In statements such as European Greens continue to stand in undivided solidarity with Ukraine, the EU Greens call the Russian invasion “unprovoked” and support sending arms to Ukraine. The EU Greens make a similar statement in US Elections: European Greens call for Jill Stein to step down.
The naiveté of the EU Greens about the war in Ukraine is surprising and disturbing, for four reasons.
First, the facts about U.S. provocations of the Russian invasion are widely avaiable; I will review them below. Those facts show that the U.S. shares a large proportion of responsibility for the war in Ukraine.
Secondly, Europe is suffering greatly from the costs of the war, including increased energy prices due to sanctions on Russia, and increased military budgets due to NATO expansion. Such costs should motivate Europeans to look after their own interests, rather than being subservient to the United States. You can listen to a satirical song about EU subservience here. Why is the EU bending over for Uncle Sam?
Thirdly, even if you think the U.S. is as innocent as a baby in the war in Ukraine, and even if you are willing to sacrifice your economies to stop Russia, you should prioritize a negotiated solution to the war in Ukraine, since the risk of nuclear war is too high. But once you acknowledge that the West has been lying about the history behind the Russian invasion, you should be even more in favor of negotiations.
Fourth, the EU Greens are extremely naive about U.S. intentions in Ukraine. given the many invasions, bombings, coups, assassinations, proxy wars and government overthrows that the U.S. has instigated all over the world, and given the fact that the U.S. lied about pretty much all of them. Think, too, of the 800 or so overseas military bases that the U.S. has in 70+ countries.
The Russian invasion was along its borders, involving a country with deep historical and cultural ties to Russia, and was in response to intense U.S. provocations, which I now summarize. For more details, see Senior U.S. Diplomats, Journalists, Academics and Secretaries of Defense Say: the U.S. Provoked Russia in Ukraine .
It’s well known that the U.S. government lied about the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and about the dirty wars in Latin America. Such meddling in Latin America continues to this day, e.g., in Venezuela and Cuba.
The U.S. government lied, too, about U.S. bombings in Serbia, Sryia, and Libya; the U.S. allied with Muslim extremists, and the justifications were a lot more flimsy than the offical narratives would have you believe. About Serbia see this, this (Chapter 3), and this. (In short, the Kosovo Liberation Army that the U.S. supported was, basically, a terrorist organization funded by the CIA.)
In many of these conflicts, the CIA and its affiliate, the National Endowment for Democracy, set the stage by funding opposition groups; by making false claims of voting irregularities; by arming brutal militias; and by launching coups.
The CIA and NED were similarly involved in setting the stage for the war in Ukraine. The CIA’s involement was reported in the Washington Post and the New York Times. The New Yorker reported in 2023 that the CIA and NSA worked hard “to close off many ‘sources related to Russia/Ukraine matters.'” The NED’s involvement was reported in this Eighty page document listing the so-called National Endowment for Democracy’s funding for projects in Ukraine, referenced in Washington rushes to hide its “˜octopus’ NED funding in Ukraine.
Senior U.S. diplomats and others say the U.S. provoked Russia in Ukraine by aggressive NATO expansion, including “engineering” (according to former U.S. Ambassador Chas W. Freeman) the 2014 Maidan coup and installing a puppet government. Jack Matlock, former U.S. Ambassadador to the Soviet Union, said of the coup, “Obviously, to any Russian leader, not just Vladimir Putin, that would have been an absolutely impossible, hostile act, which they had to react to. And in particular, they were not going to lose their naval base in Crimea.” Matlock said the Ukrainians are “dominated in their thinking by neo-Nazis – we tend to ignore that, or when Putin points it out, we say he’s lying. He’s not lying.”
Former Ambassador Thomas Graham, who served under six U.S. presidents and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote:
[T]he 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.
Crimea had voted multiple times to align with Russia (see this, this this, and this). RAND Corporation recommended arming Ukraine as the best way to weaken Russia; RAND predicted it would result in a war.
