What Putin Wants From Ukraine
The fact is that there have been many speeches over the years by Putin acknowledging full Ukrainian sovereignty since the 1991 breakup of the former Soviet Union, an authoritarian state in which Ukrainian Communists had played a major leadership role. Putin consistently has asked for two things of Ukraine.
• First, decent good-neighborly relations based on mutual respect and mutual security, as between the U.S. and Canada.
•And second, as in Canada, respect for the full human rights of Ukraine’s numerous – the 50-percent-plus of Ukrainians who share Russian native language and culture. This importantly includes a right to share in the formation of Ukraine’s national security policies and priorities. But the U.S. has at least since 2013 used Ukraine’s Nazis, and there are plenty of those, as the spearhead of its determination to make Ukraine monocultural, militarized and permanently hostile to Russia.
Just because Putin asserts these things does not mean they are not true. I believe they are true. In he end they could not halt the determination of Washington and Kiev foolishly to provoke the Russian bear.
Over months,Putin had warned the West to step backwards from the militarization of Ukraine, and to work with Russia towards a wider European settlement, reversing NATO’s dangerous expansion towards Russia’s borders since 1996.
As usual, the West cherry-picked, they prevaricated and – the biggest Western blunder of all – Washington’s Joe Biden supplied powerful city-destroying heavy weapons to the ill-disciplined and Nazi-infected Ukrainian army. The temptation to start using them was irresistible.
We saw from Feb. 17 onwards a determined, very threatening, but foolish attempt by Kiev’s armed forces along the line of contact, including the notorious Azov Battalion, to advance into and occupy Donbass, under the noses of the 130,000 Russian troops waiting for orders in nearby Russia.
The Ukrainian government ofPresident Volodymyr Zelensky and his American advisers like Victoria Nuland had convinced themselves that Putin would not now dare to invade Ukraineafter all the Western warnings of wider retribution. How wrong they were: right that he would not try to occupy Kiev, but wrong that he would let Donbass fall, creating unacceptable high risks of brutal ethnic cleansing of up to 4 million Russian Ukrainians forced to flee Donbass into Russia. And what a political humiliation this would have been for Putin.
By Feb. 18 it was already clear from Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe reporting that a sharp escalation in Kiev’s shelling of Donbass was taking place. Donetsk suburbs were being shelled. A Ukrainian special forces commando raid into neighbouring Rostov province in Russia was discovered and neutralized. The Donbass leaders wisely ordered evacuations, not to leave civilian hostages in place in cities at imminent risk of carpet-bombing, if they did not surrender. Aleppo was the stark example of what could have happened. Now Russia has given the green light to Donbass independence, protected by Russian military might, as was the case in Crimea.
But Putin had no alternative: in the end, he had to defend Russians at grave risk abroad, with real threats to their lives as reported by OSCE and Russian intelligence. The Minsk Accords are now dead. These steps already seem irreversible. But then, Kiev nationalists, quietly backed by NATO, had reneged on Minsk, confident that in the end they could achieve the unitary Ukraine they wanted by letting the Minsk Accords be forgotten.Now, ironically, Kiev pleads in the UNSC for a return to the Minsk Accords. But this train has already left the station.
I believe that China, and more quietly India , will stand by Russia. Others– we shall see.
Putin was desperate for this outcome and he waited as long as he could. But Washington and Kiev wanted confrontation and permanent East-West hostility, whipped up by Victoria Nuland and her ilk. They now have this. Ukraine will remain poor, depopulated, illiberal and militarized. It is a tragedy,but the threatened genocide and ethnic cleansing of Donbass Russians would have been intolerable for the majority of Russians. As it was personally, for an obviously angry and distressed Putin. This outcome will bring him and his key advisers no great joy, but it was the right decision to take.
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/02/23/ukraine-shrinks-again/