” … what should an alert and knowledgeable American citizenry know about the role our government has played in fomenting the crisis in Ukraine, a role that the corporate media has swept under the rug? That is one of the main questions we have tried to answer in our book War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict. The answers include:

• The US broke its promises not to expand NATO into Eastern Europe. In 1997, before Americans had ever heard of Vladimir Putin, 50 former senators, retired military officers, diplomats and academics wrote to President Clinton to oppose NATO expansion, calling it a policy error of “historic proportions.” Elder statesman George Kennan condemned it as “the beginning of a new cold war.”
• NATO provoked Russia by its open-ended promise to Ukraine in 2008 that it would become a member of NATO. William Burns, who was then the US Ambassador to Moscow and is now the CIA Director, warned in a State Department memo, “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red-lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).”
• The U.S.backed a coup in Ukraine in 2014 that installed a government that only half its people recognized as legitimate, causing the disintegration of Ukraine and a civil war that killed 14,000 people.
• The 2015 Minsk II peace accord achieved a stable ceasefire line and steady reductions in casualties, but Ukraine failed to grant autonomy to Donetsk and Luhansk as agreed. Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande now admit that Western leaders only supported Minsk II to buy time for NATO to arm and train Ukraine’s military to recover Donbas by force.
• During the week before the invasion, OSCE monitors in Donbas documented a huge escalation in explosions around the ceasefire line. Most of the 4,093 explosions in four days were in rebel-held territory, indicating incoming shell-fire by Ukrainian government forces. US and U.K. officials claimed these were “false flag” attacks, as if Donetsk and Luhansk’s forces were shelling themselves, just as they later suggested that Russia blew up its own pipelines.
• After the invasion, instead of supporting Ukraine’s efforts to make peace, the United States and the United Kingdom blocked or stopped them in their tracks. The UK’s Boris Johnson said they saw a chance to “press” Russia and wanted to make the most of it, and US Defense Secretary Austin said their goal was to “weaken” Russia.

“What would an alert and knowledgeable citizenry make of all this? We would clearly condemn Russia for invading Ukraine. But then what? Surely we would also demand that US political and military leaders tell us the truth about this horrific war and our country’s role in it, and demand that the media transmit the truth to the public. An “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” would surely then demand that our government stop fueling this war and instead support immediate peace negotiations.”

From an article by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies: “How Spin and Lies Fuel a Bloody War of Attrition in Ukraine”

Gee, it almost seems like our government wanted to provoke a Russian invasion. In fact, there’s precedent for that (see the “Afghan Trap“). [Don]