At the very beginning of the Ukraine war, Russia cited its exasperation with NATO over deliberate ignorance of Moscow’s repeated appeals not to expand further to doorstep of the Russian Federation.
This was as Ukraine, Russia’s strategic next-door neighbour, increasingly became a new frontier for NATO’s encirclement of Russia through a nefarious expansionist agenda.
Russia has raised its security concerns with both NATO and Washington, recalling that at the end of the Cold War both sides had agreed that NATO would not expand eastward and thereby threaten Russia’s security.
This is the narrative that is seldom shared publicly in the West. Instead, the preferred narrative is that Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, are guilty of an expansionist agenda it whose centre is to conquer Ukraine.
I paint this picture to draw attention to what has become empirical evidence that NATO and the West are engaged in a proxy war against Russia, using Ukraine as a pawn.
Initially, Western countries appeared somewhat embarrassed to openly admit involvement in the conflict. Their strategy, which remains unchanged to this day, was to depict Ukraine and its President, Volodymyr Zelensky, as victims of Russian brutality. The grand plan – that of encircling Russia and, according to Moscow’s intelligence – conquer Russia and balkanize the powerful nuclear power into smaller “independent” states, remains intact but less certain. It is been dealt a major blow by Putin’s chess mastery, striking first whilst the enemy was busy finalizing plans.
Western media has gone overboard with reports of North Korean soldiers fighting on the side of the Russians in the conflict. This was laced with additional speculative reports that Russia has become too weak to fight Ukraine without outside assistance.
Conversely, too many Western nations, encouraged also by Brussels, have shored up Ukraine with military supplies and economic empowerment programs.
Coupled with this has been the intentional strategy to cast Zelensky as a war hero and Putin as a villain. At every opportunity, Western powers provide platform for Zelensky to bastardize Putin and Russia. This happens amid pomp and ceremony that has marked Zelensky’s constructed status as a protagonist.
The diplomatic isolation of Russia has clearly failed. The economic sanctions, unprecedented in nature, have boomerang. Europe in particular is reeling in economic woes. Recent protests in Spain over housing, France over education and Italy over economic issues mirror the quagmire EU is going through. The self-inflicted economic woes continue to see the emergence and rise of right-wing parties perform much better in elections, as Germany can attest.
This week, the veil of naked secrecy over foreign participation in the Ukrainian army was blown away.
Russian forces wiped out Colombian mercenaries’ base inside Ukraine. According to the Moscow weekly report, it was a large, temporary deployment site in Dergachi, near Kharkov.
It housed fighters from the 23rd Special Purpose Regiment of Ukraine’s National Guard who had been transferred there from Kiev, the Russian Security Services said.
The report further revealed that there were deaths of foreign fighters from Colombia, the UK, Georgia, Poland and “other countries”. It said the Ukrainian regime treats them as “cannon fodder”.
In addition, the reported stated that “foreign mercenaries have admitted in numerous interviews that Ukrainian commanders poorly coordinate their operations and that their chances of survival are slim, as the intensity of the fighting is far greater than what they experienced in Afghanistan or the Middle East”.
This, for me, is the crux of the matter. The Ukraine conflict can be made out to look like a simple matter of war between two neighbouring states. It has far-reaching repercussions in geopolitics. It is about surreptitious political ambitions based on expansion eastward to conquer Russia, and then turn on China afterwards.
The eastward expansion was always doomed to fail, if Western imperial goals did not blind NATO decision-makers’ judgement.
Russia is not a small nation. It is a nuclear power with the most arsenal in that regard. The penchant of the West to believe they can force any nation to abide by Western standards is shortsighted and dangerous. The West refers to this imperialism as a “rules-based world order”. Here, they mean their rules, e.g.: democracy according to their definition and characterization. In brutal honest words, what the West mean is that if you aren’t like the West, you are the enemy of a rules-based world order.
Western imperialism lacks grace and magnanimity. It does not accept the difference of worldviews, ideology and form of governance.
In Africa, the West regards the continent as backward and in dark ages. They do so without taking responsibility for their continued looting of Africa’s natural wealth and interference in the political systems through funding of their stooges.
A powerful nation such as China has had the courage and no-fear in telling the West that the Chinese governance model is “democracy with Chinese characteristics”.
The Russian conflict, week after week, lays bare the treacherous nature of geopolitics and how the world is constantly getting closer to the outbreak of a nuclear world war.
We are all teetering on the brink of an apocalypse, and Ukraine as a powder keg. Unless and until the West can withdraw their ambition to topple nuclear power Russia, the future for mankind looks bleak. The West must respect the sovereignty of all nations, not only their allies, but foes as well. It is a fundamental principle upon which the UN Charter is based. Ukraine resembles the stranglehold that unilateralism has had over multilateralism. This is a grave danger to the peaceful coexistence of all people and all nations of the world.
