Teach-in about the war in Ukraine

by Donald A. Smith, PhD

This teach-in

• Exposes the lie that the Russian invasion was "unprovoked."
• The U.S. intentionally provoked the war by aggressive NATO expansion.
• Diplomats warned that NATO expansion would lead to war.
• The RAND Corporation suggested arming Ukraine as the best way to weaken and over-extend Russia. It too predicted a war.
• The CIA was deeply involved and tried to hide its tracks.
• The U.S. launched numerous, less justified, and more deadly invasions far from U.S. borders.

The importance of a negotiated solution

• War has a high cost in lives, money, inflation, opportunity costs
• Risk of nuclear war
• Most of the world realizes the U.S. provoked the war.
• Stalemate in Ukraine
• Russia is winning, and the Russian economy is booming
• Europe is being weakened, while U.S. energy and military companies prosper.

The U.S. lied about every war

• Most infamously about the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
• But also about the wars and proxy wars in Iran, Indonesia, Latin America, Syria, Libya, Yugoslavia, etc.
• It took years and relentless efforts by whistleblowers and peace activists to expose the truth.
• The U.S. has gotten even better at suppressing information: classifying almost everything.
• Relentless attacks on whistleblowers.
• Most media orgs are complicit and are financially struggling.

So it shouldn't come as a shock to learn

• The U.S. government is lying when it says the war in Ukraine was "unprovoked."
• The U.S. intentionally provoked the war by aggressive NATO expansion, including helping to overthrow the pro-Russian government of Ukraine in 2014; allying with far-right militias attacking Russian-speakers in the east of Ukraine; and undermining potential peace deals both before and after the Russian invasion.
• When you realize the extent of U.S. provocations, and the extent of U.S. hyprocrisy, you'll know that the U.S. too has blood on its hands.
• More reason for negotiating an end to the war

OF COURSE the U.S. is lying about Ukraine!

The truth takes time and work to be exposed

• Vietnam: the Pentagon Papers, antiwar protests due to the draft, teach-ins, antiwar music.
• The Church Commission exposed U.S. dirty wars and assassinations.
• Iraq: a dribble of revelations that there were no WMDs, no connection to 9/11.
• Afghanistan: the Afghanistan Papers; it took almost 20 years for the truth to come out.

We need teach-ins like this!

U.S. hypocrisy is stunning

• The U.S. launched, far from U.S. borders, numerous invasions that were deadlier and less justified than the Russian invasion.
• Many of the U.S. invasions were against Russian allies (e.g., Serbia, Syria, Libya).
• Ukraine borders Russia and has strong historical and cultural ties to Russia.
• Russia's invasion was, partly, in defense of Russian speakers being attacked by far right militias that the U.S. aided.
• When the U.S. invades a nation, we do so to help "freedom fighters."

Obsessive Secrecy about Ukraine

NED hid information about Ukraine

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED, a CIA offshoot), the USAID, George Soros' International Renassiance Foundation, and various U.S.-funded NGOs played direct roles in starting the Madain protests. But the day after the Russian invasion, the NED "deleted all records of funding projects in Ukraine from their searchable ‘Awarded Grants Search’ database." (source)

Documentation of claims in this teach-in

• Harper's Magazine's Why are we in Ukraine?
• Senior U.S. diplomats, journalists, academics and Secretaries of Defense say: The U.S. provoked Russia in Ukraine
• How the U.S. Provoked the War in Ukraine: a Compendium
• Jeffrey Sach's articles about Ukraine
• War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless War by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies

Provocation doesn't imply justification

• The Hamas invasion of Israel was provoked but not justified (because it targeted civilians).
• The Israeli reprisal invasion of Gaza was provoked but not justified (because it's targeting civilians).
• The U.S. invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and many other countries were barely provoked and were unjustified.
• The Russian invasion of Ukraine was provoked but not justified.
• The Russian invasion was more justified than many U.S. invasions.

Legacy of U.S. wars post-WW II

• Overthrow in Iran (1953)
• CIA dirty wars and assassinations of the 1950s
• War in Indonesia: 1 million leftists killed with U.S. aid.
• War in Vietnam: several million people killed.
• Iran contras
• Dirty wars and government overthrows throughout Latin America up til even now; overthrew left-wing governments, installed repressive regimes with death squads; sanctions.

The CIA allied with Nazis

• After WWII, the U.S. recruited and protected Nazis, to fight the Soviets
• This included working with Nazis in Ukraine and elsewhere.
• David Talbot's book The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government documents CIA collaboration with Nazis.

