Zelensky didn't "start" the war, he provoked it

Trump's heresy was not literally true, but it was grounded in a fundamental truth that has been denied to Americans so the national security state could bilk them for billions.

By Max Blumenthal

President Donald Trump’s claim that his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, “started” his country’s war with Russia is being treated by his domestic foes as one of the most heretical foreign policy statements ever issued by a sitting president. These include usual suspects of Russiagate, who have resurfaced to cite Trump’s remark as concrete evidence that the Kremlin had hacked his brain.

Having tried from my little corner of the internet to warn the American public on the coming proxy war in Ukraine since 2014, and to educate it about its real causes since the war erupted, I felt like I was dreaming when I heard the president’s comments. Of course his words were not literally true; Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. But they were grounded in a fundamental truth which had been denied to Americans by the Nulandite foreign policy team of Obama-Biden, and their Mighty Wurlitzer, which psychologically battered them for years with the relentlessly repeated phrase, “the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine” in order to bilk them for billions of dollars – money which Zelensky now says has largely gone missing.

Anyone capable of seeing outside the Clockwork Orange-style, eyelids-peeled-back anti-Russia struggle sessions of Western corporate media for the past three years recognizes this war was, in fact, one of the most provoked conflicts in recent history - and that Ukraine would never emerge victorious. No sovereign, nuclear armed country would have allowed a hostile foreign military alliance to establish a beachhead on its borders while controlling that country's government to the point where it hand-selected its leaders. If Russia or China had attempted to install missile systems that could hit Washington on the southern border of the US, and orchestrated a coup to install a puppet leader in Mexico City, the American military would have immediately dispatched B-52's to blanket everywhere from Tijuana to Teotihuacan with JDAMs. But this is precisely what Russia was expected to accept.

Just two days after Zelensky was elected president with the help of American advisors, the Pentagon-linked RAND Corp published a paper which concisely spelled out the collective West's agenda for post-Maidan Ukraine in its title: "Overextending and Unbalancing Russia."

France's Hollande and Germany's Merkel later admitted that the Minsk Accords were were merely a ruse the West agreed to in order to buy Ukraine time to build up its military for the coming war with Russia. At the 2022 Munich Security conference, Zelensky articulated Russia's worst nightmare, calling on the Western powers which controlled him to immediately welcome his country into NATO, a move which everyone from former CIA director William Burns to former US ambassador to Russia Jack Matlock have described as a near-certain recipe for war. Though they never intended to grant Zelensky’s wish, his fevered demands were met with thunderous applause from Berlin, Brussels and London.

By this point, the Russophone Ukrainians who voted for Zelensky in large numbers in hopes of peace were being stripped of their national rights under his watch; their local broadcast outlets were being banned with Washington's encouragement; and in the Donbas, they were bunkered and taking bodies every day thanks to the relentless shelling of the Ukrainian military. In February 2022, OSCE observers documented a record number of violations, mostly by the Ukrainians. By the 18th of that month, as Aaron Mate noted, the US removed its OSCE observers and Ukraine rejected a revival of Minsk negotiations with Donbas separatists. Five days later, reality came crashing through in the form of the Russian Special Military Operation.

Speaking from an alternately opposed angle to Trump in May 2023, then-NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg effectively admitted the West set the stage for the Russian invasion by backing the Maidan coup, which triggered Putin’s annexation of Crimea. “This war actually started in 2014, with the illegal annexation of Crimea and then a few months later, Russia went in and took control over eastern Donbas,” Stoltenberg remarked. “And since then since 2014, and NATO has implemented the biggest reinforcement of our collective defense in a generation.”

This history and much more is documented in small print over the course of 690 meticulously footnoted pages in Scott Horton's authoritative new book, “Provoked.” I could not recommend it more highly today.

Once Americans begin to understand that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was one of the most provoked wars in our time, the rest of the contrived narratives about Project Ukraine's heroic battle for freedom and democracy evaporate almost as quickly as USAID funds in Kiev. With his heresy, Trump has finally given them the chance to recognize the criminal manipulation to which they were subjected.