This is an excellent quick primer on the situation in Ukraine as of 2014, just two weeks before Putin annexed Crimea, an event this video suggests is imminent.
Let me throw in one bit of deep history that he doesn't get to (and perhaps this is my own personal prejudice--you decide): speaking of "Russia" and "Ukraine" are misnomers; what we mean are "Moscow" and "Kiev". Kiev is an ancient city, been there for as long as anyone can remember, whereas Moscow is not quite a thousand years old. Throughout the 13th and 14th centuries both cities were besotted with the Golden Horde, the eastern European branch of the Mongol Empire. When the Mongols finally receded around 1450, it was Moscow that rose to prominence, first and foremost by luring the Orthodox Church to headquarter there. With this cultural muscle behind it, the Muscovites set out to solidify the long stretch of territory between the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea that had long been home to the Rus people (and then eventually the long stretch to the East known as Siberia).
Imagine the relationship between Moscow and Kiev, then, as that of the upstart little brother trying to assert its dominance over the big brother that it admires/loathes. (Okay back to the video)
While decrying the then recent invasion of Crimea by Putin, he points out that Crimea is naturally a part of Ukraine, as its electricity and water comes from the Ukrainian mainland. I'll add a detail he left out: the reason for Putin's invasion was because the Ukrainian gov't (an unelected de facto gov't at that time) cut off the water supply to Crimea, leading to massive crop failure in 2014. I point this out because while he mentioned the "disastrous" results of Putin cutting off oil supplies to Ukraine in 2015, he neglects to mention the Ukrainians doing the same thing (same thing? Even worse thing, no?) to Crimea the year before.
And why did the West uniformly decry Putin's annexation of Crimea? In the video he refers to this as "a big f'n deal", but why? Check out the Wikipedia entry on Crimea....where is the point where Crimea ever belonged to Kiev? Ever?
In BC times, it was a Greek colony and then a Persian outpost. In Christian times it was territory controlled by the Byzantines, then the Ottomans. It was first annexed by Moscow in 1783. During the Soviet period, Josef Stalin (as he notes in the video), removed the ethnic Tartars and packed in ethnic Russians. In 1954, Crimea was made part of Ukraine in a drunken ramble by Nikita Khrushchev of which even the West "doubts...the legitimacy". And even then it was an autonomous region still realistically controlled by Moscow. And that autonomous status was reaffirmed in 1991 after the dissolution of the USSR.
The Wikipedia entry (a well known bastion of Putin-esque misinformation?) goes back 3000 years and never at any point was Crimea ever part of Kiev. Even in that brief period of time (1954-1991) when it was ostensibly Ukrainian territory, it was autonomous and even then, as the home base of the Russian Navy, it was never out of Moscow's orbit. Crimea has never belonged to Kiev.
Personally, I never had any problem with the 2014 annexation of Crimea and I think Western outcry is, it best, misplaced--and, at worst, totally ignores that Putin was actually trying to save the lives of those people imperiled by the (unelected) Ukrainian parliament. And how do we correct this "big f'n deal"? By putting Crimea under the sway of the Ukrainian gov't? How does that solve anything? In 3000 years Crimea has never belonged to Kiev nor has the population ever been made up of native Ukrainians. Why are we under the illusion that Crimea belongs to Ukraine? Indeed, wasn't it Kiev trying annex Crimea by starving it 2014?
New York Times, March 11, 2014 ("Ukraine 2014: Ukraine-Russia Ties Explained")
Check out this next video (from those pro-Putin puppets at the New York Times).
"Ukraine, like every other non-Russian Republic in the Soviet Union was the creation of of the Russian--or if you prefer, the Soviet--leadership in the 1920s and 1930s. These boundaries are drawn and the attempt was to bring together within certain administrative units individuals that could be identified in terms of language, culture, and so on." When the NYT says it, you believe it, right? It's only "disinformation" when Putin says it.
"Crimea was, is and will be an integral part of Ukraine." -- Arseniy Yatsenyuk ("Yats" to his Western allies), the interim (unelected) prime minister of Ukraine in 2014.
Tell me: is this "disinformation"? Show me when Kiev ever ruled over Crimea? If you find something prior to 1000BC, I'd love to see it, because at no time since then was any kind of ruling power in Kiev ever in control of Crimea.
"...(M)any advocate moving NATO troops to the Polish-Russian border....aircraft is already there and NATO is moving troops around. If that happens, Putin almost certainly moves 150,000 troops...into South and eastern Ukraine...that would be the Cuban Missile Crisis..."
In 2014, the danger was already firmly in place. If this video seems repetitive its because everything Cohen is saying in 2014 is all the same stuff Cohen has been saying since at least 2006. He was right in 2006, he was still right in 2014 and even though Cohen has since passed away, he's still right in 2022.