From CIA's own archives: Cold War Allies: The Origins of CIA's Relationship with Ukrainian Nationalists:

The sometimes brutal war record of many emigre groups became blurred, as they became more critical to the CIA... Hillenkoeeter did not deny that many emigres had sided with the Nazis, but did so, he said, less out of a "pro-German or pro-Fascist orientation, but from a strong anti-Soviet bias. In many cases their motivation was primarily nationalist and patriotic with their espousal of the German cause determined by the national interests."

CIA later informed the Immigration and Naturalization Service that it had concealed [Nazi] Stefan Bandera and other Ukrainians from the Soviets... By 1951, the Agency excused the illegal activities of OUN's security branch in the name of Cold War necessities.

Post 9/11

• Brown University's Costs of War project
• Since 9/11, over 900,000 direct deaths caused by U.S. wars.
• An additional 3.5 million indirect deaths.
• 38 million refugees
• Over $8 trillion in cost
• U.S. interventions are a major cause (along with current sanctions) of the migration crises worldwide.

Between 1.5 and 3.4 million killed in Iraq

Nicolas Davies, author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq, writes:

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies wrote:

The most devastating campaign the U.S. military has waged in recent years dropped over 100,000 bombs and missiles on Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa in Syria, and other areas occupied by ISIS or Da’esh. An Iraqi Kurdish intelligence report estimated that more than 40,000 civilians were killed in Mosul, while Raqqa was even more totally destroyed.

The shelling of Raqqa was the heaviest U.S. artillery bombardment since the Vietnam War, yet it was barely reported in the U.S. corporate media. ....

When British playwright Harold Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005 [he said,] "The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

More costs of militarism

• The U.S. spends over a trillion dollars a year on the military
• Increasing U.S. debt beyond $33 trillion
• U.S. interest payments: $659 billion
• Multiple weapons programs, such as the $1.7 tillion F-35 fighter jet, are expensive boondoggles (a "rat-hole program")
• In 2023 the Pentagon again failed to complete an audit and could not account for 63% its $3.8 trillion in assets.
• There's a wide open revolving door between military contractors and congressional, military and executive branch employees.

From Anti-Imperialism in the US Today: What it is and is not

"The $18 billion the US provided to maintain Israeli apartheid in 2023 was almost the $20 billion needed to end homelessness here. The $111 billion spent just since 2022 for Ukraine war, which many progressives did support  – with Biden wanting $60 billion more – could make public university free ($79 billion a year) and end hunger ($25 billion as of 2016). UN climate scientists say $300 billion a year would stop the rise in greenhouse gases, a mere quarter of the US military budget."

U.S. allied with far-right recently in Ukraine

• Scores of mainstream media news articles documented far right groups in Ukraine and Congress's efforts to stop U.S. collaboration.
• Hareetz (Israel): Rights Groups Demand Israel Stop Arming neo-Nazis in Ukraine .
• CNN, March 6, 2014: Rein in Ukraine's neo-fascists
• USA Today: Volunteer Ukrainian Unit Includes Nazis
• Washington Post: Right-wing Azov Battalion emerges as a controversial defender of Ukraine

Aaron Maté's By using Ukraine to fight Russia, the US provoked Putin’s war

While hailed by the US as an expression of Ukraine’s democratic aspirations, the post-coup Ukrainian government was dominated by the right-wing forces that had brought it to power. At least five key cabinet posts went to members of the far-right Svoboda and another right-wing party, Right Sector, including the national security, defense, and legal ministries. Andriy Parubiy, the far-right co-founder of Svoboda’s origin party, was appointed the head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council. During the Maidan protests, Parubiy had served as the Maidan encampment’s “commandant” and head of its security.

In the fall of 2014, the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion was formally incorporated into Ukraine’ National Guard, making post-Maidan Ukraine the "world's only nation to have a neo-Nazi formation in its armed forces,” the Ukrainian-American journalist Lev Golinkin later observed.

More on Andriy Parubiy, from Wikipedia

In 1991 he founded the far-right Social-National Party of Ukraine together with Oleh Tyahnybok[11] the party combined radical nationalism and neo-Nazi features (by its name and the "Wolfsangel"-like sign).[7][12][13] In 1998–2004 Parubiy led the paramilitary organization of SNPU, the Patriot of Ukraine....

Between 2002 & 2007 Parubiy was head of the L'viv based Society to Erect the Stepan Bandera Monument...

From December 2013 to February 2014 Parubiy was a commandant of Euromaidan.[20] He was coordinator of the volunteer security corps for the mainstream protesters.[21] He was then appointed Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine.[8] ...

As Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, Parubiy supported the anti–terrorist operation against pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.[23]

According to wikipedia and a reverse image search, the guy on the left is Oleh Yaroslavovych Tyahnybok, a leader of the Ukrainian "ultranationalist" Svoboda political party." The wikipedia page shows an image of Tyahnybok with Sec. of State John Kerry. The second guy is Vitali Klitschko, who founded UDAR, which allied with Svoboda. The third guy is Arsenny Yatsenyik, who "competed on a party list based on the party All-Ukrainian Union 'Fatherland'", which "played a substantial role in the anti-government Euromaidan protests."

Victoria Nuland: "Fuck the EU"

BBC reports Ukraine crisis: Transcript of leaked Nuland-Pyatt call: "An apparently bugged phone conversation in which a senior US diplomat disparages the EU over the Ukraine crisis has been posted online. The alleged conversation between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, appeared on YouTube on Thursday."

In the conversation, Nuland and Pyatt can be heard planning who will run the new government of Ukraine.

In Remarks at the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation Conference in 2003 (also here and on youtube ), Nuland spoke of U.S. regime change operations in Ukraine:

Since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, the United States has supported Ukrainians as they build democratic skills and institutions, as they promote civic participation and good governance, all of which are preconditions for Ukraine to achieve its European aspirations. We’ve invested over $5 billion to assist Ukraine in these and other goals that will ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine.

Victoria Nuland and John Kerry with new leaders of Ukraine

From 2018, in Medium: American Lethal Weapons Could Already Be on the Ukrainian Front Line "Two weeks ago, the Trump administration announced it will allow the sale of some lethal weapons to Ukraine, including the Javelin anti-tank missile....Butusov identified the [Nazi] Azov Battalion as a recipient of the PSRL-1 [grenade launcher] systems. "

More Nazi influence, possible false flag operation

"Sen. John McCain, Sen. Christopher Murphy (D-CT) and Victoria Nuland spoke to protesters on stage in Kyiv during the Maidan unrest. McCain and Murphy shared the stage with Oleh Tyahnybok, the leader of the neo-Nazi Svoboda party in Ukraine. Tyahnybok ... later met with an anonymous Western official and discussed how many Ukrainians needed to be killed by the Yanukovych government for the West to no longer recognize Yanukovych as Ukraine’s leader," with evidence by Dr. Ivan Katchanovski (Univ. of Ottowa) and others that the Maidan killings were a false flag operation by the far right. (source)

The U.S. bombed Russian allies

• Yugoslavia (U.S. allied with Kosovo Liberation Army, a Muslim terrorist group)
• Libya (U.S. allied with Muslim extremist groups)
• Syria (U.S. allied with Al Qaeda)
• The U.S. currently occupies about 1/3 of Syria (the parts with oil), via its proxy army, the Syrian Defense Forces

In 2008 an international prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, accused U.S.-backed Prime Minister Hashim Thaci of Kosovo of using the US bombing campaign as cover to murder hundreds of people to sell their internal organs on the international transplant market. Del Ponte’s charges seemed almost too ghoulish to be true. But on June 24th, Thaci, now President of Kosovo, and nine other former leaders of the CIA-backed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA,) were finally indicted for these 20-year-old crimes by a special war crimes court at The Hague.

From 1996 on, the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies covertly worked with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to instigate and fuel violence and chaos in Kosovo....

I strongly urge you to read that article. You'll be shocked at the dishonesty and viciousness of the U.S. government. See, too, this.

NATO expanded to Russia's borders

Source: Branko Marcetic: Diplomatic Cables Show that Russia Did See NATO Expansion as a Red Line

The U.S. had promised Gorbachev and other Soviets not to expand NATO

George Washington University’s National Security Archive reports NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard. “Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner.”

RAND Corporation's reports predicted the war

The 2019 RAND Corporation study Overextending and Unbalancing Russia “examines nonviolent, cost-imposing options that the United States and its allies could pursue across economic, political, and military areas to stress – overextend and unbalance – Russia’s economy and armed forces and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad." It includes the paragraph:

"Providing lethal aid to Ukraine would exploit Russia’s greatest point of external vulnerability. But any increase in US military arms and advice to Ukraine would need to be carefully calibrated to increase the costs to Russia of sustaining its existing commitment without provoking a much wider conflict in which Russia, by reason of proximity, would have significant advantages."

The highlighted words indicate that the authors were quite aware that US provocations would cause Russia to respond militarily.

The Washington Post reports

"Since 2015, the CIA has spent tens of millions of dollars to transform Ukraine’s Soviet-formed services into potent allies against Moscow, officials said....

