History of the Ukrainian War

by Eric Zuesse

The Ukrainian war started when the democratically elected President of Ukraine (an infamously corrupt country), who was committed to keeping his country internationally neutral (not allied with either Russia or the United States), met privately with both the U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2010.

This was shortly after the Ukrainian President’s election earlier in 2010; and, on both occasions, he rejected their urgings for Ukraine to become allied with the United States against his adjoining country Russia.

This was being urged upon him so that America could position its nuclear missiles at the Russian border with Ukraine, less than a five-minute striking distance away from hitting the Kremlin in Moscow.

On 23 June 2011, according to WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange in his 27 October 2014 posted article “Google Is Not What It Seems”, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt and his aide (and Hillary Clinton’s friend) Jared Cohen, met together with Assange during Assange’s involuntary house-arrest by the UK regime inside Ecuador’s Embassy in London.

They managed to fool him into providing crucial information about how the internet could be used in order to help stir Ukrainians to overthrow their current corrupt President and how to train the leaders of Ukraine’s two racist-fascist anti-Russian political parties (the Social-Nationalist Party of Ukraine — which the CIA got name-changed to the “Freedom” or “Svoboda” Party — and the Right Sector Party) so as to lead a U.S. coup there, under the cover of popular anti-corruption protests that the U.S. was aiming to produce in Kiev.

On 1 March 2013 inside America’s Embassy to Ukraine in Kiev, a series of “Tech Camps” started to be held, in order to train those Ukrainian nazis for their leadership of Ukraine’s ‘anti-corruption’ organizing.

Simultaneously, under Polish Government authorization, the CIA was training in Poland the military Right Sector leaders on how to lead the coming U.S. coup in neighboring Ukraine. As the independent Polish investigative journalist Marek Miszczuk headlined for the Polish magazine NIE (“meaning “NO”) (the original article being in Polish): “Maidan secret state secret: Polish training camp for Ukrainians”. The article was published 14 April 2014. Excerpts:

An informant who introduced himself as Wowa called the “NIE” editorial office with the information that the Maidan rebels in Wrocław are neo-fascists … [with] tattooed swastikas, swords, eagles and crosses with unambiguous meaning. … Wowa pleadingly announced that photos of members of the Right Sector must not appear in the press. … 86 fighters from the then-prepared Euromaidan flew over the Vistula River in September 2013 at the invitation of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The pretext was to start cooperation between the Warsaw University of Technology and the National University of Technology in Kiev.

But they were in Poland to receive special training to overthrow Ukraine’s government. … Day 3 and 4 – theoretical classes: crowd management, target selection, tactics and leadership. Day 5 – training in behavior in stressful situations. Day 6 – free without leaving the center. Day 7 – pre-medical help. Day 8 – protection against irritating gases. Day 9 – building barricades. And so on and on for almost 25 days.

The program includes … classes at the shooting range (including three times with sniper rifles!), and tactical and practical training in the assault on buildings. …

Excited by the importance of the information that was presented to me, I started to verify it.

The Office of the Press Spokesman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs refused to answer the questions about the student exchange without giving any reason. It did not want to disclose whether it had actually invited dozens of neo-fascists to Poland to teach them how to overthrow the legal Ukrainian authorities. …

Let us summarize: in September 2013, according to the information presented to me, several dozen Ukrainian students of the Polytechnic University will come to Poland, at the invitation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In fact, they are members of the Right Sector, an extreme right-wing and nationalist Ukrainian group led by Dmytro Jarosz – he declined to comment on his visit to Legionowo.

Poland’s ‘fact-checking’ organization is (appropriately) titled demagog dot org (Demagog Association), and it is funded by the Stefan Batory Foundation. Demagog’s article about that NIE news report rated it “NIEWERYFIKOWALNE” or “ NOT VERIFIABLE”. The sole reason given was:

“The Ministry [of Foreign Affairs] strongly opposes such news, emphasizing that the weekly (magazine) has violated not only the principles of good taste, but also raison d’etat (reasons of state).”

No facts that were alleged in Miszczuk’s article were even mentioned, much less disproven. How can his article be “unverifiable” if the evidence that it refers to isn’t so much as even being checked?

Miszczuk’s article’s mention of “the Right Sector, an extreme right-wing and nationalist Ukrainian group led by Dmytro Jarosz” referred to the key person (Dmitriy Yarosh) and the key group (his Right Sector paramilitary organization and political party) that has actually been running Ukraine behind the scenes ever since the coup, and they also were the key people who had led the snipers who were firing down from tall buildings upon the Ukrainian Government’s police and upon the anti-Government demonstrators at Kiev’s Maidan Square — the violence simultaneously against both sides — that the newly installed post-coup government immediately blamed against the just-ousted democratically elected President, so that the new top officials were all blaming the ones that they had replaced.

The first time that this fact about the coup became publicly known was in an internet-uploaded telephone conversation, a phone call on 26 February 2014, between the foreign-affairs chief of the European Union, Catherine Ashton, and her investigator, Urmas Paet, who informed her that the new Government in Ukraine was not actually the result of what the democratically elected Government (the one that had just been overthrown) had done, but was instead a coup by “the new coalition” government that overthrew the elected Government. This is from that transcript:

What was quite disturbing, the same oligarch [Petro Poroshenko — and so when he soon thereafter became Ukraine’s President three months later, he already knew this] told that well, all the evidence shows that the people who were killed by snipers, from both sides, among policemen and people from the streets, [this will shock Ashton, who thought that Yanukovych had masterminded the killings] that they were the same snipers, killing people from both sides [so, Poroshenko himself knew that his regime was based on a false-flag U.S.-controlled coup d’etat against his predecessor, Yanukovych — and he even said as much to Ashton’s investigator]

Well, that’s yes, …

So that and then she [Dr. Olga Bolgomets] also showed me some photos, she said that as a medical doctor, she can, you know, say that it’s the same handwriting, the same type of bullets, and it’s really disturbing that now the new coalition that they don’t want to investigate, what exactly happened; so that now there is stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new coalition.

