By Statement of the World Socialist Web Site Editorial Board
The World Socialist Web Site condemns the escalating provocations by the United States and NATO against Russia. Their aim is to manufacture a pretext for war. These reckless actions threaten to trigger a global conflagration that would cost the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
The Biden administration announced yesterday that it is placing 8,500 troops on standby for deployment to countries in Central and Eastern Europe, on Russia’s border. This follows a report in the New York Times that the US government is developing plans to send up to 50,000 troops to the region.
US Colonel Alexander Vindman, who is involved in top-level US talks with the Ukrainian regime, declared: “Why is this important to the American public? It’s important because we’re about to have the largest war in Europe since World War II. There’s going to be a massive deployment of air power, long-range artillery, cruise missiles, things that we haven’t seen unfold on the European landscape for more than 80 years, and it is not going to be a clean or sterile environment.”
Like the disastrous US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the road to war with Russia is paved with lies. The military build-up in Eastern Europe is being justified with media-hyped claims that an invasion of Ukraine is imminent, which even the Ukrainian government has questioned. This has been supplemented by warnings, without any factual basis, that Russia is planning to stage a “false flag” operation. If such an operation takes place, one can be certain that its authors will be in Washington, not Moscow.
The latest lie is the claim, manufactured by the British government, that Russia aims to forcibly install a puppet regime in Ukraine—precisely what Washington, Berlin and the NATO alliance did in 2014, backing a far-right putsch that seized power in Kiev. This lie has already exploded in London’s face. The man identified as the putative leader of a Russian puppet regime in Ukraine, businessman and former parliamentarian Yevhen Murayev, is in fact banned from Russia, which has seized his assets.
The biggest lie of all is that the US and NATO are engaged in a defense of “democracy” and against “foreign aggression.” The Ukrainian government and state apparatus is riddled with neo-Nazi paramilitary forces who played a central role in the 2014 putsch. This includes the Svoboda party, which the European Parliament had formally condemned for its “racist, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic views,” and the neo-Nazi Right Sector militia and Azov Battalion.
As for the Biden administration’s claims that it is defending the sanctity of Ukraine’s national sovereignty against “foreign aggression,” the list of countries invaded and/or bombed by the US in the last 30 years includes Panama, Iraq, Kuwait, Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya and Syria.
Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the NATO military alliance has extended its borders 800 miles to the east, incorporating Poland, Hungary, Czechia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro and North Macedonia. In 2021, NATO officially recognized Ukraine itself as an “aspiring member,” and Sweden and Finland are also considering joining the anti-Russia alliance. Both Finland and Estonia are less than 200 kilometers (125 miles) from St. Petersburg, and Ukraine’s eastern border is less than 750 kilometers (465 miles) from Moscow.
While the US and European powers are denouncing Russia for alleged troop movements within its own borders, billions of dollars in arms have been supplied by the US to the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia which are now being shipped to Ukraine. The US already has more than 150 military advisers in Ukraine, including Special Operations Forces, joining advisers from the UK, Canada, Lithuania and Poland. Under these conditions, how could Russia not assume that it is the target of a military attack?
While the lies used to justify imperialist aggression are no more credible than the claims of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction,” the new lies, as with the old, are presented by the media as absolute truth…
READ FULL ARTICLE HERE…. (wsws.org)
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