The Birth of the Baby Twins: Russia’s Strategic Swing Drives NATO-stan Nuts

The Foreign Ministry in Beijing so far has been extremely cautious. Wang Yi has reiterated “China’s long-standing position that the legitimate security concerns of all countries must be respected, and the purposes & principles of the UN Charter must be upheld.” Further on down the road, presumably after some serious exchanges between Wang Yi and Lavrov, China can always find myriad ways to unofficially help the baby twins, including advancing BRI-related connectivity and sustainable development projects. As for Kiev disintegration, that’s directly linked to Moscow demanding the immediate stop of the mini-blitzkrieg against Donbass, otherwise they will bear full responsibility. Yes, regime stalwarts will be hunted and punished – complete with a possible War Crimes Tribunal. No wonder all sorts of oligarchic/political rats, big and small, are scurrying away, to Lviv, Poland and the UK.

The Munich effect

The intervention of all 12 members at the Security Council session, combined with Putin’s address to the nation was the stuff of gripping geopolitical drama. Putin’s body language and the look in his eyes testified to the immense gravity of the moment – and it all came to the forefront when he embarked in a concise history lesson spanning a century. Barely containing his anger at the countless ways Russia has been vilified by the West, and taking no prisoners when referring to communism, what mostly stood out was the clear-cut rendition of the insurmountable antagonism between the Anglo-American islands and the civilizational Heartland – or the clash between maritime powers and land powers. That Eurasia classic was the bulk of his exposition: the recognition of the baby twins took less than three minutes.

The Munich Security Conference, this past weekend, had made it all so explicit. Munich, as terrifying as it was in terms of a congregation of headless chickens posing as eagles, at least confirmed everything is in the open.

The enemy is Russia. NATO infinite expansion – to outer space – is against Russia. And then we had a parade of add-on threats: no disarmament in Eastern Europe, cutting off the Russian economy from the EU, end of Nord Stream 2, Ukraine in NATO, world order built on “universal liberal values”.

Munich spelled out No Compromise Whatsoever – which was exactly what Putin, Lavrov, Patrushev and co. expected, the warmongering rhetoric burying any meaningful discussion of migration, inflation, cyber wars, the European energy crisis and, of course, the only thing that matters for the MICIMATT (military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank complex, as defined by Ray McGovern): let’s milk this Eurotrash lot for untold billions in new contracts, let’s isolate Russia, let’s destroy Nord Stream 2 to sell them our ultra expensive LNG, let’s keep them on a leash – forever.

So actually it’s not even war against Russia: the $30 trillion-indebted Empire with a woke military attached simply could not afford it. Not to mention the certified freak out in case they receive a phone call from Mr. Khinzal and Mr. Zircon : cue to the spectacular Russian display of “military and technical” superiority, hypersonic and otherwise – staged, irony of ironies, in synch with the circus in Munich. What we have here is so lame: just a lowlife offer-you-can’t-refuse racket to be inflicted on the EU.

The Indivisible Security dance

The rabid Munich “No Compromise” show; the imperially-ordered Ukro crypto-blitzkrieg against Donbass; and the role of the U.S. Lack of Intelligence Community – an Andrei Martyanov-coined howler – altogether sealed the deal for the Security Council deliberations and Putin’s decision. Considering the ideological stupidity of the current Brussels gang – Stoltenberg, von der Leyen, Borrell –, incapable of understanding even basic economics, the fact remains that the EU without Russian energy is doomed. Martyanov stresses the algorithm: Russia can afford the break up with Europe. Europe cannot. The U.S. just wants to collect. And we’re not even talking about the dire, incoming ramifications of the systemic crisis across NATOstan.

Even as Moscow plays a very long, calculated game, as it stands that does not necessarily mean that Russia will be “winning” the baby twins while “losing” Europe. Russia’s strategic swing repeatedly baffles the Atlanticist combo. The U.S. lack of intelligence community was predicting a Russian “aggression” every other day – and still is. Instead they got the baby twins as the latest independent republics of the Global South.