"Demonization of Putin is not a policy but an excuse for not having a policy." -- Henry Kissinger
Jack Matlock on Democracy Now!, March 20, 2014
Final word: "They're better off without Crimea."
Matlock is not as media savvy as most of the other featured talkers in this post. And he's an old timey Cold War soldier. But he brings an interesting perspective and is properly guarded in his commentary. He was a career ambassador meaning he was trained to say blandly non-committal pleasantries without belying any confrontation (or information). Worth checking out, though, in the context of these other videos and articles.
Ukraine Crisis Media Centre, June 24, 2014
This is a long press conference of the UK's Ambassador to Ukraine in 2014. It is mostly just self-serving double talk, which is frankly all ambassadors are equipped to do. I'll refrain from any other observations because....well, I don't have any, there's not much else to say. Just thought I'd add it here in case you want to see what British stuffed shirts sounded like in 2014. (Though now might be a good time to recall that the during first impeachment of Trump, the testimony came almost exclusively from ambassadors....who know virtually nothing about how the White House works or even how foreign policy is developed and implemented, meaning the trial to evict the President was led by the absolute lowest people on the totem pole--hell, ambassadors aren't even on totem pole!)
New York Times, June 27, 2014 (pay wall)
(Well, I read this a few days ago but when I went back to take notes, I was paywall-ed out. So, whatever it was the NYT had to say, it seemed important to me earlier in the week but the NYT has decided it doesn't want me to see it again. So, I'll just leave the link in case you want to see the NYT's version of Ukraine's trade pact with the EU in the summer of 2014)
Brookings Institution, June 27, 2014 ("Poroshenko Signs EU-Ukraine Association Agreement")
"It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Moscow's actions since late February have aimed to destabilize the gov't in Kiev and slow its path to the European Union."
Really? By late February 2014 the gov't in Kiev was already very de-stabilized thanks to the bogus negotiations of the EU in the fall of 2013. In fact, Kiev was pretty stable until they began talking to the EU.
"Russia can use that influence and leverage to promote a ceasefire and a settlement, if it wants to."
So could the Americans. So could the Europeans. But why would the Western powers want that? They wanted a Ukrainian president that would sign the deal to anger Russia and, after years of fraudulent negotiations and a coup d'état, they finally found their man in Poroshenko. (Oh, fun fact: Petro Poroshenko, who won the election of June 2014 to be Ukraine's president (where he served until 2019), was the owner of Ukraine's two largest news channels, Pryiami and 5 Kanal, all through his presidency. Do you suppose the Ukrainian people were well informed by their Media?)
Politicos have been crafting whatever narrative suits them at the moment and in 2014 the narrative was "Putin is the problem, not us" and that played very well to American and European audiences. But the idea that Russians are crazy for thinking of Ukraine as part of their own land that has been "invaded" by Western infidels is not as far fetched as, say, the Brookings Institution would have you believe.
The Minsk Protocols, September 5, 2014
There were negotiations between Russia, Ukraine and the OSCE and a handful of separatist factions from Luhansk and Donetsk. The idea was to create a ceasefire in the restive Eastern Ukrainian areas but this collapsed almost immediately. This was followed by Minsk II in February 2015 but this, too, was a non-starter in reality. (Think about it: in all that's gone on in the past 6-8 weeks, has anyone ever bothered to bring up the Minsk Protocols?)
The only notable part of this negotiation is it suggests that Luhansk and Donetsk are potentially independent territories...why would the Kiev gov't or the OSCE even entertain the idea in 2014?
The Obama White House, November 26, 2014
Here's some utterly harmless video of then Vice President Joe Biden making some bland pleasantries with Poroshenko near the end of 2014. "I want to congratulate all Ukrainians on last month's successful parliamentary elections, overwhelming endorsed by Ukrainians and the entire int'l community as being fair and free."
"Fair and free" is a phrase that recurs again and again in relation to Ukraine. I think Orwell would've suggested this is the beginning of the movement to ensure that the words "fair" and "free" will never be useful to the Ukrainian people ever again.
Though I must concede that the slow erosion of independent thought through the warping of language is preferable to columns of tanks on city streets, I can't help but see that over time the two things have a lot in common.
Noam Chomsky on Democracy Now!, March 2, 2015
Noam Chomsky on "Diaper-ology" and John Mearsheimer. Pretty much the same as all the other links in this post (though he veers numerous times into Cold War tales of near nuclear war).
He raises an excellent point that I haven't noticed anyone else saying: why not encourage Ukraine to take a neutral position? It wouldn't join NATO, nor would it militarily align with Russia. What's wrong with that? Ukraine gets to maintain trade with Russia and with Europe without militarily antagonizing anyone. Seems like a pretty elegant solution at this point.
