U.S. President Joe Biden called the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Russian President Putin “justified” and termed it “a strong signal.” However, it is the U.S. that does not recognize this criminal court, for good reasons. For otherwise, quite a few of their own politicians would have been internationally indicted for crimes in the past, possibly even Biden himself for his involvement in the Iraq war – and not only that.
On October 16, 2002, President George W. Bush authorized the use of force against Iraq, which led to another senseless U.S. war of aggression. After initial euphoria, U.S. soldiers and large segments of the population soon began to wonder what it was all for. Pictured right: Joe Biden, then a senator.
As a reminder:
In 2001, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden supported President Bush’s decision to attack and invade Afghanistan, a mission which ended in disaster under the current President’s leadership.
In 2002, he pushed for a bipartisan resolution authorizing President Bush to attack and invade Iraq. Five years later, Biden approved a plan to divide Iraq into three regions – one Kurdish, one Sunni, and one Shiite – that was consistent with U.S. strategy.
Between 2009 and 2017, Biden participated in the planning and execution of the wars against Libya and Syria and the coup in Ukraine. The current U.S. President played a direct role leading to the mass protests on the Maidan in Kiev and ultimately to the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was legally elected to office.
Facts no longer matter today.
The shamelessness and mendacity of the West along with its corporate media is unprecedented.
There is such a nice saying in German: “When two do the same thing, it is far from being the same.”
More than any other country in recent history since World War II, the United States under the leadership of presidents from both parties has instigated wars on more than questionable grounds, interfered, supplied weapons, bombed, killed, actively contributed to the overthrow of disagreeable governments around the world, and, not least, planned, paid and directed the political upheaval in Ukraine in 2014. Each time, it was not about democracy and freedom or humanity, but about maintaining U.S. supremacy in the world and the acquisition of sales markets. Millions of U.S. citizens do not want to believe this; instead, they pay homage to a fabricated patriotism and believe in things that can neither be rationally explained nor proven.
It is the result of what their own country’s media successfully drums into them on a daily basis. Partial truths serve to distract from the truth about one’s own country, which should not even arise in the consciousness of the population. Only what is useful for the purposes of the leading class should be present in the minds of the people.
This is the result of paid journalism – again, as with politics, big money is behind it, because the corporations don’t want the majority of people to realize the facts that have led to the polarization within the US. The social division is deliberate, because nothing is more dangerous to the corporations than a united people who would have the idea of truly exercising power in the sense of “WE THE PEOPLE.” At the same time, media outlets like CNN or Fox News not only engage in politics on behalf of their clientele – they also earn billions from it. It doesn’t bother them to mislead the people through and through.
The sanctions against Russia and Russia’s war against Ukraine have ensured that this no longer applies only to the USA. People are only presented with stories agreeable to Western politics, and the back story is often deliberately completely omitted. The public should not even think about who the profiteers of wars are, while people pay with their lives.
Each time, as today, American defense corporations made billions and wrote their own laws and regulations along the way, which were rubber-stamped by members of Congress because the corporations gave them huge grants for their election campaigns. The Biden administration has not the slightest interest in ending the war in Ukraine through negotiations and therefore let the near Istanbul agreement of last year fail. The fact that the war is causing the U.S. national deficit to take on ever more astronomical forms is of no concern to the politicians, because the taxpayer has to fix the problem that has been put on the back burner.
Now the Biden administration accuses China of trying to supply Russia with weapons.
The West risks new tensions with China over, among other things, spy balloons that Pentagon military strategists apparently could not say with certainty might have been sent into the sky by amateur groups from their own country.
The only reason why large parts of the population of Western countries agree with current policies toward Ukraine is the fact that people are exposed to widespread war propaganda, which makes them draw irrational conclusions and, in any case, hardly allows any different opinion, if one does not want to be put in the corner of the malicious.
Instead, everyone who shares non-governmental opinions about Ukraine is on the side of the Russians – no other option is allowed to the dissenters. This is the state of democracy in the self-proclaimed “value-regulated society” of the West.
Targeted misrepresentation about my home country in many U.S. media, not just CNN, and also in Germany itself: The truth of the tank issue is rather that the Biden administration, at least in its official presentation, has also changed course, primarily to help Polish demands for the delivery of German Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine to gain acceptance.
It is downright absurd to speak of “growing German influence” in this context, and the authors of such articles know this very well. The deliberate intention is not to let the USA appear as a profit-hungry, all-determining power on the globe, at least not all the time. Anyone who disagrees should take a look at the US defense budget figures – a budget that does not deserve the name. They are more than double the military spending of China and Russia combined to ensure American military presence and superiority in all parts of the world. A so-called “defense” budget looks different.
