long as he has America’s backing…”.
“He’s got to say I want to make peace,” Trump said before he departed the White House on Friday. “He doesn’t have to stand there and say about ‘Putin this, Putin that,’ all negative things. He’s got to say I want to make peace. I don’t want to fight a war any longer.”
Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.