Vox, March 25, 2015 ("What Most People Miss About the War in Ukraine")
This is a short video on where Ukraine stood in the spring of 2015, roughly a year after the fall of Yanukovych. The sociological overview of Ukraine is pretty basic and uncontroversial. But it isn't much of a "deeper" look.
"When (Yanukovych) abandoned (a deal with the EU) and took a bailout from Russia instead that was perceived as turning away from the West...and it was controversial and prompted protests largely in the western part of the country..."
This video is trying to get beyond the conventional wisdom and yet it totally absorbs and regurgitates that official line while pretending to go deeper. Notice how effortlessly it describes Tymoshenko as "Pro-Europe" and Yanukovych as "Pro-Russia". That's not really fair at all to Yanukovych (nor to Tymoshenko, who had her own agenda), who was desperately pro-Europe. But that just highlights the convenience of using Yanukovych as the scapegoat, the punching bag, allowing him to take all the blame when I'd say he was seduced and abandoned by the EU and left to the mercies of Moscow. He took the "bailout" from Moscow, because Ukraine needed a bailout and he wasn't going to get it from the EU or the IMF, despite feigned overtures from the West.
But that story is complicated, nuanced, and not the one American audiences want to hear. This is ultimately an examination of how "news" is just entertainment and "journalists" are just telling the story that the audience wants to buy (everyone on TV is just an entertainer). I blame the audience not the newscasters, they're just doing their job, which is to entertain rather than inform. But even in "deeper looks" like this video, the conventional wisdom is a tar pit that engulfs the Left and the Right, when it comes to Russia.
The Obama White House, June 5, 2015
Nothing to see here. It is as deep and informative as what you'd expect from a White House press release (which is to say not at all). But it does suggest that Putin is in violation of the Minsk Protocols (of which USA was not a signatory).
Max Blumenthal on Real News, February 4, 2018
Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate on Americans arming neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
Obviously, this is a nonsense disinformation story--I mean Ukraine has a Jewish president! How can they possibly have Nazi citizens? Preposterous! (**)
Vice News, February 18, 2018 ("Why Ukraine is Trapped in Endless Conflict")
"Conflict began in 2013, when the Ukrainian gov't rejected an association with the European Union in order to build stronger ties with Russia."
Five years later the Western narrative is perfectly ensconced. It isn't that the EU negotiated in bad faith with Yanukovych for the purpose of encouraging a pro-Western uprising. It is that Kiev needed to strengthen ties with Moscow--as if those ties weren't already centuries old!
"The pro-Moscow move led to massive protests in the capital of Kiev....Russia took advantage of the chaos and sent its military in to annex Crimea."
But, again: Yanukovych's turn wasn't a pro-Moscow move but a realization that the EU was jerking him around with an impossible offer that solved none of Ukraine's problems (because the EU was motivated exclusively by antagonizing Russia). The Ukrainian People are pawns in the game of Western buzzards trying to pick clean the Russian carcass. And--really?--it was Russia that took advantage of the ensuing chaos? How did the chaotic decline of Yanukovych benefit Russia in any way?
Then the video falls into thinking that Minsk and Minsk II were actually of any use. But then reminds that the various militia groups highlighted by the Media (and "disinformation-ed" by Putin) are from all over the country, represent a wide swath of political views and are funded by a variety of sources. If you seen one militia group, you most certainly have not seen them all.
I'm all for the Ukrainian People living freer, richer and smarter lives, but the overtures from the EU were disingenuous to say the least and led only to Ukraine falling into chaos. But the Western media--even the independent-minded Vice News--falls lock step over time with the conventional wisdom, frankly because they're just lazy.
Stephen F. Cohen and Aaaron Mate on The Grey Zone, November 13, 2019
Cohen and Mate revisiting the Ukraine crisis during the time of Trump's first impeachment. (Oh, and what were the Bidens doing in Ukraine again?) And for good measure, a reminder of what Noam Chomsky thought about Trump around the time of the release of the Mueller Report. There's no discussion of Ukraine but Ukraine has been playing a large role in American politics ever since.
"What's bad for Russia is what's good for us."
A good talk, well worth your time if you want to learn more about what led to the current Ukraine crisis. But, yes, basically a recycling of all the same warnings Cohen has been giving for decades.
(*) And look how deep does this "disinformation" goes: here's the BBC in 2014 (twice) and 2015. And The Guardian in 2017. Then the BBC again in 2018. And Time Magazine in 2019. Just remember: it's only "disinformation" when Putin says it.
(**) Hat tip to Spondulix99 from whom I cannibalized a good deal of this deep dive.
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