Even before Munich, the Ukro crypto-blitzkrieg, and the recognition of the baby twins, Moscow had again warned it may respond with “military and technical measures” to ensure its own security after the U.S. and NATO blatantly ignored key points from its proposal for a long-term European security architecture, and instead “cherry-picked” issues from a package deal.

Moscow will not let the Americans run away from the by now notorious 10-page Russian response. Putin, addressing the Stavka, had already warned “we are in a situation (…) where we are forced to resolve it.” Which bring us to what John Helmer niftly qualified as Russia’s black box defense. The beauty is no one knows what’s inside the black box.

Enter, once again, the “military-technical measures” that will be “reciprocal” (Putin) to what U.S. and NATOstan are already deploying against Russia. They won’t necessarily be implemented in the Black Sea, the Sea of Azov, in the airspace above Donbass, even in cyberspace. It could be anywhere – from the Syrian theater to Latin America. Surprise! That’s what strategic ambivalence, ambiguity, or – let’s get down to the rhythm – swing is all about. You don’t believe in the principle of indivisible security? Fine. Now we dictate the security rhythm. You’re not gonna stop deploying nuclear weapons outside your territory? Fine. Here’s some reciprocity. You’re not gonna accept legally binding guarantees of our security? Fine. Meet our “military-technical” measures.

Now dance, suckers.

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation. 

(Banned by Twitter.)

The U.S. Needs Cold War but the Real Enemy Is Within

The U.S. has a date with destiny as it faces up to its own inherent failings and its very real enemy within – the national security state. Georgy Arbatov, the witty Soviet diplomat, remarked for an American audience at the end of the Cold War: “We are going to do a terrible thing to you. We are going to deprive you of an enemy.” His observation at the time seemed to be an oxymoron. Arbatov died in 2010 at the age of 87. But how true his words have proven nearly 30 years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and what was presumed to be the end of the Cold War and America’s historic victory. As it turns out, there were no winners. The seasoned diplomat served as an advisor on U.S. relations to five Soviet leaders. He traveled to the United States frequently and was the U.S. media’s go-to Soviet spokesman. Arbatov knew intimately how the Cold War worked as an organizing principle for the edifice of U.S. society, politics, economics and military. He knew how and why the Soviet Union was cast as the “evil empire” by the U.S. The portrayal had little to do with the Soviet Union objectively presenting a mortal threat. But the waging of a Cold War and forging a supposed Soviet nemesis to “the American way of life” was a vital necessity for the operation of U.S. global power.

The militarism was essential for the functioning of American capitalism and its vast taxpayer-funded Pentagon budgets every year. Having a Soviet enemy also provided the United States with an apparent purpose of “defending the free world” and acting as a patron over European and NATO allies. In less benign terms, the relationship is seen more as one of hegemony and Washington’s dominance.

A third vital reason for Cold War against the Soviet Union was the cover it gave to U.S. military adventures around the world. Under the guise of protecting the world from “Godless Communism”, the Americans prosecuted imperialist wars and subterfuges that can otherwise be seen as criminal aggression and genocides.

A fourth crucial benefit from having a supposed dastardly foreign enemy was the national unity it provided for American rulers. Citizens would rally around the flag and the mythology of “American exceptionalism”.

When the Soviet Union disappeared from the global map in 1991, incisive analysts like Georgy Arbatov discerned that it would also herald the demise of the United States. For a brief moment, there was euphoria from “winning the Cold War”. President HW Bush declared a “new world order” under American leadership. State Department scholars hailed the “end of history” had arrived in the form of “liberal democracy” and market capitalism. How fleeting do these celebrations seem now.

The loss of a Soviet enemy also in a very real way spelled the end of the United States. So much of the modern U.S. state since World War II has been shaped by Cold War militarism. Without the cover of a Soviet bogeyman, the United States became visible for the imperialist monster that it is. The emperor was naked. No sooner had the Soviet Union dissolved than the United States embarked on a seeming non-stop rampage of wars across the globe. The relentless warmongering has been largely about finding a purpose for wielding U.S. power under a myriad of pretexts from “defending human rights” to “war on drugs”, from “preventing weapons of mass destruction” to “war on terrorism”, and so on.

