Perspective on the War in Ukraine

Doing Away With The Gaslighting

Gaslighting has become a well honed method of keeping people focused on certain aspects of a debate without allowing or even acknowledging other points which might make the chosen narrative weaker. Such is the case with the war in Ukraine. In this article I will attempt to fill in some of the gaps and help the reader appreciate the conflict from a slightly different perspective.

I can hear the caterwauling already, “You’re Putin’s Puppet!” “You’re a Russian sympathizer!”

Like I said at the beginning — gaslighting. This is the knee jerk response to anyone who dares to challenge the narrative put forth by both parties in Washington DC and most of the governments in Europe.

Is it not odd that senior members of both the Democrat and Republican parties say winning the war in Ukraine is THE MOST IMPORTANT thing the United States must do? Not the humanitarian crisis on America’s southern border, not federal government agencies colluding with big tech firms to censor American citizens, not sky high mortgage rates, not China sending Fentanyl into America through Mexico and killing over 100,000 Americans a year, not declining real wages for working class Americans — no, the number one issue is winning the war in Ukraine.

And what does “winning” mean? If it means Russia withdraws from Ukraine and goes back to the status quo ante then what are we willing to do to ensure this outcome? Particularly since Russia has a lot of nuclear weapons.

I am also confused as to how “we” will win the war in Ukraine since “we” have not declared war on Russia — or did I miss that? Why is it in our national interest to spend crazy sums of money, deplete our military stockpiles and push Russia and China closer together all to win this war?

Some of the answers I have heard are “If we don’t stop them in Ukraine, they’ll go into the rest of Europe!” “Putin’s evil and we must stop evil.” “The Ukrainians are the victims and it’s only right for us to defend them.”

Before we go into the analysis of these statements, let us look at some background.

Russia in one form or another, has been around for well over 1000 years. What we now consider Ukraine used to be referred to as Kievan Russia. True, the nation state we know of as Russia today was a few centuries in the future, but the Russian identity was always there.

Russia’s history is one of being invaded. Between 1237 and 1242, the Mongols captured or destroyed all of present day Russia and Ukraine. For the next 240 years, Russia and Ukraine were controlled by the Mongols. After this, the Russians, who controlled Ukraine, still paid tribute to the Golden Horde for another 220 years until Peter the Great stopped it in 1700. In 1812, Napoleon invaded Russia with horrendous loss of life on both sides. In 1914 and again in 1940, Germany invaded Russia, first, and then the Soviet Union, with even more loss of life and destruction to the country.

We in America cannot comprehend how these repeated invasions and destruction over centuries has affected the national psyche of the Russians. To say they are paranoid about being invaded would not be far from the truth. Conversely, Americans have never felt truly threatened with invasion by military forces (as compared to the unarmed invasion of the southern border) since the War of 1812 and even that was just for a year or two.

NATO was established in 1949 to counter the threat of the Communist Soviet Union. Communism, we need to remember, has as one of its core principles the overthrow of all non-Communist governments in order to institute worldwide Communism. The Soviet Union certainly worked hard to fulfill this principle and Europe, weakened by World War II, needed to band together to defend against this menace.

Fast forward to the early 1990s. The Soviet Union is no longer. It is now replaced by the Russian Federation which is not Communist. However, NATO continues to exist. In the 1990s, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Russian Federation President Boris Yeltsin lobbied for entrance to the alliance. They were rebuffed.

Two questions immediately come to mind: 1) Why was NATO still in existence once the Communist threat from the Soviet Union was no longer? 2) Why keep the newly formed Russian Federation on the outside if they were no longer the enemy?

The answer to the first is that it is incredibly difficult to dismantle an entrenched bureaucracy — and NATO is known as having a very large and determined one. The answer to the second is tied to the first. In order to justify its own existence, the NATO bureaucracy needed an enemy — or at least a possible enemy. Keeping Russia out of the organization allowed for this. NATO is also a part of the Military-Industrial Complex which President Eisenhower warned us about in 1960.

When Vladimir Putin came to power in 1999, he became an easy person to make into an enemy. After all, he is a former KGB agent who has, likely, killed many people with his bare hands and definitely has had many more killed who stood in his way.

He is ruthless, cunning, but also principled — just not in the principles we tend to hold dear such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness unless they are on his terms. As brilliant as he is corrupt, Putin’s motivation has always been what is best for Russia — and himself. The easiest way for Americans to understand him is as a larger than life Mafia boss in charge of massive reserves of oil and natural gas with a huge military complete with nuclear weapons.

He is not “crazy” or “mad” or “insane” or a “megalomaniac”. Like we do with organized crime in America, he can be negotiated with. Why we (America and NATO) have not availed ourselves to try and negotiate peace in the Ukraine is something we will answer for. Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of people have died, been maimed, have been displaced and suffered through this war which could have ended very quickly if it needed to start at all. We have much blood on our hands.

Why did Putin invade Ukraine in the first place?

When the Soviet Union disintegrated, Ukraine became an independent nation for the first time since before the Mongol invasion. Along with many of the other Eastern European countries which the Soviet Union controlled during the Cold War, they wanted to be part of the European community which meant, among other things, membership in NATO.

