In the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine that potentially threatens the planet even with World War III, the Liberal Globe section of the Geopolitical Analysis presents an analysis of the course of the war, the responsibilities of the West, but also the complex nature of the information light of publicity in time of war.
How did Russia and Ukraine get into the war?
We will try to look first at the roots of the Ukrainian conflict. It starts with those who have been talking about “separatists” from Donbass for the last eight years. This is a misnomer. The referendums held by the two self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in May 2014 were not “independence” referendums, as some incumbent journalists claimed, but “self-determination” referendums. The term “pro-Russian” implies that Russia was a party to the conflict, which did not happen, and the term “Russian-speaking” would be more honest. In addition, these referendums were held against the advice of Vladimir Putin.
In fact, these Republics did not seek to secede from Ukraine, but to gain a status of autonomy, guaranteeing them the use of Russian as an official language – because the new government’s first legislative act resulted from the overthrow of the America’s [democratically elected] President Yanukovych, was the repeal, on February 23, 2014, of the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko 2012 law that made Russian the official language in Ukraine.
This decision caused a storm in the Russian-speaking population. The result was the brutal repression of Russian-speaking areas (Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkiv, Lugansk and Donetsk) that took place in February 2014 and led to the militarization of the situation and some horrific massacres of the Russian population.
At this stage, very rigid and absorbed in a dogmatic approach to operations, the Ukrainian General Staff subdued the enemy but failed to prevail. The war waged by the autonomous consisted of high-mobility operations carried out by light means. With a more flexible and less dogmatic approach, the guerrillas managed to take advantage of the inaction of the Ukrainian forces to “trap” them repeatedly.
Information from the OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] – stated that there were no deliveries of weapons and military equipment from Russia. The guerrillas were armed thanks to the distance of the Russian-speaking Ukrainian units that sided with the guerrillas. As Ukrainian failures continued, battalions of artillery, artillery, and anti-aircraft guns expanded into the ranks of the autonomous. This prompted the Ukrainians to commit to the Minsk Agreements.
It is important to recall here that the Minsk 1 (September 2014) and Minsk 2 (February 2015) agreements did not provide for the separation or independence of the Republics, but for their autonomy within Ukraine. Those who have read the Agreements (few who have actually read them) will note that it is written that the status of the Republics was to be negotiated between Kiev and the representatives of the Republics, for an internal solution within Ukraine.
But shortly after the signing of the Minsk 1 Accords, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko launched a massive “counterterrorism operation” (ATO) against Donbass. On the bad advice of NATO officials, the Ukrainians suffered a crushing defeat at Debaltsevo, which forced them to join the Minsk 2 Accords.
That is why, since 2014, Russia has been systematically demanding the implementation of the Minsk Agreements, while refusing to be part of the negotiations, because it was an internal matter of Ukraine. On the other hand, the West – led by France – has systematically tried to replace the Minsk Agreements with the “Normandy format”, which brought Russia and Ukrainians face to face. However, let us remember that there were never any Russian troops in Donbas before 23-24 February 2022. In addition, OSCE observers had never noticed the slightest trace of Russian units operating in Donbas until then. For example, the US intelligence map published by the Washington Post on December 3, 2021 does not show Russian troops in Donbas.
In October 2015, Vasyl Hrytsak, director of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), admitted that only 56 Russian fighters had been spotted in Donbas. The Ukrainian army was then in a miserable state. In October 2018, after four years of war, the Attorney General of Ukraine, Anatoly Matios, stated that Ukraine lost 2,700 men in Donbas: 891 from diseases, 318 from road accidents, 177 from other accidents, 175 from poisoning. , drugs), 172 from careless handling of weapons, 101 from violations of security regulations, 228 from murders and 615 from suicides.
In fact, the Ukrainian army was undermined by the corruption of its cadres and no longer enjoyed the support of the population. Young Ukrainians refused to go to war in Donbass and preferred immigration, which explains, at least in part, the country’s demographic deficit.
The Ukrainian militia and the Ukrainian (Western type) army
The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense then turned to NATO to help make its armed forces more “attractive”. But this is a long-term process and the Ukrainians wanted to move fast.