One baleful outcome of this degenerate conduct has been the corrosive effect on international law, the United Nations Charter and, ironically, the presumed moral authority of the U.S. The international standing of the U.S. has plummeted as the world comes to abhor its unilateral arrogance and tyrannical, pathological caprice. The avowed pretexts for military interventions were never sufficiently plausible despite having a global media machine (conceitedly called the “free press”) to sell those pretexts to the public. Without a seemingly credible international mission – fighting the evil Soviet empire – the United States has lost the ability to cohere its own nation. The Wizard of Oz is an impotent charlatan. It is no coincidence that a mere 30 years after the supposed end of the Cold War, the U.S. is a cauldron of internal political chaos and seething enmity. Republicans and Democrats are riven by mutual contempt as one party accuses the other of treason and treachery.

The U.S. military spending of over $700 billion a year appears as a grotesque and shameful obscenity. All the more so in the face of a plethora of neglected American social needs and infrastructure collapse.

That is why the U.S. political class has needed to revive the Cold War as an absolute necessity. Without the Cold War, the United States is in mortal danger of collapsing from its own internal failures as a hyper-militarized national security state.

This explains the madcap media propaganda campaign over recent weeks to stoke dangerous tensions in Europe with Russia. It explains, too, why the U.S. has continually slated China as a global adversary. And why the Pentagon has sought to portray a growing natural partnership between Moscow and Beijing as an alarming pernicious development that “threatens Western democracy”. However, reviving the Cold War is a futile endeavor. The United States and its allies are not threatened by Russia or China in any objective way. Thus, the demonization of Russia and China – while acting as a short-term cover for the United States and causing wanton geopolitical tensions even to the point of risking confrontation – will in the end not suffice as a pretext. The U.S. has a date with destiny as it faces up to its own inherent failings and its very real enemy within – the national security state.

Source: SCF

Nord Stream 2: The Geo-politics of Keeping Germany ‘Down’, Russia ‘Out’, and Instability in Ukraine

It seems reasonable to expect we will have this crisis with us – in its various forms – for at least the next two years, Macron in a remarkably frank interview with a French Journal put his finger on the main structural problems facing the EU: He lambasted the fact that the EU Council (and other EU states) had vetoed the earlier French-German proposal for a Russia-EU summit. The consequences to this omission, he said starkly, was that: ‘Others’ were talking to the Russians on the behalf of the EU. It’s not hard to surmise that he is implying that U.S. ‘interests’ (whether directly or via NATO ventriloquism) were the ones doing the talking. And that ‘Europe’ had lost its voice.

This is not simply a case of wounded amour propre by the French Jupiterian leader. It is rather, that some West European leaders (ie. the Carolingian Axis), belatedly have awoken to the realisation that the whole fake artifice of the ‘imminent Russian invasion’ of Ukraine is about corralling European states back into bloc (NATO) discipline. Macron – to give him his due – showed by his remarks at the Moscow press conference that he understood that silence at this crucial moment could define Europe for the next decades – leaving it bereft of the autonomy (let alone any modicum of sovereignty) that Macron so much wants for Europe.

The account of Macron’s press conference after his long tête-à-tête with Putin represents the contortionism of a French President unable to explicitly diss the dominant Anglo-American narrative on Ukraine, whilst saying – in barely coded language – that he was at one with Russia on all its complaints about the failed European security architecture, and the real risks of its toxicity for Russia that could lead to war in Europe.

Macron explicitly said that new security arrangements in Europe are absolutely needed. (In spite of his care not to poke the U.S. in the eye, he was clearly signalling a non-NATO ‘new’ arrangement). He also flatly contradicted the Washington narrative, saying that he did not believe Russia had an intent to invade Ukraine. Adding that in respect to NATO expansion, mistakes had been made.