Here we have to put some of the puzzle pieces together. NATO was formed to counter the Soviet/Communist menace. The Soviet/Communist menace went away in 1990, yet NATO persisted. It kept the newly formed Russia out of its organization but added country after country of the former Eastern bloc coming ever closer to Russia’s border. Is it any wonder that Putin saw this as a political invasion from the West? In 2008, and many times after, he declared that if Ukraine joined NATO there would be consequences including the annexation of the Eastern part of Ukraine (the Donbass) and Crimea.

In February of 2014, the CIA greatly assisted in the “Revolution of Dignity”, a coup which replaced an elected a pro-Russian government in Ukraine with a pro-Western one open to NATO membership. True to his word, Putin annexed Crimea in March of 2014.

That same year the pro-Western government in Ukraine started using neo-Nazis to terrorize the primarily ethnic Russian areas of Eastern Ukraine in the Donbass region (on the border with Russia). It was so blatant that in 2016 the United States had to change its rules against Nazis in order to allow aid to Ukraine.

Additionally, the terrorizing of their ethnic brothers and sisters played into the old Russian attitude of “Protector of the Slavs” and motivated Putin to conduct direct military action against a country so stridently supported by the West as Ukraine.

This is why the idea that Putin will continue to roll into Europe is silly. He knows NATO has Article 5 which states that an attack on one is an attack on all. While Russia is strong, it is not as strong as the old Soviet Union. The biggest reason is a large part of Soviet strength was the manpower and resources of Ukraine which present day Russia no longer has. Russia’s conventional forces prior to the Ukraine invasion were no match for NATO and after the last year, they are even less so. Putin was willing to risk an attack on Ukraine before it became a NATO country because the chance of full-scale war with NATO was very slim.

On top of all this, the existence of US funded bio labs in Ukraine from at least 2010 that were researching deadly pathogens (finally admitted to by Under Secretary Victoria Nuland) also played into the equation for Russia’s invasion. Remember, the invasion occurred in 2022 which is two years after the world suffered through COVID which has long been thought of as starting in a US funded bio lab in Wuhan, China. Unlike America, the Russians did not have to deal with a press corps which worked feverishly to keep that story under wraps. Is it any wonder the Russians were concerned about US funded biolabs on their border?

Was not the invasion of Ukraine just a continuation of his military campaign against Georgia (2008) and annexing Crimea (2014)? Does this not show Putin’s desire to ultimately invade Europe? Again, Russia today is not the Soviet Union of old. We have to realize Putin’s desire is far more a restoration of the Russian Empire rather than the USSR. The Russian Empire was a geo-political adversary for hundreds of years, but it was not a threat to overrun Europe — nor did it want to.

But isn’t Putin evil and aren’t we, as good citizens of the world, supposed to oppose evil and defeat it? This question is often coupled with the other statement I posed at the beginning of this article which is “The Ukrainians are the victims and it’s only right for us to defend them.”

Evil will always be with us until the return of Christ. However, as I have shown above, Putin had more than enough reason and justification for his invasion. Especially as it appears pretty obvious that he did not want to conquer all of Ukraine, but mostly to protect the ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine and to rid his border of the US funded bio labs. This explains Russia’s actions at the beginning of the invasion which did not include wholesale aerial bombardment of all the infrastructure within Ukraine — something Putin could have easily done and would have if his aim was conquest.

And while any war always has victims who are usually the most vulnerable in the society in conflict, the continuation of this war for more than 14 months is primarily due to Western nations wishing to fight a proxy war against Russia than Ukraine’s desire for peace.

Indeed, very soon after the invasion, Ukraine seemed ready to come to terms with Russia. That was until an unannounced visit by then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson “persuaded” Ukrainian President Zelensky to fight until the bitter end. It seems the Global Elites had some score to settle with Russia. Since then, the West has sent money and munitions totaling many hundreds of billions of dollars some of which actually got to the troops in the field — Ukraine has always been known as one of the most corrupt countries in the world.

There is, obviously, a very big incentive for the elites in America and Europe to keep this war going. The simple answer is this is the Military-Industrial Complex acting without any constraint and allowing its members to make tons of money.

But it seems more than that. The intensity towards any opposing views regarding this war feels off the charts. This is usually a tell that something of even greater importance than making money is being hidden.

Before the war, human trafficking was a huge issue in Ukraine — particularly with selling babies. Likewise, it was a favorite spot for the world’s elite to launder money through. What was the dirty money from? Then there is the connection between Ukraine and the current president of the United States, Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.

Whatever the bigger reasons may be, they are greater to the Global Elites than the threat of nuclear weapons and World War III. To uproot the Russians from Eastern Ukraine and to remove Putin from power would require taking the battle into Russian territory since the West’s sanctions have proven to be laughingly inadequate. To think that someone as nationalistic as Putin would not use nuclear weapons as a final defense for the life of his country is imbecilic. Look at how close the United States came to using nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Like any complex issue, there is no one reason that will explain this continued war besides the depravity of man. It is likely a combination of the reasons listed above plus some that I am not aware of. One thing is certain, however, and that is this war is not being waged simply to save the Ukrainian people. If that were the case, America and the West would have been brokering peace from the start rather than pushing for more war.