Former Secretaries of Defense William J. Perry and Robert Gates said that trying to expand NATO into Ukraine was overreaching.
In addition to overthrowing the Russian-friendly government of Ukraine in 2014, the U.S. armed far right militias that were attacking Russian speakers in the east. Ambassador Michael Gfoeller and David H. Rundell wrote in Newsweek’s Lessons From the US Civil War Show Why Ukraine Can’t Win:
Before the war, far right Ukrainian nationalist groups like the Azov Brigade were soundly condemned by the US Congress. Kiev’s determined campaign against the Russian language is analogous to the Canadian government trying to ban French in Quebec. Ukrainian shells have killed hundreds of civilians in the Donbas and there are emerging reports of Ukrainian war crimes. The truly moral course of action would be to end this war with negotiations rather than prolong the suffering of the Ukrainian people in a conflict they are unlikely to win without risking American lives.
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, “The war in Ukraine did not start on 24 February 2022, but already in February 2014. The civilian population of the Donbas has endured continued shelling from Ukrainian forces since 2014, notwithstanding the Minsk Agreements. These attacks on Lugansk and Donetsk significantly increased in January-February 2022, as reported by the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine.”
Cold War architect George Kennan had opposed NATO expansion and wrote: “this expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.” Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and 49 other U.S. foreign policy experts wrote to President Bill Clinton in 1997, opposing NATO expansion.
So, the U.S. invades, bombs, and overthrows governments all over the world, for flimsy reasons. Russia’s invasion was along its borders and in response to decades of U.S. medddling there, to U.S.-backed color revolutions in Eastern Europe, and to U.S. bombings of Russian allies in Afghanistan, Serbia, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere. The U.S. intervened to aid “liberation” movements against Russian allies in Afghanistan, Serbia, Libya, and Syria – allying with Muslim extremists to do so – but the U.S. condemns Russia for intervening to aid Russian-speaking people along Russia’s own borders, in a conflict against Nazi militias supported by the U.S. and driven by aggressive NATO expansion.
Furthermore, the U.S. withdrew from multiple arms treaties and stymied peace deals that could have resolved the crisis. The Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015 were exploited to buy time for arming Ukraine. In December of 2021, Washington rejected Russia’s proposed security arrangement for Europe. The U.S. and U.K. pressured Zelensky to reject the peace deal that was almost reached a month after the Russia invasion. See this, this, this, this, and this.
Would the U.S. allow Russia to overthrow the government of Quebec, set up and arm a puppet regime, appoint the new Prime Minister, arm anti-U.S. militias, and ban the official use of the English language (as Ukraine did with Russian after the 2014 coup)?
Moreover, the U.S. occupies one third of the sovereign nation of Syria, with help from its proxy army, the Syrian Defense Forces. Likewise, U.S. troops remain in Iraq, despite the opposition of the Iraqi government. So, it’s quite hypocritical for the U.S. to reject a ceasefire which allows Russia to occupy Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine which voted overwhelmingly for closer ties with Russia.
Now Russia is winning the war (as RAND predicted would likely happen) and the West is considering allowing Ukraine to launch missiles deep into Russian territory. Russia has said that such actions would cause it to consider itself at war with NATO. The war could easily escalate into a nuclear conflict, in which Europe would bear the brunt of the damage.
A negotiated end to the war in Ukraine is urgently needed. Rather than further arming Ukraine, and risking World War Three, the West and the EU Greens in particular should prioritize diplomacy, which could have prevented the war in the first place.
Note: the U.S. Greens’ response to the EU Greens’ call for Jill Stein to withdraw from the presidential race is here.
Donald A. Smith is a writer, a peace activist working with CodePink, a Democratic Precinct Committee Officer, the editor of http://waliberals.org, and the creator of https://progressivememes.org. He lives in Bellevue, Washington and has a PhD in Computer Science.