Macron, in short, came out at complete odds with the Biden narrative of imminent war. He clearly risks an outpouring of Anglo-U.S. and some European wrath for unreservedly taking on board Putin’s ‘not an inch’ stance of full Kiev compliance with Minsk, and a complete settlement for Donbass, as his own. The French President subsequently travelled to Kiev to shore up the ceasefire on the Contact Line. Predictably, the Anglo press is now hailing Minsk II as a weapon being held to the head of Kiev – precisely loaded to fracture the state and trigger a civil war.

Macron, from his comments, seemingly understands that the Ukraine crisis – through posing grave risks war inside Europe – paradoxically does not lie at the heart of the Carolingian fears.

Strikingly, China is saying the same explicitly: The authoritative Global Times in an editorial warns that the U.S. is instigating conflict in Ukraine in order to tighten bloc discipline – to corral European States back into the U.S.-led fold. No doubt, China makes the connection that Ukraine provides the perfect pivot for shepherding Europe towards America’s next stage of requiring a united front with the U.S. for the later task of barricading-in China, behind her borders.

In play, therefore, are key decisions that will define Europe for the future. On the one hand, (as Pepe Escobar noted some two years ago), “the goal of Russian and Chinese policy is to recruit Germany into a triple alliance locking together the Eurasian land mass à la Mackinder into the greatest geopolitical alliance in history – switching world power in favour of these three great powers, and against Anglo-Saxon sea power”. And on the other hand, NATO was conceived, from the outset, as a means of Anglo-American control over Europe and more precisely for keeping Germany ‘down’, and Russia ‘out’ (in that old axiom of western strategists). Lord Hastings (Lionel Ismay), NATO’s first Secretary General, famously said that NATO was created to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”. This mindset lingers on, but the formula has acquired today a greater import, and a new twist: To keep Germany ‘down and price uncompetitive’ versus U.S. goods; to keep Russia ‘out’ from being Europe’s source of cheap energy; and to keep China ‘fenced out’ from EU–U.S. trade. The aim is to contain Europe firmly within America’s narrowly defined economic orbit and compelled to forgo the benefits of Chinese and Russian technology, finance and trade – thus helping towards achieving the aim of barricading China within its borders.

Largely overlooked is the geo-political import: that China, for the first time, is directly intervening (taking a very clear and powerful stance) on a matter central to European affairs. In the longer term, this suggests that China will be taking a more politically orientated approach to its relations with European states. In this context, at the Biden and Olaf Scholtz’s press conference in Washington this week – lit up, in flashing neon lights, for all to see – Biden literally bullied Germany into a commitment to scrap Nordstream 2 (should Russia invade Ukraine), reflecting Washington’s aim to keep Germany on the leash of bloc discipline. He effectively said that if Scholtz doesn’t bin Nordstream, then he, Biden, would do it: “I can do it”, he underlined.

Yet, the moment he gives that undertaking, Germany’s little slice of sovereignty is gone – Scholtz yields it to Washington. Moreover, Macron’s aspiration to some wider euro-autonomy is gone too, for without French and German policy alignment, EU ‘pretend sovereignty’ is gone. Moreover, if Nordstream is binned, EU energy security is blown away. And with little real alternative supply, the EU is nailed for good to expensive U.S. LNG dependency (with the likelihood of gas price crises at home, too).

It is not clear (and a likely source of anxiety for Macron), whether Germany’s refusal to give Biden his desired Nordstream ultimatum represents any meaningful reserve of Euro-sovereignty at all. What would happen were Washington to incite the Ukrainian militia ‘crazies’ into some outrage, or into a false flag attack that triggers mayhem?

Would Scholtz be able to hold his Nordstream ‘line’ in the ensuing frenzy that the Anglo-axis would whip up? The little space which Macron has been trying to free-up in order to resolve the Ukraine crisis, would evaporate in the moment. All this underlines what a narrow ‘line’ Macron is trying to walk: Were Schulz ‘to cave’ over Nordstream, Macron’s aspirations to re-shape Europe’s security architecture inevitably would be perceived in Moscow – though laudable – as hollow for their lack of any real European agency. And in the Ukrainian particular, Macron’s room for manoeuvre to prevent a war in Europe would be attenuated, since only by Macron (backed by the EU), acting in lockstep with Putin, would there be a chance to compel Kiev to implement Minsk II.