A clear-thinking person must ask why a supposedly peace-loving country has to spend so much money on the military, moreover for the strategic orientation to dominate others – with military presence even in the remotest corners of the earth. Russia maintains 20 military bases outside its own country, the U.S. nearly a thousand worldwide. What for?
The whole world had seen and heard who set the pace when US-President Joe Biden gave the answer in the press conference nearly a year ago about how the USA would prevent Nord Stream 1 and 2. A grinning German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stood by and had nothing to say in response to the open threat against German infrastructure. Since then, no “transatlantic power dynamic” has changed, because the U.S. doesn’t let anyone tell it anything when it comes to their interests. NATO is essentially them, and the others are mere vassals and performing agents.
From the beginning, the Americans intended to cut off Russian energy supplies to Germany in order to sell their dirty fracked gas to Europe at higher prices while weakening Russian-German relations. There are corresponding documents, including public ones, which prove this, up to the written threat to “destroy the ferry port of Sassnitz” on the Baltic coast, where the last pipelines for the completion of Nord Stream 2 were stored.
The U.S. is the only country to benefit from the end of Russian energy supplies to Europe and especially Germany. In this context, the statement by political scientist George Friedman, after which it has been the goal of U.S. policy for a hundred years to prevent Russian raw materials from coming together with German technology, is highly interesting.
The big losers today are first and foremost the people of Germany, who are now suffering the greatest loss of prosperity since the end of World War II after their own government willingly subjugated itself to the repressive policies of the United States in the form of the imposed sanctions against Russia.
For those still capable of recognizing the facts of our times, it should be a ridiculous staircase joke to speak of a shift in the “transatlantic dynamic.” The reality is a cold power politics of the Biden administration against Europe and in particular against Germany. Most people there are not foolish enough not to notice this.
As a German and believing to be halfway familiar with the history of my country, I can’t trust my own eyes when I read something like the following. Discovered today on CNN:
In supposedly free countries like the USA or Germany, do media still exist that are not addicted to unconditional warmongering – media that do not have in mind to almost uncritically pass on the views of their respective governments to a bleary-eyed population?
Are there any historically literate scribblers or even politicians, called “Western officials”, who still use facts from history to assess today’s situation, even if they only refer to a quotation? How is Ukraine supposed to achieve lasting peace if old mistakes are repeated during the war, possibly also after the war, and the country – which is actually to be feared – continues to be used by the West as a protective shield against Russia?
Didn’t German tanks kill Ukrainians 80 years ago as well? Such an argument to justify German arms deliveries to Ukraine today is not only cynical, but in its naively simplified form it also bears no causal relation to history as it actually happened. Because in reality, by far more ordinary Ukrainians have suffered from a criminal collaboration of German Nazis and Ukrainian nationalists than from German tanks.
Bandera monument in Lviv, western Ukraine, a city which once was called Lemberg.
Of course, from the point of view of those who think they have to use weapons to resolve a conflict that cannot be judged in black and white, it is inevitable to resort to such naive platitudes.
The author of the nonsense at CNN obviously has no knowledge of the fact that when Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded Ukraine, large parts of the Ukrainian population received the German soldiers as liberators from Stalinism – a mistake for which they were later to pay bitterly. I had former soldiers of the German Wehrmacht in my own relatives who reported about it. It is part of a narrative about a cruel war that brought us (by that I mean: we Germans) too late to the realization: “Whoever picks up a gun again, let his hand fall off.” Unfortunately, the quote does not stem from me, but from Franz-Josef Strauss, an arch-conservative Bavarian politician who himself fought as an officer on the Eastern Front during World War II.
The historical knowledge about the collaboration of Ukrainian extremists with Hitler is linked to an astonishing development, according to which there were and are political forces in Ukraine, which not only strived for a plausible independence of their country, but also wanted to ethnically cleanse it. Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian ideologist and national movement leader of the 20th century, with his Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) played into the hands of the Holocaust with active assistance. Under their “cooperation” the German occupiers killed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Jews. Tens of thousands of Poles who escaped with their lives were expelled from their ancestral homeland.
All this suited the OUN because its goal was to transform Ukraine into an ethnically homogeneous country. It was clear to the organization that this could only be achieved by means of mass killings. The West, with all its peace-preaching politicians, no longer wants to know anything about all this.
What does that have to do with today?