Thus, to compensate for the shortage of soldiers, the Ukrainian government resorted to paramilitary militias. In 2020, they made up about 40% of the Ukrainian forces and numbered about 102,000 men, according to Reuters. They were armed, funded and trained by the United States, Great Britain, Canada and France. There were more than 19 nationalities.
These militias have been operating in Donbas since 2014, with Western support. Even if one may disagree with the term “Nazi”, the fact remains that these militias are violent, carry a disturbing ideology and are strongly anti-Semitic … [and] are made up of fanatics and brutal people. The most famous of these is the Azov Regiment, whose emblem is reminiscent of the 2nd Panzer Division SS Das Reich, which is honored in Ukraine for the liberation of Kharkiv from the Soviets in 1943, before carrying out the 1944 massacre in Oradour-sur- Glane, France.
Describing Ukrainian paramilitaries as “Nazis” or “neo-Nazis” is considered Russian propaganda. But that is not the view of the Times of Israel or the West Point Academy Counterterrorism Center. In 2014, Newsweek magazine seemed to link them more to Islamic State. Thus, the West has supported and continued to equip militias that have committed numerous crimes against the civilian population since 2014: rape, torture and massacres.
The integration of these paramilitary forces into the Ukrainian National Guard was not accompanied at all by “de-Naziization”, as some claim. Among the many examples, this one with the insignia of the Azov Constitution is instructive:
In 2022, very schematically, the Ukrainian armed forces fighting the Russian attack were organized as:
- Army
under the Ministry of Defense. It is organized in 3 army corps and consists of maneuver formations (tanks, heavy artillery, missiles, etc.).
- National Guard
which depends on the Ministry of Interior and is organized in 5 territorial administrations. The National Guard is therefore a territorial defense force that does not belong to the Ukrainian army. It includes paramilitary militias, called “volunteer battalions” (volunteer battalions), also known as “retaliatory battalions” and consisting of infantry. Mainly trained for battles in the cities, they now defend cities such as Kharkiv, Mariupol, Odessa, Kyiv, etc.
The outbreak of war
Since November 2021, the Americans have been constantly threatening with a Russian invasion of Ukraine. However, the Ukrainians at first did not seem to agree. Why not; We must return on March 24, 2021. On that day, Volodymyr Zelensky issued a decree for the recapture of Crimea and began to expand his forces in the south of the country. At the same time, many NATO exercises took place between the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea, accompanied by a significant increase in reconnaissance flights along the Russian border. Russia then conducted several exercises to test the operational readiness of its troops and to show that it was monitoring the situation.
Things calmed down until October-November with the end of ZAPAD 21 exercises, the movements of whose troops were interpreted as reinforcements for an attack on Ukraine. However, even the Ukrainian authorities have rejected the idea of Russian preparation for war, and Oleksiy Reznikov, Ukraine’s defense minister, says there has been no change in its borders since the spring.
In violation of the Minsk Agreements, Ukraine conducted air operations in Donbas using drones, including at least one attack on a fuel depot in Donetsk in October 2021. The American press covered this, but not the Europeans and no one condemned them.
In February 2022, the events came to the fore. On February 7, during a visit to Moscow, Emmanuel Macron reaffirmed to Vladimir Putin his commitment to the Minsk Accords, which he would repeat after meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky the next day. But on February 11, in Berlin, after nine hours of work, the meeting of political advisers to the leaders of the “Normandy format” ended without any concrete results: the Ukrainians were still refusing to implement the Minsk Agreements, obviously under pressure of the United States. Vladimir Putin noted that Emmanuel Macron had made empty promises and that the West was not ready to enforce the agreements, the same opposition to an arrangement he had shown for eight years.
Ukraine’s preparations in the contact zone continued. The Russian parliament was concerned and on February 15 asked Vladimir Putin to recognize the independence of the Republics, which he initially refused to do.
On February 17, US President Joe Biden announced that Russia would attack Ukraine in the coming days. How did he know that? It is a mystery. But since the 16th, the bombing of the Donbass population has increased dramatically, according to the daily reports of OSCE observers. Naturally, neither the media, nor the European Union, nor NATO, nor any Western government reacted or intervened. It will be said later that this was Russian misinformation. In fact, it seems that the European Union and some countries have deliberately kept silent about the massacre of the population of Donbass, knowing that such a thing would provoke a Russian intervention.