The list of Macron’s challenges do not end there: France has the EU rotating Presidency, but EU foreign policy requires unanimity amongst member-states. Can he get that? Will Team Biden become so angered at France playing the maverick, that Washington resolves to stick a spanner in Macron’s works?

Biden needs a foreign policy achievement for his campaign into the Midterms. And 63% of Americans say they would support massive sanctions imposed on Russia, were Moscow to invade Ukraine. Biden is known to believe in the adage that ultimately all politics – including foreign policy – is subservient to domestic electoral needs. Heavily sanctioning Russia – with Europe acting in lockstep – is just the step that would likely be seen in the White House as giving his ratings a needed fillip. (And not unprecedented: Recall Bill Clinton, under pressure over the Lewinsky exposé, triggered the Balkan war to distract from his personal predicament).

Not surprisingly, President Putin is cautious. Is Macron, who says he has consulted widely, speaking for the EU? And most important of all, where does Washington stand in this? The most significant point to grasp from the Putin–Macron episode is that it gave the lie to the idea that Moscow is somehow hoping to open negotiations with the West on secondary issues, as a possible gateway to Russia’s existential concerns. Russia is open to negotiations, but only in respect to Putin’s three red lines: No NATO (including stealth NATO) in Ukraine; no strike missiles on Russia’s border; and the roll-back of NATO to the lines of 1997. Putin did not give an inch on the latter; he gave not an inch either on Minsk as the only solution in Ukraine. Putin did not give at all the impression of a man liking negotiating for the sake of negotiating.

Bottom line: No easy fixes. Even if conflict is frozen or paused over the short term, it will not hold longer-term, as the West refuses to acknowledge that Putin means what he says. This likely will only change through the sides’ experience of pain. The West, for now, sits sanguine in the belief that it has escalatory preponderance in the application of pain. We’ll see how true that proves to be. It seems reasonable to expect we will have this crisis with us – in its various forms – for at least the next two years. These political initiatives mark but the start of a drawn-out, high-stakes, phase of a Russian effort to shift the European security architecture into a new form which the West presently rejects. The Russian aim will be to keep the pressures, and even the latency, of war ever-present, in order to harass war-averse Western leaders to make this necessary shift.

Source: SCF.

UK’s Johnson Hails Diplomacy While Stoking Russia War

Johnson wrote an opinion piece for the Times newspaper this week in which he said he believed that “diplomacy can prevail” to prevent mounting tensions over Ukraine from escalating into a full-blown war between the US-NATO military bloc and Russia. This was while Johnson announced that Britain was planning to deploy more Marines, fighter jets and warships to Eastern Europe. Britain has already taken the lead among European NATO members in sending weapons and special forces to Ukraine in what is claimed to be a defense against “Russian aggression”.

What Johnson is proposing this week is deploying more British forces to Poland and the Baltic states in what he calls a show of Britain’s “immovable” support for Europe. This is cynical grandstanding to burnish Britain’s image as some kind of noble power. France’s President Emmanuel Macron was in Moscow this week for substantial talks with Russian leader Vladimir Putin on efforts to deescalate tensions over Ukraine. Next week, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is also to visit Moscow for talks with Putin.

Then we see London seeming to do its utmost to make sure diplomacy fails by wantonly raising military tensions with Russia.

Johnson and his Foreign Secretary Liz Truss have been busy issuing dire warnings to Russia that it faces bloody carnage if it dares invade Ukraine. Moscow has repeatedly denied it is planning to invade. Nevertheless, Truss has been photographed in British news media donning military body armor while riding atop a tank. She is due to visit Moscow in the coming days for talks with her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov. It promises to be a frosty meeting. One wonders why the Kremlin is even entertaining such an incompetent and disingenuous British envoy.

London, as usual, is doing Washington’s bidding. Since the United States launched the propaganda campaign nearly three months ago accusing Russia of aggression against Ukraine, Britain has been vocal in amplifying Washington’s message of alleged Russian aggression.