Some. For to this day, Bandera is revered as a national hero in western-oriented parts of the Ukrainian population. Not only are there several monuments to Bandera in Ukraine, erected after the breakaway from the Soviet Union, but a main street in Kiev was renamed after him in 2016 – much to the dismay of the Russians living in eastern Ukraine, and also, by the way, of Israel.
It is not only the memory of Bandera that is glorified today in large parts of the non-Russian speaking population. The notorious Azov regiment, which today plays a large part in Ukraine’s military resistance to Russia, is infested with Nazi ideology; until recently it was seen with symbols closely associated with the German Waffen SS.
So, when Vladimir Putin blathers about wanting to purge Ukraine of “fascist elements,” the West does not have history on its side at all. The problem is that peace cannot be achieved with such attitudes on either side.
And by the way, even German tanks cannot solve problems that have their multi-layered origins in social spheres. Politicians and media should stop poisoning people’s minds with irresponsible war polemics.
One more remark: A country like the U.S., which for sole interest demonstrably carries out one military aggression and intervention after another or has them carried out by third parties, cannot hold the leadership of a pretended defense alliance like NATO. Europe should take care of itself instead of submitting to American market interests. The idea is realistic if the will to implement it were there – but it is not.
Defense, protection from Russia? France, unlike Germany, is a nuclear power, and together the two countries have a higher military budget than the largest country in the world – Russia.
But none of this seems to play a role in the deliberations of those responsible in my home country. Germany is in a politically neglected state and lets itself be led by the Biden administration on the nose ring through world history. It does not seem to occur to any of those playing with fire today how much the possibility of a nuclear confrontation with Russia endangers Europe in particular. The Americans always wage their wars far enough away from their own country and withdraw as soon as things get dicey, or they run away altogether with their glorious military – see Afghanistan – and are then no longer directly affected for the time being.
Ukraine, however, is barely a two-hour flight from Germany.
As long as I have been in this world, we Germans have been told time and again by our own governments – both in the dictatorial GDR and in the later, reunified Germany – war is not a means of politics and that, because of our history, we should stay out of everything that has to do with militarism.
German Tiger tanks in 1943 shortly before the order to attack near Kursk in the Soviet Union. The Kursk arc was the site of the largest tank battle in military history. – I myself lost several relatives during the war in the Soviet Union; their bones still lie buried somewhere in the vastness of Russian space, and no one knows where exactly.
Those who can think of nothing better than to respond to violence with counter-violence are setting in motion a spiral that ends in nothing other than the death of countless innocent people. How many more examples of this kind have to be added to history before mankind learns something from them? Especially Christian people or those who fancy themselves as such should know this better than someone like me.
Now, sooner or later, the German government will actually deliver “Leopard” tanks to Ukraine; tanks that will then shoot at Russian soldiers with the Iron Cross on their turrets for the first time since Adolf Hitler. Every normal person in Germany should know how wrong this is, especially since Ukraine is so torn apart that even after the war with Russia it is very unlikely to achieve a progressive democracy for the country as a whole.
Ukraine has never been an ethnically unified, nation-state entity. Corrupt politicians have squandered all opportunities to do so since the country’s secession from the Soviet Union in 1991, and instead have gradually bartered away sovereignty to Western economic interests and to NATO, which has had its fingers in the pie from the beginning. It is to be feared that corruption and abuse of authority will not end even after a cease-fire with Russia and instead the country will apply for all kinds of aid from the European Union – aid which in turn will only benefit the corrupt politicians on the scene, but not the simple, suffering people.
Europe, and Germany in general, will bear a responsibility in the coming decades which the Germans in particular, as the (still) strongest economic power in Europe, will not be able to escape. I believe this is deliberate – not only on the part of the USA for reasons of its own economic and military world domination, but also on the part of countries such as Poland, where leading politicians still want to take belated revenge because of the German Reich.
If it was indeed the Russians themselves who rendered the two natural gas pipelines Nord Stream 1 and 2 in the Baltic Sea south of Bornholm unusable last September – then why is the German government so reluctant to this day to release information about it? Berlin is stonewalling with a tenacity that brings the worst suspicions to the fore.
Red dot: Danish island Bornholm in the Baltic Sea. South of it, the natural gas pipelines from Russia, Nord Stream 1 and 2, were rendered unusable in September 2022 after several explosions.
Sahra Wagenknecht, a member of the Bundestag for the Left Party, has asked no fewer than three times about the circumstances of the case and received essentially the same answer to all three inquiries: The release of information of any kind was not possible for reasons of state interest – not even a committee sworn to secrecy could be provided with the facts.