At the same time, there were reports of sabotage in Donbass. On January 18, Donbas’s fighters intercepted Polish-speaking saboteurs equipped with Western equipment and trying to create chemical incidents in Gorlivka. They could be CIA mercenaries, led or “consulted” by Americans and made up of Ukrainian or European fighters, to carry out sabotage operations in the Donbass Republics.
In fact, as early as February 16, Joe Biden knew that the Ukrainians had begun bombarding the civilian population of Donbass intensely, forcing Vladimir Putin to make a difficult choice: to help Donbass militarily and create an international problem, or to create an international problem. stay idle and watch the crushed Donbass Russians.
If he decided to intervene, Putin could invoke the international “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) obligation. But he knew that whatever its nature or scale, the intervention would trigger a storm of sanctions. Therefore, whether Russian intervention was limited to Donbass or went further to put pressure on the West over the status of Ukraine, the price would be the same. He explained this in his speech on February 21. That day, he agreed to the Duma’s request and recognized the independence of the two Donbass Republics, and at the same time signed treaties of friendship and assistance with them.
The bombardment of Ukrainian artillery against the population of Donbas continued and, on February 23, the two Republics requested military assistance from Russia. On February 24, Vladimir Putin invoked Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which provides for mutual military assistance in the context of a defense alliance.
To make the Russian intervention seem completely illegal in the eyes of the public, Western powers deliberately concealed the fact that the war began on 16 February. The Ukrainian army was preparing to attack Donbass as early as 2021, as some Russians and European intelligence services were well aware.
In a speech on February 24, Vladimir Putin stated the two goals of his operation: “demilitarization” and “de-Naziization” of Ukraine.
Beyond that, our knowledge of the course of the operation is limited: the Russians have excellent security for their operations (OPSEC) and the details of their design are not known. But fast enough, the course of the business allows us to understand how the strategic goals were translated at the operational level.
1. land-based destruction of the Ukrainian air force, air defense systems and means of reconnaissance;
2. neutralization of administration and information structures (C3I), as well as the main logistical routes in the depths of the territory;
3. encirclement of most of the Ukrainian army concentrated in the southeast of the country.
4. destruction or neutralization of battalions of volunteers operating in the cities of Odessa, Kharkiv and Mariupol, as well as in various facilities in the territory (De-nazification).
The demilitarization of Ukraine
The idea that Russia is trying to occupy Kyiv, the capital, in order to eliminate Zelensky, typically comes from the West. But Vladimir Putin never intended to assassinate or overthrow Zelensky. Instead, Russia is seeking to keep him in power by forcing him to negotiate, encircling Kyiv. The Russians want to ensure Ukraine’s neutrality.
Many Western commentators were surprised that the Russians continued to seek a negotiated solution during the military operation. The explanation lies in the Russian strategic perspective from the Soviet era. For the West, war begins when politics ends. However, the Russian approach follows an inspiration from Clausewicz: war is a continuation of politics and one can move fluidly from one to another, even during battle. This allows one to put pressure on the opponent and push him to negotiate.
From an operational point of view, the Russian attack was an example of previous military action and planning: in six days, the Russians occupied an area as large as the United Kingdom, advancing faster than the Wehrmacht had achieved in 1940.
Most of the Ukrainian army was deployed in the south of the country in preparation for a major operation against Donbass. That is why Russian forces have been able to encircle it since early March in the “cauldron” between Slavyansk, Kramatorsk and Severodonyetsk, pushing from the east through Kharkov and another from the south through Crimea. Troops from the Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR) republics are supplementing Russian forces with an Eastern push.
At this stage, the Russian forces are slowly tightening the noose, but they are no longer under time pressure or schedule. The goal of demilitarizing them has been achieved and the remaining Ukrainian forces no longer have an operational and strategic command structure.
The “slowdown” that Western experts attribute to bad logistics is only the consequence of achieving their goals. Russia does not want to occupy the entire Ukrainian territory. In fact, it seems that Russia is trying to limit its advance on the country’s linguistic borders.
The media talk about indiscriminate bombing of civilians, especially in Kharkov, and horrific images are widely spread. However, Gonzalo Lira, a Latin American correspondent living there, introduces us to a quiet city on March 10 and March 11. It is true that it is a big city and we do not see it all – but that seems to indicate that we are not in the total war that is constantly being served on our television screens. As for the Donbas Republics, they have “liberated” their own territories and are fighting in the city of Mariupol.
The de-Nazification of Ukraine
In cities such as Kharkiv, Mariupol and Odessa, Ukrainian defense is provided by paramilitary militias. They know that the goal of “de-Naziization” is primarily aimed at them. For an attacker in an urbanized area, citizens are a problem. That is why Russia is seeking to build humanitarian corridors to evacuate cities from civilians and leave only the militias to fight them more easily.
Instead, these militias seek to prevent civilians in the cities from evacuating in order to prevent the Russian army from fighting there. That is why they are reluctant to implement these corridors and are doing everything they can to ensure that Russian efforts are unsuccessful – they are using the civilian population as “human shields”. Videos showing civilians trying to leave Mariupol and being beaten by fighters of the Azov regime are, of course, carefully censored by the Western media.
On Facebook, the Azov group was considered in the same category as the Islamic State [ISIS] and is subject to the “platform policy for dangerous individuals and organizations”. So she was forbidden to glorify her activities and “posts” that were favorable to her were systematically forbidden. But on February 24, Facebook changed its policy and allowed posts favorable to the militia. In the same vein, in March, the authorized platform in the former Eastern countries called for the assassination of Russian soldiers and leaders.
The Western media spread a romantic image of popular resistance from the Ukrainian people. It is this image that has led the European Union to finance the distribution of weapons to the civilian population. We should point out that violence against civilians takes place in very specific contexts. Especially when weapons are plentiful and there are no command structures.
These command structures are the essence of armies: their function is to channel the use of force towards a target. Equipping civilians at random, as is the case today, the EU is turning them into fighters, making them potential targets. Moreover, without administration, without operational objectives, arms distribution inevitably leads to liquidation, robberies and actions that are more deadly than effective. War becomes a matter of emotions. Power becomes violence. This happened in Tavarga (Libya) from 11 to 13 August 2011, where 30,000 black Africans were slaughtered with weapons smuggled (illegally) from France. By the way, the British Royal Institute for Strategic Studies (RUSI) sees no added value in these arms deliveries.
In addition, by handing over weapons to a country at war, one is exposed as a warrior. The Russian strikes of 13 March 2022 against the Mykolaiv air base follow Russian warnings that arms shipments would be treated as enemy targets.
The EU is repeating the catastrophic experience of the Third Reich in the last hours of the Battle of Berlin. The war must be left to the army and when one side has lost, it must admit it. And if there is to be resistance, it must be led and structured. But we are doing just the opposite – we are pushing citizens to go to war, and at the same time, Facebook is approving calls to assassinate Russian soldiers and leaders.
Some intelligence agencies see this irresponsible decision as a way to use the Ukrainian population as cannon fodder to fight Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It would be better for them to get involved in negotiations and thus receive guarantees for the civilian population than to add fuel to the fire. It is easy to fight on words and from the safe, when in practice others are fighting for you.
It is important to understand in advance that it is not the Ukrainian army that is defending Mariupol, but Azov’s militia, which is made up of foreign mercenaries.
The hospital of Mariupol holds a dominant position, perfectly suitable for the installation of anti-tank weapons and for observation. On March 9, Russian forces hit the building. According to CNN, 17 people were injured, but the images do not show casualties in the building and there is no evidence that the casualties reported are related to this hit. There is talk of children, but in reality there is nothing. That does not stop EU leaders from seeing it as a war crime. And that allows Zelensky to call for a no-fly zone over Ukraine.
In fact, we do not know exactly what happened. But the sequence of events tends to confirm that Russian forces hit a position on Azov’s constitution and that the maternity hospital was then free of civilians.
The problem is that paramilitary militias defending cities are encouraged by the international community to disregard the rules of war. The Ukrainians appear to have repeated the scenario of the Kuwaiti city maternity hospital in 1990, which was fully organized by Hill & Knowlton for $10.7 million to persuade the UN Security Council to intervene in Iraq for Operation Desert Shield/Storm. Western politicians have been accepting civilian strikes on Donbass by the Ukrainian government for eight years without imposing sanctions on the Ukrainian government. We have long been in a dynamic where Western politicians have agreed to sacrifice international law for their goal of weakening Russia.
