Trying to make sense of the geo-politics swirling around Ukraine this week is difficult. The only person I have heard who does not obfuscate is Lavrov. He demands that the ROOT CAUSES are dealt with. All the leaders of the world seem to have very different views about what the root causes actually are. I guess it depends on the propaganda they wish to maintain for their citizens rather than actually dealing with reality.
I have been listening to Trump putting on a good show of demanding peace. Starmer and Macron demanding war. Zelensky trying to garner more support for his country and none of them seem to even be aware of the root causes that Lavrov wants aired.
I wrote about the old and buried history which shows where the resentments against Russia began, back in the 10th century:
To bring light to the current century and its events, I came across this comment by @JACk in reply to this post:
Jack wrote: (my emphasis throughout)
If you really want to look into it, the US started framing Ukrainian fascists as good guys and setting them up for destabilizing Russia before WWII was over. LtGen Gehlen (Nazi head of East European Intelligence) surrendered to the US before WWII was over. Gehlen partnered with Allen Dulles to set up remain behind forces in most European countries in what became Operation Gladio (umbrella title as it had different names in different countries). Gehlen also set up remain behind forces in Ukraine in what became the CIAs largest overseas operation.
Dulles brought Mykola Lebed (one of the leaders of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists - OUN - working with Stepan Bandera) to the US. Once in the US, Lebed was installed at the Prolog Research Corporation, a CIA publishing house designed to promote Ukrainian nationalist sentiment through fascist organizations. After the Church Commission Prolog was made an NGO with the CIA donating rather than running it directly.
US efforts were run through: Project Icon, Project Aerodynamic (indirectly preceded by Redsox and more directly by Androgen) QRPLUMB, and PDDYNAMIC. Icon started during WWII. Aerodynamic ran from 1949 to 1970. PDDYNAMIC ran till 1991.
From 1991 to 2013 the US spent over $5 billion to promote "democracy" (find Victoria Nuland's National Press Club speech from Dec 2013 where she declares this) meaning the US was continuing efforts preceded by the aforementioned projects started in WWII. Among other things, that money paid for a coup in 2004 commonly called, the Orange Revolution.
On 29 August 2005 the US signed a treaty with Ukraine establishing biological research labs in violation of the UN Biological Weapons Convention. This treaty is still posted on the US State Department website. In the name of safety and non-proliferation the US funded multiple facilities through the DoD (contract still on the US GSA website) employing US company, Black & Veatch (among others), to carry out maintenance and renovations. The US stored, transported and conducted research on pathogens at these sites.
There are over 3,800 US FOIA released documents describing Project Aerodynamic on the US gov website, the CIA Reading Room. All of this is backed up by US documents and US official government statements. By the time you add the other programs, there are over 5,000 publicly available official US records.
You don't need one single Russian statement.
Bonus: the US DTRA produced PR videos about these sites until 2021. In 2022 they were scrubbed from the internet, but with digging they are still on the Internet Archive. There are also facilities in Kazakhstan and Georgia (in Tbilisi, Georgia it's named after Sen Lugar identifiable on Google maps).
Then the US started negotiating the placement of CIA bases (reported in the NYT after the CIA gave an interview) in Ukraine prior to 2014 placed along the border with Russia. In 2014 Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador Pyatt got caught picking Ukraine's government (recording still available online). Then there was a coup that toppled Ukraine's government again.
If you want to understand the rationale for US actions start with Zig Brzenzinski's 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard. If you want to understand Brzezinski, look into Prof H. Mackinder and his, Heartland Theory of Geopolitics.
This fight with Russia goes back before the Soviet Union and the Cold War. Brzezinski uses MacKinder's terms and concepts but updates them for modern, post Soviet geopolitical context.
If you are still curious, the 2019 Rand Corporation Report Extending Russia lays out how the US should use Ukraine (and Moldova, Romania, the Caucasus region i.e. Georgia, and NATO expansion and sanctions) to hurt Russia. This was published three years before Russia's 2022 offensive. And on page 100, it says Ukraine would likely lose with catastrophic losses and an unfavorable negotiated peace, but in context of the report, it's worth it because Russia would be hurt.