This urge for secrecy naturally gives rise to the suspicion that one of Germany’s allies commissioned the blasting of the undersea lines or carried it out itself, or that Germany itself, in willing complicity with the USA, “settled” the question of restarting the pipelines once and for all.
In any case, it is striking that at the time in question in September the NATO maneuver “BALTOPS 22” under the leadership of the USA was taking place in the Baltic Sea. This also involved the “USS Kearsarge”, which was actually designed for the deployment of naval landing forces, but is also specialized in underwater operations, partly with combat swimmers. Although the warship was already a considerable distance away from Bornholm at the time of the explosions, this says nothing about the manner in which the detonations could have been set off. On the basis of various investigations, including those by Greenpeace, the only certainty seems to be that the destruction did not occur from inside the pipelines. This certainly rules out the possibility of direct Russian involvement, as there had previously been speculation in Western media about robots that could have reached the explosion site far away from Russia.
Also noteworthy is a joint press conference between Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Washington on February 7, 2022 – that is, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine took place. When asked by a journalist what the American response would be should Putin march into Ukraine, Biden gave a pinpoint answer:
“If Germany – if Russia invades, that means tanks or troops crossing the … the border of Ukraine again, then there will be, [we …] no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” The reporter asked quite specifically: “But how will you – how will you do that exactly, since the project and the control of the project is within Germany’s control?”
Answer from the President: “We will – I promise you, we’ll be able to do it.” At this point in the press conference, a few feet away from Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, bound by oath to the good of the German people, responded with a broad grin.
Looking at the following excerpt of the press conference repeatedly (klick below, Biden’s response begins at minute 11 and 22 seconds in the video), I cannot avoid the following interpretation: Joe Biden’s face shows a richly superior smile, certain of victory. Apparently, he kept the promise he made to the reporter – in an act of state terrorism.
Yesterday, the first U.S. ship loaded with environmentally harmful fracking gas arrived in Wilhelmshaven on the German North Sea coast. American corporations are raking in billions from the business, while German private households, despite subsidies, have to pay a multiple of what the cheap Russian natural gas used to cost.
Now and then, and away from the corporate media, one can still find references to facts even in the U.S. that are useful for causal research (see below). It should perhaps be added that the USA installed a missile defense system on NATO’s eastern border in 2016 under the Pentagon’s lie that this system would serve to repel Iranian long-range missiles in an emergency. In reality, it served to intimidate and provoke Russia with the possibility that these American missiles could reach cities like St. Petersburg and Moscow in minutes. Just as a side note, the President at the time was Barack Obama.
The above is an excerpt from an article written by Peter Beinhart, February 7, 2022. Beinhart is a Jewish columnist, journalist and political commentator. He lives in New York City. – Note: William Burns is an American diplomat and currently serving as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the Biden Administration.
Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the so-called Wolfowitz Doctrine revealed in 1992 the unmistakable intention of the Americans to establish themselves as the sole world power. Quote: “Our goal is to prevent the emergence of a new rival, whether on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere ….”
There are still smart people in Washington who are not comfortable with their own country’s aggressive, imperial policies. Unfortunately, a fossilized President Biden doesn’t listen to them for he himself in his entire political life has pushed the great power aspiration of the USA without consideration for others. Instead of reaching out to a former World War II ally, then former Cold War enemy, the USA, in its insatiable greed for world dominance, set its sights on confrontation – with fatal consequences for millions of people not only in Europe, but the entire world.
The leading world power is playing with the possibility of nuclear war because it wants to control fossil fuels and their commercialization, as it is currently doing successfully in Europe, imposing its will on others for reasons of profit and power, and in complete ignorance of the existential threat to the entire human race posed by the climate catastrophe that is more than just in the offing.
Of all parties, the Green Party in Germany – which emerged from the peace movement in the early 1980s in the old Federal Republic of Germany – currently supports German arms deliveries to Saudi Arabia more than anybody else.
Self-deception in one’s own cause and mendacity apparently know no bounds in my country anymore. The Greens have betrayed their own ideals: Supplying weapons to war zones, reactivating coal-fired power plants, extending nuclear power plant lifetimes are all things the party vehemently opposed until recently. A turnaround that is unparalleled in German history.
For when German arms deliveries to Ukraine the topic are, Green Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has adopted a widespread style of argumentation: the Greens (who are currently part of a so-called traffic light coalition: Red for the Social Democrats, Yellow for the Liberals, Green for the Greens) demand these deliveries because Ukraine needs to defend itself against the aggressor Russia.