The extent of the CIA’s involvement with Ukraine’s security services has not previously been disclosed....

These [often lethal] ... represent capabilities that Ukraine’s spy agencies have developed over nearly a decade — since Russia first seized Ukrainian territory in 2014 — a period during which the services also forged deep new bonds with the CIA."

YouTube video of John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Amy Klobuchar in Ukraine (December, 2016)

Surrounded by Ukrainian soldiers in U.S.-style Army fatigues, and with Senator Amy Klobuchar watching, Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain promise to help Ukraine stop Putin.

Lindsey Graham: “2017 will be the year of offense. All of us will go back to Washington and we will push the case against Russia. Enough of Russian aggression. It is time for them to pay a heavier price. Our fight is not with the Russian people but with Putin.

McCain: “I believe we will win, I am convinced we will win, and we will do everything we can to provide you with what you need to win.... we cannot allow Vladimir Putin to succeed here, because if he succeeds here he will succeed in other countries.”

(Skip to 1:22.)

The U.S. withdrew unilaterally from arms treaties

• Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty
• Strategic Arms Reduction (START II)Treaty
• Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty
• Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Iran deal
• Open Skies Treaty

People of the Donbas and Crimea wanted close ties to Russia

• Carnegie Endowment for Peace and Foreign Affairs documented that a majority of the people of Crimea welcomed Russia’s annexation of their territory in 2014: Denis Volkov and Andrei Kolesnikov’s My Country, Right or Wrong: Russian Public Opinion on Ukraine (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, September 7, 2022); John O’Loughlin, Gerad Toal and Kristin M. Bakke’s To Russia With Love: A Majority of Crimeans are Still Glad for Their Annexation (Foreign Affairs, April 3, 2020).)
• Alfred de Zayas, a former senior lawyer with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, says in The Ukraine War in the Light of the UN Charter:

  I was the UN representative for the elections in Ukraine in March and June 1994 and criss-crossed the country, including Crimea. Without a doubt, the vast majority of the population there and in the Donbass are Russian and feel Russian.

Responsible Statecraft: The Last Ukrainian Peacemaker: Sergei Sivokho Remembered

At first Sivokho’s optimism [that peace with Russia was possible] was echoed by Zelensky himself. At the 2020 Munich Security Conference, and later at the Forum on Unity in Mariupol, Zelensky called for “a massive national dialogue,” where people could discuss their common future face-to-face. To this end, he endorsed Sivokho’s pet project — a National Platform for Reconciliation and Unity — which was formally presented to the public on March 12, 2020.

That presentation, however, lasted just 20 minutes, because a gang of some 70 young people from the National Corps (the civilian wing of the Azov Battalion) stormed into the hall, and with shouts of “traitor,” pushed Sivokho until he fell to the ground. Sivokho was fired from his advisory government position two weeks later.

The U.S. undermined peace agreements

• Russia tried repeatedly to negotiate a peaceful resolution to Ukraine, including in Dec. of 2021.
• Reuters reported: "In an interview published in Germany's Zeit magazine on Wednesday, former German chancellor Angela Merkel said that the Minsk agreements had been an attempt to 'give Ukraine time' to build up its defences."
• The U.S. prevented a peace deal even after Russia's invasion: "Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said in an interview posted to his YouTube channel on Saturday that the US and its Western allies 'blocked' his efforts of mediating between Russia and Ukraine to bring an end to the war in its early days."

The American Conservative's
Why Peace Talks, But No Peace?

"Three separate times in the early weeks of the war, negotiations produced the real possibility of peace. The third even yielded a tentative agreement that was, according to Putin, signed. Both sides made “huge concessions,” including Ukraine promising each time not to join NATO. But each time, the U.S. put a stop to the promise of a diplomatic solution and peace, allowing the war to go on and to escalate, seemingly in the pursuit of U.S., not Ukrainian, interests."

David Arakhamia, a high-ranking member of Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People political party, said that Kyiv could have ended the war with Russia after a month if it agreed not to join NATO. The official said that Moscow was not concerned about other issues, such as “denazification,” but only wanted Kyiv to agree to neutrality.

In an interview with TV channel 1+1, a Ukrainian network, Arakhamia confirmed previous reporting that Moscow and Kyiv had nearly agreed to end the war in March 2022. Still, Ukraine’s Western backers pushed it to try to win the war against Russia

Ukrainians know

An WSJ/NORC poll taken in June of 2022 showed that 58% of Ukrainians polled thought that the U.S. bears a great deal or some responsibility for the war. They knew what the U.S. did.