There are another 10 or so books coming out of US think tanks or people like Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol. Or you can look up Sen John McCain and Sen Linsey Graham visits to Ukraine long before 2022. McCain visited so many times and funnelled so much money to Ukraine, Kiev named a street after him before he died.
That's the tip of the iceberg. If you dissect the 1994 Budapest Memo - actually read it, the US violated it the moment it was signed. The US offered NATO membership to Ukraine in 2008, which violated the Memo as did both coups which are war crimes in their own right. In the US's case, the Memo was signed but never made law by Congress because it would not have passed. So, it was an agreement without force of law in the US. But it did authorize any signator to intervene if another signator used Ukraine militarily, economically, or politically against another signator. The US did this multiple times. By the time Russia went into Ukraine the US violated it more times than Ted Bundy violated women on a date.
There is a lot more. Suffice it to say, Russia was provoked.
I wrote about the underlying resources of Ukraine which are so attractive to NATO countries here:
So what about the British and the French?
During the Crimean War from October 1853 to February 1856, the British and French supported the Ottoman Empire to prevent Russia from extending its influence. The British policy was to maintain the Ottoman Empire as a buffer state between itself and the Russian Empire, thereby preventing Russian expansion. Additionally, the British and French were motivated by a desire to protect their interests in the Middle East and to prevent Russia from gaining control over the region.
In the context of the French invasion of Russia, Napoleon's motivations were presented to the French people as a desire to destroy the permanent threat to Europe posed by Russian power but WHY Napoleon thought that Russia posed a threat to Europe remains obscure. Maybe the nobility nudged Napoleon?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_invasion_of_Russia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_War
Timeline: The Russian Campaign and Napoleon's Defeat
But there is more…..
The British royal family, particularly King George V, had a complex relationship with the Russian royal family, the Romanovs. King George V is shown to have betrayed his cousin Tsar Nicholas II in some way but the British royal family was shocked by the execution of the Romanovs and had not expected such a brutal outcome of the Bolshevik revolution. They were related to the Romanovs through Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and they were worried about the potential consequences of the execution for their own royal families.
Murder of the Romanov family - Wikipedia
How did foreign royal families react to the execution of the Romanovs? - Quora
Why the British Royal Crown Failed to Save the Romanovs | HISTORY
Personally, considering all the history, I am inclined to recognise that the possession of land from Kiev to Astana amounts to the re-establishment of old Khazaria.
The bread basket, the rare earth minerals, the evocative history all add up to some highly desirable real estate with the added bonus of being right on Russia’s border and capable of harassing ad infinitum with an ugly objective…. the Balkanisation of Russia.

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"The affair appears to be a deceitful ploy contrived by the British ruling establishment to lure Donald Trump into providing security for Ukraine and ultimately to go to war against Russia. However, this could prove to be the British Empire’s fatal mistake that will probably accelerate its final collapse." Listen to Alex Krainer's analysis in his video here:
https://alexkrainer.substack.com/p/ukraine-rare-earths-deal-the-empires
"Putin’s ‘final completion’ likely will not credibly be achieved through some itinerant peace broker. In his Foreign Ministry address, Putin dismisses devices such as ‘ceasefires’ or ‘freezes’. He is seeking something permanent: An arrangement that has ‘solid legs’; one that has durability.
Such a solution – as Putin before has hinted – requires a new world security architecture to come into being; and were that to happen, then a complete solution for Ukraine would flow as an implicit part to a new world order. That is to say, with the microcosm of a Ukraine solution flowing implicitly from the macrocosm agreement between the U.S. and the ‘Heartland’ powers – settling the borders to their respective security interests.
This clearly is impossible now, with the U.S. in its psychological mindset stuck in the Cold War era of the 1970s and 1980s. The end to that war – the seeming U.S. victory – set the foundation to the 1992 Wolfowitz Doctrine which underscored American supremacy at all costs in a post-Soviet world, together with “stamping out rivals, wherever they may emerge”."
https://www.unz.com/article/putins-war-to-re-shape-the-american-zeitgeist/