The conclusions
- The problem is that politicians are the ones who decide – the best intelligence service in the world is useless if the decision-maker (the political leadership) does not listen. In addition, if the Western intelligence services have a poor analytical level – due to dogma, then their analysts are deprived of the intellectual and political independence required to assess a situation of military “quality”. This exacerbates their failure so far to present an accurate picture of the situation in Ukraine in recent years. This happened during this crisis. Probably, this is due to the complete absence of Western intelligence services to accurately represent the situation last year and not to their undisputed capabilities.
- It seems that in some European countries, politicians have deliberately responded ideologically to the situation. That is why this crisis was absurd from the beginning. It should be noted that all documents presented to the public during this crisis were presented by politicians based on commercial sources.
Some Western politicians obviously wanted a conflict. In the United States, the attack scenarios presented by Anthony Blinken to the UN Security Council were merely the product of the imagination of a Tiger group working for him – just as Donald Rumsfeld did in 2002, who bypassed the CIA and others. intelligence services that were much less powerful for Iraqi chemical weapons.
The dramatic developments we are seeing today have causes we knew about but refused to see:
1. At a strategic level, the expansion of NATO (which we have not dealt with here).
2. At the political level, the West’s refusal to implement the Minsk Agreements;
3. At the military (operational) level, the continuous and repeated attacks on the civilian population of Donbass in recent years and the dramatic increase at the end of February 2022.
In other words, we can of course condemn and condemn the Russian attack. But we – the West (ie: the United States, France and the European Union) created the conditions for a conflict to break out. We show compassion for the Ukrainian people and the two million refugees. But if we had a little sympathy for the same number of refugees from the Ukrainian population of Donbass who were slaughtered by their own government and who sought refuge in Russia for eight years, none of that would have happened.
Whether the term “genocide” applies to the abuses suffered by the people of Donbass is an open question. The term is generally intended for larger cases (Holocaust, etc.). But the definition given by the Genocide Convention is probably broad enough to apply in this case.
- Sanctions seem to have become the preferred tool of our foreign policy. If Ukraine had insisted on adhering to the Minsk Agreements, which we had negotiated and approved, none of them would have happened. The condemnation of Vladimir Putin is also ours. No sense in telling you now – I don’t wanna ruin the suprise. However, neither Emmanuel Macron (as guarantor and member of the UN Security Council), nor Olaf Scholz, nor Volodymyr Zelensky have fulfilled their commitments.
The European Union has not been able to promote the implementation of the Minsk agreements – on the contrary, it has not reacted when Ukraine bombed its population in Donbas. If he had done so, Vladimir Putin would not have needed to react. Absent from the diplomatic phase, the EU distinguished itself by fueling the conflict. On February 27, the Ukrainian government agreed to start negotiations with Russia. But a few hours later, the European Union passed a 450m-euro budget for arms supplies to Ukraine, adding fuel to the fire. Beyond that, the Ukrainians felt they did not need to reach an agreement. The resistance of Azov’s militia in Mariupol even led to a push of 500million euros for weapons.
- In Ukraine, with the blessing of Western countries, those who are in favor of a negotiation have been eliminated. This is the case of Denis Kireyev, one of the Ukrainian negotiators, who was assassinated on March 5 by the Ukrainian secret service (SBU) because he was very favorable to Russia and was considered a traitor. The same fate befell Dmitry Demianenko, the former deputy head of the SBU’s main directorate for Kyiv and its environs, who was assassinated on March 10 because he was in favor of a deal with Russia – shot dead by the Mirotvorets militia (“Peacemaker”).
- In the end, the price will be high, but Vladimir Putin will probably achieve the goals he set for himself. We have pushed him into the arms of China. Its ties with Beijing have stabilized. China is emerging as a mediator in the conflict. The Americans must ask Venezuela and Iran for oil to get out of the energy impasse they have fallen into – and the United States must grieve over the sanctions imposed on its enemies.
- We should all ask ourselves and answer the question honestly: what makes the conflict in Ukraine more valuable than our wars in Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya? What sanctions have we taken against those who have deliberately lied to the international community in order to wage unjust, unjustified and murderous wars? Have we adopted a single sanction against countries, companies or politicians that supply weapons to the conflict in Yemen, which is considered the “worst humanitarian catastrophe in the world?”
