by Paul Craig Roberts, Paul Craig Roberts:
I admire Putin, but I am his critic. I think he is unintentionally leading us into World War 3.
Putin’s limited military operation in Ukraine confined to clearing Ukrainian Nazi militias and Ukrainian military forces out of Donbas, a Russian speaking province attached to Ukraine by Soviet leaders as was Russian Crimea, was a strategic blunder.
It was a strategic blunder that followed four or five previous strategic blunders within the Ukraine context. There were others outside the Ukraine context.
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Donbas formed into two independent republics in response to the anti-Russian coup orchestrated by the United States that overthrew the elected Ukrainian government. Putin’s first strategic blunder was in permitting Washington’s overthrow of the democratically elected Ukrainian government.
In 2014 after the overthrow of the Ukrainian government the two independent Donbas republics voted overwhelmingly, as did Crimea, to be reincorporated into Russia. Putin accepted Crimea’s request, as otherwise Russia would lose its Black Sea naval base, but rejected the request of the Donetsk and Luhansk republics.
This was Putin’s second strategic blunder. If Putin or the Kremlin or the Russian government had given equal treatment to Donetsk and Luhansk a decade ago in 2014, there would have been no limited military operation with Ukraine. Neither Ukraine, NATO, nor Washington would dared to have attacked Russian territory in order to “recover Donbass.”
If the US persisted in bringing Ukraine into NATO, Putin would have been forced to recognize that he was at war with the West and that he had no alternative but to reestablish Ukraine to its many centuries existence as a part of Russia. Ukraine’s “independence” is an American creation 30 years old. Every Western analyst has overlooked, or kept silent about, the fact that the dismemberment of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union is like the dismemberment of Germany after World War I, the difference being that Hitler was determined to put Germany back together but Putin has no such ambition. If truth be known, Putin is essentially a 20th century Western liberal, and this is why he is failing as a war leader of Russia in the 21st century.
Instead of accepting the Donbas vote, Putin elected to leave Donbas in Ukraine, but he tried to protect the Russian population there with the Minsk Agreement sometimes called the Minsk Protocol. Briefly, under the Minsk Agreement, Donbas remained in Ukraine but was granted some forms of autonomy, such as its own police force in order to protect the Russian population from being persecuted by the Ukrainian government. Putin secured the signatures of Ukraine and the two independent republics to the agreement, and he secured the agreement of Germany and France to enforce the agreement. Quite clearly, despite the obvious lies of Washington, EU governments, and the Western presstitutes, Putin intended no “invasion of Ukraine” or even a limited military operation. He wanted to avoid military conflict
During the next 8 years from 2014-2022 we witnessed extraordinary diplomatic efforts by Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, the two most capable diplomats of our time, to work out a mutual security agreement between the West and Russia, even including Russia as a member of NATO.
For 8 years Russia got the West’s cold shoulder. In December of 2021 and January of 2022 Putin and Lavrov worked hard to secure a mutual defense agreement with the West in order to defuse the military action that Washington was forcing on Russia to defend the Donbas Russians from the large Ukrainian army Washington had built while Putin for 8 years had his hopes on the Minsk Protocol. In the past year or two both the German Chancellor Merkel and the French President admitted that the Minsk Protocol was used to deceive Putin while the West built up the Ukrainian military. You can find these admissions online. Here, for example, is Merkel:
According to former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Minsk agreement served to buy time to arm Ukraine. “The 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give Ukraine time,” Merkel told the weekly Die Zeit. “It also used this time to become stronger, as you can see today (December 21, 2022).”
Putin expressed his disappointment in Merkel’s confession:
Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, has been disappointed by the statement of German ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel, where she claimed that the Minsk agreements of 2014 enabled Ukraine to prepare for the war with Russia. “For me, it was completely unexpected. It is disappointing. I did not expect to hear something like that from the ex-Chancellor. I always hoped that the German leadership was genuine. Yes, she was on Ukraine’s side, supporting it. But nevertheless, I genuinely hoped that German leadership expected a settlement based on the principles achieved, among other things, during the Minsk negotiations.”
The naivety Putin reveals is extraordinary. He is a babe in the woods having to contend with Satan.
Faced with an Ukrainian invasion of the Donbas republics, Putin was forced to intervene. But having foolishly trusted the West to abide by the Minsk agreement, Putin was not prepared for military action. He had to rely on a private military unit, whose professionalism embarrassed the Russian generals who came to see Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner Group as the enemy instead of the West.
When a few of Prigozhin’s men marched on Moscow in protest of the high casualty manner in which the conflict was being managed and demanded the use of force to get the war over, the jealous Russian generals told Putin it was a coup attempt and by deceiving Putin achieved their aims of banning Prigozhin, latter killed in a mysterious airplane crash, and incorporating the Wagner Group into the Russian army. Like generals the world over, their last concern was the conflict. Generals use wars to build empires.
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