Propaganda and media psychological operations are one realm where the decrepit British empire retains some dubious skills. Presumably, the prevalence of anglophone mass media gives the Brits an innate advantage.

What London seems good at capitalizing on is animating the ready and willing inherent Russophobia of Poland and the Baltic states. The recent British military deployments have been concentrated in these Eastern European states, as well as in Ukraine. This move has served to pump up the hysteria of Russian aggression.

It is significant that last week Johnson was in Kiev meeting Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky on the same day as Polish premier Mateusz Morawiecki. Morawiecki has been among the most vehemently Russophobic Eastern European voices demanding more drastic sanctions against Moscow.

Johnson is reinforcing these calls for a unified NATO and European position on preemptive sanctions against Russia “if it invades Ukraine”. Johnson said the sanctions should be “ready to go” and should include the termination of the Nord Stream 2 gas supply pipeline between Russia and the European Union.

Notably, Germany and France – the two largest economies of the European Union – are reluctant to talk about terminating Nord Stream 2 in the event of escalating tensions. Berlin and Paris are discernibly more disposed to find a diplomatic way out of the impasse between the US-led NATO bloc and Russia.

Here’s a bitter irony: Britain quit the European Union after its Brexit referendum in 2016. Boris Johnson was a leading public figure pushing for Brexit with the mantra of “taking back control” from the European Union.

Yet while Britain is now formally out of the European bloc, it is still able to exert tremendous sway over the EU in its relations with Russia. London is mobilizing an axis of hostility towards Moscow by militarizing the Russophobic Eastern European states, as well as Ukraine, and by pushing sanctions to destroy strategic energy trade with Russia.

Indeed, arguably Britain is deliberately inflating its international importance by stoking dangerous tensions with Russia.

The crisis over Ukraine has been artificially pumped up by Washington aided and abetted by London. Dictating Europe’s energy and foreign affairs with regard to Russia, and also China, is the tacit objective for Washington and its trusty British minion. And in pulling that objective off, Britain has cynically exploited Eastern European Russophobia to land itself an outsized role in interfering with the European Union’s affairs, a bloc which it officially left after Brexit.

Russia’s security concerns should be rationally and calmly negotiated through diplomatic means. Moscow’s objections about Ukraine joining NATO are entirely reasonable.

But there is little chance of diplomacy prevailing when the likes of Boris Johnson and other Cold Warriors in London are fueling war tensions with provocative supplies of weapons to Eastern Europe amid fantastic distortions about “Russian aggression”.

A further bitter irony is Britain’s nefarious historical role in inciting wars in Europe. Contrary to the conventional propaganda version of the Second World War, it was London that covertly mobilized Nazi Germany to attack the Soviet Union, thereby sacrificing its nominal “ally” Poland and others in the process. Today, London proclaims it is defending Europe against “Russian aggression” while paving the path to war against Russia.

Source: SCF.

Russia, Ukraine, and The New York Times.

Ukraine shares a border with Russia the way Mexico and Canada do with the United States. Since 1823, we have claimed the right to defend our hemisphere in accordance with the Monroe Doctrine, and now Russia is putting into practice a similar policy against a militarized Ukraine. The parallels are close; the reasons for a defensive posture, obvious. Yet Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said the US no longer believes that there are spheres of influence.

Or rather, there is just one sphere: the ever-expanding terrain of legitimate Western democracies approved by NATO. This worldview—an immediate, unexamined consequence of the fall of Soviet communism in 1991—cut a clear path through the Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, and (for all the fuss) Trump administrations. But there were two bumps that might have served as a warning. In 2008, Georgia’s attack on Russian troops in South Ossetia was answered with decisive and crushing force, and in 2014, Russia responded to the US-backed coup in Ukraine by annexing Crimea. Vladimir Putin explained that when he next visited Sevastopol, he would prefer not to be greeted by NATO sailors on the Black Sea.