This is how a German government twists the facts nowadays, and every day the German public is more and more fooled. The system of propaganda and lies is no longer inferior to the American one. Because when it comes to German arms deliveries to Saudi Arabia and not to Ukraine, an aggressor suddenly no longer plays a role.
With regard to deliveries of German armaments to the Arabian Peninsula, Baerbock recently had the cold-bloodedness and impudence to say the following:
“We do not deliver directly to Saudi Arabia, there are no arms deliveries from Germany to Saudi Arabia, where human rights are trampled underfoot.”
Oh, so that’s what my compatriot wants to express – if German weapons are not delivered “directly” to Saudi Arabia, but via third countries, then that is not German support for an aggressor.
A brutal civil war has been raging in Yemen since 2014, with women and children suffering the most. A war coalition led by Saudi Arabia, including the U.S. and the U.K., intervened a year later with aerial bombardments. According to the UN, at least 150,000 people have died in the war so far.
Saudi Arabia is conducting regular offensive operations, including air strikes, in a country where, according to the UN, 20 million people are at risk of famine. The U.S. – under the pretense that Iran had interfered in Yemen – provided the government of Yemen with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of weapons, most of which reportedly went missing in Yemen.
A German peace party now wants to supply weapons to such a war zone in support of Saudi Arabia. It is not difficult to figure out what caused the sudden change of mind: In addition to Russian natural gas, which is still flowing to Germany in a very limited way and not via Nord Stream 1, Russian oil is to be stopped. Germany, which joined the nonsensical sanctions against Russia and suffers from them like no other country, is begging the world for natural gas and oil.
For this, the responsible politicians are now throwing overboard all the values that brought my country back into the world community after a devastating Second World War and after Hitler, transforming it into a recognized, admired nation that was once the envy of the whole world in the light of its technological uniqueness, its outstanding products under the label “Made in Germany”, and its exemplary social system.
Of course, things change over time and space; new circumstances require new thinking. A historian is aware of this. But the way my country has developed in the last two or three years, it is hard to understand, especially for a conservative German, how all this could happen and become what it is today.
I do not recognize my own country anymore since I left it a quarter of a century ago, and all that remains are the memories of better times.
This is where the duplicity of many Western politicians and one-sided reporting media becomes apparent: If that many Russians leave their homeland because of the partial mobilization and their country is the sole culprit – why doesn’t Russia prevent them from leaving? Surely this could be put into practice relatively easily by closing the borders. Why are Russian draftees apparently able to escape unimpeded – something many Americans could not do to evade having to go to the murderous war in Vietnam?
Why does the West so blatantly apply double standards? How can the American Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, accuse Russia of ignoring UN values when his own country has so shamelessly and deliberately lied about weapons of mass destruction before the same body to justify an invasion of Iraq? As an American of all people, Blinken should be blushing up to his ears when he says something like that in public.
Meanwhile, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is touring the Gulf region these days to explore energy sources in replacement of lost Russian oil and natural gas, which has stopped flowing due to sanctions against Russia and could put Germany in even more dire straits over the winter.
The German chief diplomat’s first dialogue partner yesterday was Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince bin Salman – admittedly only after big uncle Biden from America made his first appearance there weeks ago. Anyone who actually assumes that figures like this Crown Prince including his country are less involved in crime than Putin and can even be a more reliable source of Germany’s energy shortage than Russia in the long run is playing with the safety of the German people and believes in Santa Claus. What a despicable double standard.
As a reminder, Saudi Arabia is one of the countries where Sharia law still applies, which means: oppression of women, especially when it comes to marrying off underage girls; application of inheritance and divorce laws in which a woman’s word counts for only half as much as that of a man. In the case of rape, the woman must name at least four eyewitnesses (!). Sharia also provides for punishments for theft and homosexuality, as well as for apostasy with floggings and amputations.
So, this is not just about the murder of journalist Jamal Kashoggi, which the U.S. blames on the Saudi crown prince. But the people of Germany are officially being asked to make horrendous sacrifices because of the loss of Russian energy supplies, while their chancellor is begging for replacements from countries that are not a whit better than Putin’s Russia, especially since they themselves have been and are involved in many proxy wars that are solely about their very own interests in the name of profit.
The fact that they also go over dead bodies then no longer plays a role.