Anti-Russia propaganda:
Russiagate was largely a fabrication

• Russiagate (the part about Russian interference and collusion) was largely a fabrication.
• Many claims were debunked.
• Matt Taibbi : Master List Of Official Russia Claims That Proved To Be Bogus
• The U.S. interferes with elections in other countries all the time.
• Putin demonization: like Saddam demonization, the enemy du jour

Of course Russia felt threatened!

Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute in The US and NATO Helped Trigger the Ukraine War. It’s Not ‘Siding With Putin’ to Admit It: “One can readily imagine how Americans would react if Russia, China, India, or another peer competitor admitted countries from Central America and the Caribbean to a security alliance that it led – and then sought to add Canada as an official or de facto military ally. It is highly probable that the United States would have responded by going to war years ago. Yet even though Ukraine has an importance to Russia comparable to Canada’s importance to the United States, our leaders expected Moscow to respond passively to the growing encroachment.They have been proven disastrously wrong, and thanks to their ineptitude, the world is now a far more dangerous place.”

In short

The U.S. intentionally provoked the war by aggressive NATO expansion, including helping to overthrow the pro-Russian government of Ukraine in 2014; allying with far-right militias attacking Russian-speakers in the east of Ukraine; and underming potential peace deals both before and after the Russian invasion.

Yet another unnecessary, stupid, disastrous war

• Organized by many of the same people who organized the failed War on Terror
• Began not even six months after disastrous end of the war in Afganistan
• One aim was to wean Europe from Russian energy
• Sanctions aid BRICS and the decline of dollar hegemony
• Preparing for war with China

EU is a lapdog, submitting to U.S. Hegemony

Chomsky on Provocations

Noam Chomsky: Propaganda Wars Are Raging as Russia’ War on Ukraine Expands

"The Iraq War was totally unprovoked: Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had to struggle hard, even to resort to torture, to try to find some particle of evidence to tie Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. The famous disappearing weapons of mass destruction wouldn’t have been a provocation for aggression even if there had been some reason to believe that they existed."

"In contrast, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was most definitely provoked — though in today’s climate, it is necessary to add the truism that provocation provides no justification for the invasion."

Diplomats and government officials warned that expanding NATO was unnecessary and would lead to war:

50 foreign policy experts warned Clinton

As quoted in Ukraine war follows decades of warnings that NATO expansion into Eastern Europe could provoke Russia

In June 1997, 50 prominent foreign policy experts signed an open letter to [President Bill] Clinton, saying, “We believe that the current U.S. led effort to expand NATO “is a policy error of historic proportions” that would “unsettle European stability.”

Matlock also wrote:

"What President Putin is demanding, an end to NATO expansion and creation of a security structure in Europe that insures Russia’ security along with that of others, is eminently reasonable. He is not demanding the exit of any NATO member and he is threatening none. By any pragmatic, common sense standard it is in the interest of the United States to promote peace, not conflict. To try to detach Ukraine from Russian influence — the avowed aim of those who agitated for the “color revolutions” — was a fool’s errand, and a dangerous one. Have we so soon forgotten the lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis?"

Kennan also wrote:

“were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy."

(More from Ambassador Thomas Graham)

"Finally, in light of the growing problems with Russia in the former Soviet bloc, the US push in 2008 to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was ill-advised at best. It tied together the two strands of the Bush administration’s hedging policy—NATO expansion and Eurasian geopolitical pluralism—in a way guaranteed to provoke a powerful Russian backlash. Key allies, notably France and Germany, were adamantly opposed. Bush’s own ambassador in Moscow warned that extending an invitation to Ukraine would cross the “brightest of red lines” and elicit sharp condemnation across the political spectrum."

NATO head says Putin invaded to stop NATO

Academics, journalists, and the Pope agree

Michael Brenner
(Prof. at Univ. of Pittsburgh)

John Quincy Adams warned against going abroad to fight monsters

Biden, Blinken, Sullivan, and Nuland fight monsters

For more information

• Harper's Magazine's Why are we in Ukraine? ( https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/)
• Senior U.S. diplomats, journalists, academics and Secretaries of Defense say: The U.S. provoked Russia in Ukraine (https://progressivememes.org/senior-US-diplomats-academics-journalists-and-secretaries-of-defense-say-the-US-provoked-Russia-in-Ukraine.html)
• Jeffrey Sach's articles about Ukraine (https://www.jeffsachs.org/newspaper-articles/)
• Resolution Calling for the U.S. to Support a Negotiated End to the War in Ukraine . (https://progressivememes.org/ukraine/ukraine-resolution.html/)
• War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless War by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies