Ukraine, the new cold war, & NATO’s plan to break Eurasia apart

The game the imperialists are playing in Ukraine, and in Eurasia more broadly, is one that they encourage the world to think of as nothing more than that. They only want us to view the issue in terms of abstract political-military competitions, maps, and jargon. They don’t want us to consider the impacts Washington’s instigations of violence are having on the region’s people.

Jan Egeland, the secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, has reported about the perspectives of these victims:

I was there now for the last 72 hours, met with lots of completely exhausted, freezing, poor, miserable communities along the contact line. And their message, of course, to the world is: You know, enough of this political military chess game that everybody is obsessed with. We are suffering now. We’ve suffered for eight years with conflict. Our communities have been divided in Donetsk and in Luhansk. There is a frontline that has gone through families and communities now for eight years. We need — we need reconciliation. We need peace. Stop this escalation towards another catastrophe….there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people displaced. Some of them are working as my colleagues here in Ukraine. I have colleagues here who haven’t seen their parents for years, because all of the border crossings — not border crossing. These are crossings of the contact line, the frontline, which is within Ukraine and through Luhansk and Donetsk. There are seven crossing points. Six of them are basically shut. There is one where there are still people being able to cross on foot. It’s 90% down from what it was before the COVID, which became the excuse of especially the authorities in the nongovernment-controlled areas to keep people out.

In the shadow of the 2014 mass grave that was finally uncovered in Ukraine last year, which contained over 200 bodies of those who were massacred by the fascist regime which Washington installed, these developments compound incomprehensible psychological costs. The same traumas are being endlessly pummeled into those who survive the fighting and deprivation that NATO perpetuates in the region. When the imperialist media uncritically reports the claims about “Russian aggression” that keep coming from unnamed intelligence sources, which greatly resemble the lies that justified the Iraq invasion, they help seal the dark fates of those caught in the middle. More NATO involvement means more displacement, death, poverty, and pandemic exposure, all explained away as the costs of “standing up to Russia.” 

More than that, more war means more state and paramilitary violence. The ethnic and cultural cleansing that Ukraine began committing after the 2014 coup, facilitated by the many atrocities of the Ukrainian Army and the National Guard, serve NATO’s project to make Ukraine into the perfect tool for proxy warfare against Russia. The ethnic cleansing of Russians, the banning of the teaching of Russian in schools, the prohibition of referring to Russian forces in Kazakhstan as “peacekeepers,” the rise of fascist militias enabled by the country’s descent into failed state status, and the wholesale repression of those who voice desire for the Soviet Union’s restoration have transformed the country into a shell of its former self. What’s left is a machine that NATO uses for its aggression, a government that either neglects or outright attacks its own people so it can continue waging this war.

Under the NATO-installed regime’s conditions of persecution, poverty, corruption, and fear, it’s no wonder why the Crimeans decided to escape fascist rule by overwhelmingly voting to join Russia. Or why Russian separatists exist elsewhere in the area. Russia offers the people the only available alternative to the hell NATO has cultivated, and Ukraine has always been an integral part of Russia regardless. But the Ukrainian nationalists, who are so fanatical in their Russophobia that they institutionally glorify Nazi collaborators for fighting against the USSR, seek to negate these realities both in practice and in narrative. They want to erase Ukraine’s Russian roots, and dismantle Russia itself by forcibly taking back territory that the masses have made part of Russia.

The escalations in Ukraine, and their human consequences, are seen by the imperialists as not just tolerable but indispensable. Washington aims to destabilize Eurasia by subduing a geographically and economically strategic series of countries in the continent’s central and eastern sections, leveraging this towards the weakening (and ideally the successful regime change targeting) of Russia and China. Now that this endeavor’s front in Kazakhstan has failed, the imperialists are pivoting their machinations towards Ukraine.

Ukraine’s U.S.-engineered descent into fascism, ethnic cleansing, and anti-communist repression was the final stage in the counterrevolution that the imperialists had been facilitating in the country since the fall of the Soviet bloc. The rise of oligarchs and corruption that the USSR’s collapse allowed for within Ukraine were exploited to nurture a color revolution, which dressed up the racist and aggressively militarist takeover which was the 2014 Euromaidan movement. In Kazakhstan, and ultimately in the rest of the former Soviet countries, the imperialists hope to do the same. 

Belarus is another example; its opposition movement also has ties to fascists, in this case to Ukraine’s infamous neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. These regime change agents and their backers are seeking to take advantage of the region’s refugee crisis—which emerged due to NATO’s wars—by portraying Lukashenko as using the crisis to “attack” Europe. Now the Belarusian opposition is calling upon NATO countries to impose further sanctions on the country if Russian troops stay in Belarus. Since these troops are only there in response to NATO’s threatening eastward expansions, installation of a belligerent Kiev regime, and endless provocations, this is a case of Washington exploiting a crisis that it’s created.

The limitations on Washington’s capacity to impact Eurasia are growing. China and Russia continue to deepen their cooperation, making for a more formidable anti-U.S. alliance than Washington faced during the Cold War. Russia’s peacekeepers have helped keep Kazakhstan from being assimilated into NATO’s fascist proxy state collection. Afghanistan remains unable to be brought back into being the cebters of the CIA’z opium ratline. Syria, Iran, and the other southwest Asian countries targeted by Washington continue to survive, and to build their connections with multipolar elements like the Belt and Road Initiative. The only hope of the imperialists is to carry out the equivalent of Euromaidan within all of these places, to ignite ethnic tensions to the same effects of destabilization and war. 

Washington’s proxy terrorist forces in Afghanistan are attempting this by appealing to Uyghur separatist nationalism, basing their rhetoric off of the CIA’s propaganda about a Chinese “Uyghur genocide.” Rhetoric whose ultimate goal is to create a breakaway state in Xinjiang, called “East Turkestan,” that’s run by Islamic extremists who would wage proxy warfare against China in the same way the maidan attack Russia.

Will the economic collapse that U.S. sanctions have caused in Afghanistan enable the U.S. proxies to triumph? Will Washington’s economic warfare elsewhere throughout Eurasia bring any other such victories for imperialism? For now, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and the other eastern European countries where ultra-nationalism has taken over remain the easternmost of Washington’s assets in the region. They may ultimately be too small and weak to overcome the growing might of the Russo-Sino alliance.

—————————————————————————

If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.