Letar du efter “good guys” bland ledarna som är inblandade i kriget i Ukraina så är det svårt att finna dem. Däremot finns det flera “bad guys”. Man hittar absolut inga “good gays” hos dem som backar upp Putin och hans rent kriminella angrepp på Ukraina med militära medel istället för att försöka lösa Rysslands säkerhetsproblem på diplomatisk väg. Men det även finns fler “bad guys”, skriver Paul street i CounterPunch:
US Americans, as products of television and Hollywood, want good guys and bad guys. So who have been the good guys in the Ukraine War and the politics surrounding it?
Not Putin and the Kremlin Certainly NOT the fascistic dictator Vladimir Putin and those who back his ugly invasion of Ukraine. His assault on a country directly proximate to his own is nothing on the scale of the United States’ arch-criminal assaults on nations far from its own shores – Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia in the last century and Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya in the current one – but it is a war crime nonetheless. It is chilling to witness the sheer impunity with which the sheltered, super-opulent Russian ruler has sent many thousands of Russian soldiers off to death along with (conservatively) more than a thousand Ukrainian civilians, including hundreds of children.
Instead of pursuing political and diplomatic channels to address Russia’s regional security concerns regarding Ukraine (see below), Putin opted instead for mass death and destruction while threatening to use nuclear weapons to discourage a Western military response to his criminal action. He has preposterously denied Ukraine’s existence as a legitimate nation and ludicrously called it a “Nazi” regime engaged in “genocide.”
Along the way, the blood-soaked tyrant has shut down independent media within Russia (essentially declaring “martial law for the media”) and sent his military police to sweep up Russian antiwar protesters. He has directed his government’s rubber-stamp legislative body (the Duma) to make it a crime carrying a 15-year prison sentence to call his war of invasion a war or an invasion (doing so is described in Trumpian terms as “fake news” by the Russian state). He has gone on national Russian television to deliver a chilling and fascistic speech calling war opponents a “fifth column” full of “scum and traitors,” comparing them to small insects to be spat of proud Russians’ mouth.
That he likely and wrongly expected a smooth and relatively bloodless takeover of Ukraine does not absolve him. Neither does the fact that Washington significantly provoked his incursion. Vladimir Putin is a bad guy .
Not Biden and Washington
But you won’t find the “good guys” in Washington either. The United States of America (USA) has no moral standing to denounce any other nation’s murderous wars of invasion given its own much larger criminal Superpower record on that score. To make matters worse, Washington has spent years egging the Russian strongman Putin into his latest crime. Since the late 1990s, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, that is the USA, has been boldly violating George H.W. Bush’s post-Cold War pledge not to expand NATO eastward. The USA-led Humiliate Russia Project has gone full speed ahead in defiance of warnings from imperial architects and operatives including George Kennan, Henry Kissinger, Jack Matlock, current CIA Director William Burns, and many others.
Washington has been poking the Russian bear in the eye regarding the especially sensitive case of Ukraine since at least 2014, indifferent to the plight of millions put at risk by such imperial jabbing far from US shores. A critical document that has been widely ignored by US media certainly set Putin and his planners on edge last fall. The Joint Statement on the U.S.-Ukraine Strategic Partnership signed by Joe Biden last September said that the door was wide open for Ukraine to join NATO. It established a “Strategic Defense Framework” that provided Ukraine with elite anti-tank and air-defense weapons and “a robust training and exercise program in keeping with Ukraine’s status as a NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partner.”
Läs mer:
- Looking for “Good Guys” on Ukraine? – Counterpunch, 1 apr 2022