The invasion of Ukraine is not going the way Russia envisioned – but the thought of abandoning his plans is unbearable for Vladimir Putin. At stake is Ukraine, his security buffer to the West. The enormous American and European aid flowing there has made the military situation very precarious for the Russians, prompting their president now to order a partial mobilization of Russian forces. There is even talk of using tactical nuclear weapons. An escalation of the conflict to this extent would be a catastrophe for all of Europe.
Workers’ uprising in the GDR in 1953: Soviet tanks roll through East Berlin and other places of the Soviet satellite state. The USA and the two other victorious powers in Berlin, France and Great Britain, looked on powerlessly a few hundred yards away.
Why did it have to come to this? Can the responsibility for this dire situation really be attributed solely to Russia? After all, it was they who started this war. A war, however, that has a long pre-history between Russians and Ukrainians, but also Europe.
At a time when everyone is talking about globalization, it is worth taking a look at recent history. During the Cold War, there were many situations that could have easily led to nuclear catastrophe. The two great powers, the USA and the communist Soviet Union, friends and allies against Hitler in the second half of the Second World War, fought proxy wars against each other virtually all over the world or even intervened directly, as the Americans did in Vietnam.
That was far away. But in the field of tension Europe, the Americans have never dared to act against the Soviets as they are now doing in Ukraine, right on Russia’s doorstep. When the Soviets tried to starve out West Berlin in 1948/49 by blocking the access routes in order to force the three Western powers to abandon the city, the Americans and the British flew non-stop missions via an air lift to Tempelhof to supply the population with all the necessities of life. Military action was out of the question for all sides, although the Soviets threatened it several times.
Four years later, when the workers’ uprising in the GDR took place and Soviet tanks rolled through East Berlin to crush it, the Americans watched in protest from a few hundred meters away but did not dare to intervene militarily. On August 13, 1961, when the East German communists sealed off West Berlin with barbed wire and construction of the Wall began, President John F. Kennedy was in Hyannis Port for a sail and did not want to be disturbed1. The West had known in advance what was going on with the approval of the Soviets – and did not intervene, even though there was a Berlin crisis team in the Washington State Department, set up long before.
Nor did the Americans lift a finger during the 1956 uprising in Hungary, which was put down particularly bloodily by invading Soviet troops; nor during the Prague Spring in 1968, nor in Poland in 1970 and 1981, when, by the way, Republican presidents were sitting in the White House.
These invaded states were all involuntary satellites of the Soviets and wanted to go their own independent ways, just like the Ukraine today. They were not involved in “real wars” with the Soviet Union, but at least the Soviets intervened militarily, and no one helped these countries at the time.
In a certain way, the West had accepted the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union, although there, too, the suffering of the population including politically motivated killings, imprisonments and deportations of hundreds of thousands of people were the order of the day. However, even because of all this, economic relations were never seriously questioned between the two power blocks, on the contrary. And in all these moments of world political dangers and wars, when everything was at stake, Russian natural gas and oil continued to flow not only to the Federal Republic of Germany and the former GDR, but to almost all of Western Europe during the Cold War and afterwards. Even the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 did not play a destructive role in this pattern of ongoing cooperation, apart from a boycott of the Olympic Games.
So, the question is: Why did the West interfere so massively in Ukraine’s affairs right after the Soviet Union fell apart in late 1991, when individual republics like Ukraine broke away from it and the Russian Federation under President Boris Yeltsin tried to see the West as a partner? What were the Bidens, Trumps and Giulianis and their stooges doing in Ukraine, where almost the entire upper stratum of society including governments were corrupt to the core? None of this looked like well-meaning intentions on the part of the West – more like a dangerous, creeping imperial expansion of its own sphere of power, as the Americans saw themselves as the general triumphant force after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Nevertheless, there is no justification for the war in Ukraine. However, if all accepted red lines from the Cold War era had not been crossed today, this war might not have happened.
Notes:
1 A note on my own behalf: In view of the historical facts and as someone who was born in 1961 at the eastern interface of the Cold War, the question does not even arise to me to whom I owe my personal freedom. The courageous mass demonstrations in the GDR, which led to the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989, could have been put down by the Soviets just as they had been in 1953. Here, too, the Americans could only have watched, or rather had to watch, in order not to endanger world peace. I owe my freedom to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet party and state leader and his policy of glasnost and perestroika (openness and restructuring). – I emphasize this explicitly because I have heard many voices in America according to which the USA and Ronald Reagan brought down the Berlin Wall, although the latter was not even in office anymore at the time. It would be more correct to say that the Americans kept the path to this development open – but they could not bring it about themselves.
The Wind of Change 