The US, long a one-party state in foreign policy, uses a different calendar from Russia. For us, the time line starts in 2014. For Russia, it goes back to 1999, when the first group of former Eastern bloc countries were admitted to NATO: Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. An additional group joined in 2004: Bulgaria, Romania, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. To the US and its dependent NATO allies, this was a natural reiteration of Manifest Destiny and, like the first version, well-meaning, brave, and innocent. One look at a map will tell you what the Russian reaction was bound to be.

Democrats, Republicans, and the liberal corporate media now find themselves in predictable harmony on Ukraine—coordinating all their stage effects, and as uninstructed by history as they were in Iraq. Meanwhile, Putin, his foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and his lead negotiator, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, have clarified their chief demand again and again: no further eastward expansion of NATO—specifically, a promise that Ukraine will not be admitted. Yet the phrase “eastward expansion of NATO” is only occasionally cited in mainstream reports and is never explained. The average reader of The New York Times would take it to be a Russian locution of indeterminate origins.

Recent Times reporting on Russia is marked by an overriding tendency. A brief selection follows. (An antidote, in advance, is John Mearsheimer’s 2015 lecture — available on YouTube —“Why Is Ukraine the West’s Fault?” The root cause of the crisis, as Mearsheimer argues in detail, was the decision to fortify Ukraine as a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. This began with the expansion of the European Union and NATO, was heated up by the US-sponsored Orange Revolution, and finally ignited with the US-backed Ukraine coup of 2014.)

Times print edition, January 16, Anton Troianovski and David E. Sanger, “Putin Could Cause Trouble Not Just in Ukraine but in West, Too.” The authors speak of “the security crisis Russia has ignited by surrounding Ukraine on three sides.” Note that Russia has “surrounded” Ukraine; not that NATO put Russia’s back to the wall. Troianovski and Sanger add that “by the White House’s accounting,” Russia has been “sending in saboteurs to create a pretext for invasion” (italics added). This is the same White House that cleared the August 29 drone strike that killed 10 civilians in Kabul. (An event, incidentally, on which Times reporting has been as forthright and penetrating as its coverage of Russia, NATO, and Ukraine has been slanted and deceptive.)

Troianovski and Sanger continue: “There were hints [by Russia]…that nuclear weapons could be shifted to places—perhaps not far from the United States coastline—that would reduce warning times after a launch to as little as five minutes.” Hints? From whom? And with what authority, what plausibility? The sentence is a shameless provocative conjecture posing as a fact.

Again, the crisis was “touched off by the Kremlin’s release of a series of demands that…would effectively restore Russia’s sphere of influence close to Soviet-era lines.” Here, at last, the authors arrive at a flat falsehood. The Soviet sphere encompassed Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania—all now members of NATO—and none of those countries is required by Russia to exit the West and install a Soviet-style puppet government. How did this sentence get past a fact-checker?

January 14, Troianovski and Sanger, “Russia Warns It May End Talks on Ukraine.” Summaries can mislead by grammatical as well as historical omission. “Russia,” the authors say, “is demanding that NATO drastically scale back its presence near Russia’s borders in Eastern Europe.” The adjective they omit before “presence” is “military.” Why elide that? And why not mention the broken 1990 vow by the George H.W. Bush administration: that NATO would extend “not one inch” east of Germany? Because if you say the very presence of NATO is being pushed back, you imply a return of Russian dominance on the Soviet scale.

January 9, Sanger and Eric Schmitt, “As Talks Loom, U.S. Draws a Line on Ukraine.” Putin “is demanding an end to NATO expansion,” and specifically a pledge not to admit Ukraine. True, but then the same sentence asserts, fantastically, that these “demands amount to a dismantling of the security architecture of Europe built after the Soviet Union’s collapse.” No expansion has become synonymous with dismantling.

January 15, Sanger, “U.S. Says Moscow Sent Saboteurs to Roil Ukraine.” Concerning “U.S. says”: no comment.

Expect much more of this from the Times, CNN, and our one-party foreign policy. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen were barely a first course. With Ukraine, they seem to think they have found a man-size battle, worthy of the owner and proprietor of the world’s only sphere of influence.