Beware of Enemies Bearing Gifts

U.S. authorities allegedly protecting international law is hypocrisy.

After an exhausting 10-year siege of Troy, the Achaean army, torn apart by internal contradictions and having lost all hope in winning the battle, devised an ingenious plan involving a wooden horse, which was brought into the city by the opponent, the Trojans. The Ukrainian crisis has already lasted a decade; Russia’s main challenge is not suffering the same fate as Troy. Having survived a long siege, Russia is tasked with not falling for Washington’s sanctions rhetoric, which is in fact a bluff, designed to shake things up internally in Russia.

Despite the hysteria of Western media regarding the invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s foreign policy has been overly precise. Russian diplomats, unlike their amateur Western colleagues, have acted as level-headed and rational professionals, basing their actions on international legal documents. However, their counterparts in the West have not and are not listening to the voice of reason. The wheels are turning. War has started in Donbass, which Kyiv has essentially provoked at Washington’s request. If something doesn’t fit into the script written by American and British strategists, it is immediately recognized as irrelevant or turned upside down.

The same thing has happened in all U.S. democratization and regime change operations. Remember Iraq or Libya. Of course, lobbying the business interests of members of the ruling administration has been a part of the game, as usual. At one point, the Iraq War was justified as U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s desire to support the interests of Halliburton, a corporation to which the former vice president had ties. According to observers, the beneficiary of the Ukrainian crisis may be Hunter Biden.

It is important to understand that Ukraine is just an instrument that Washington hopes to use to destabilize the situation in Russia. After all, the goal of American provocations is to be at the forefront of Russia’s fifth column, which, in fear of losing the West’s position, can do anything. In this way the U.S. expects to get rid of a powerful opponent in the global market. This is a textbook scenario — unable to win by force, enemies deploy the Trojan horse.

Back in the 1990s, several futurists predicted that revolutionary changes in the world order will happen when Russia begins to scoop up territories of the European heartland. Of course, back then it was impossible to imagine the Kyiv government sending tanks to pacify the Russian-speaking Eastern region of Ukraine. “This is not the Arab world or the Balkans,” stated observers.

9/11, America’s invasion of Iraq, the revolutionary rise of Arab Spring — none of these events led to a fundamentally new world order. On the one hand, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington demonstrated the vulnerability of the United States, but on the other, they became the pretext for expanding and strengthening Pax Americana. The Iraq War called into question the effectiveness of international institutions on which the Yalta-Potsdam world order was based and seemed to be the premise for the formation of new imperial principles of the world order. The Arab Spring, in fact, signified the failure of controlled chaos, a concept popular in Washington. Chaos in the Middle East could not be controlled.

And now there is Ukraine. For Russophobic elites in Washington, the Ukrainian problem is actually closely linked to the issue of regime change in Russia. This is an existential problem that fits the famous Roman formula of the Punic Wars: Carthage must be destroyed.

The U.S. continues to use its usual and proven methods: The CIA has played and continues to play a key role in Ukrainian events. It is worth recalling that in 2014, a few days before the start of military operations in southeast Ukraine, then-CIA Director John Brennan visited Kyiv. Incognito, with a false passport.

Apparently, Ukrainian events will revive NATO’s military bloc, which has existed with no purpose for a long time. However, European countries will have a hard time. Imposing sanctions detrimental to their own economies and taking a lion’s share of the costs of saving Ukraine, European countries will be forced to say a final goodbye to their foreign policy ambitions and agree to America’s conditions in negotiating the creation of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.

When French troops appeared in Mexico at the end of the 19th century, the U.S. sent 50,000 soldiers to the Mexican border; U.S. Secretary of State William Seward told the French Emperor Napoleon III that his actions contradicted the Monroe Doctrine. Can the Americans understand that every great nation has its own Monroe Doctrine? Why can’t the Russians have such a doctrine if the Americans do? Since 1823, the U.S. has prohibited European countries from interfering with affairs of the Western Hemisphere, but has felt quite at home in the South Caucasus or in the Caspian region, which the U.S. considers to be in the domain of its national interests. Imagine what will happen if Russia declared the Gulf of Mexico a region of its national interests. In U.S. opinion, how should Moscow react to the possibility of NATO military bases in Ukraine?

“What if suddenly, Russian power showed up in Canada and Mexico, and provinces of Canada and Mexico said they were going to join Putin’s Eurasian economic union and maybe even his military bloc? Surely the American president would have to react as forcefully as Putin has," said Professor Emeritus Stephen Cohen of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University, at the start of the Ukrainian crisis.

“Putin is not a thug; he’s not a neo-Soviet imperialist who’s trying to recreate the Soviet Union; he’s not even anti-American”, noted Cohen. “His mission is, as he sees it, and many Russians see it, [to] restore Russia from the disaster of 1991, the collapse of the Russian state. So to recreate the stability, prosperity, greatness, whatever that means in Russia at home, and in the process, restore Russia’s traditional zones of national security on its borders; that means Ukraine as well. He did not create this Ukrainian crisis; it was imposed on him, and he had no choice but to react.”

“How can we compare today's Putin’s actions in Crimea with events in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan?” asked American philosopher Noam Chomsky. “What right does the West, who attacked Iraq and occupied it, bombed Afghanistan, passively watched, if not actively provoked, the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and recognized Kosovo’s independence, [have to] protest, resent and even impose sanctions on Russia for what happened in Crimea, where as far as I know, there was no massacre, ethnic cleansing and violence?”*

Many Western experts are convinced that, from a simply pragmatic point of view, the U.S. and Europe should agree to Russia’s demand and provide guarantees that Ukraine will remain outside military blocs existing on the continent. The U.S. and its allies have already demonstrated twice that under no circumstances will they fight for the territories of the former Soviet Union. The first time was in Georgia in 2008. This means that offering to bring Ukraine into NATO would be a strategically irresponsible decision. Not only would this not strengthen NATO, but it would also lead to doubts about its readiness to bear arms for its new members.

*Editor’s Note: Although accurately translated, this quoted passage could not be independently verified.