Notice here that Paet had tactfully avoided saying that Ashton’s assumption that it had been Yanukovych was false; instead, he totally ignored her having suggested that, and he here simply said that the evidence went totally in the opposite direction, the direction that the man who would subsequently win the Presidency in Ukraine’s 25 May 2014 election — the ‘peace’ candidate in that ‘election’, the oligarch Petro Poroshenko himself — knew to be true: that the guilty party was “the new coalition” of which he was a part. Paet said nothing about this, and Ashton asked him no questions about it, nor about what country had actually organized the coup. Ashton responded:

I think that we do want to investigate. 

That sentiment on her part lasted, however, only about one second.

I mean I didn’t pick that up, that’s interesting. Gosh? 

Ashton here seemed to have felt outright embarrassed, and she thus ended in a “Gosh” that was almost inaudible, as if a question, and then she immediately proceeded simply to ignore this crucial matter entirely. All of the evidence suggests that she was exceedingly reluctant to believe that in the overthrow, the bad guys had actually been on the anti-Yanukovych side. The overthrow of Yanukovych has since been called “the most blatant coup in history”.

The classic news report about the U.S. coup that took place in Ukraine in February 2014 appeared as an independently produced ten-minute compilation video that was uploaded to youtube on 12 March 2014 — just weeks after the event — which made clear that it had been a U.S. coup, NOT a ‘democratic revolution’ as the press allege it to have been. The video placed into context the smoking-gun piece of evidence, which was the 4 February 2014 youtube recording of Victoria Nuland telling Geoffrey Pyatt whom to get appointed to run Ukraine after the coup would be over (which then happened three weeks later). Obviously, the U.S.-and-allied media lied about all of this and still do lie about it, in order to carry on the U.S. regime’s war to conquer Russia.

Then, on 15 February 2015, the German Government’s ARD TV network headlined “Maidan Snipers. German TV expose. ARD Monitor. Eng Subs”, and, independently of the Paet-Ashton phone call, verified Paet’s key findings, by their own investigative news reporting and interviewing people who had had direct access to the evidence.

That TV news report supplies overwhelming evidence that the ‘democratic revolution’ of Ukraine’s February 2014 governmental overthrow had actually been anything but, and was instead another U.S. coup — perhaps the most impactful one in all of the world’s history because that coup in Ukraine might likely bring on WW 3.

On the same day as the peak of the coup, 20 February 2014, was “The Anti-Crimean Pogrom that Sparked Crimea’s Breakaway”. Donetsk broke away from Ukraine on 7 April 2014, and U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media were immediately calling it part of a Russian ‘invasion of Ukraine’, and even calling it ‘Russian roulette’, though it was an authentic response by Donetsk residents to Obama’s anti-Russian coup in Ukraine, and the aggression there was by America’s stooges, not by any Russians or stooges of or from Russia.

On 12 April 2014, the anti-Russia U.S.-backed newspaper Kyiv Post bannered “Armed pro-Russian extremists launch coordinated attacks in Donetsk Oblast, seize regional police headquarters, set up checkpoints”, and the reporter, who was from Chicago, portrayed the anti-coup movement as non-local, a foreign invasion from Russia.

However, that ‘journalist’ gave away that it was actually a popular uprising when he noted that “One of the masked armed gunmen — among 70 who took part in the takeover of the Sloviansk police station — called the target a strategic building with a weapons arsenal that the militants began handing out to protesters.”

Then, on 9-12 April 2014, the new Ukrainian government massacred of people in Sloviansk and in Kramatorsk, two major cities that likewise had voted overwhelmingly for the President whom Obama’s bloody coup had overthrown. The locals were terrified of the coup regime.

On 16 April 2014, the Kyiv Post reported about the rebellions the prior day in Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Donetsk and Lugansk, headlining “A day of humiliation as Ukrainian military offensive stalls, six armored vehicles seized”.

On 27 April 2014, Lugansk joined with Donetsk and likewise broke away from Ukraine. All of the rebelling cities were being bombed and shelled by the Obama-installed government. As Seumas Milne well documented in the Guardian on 30 April 2014, “It’s not Russia that’s pushed Ukraine to the brink of war”, it’s the U.S. regime that did it, and Milne mentioned both the Right Sector and the Svoboda Party as the key behind-the-scenes agents, enforcers, for the U.S. regime there.

Next up was the massacre in Odessa on 2 May 2014, trapping and burning people to death. And, then, Mariupol outright rebelled, starting on 9 May 2014, and the Obama-installed Ukrainian junta crushed them within three months. However, Lugansk and Donetsk never surrendered, and that part of the civil war has continued to this day.

France, Germany, and Russia established in February 2015 the Minsk II cease-fire agreement that Lugansk and Donetsk willingly signed, and that Ukraine was compelled to sign in order to keep alive the U.S.-installed regime’s chances for admission to the EU. But Ukraine never complied with Minsk II, and just continued its shelling into those two breakaway republics.

The U.S. regime was determined to get Ukraine as a base from which to invade Russia. On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in order to prevent that. But now it appears that instead of shrinking NATO, it’s likely to increase even faster on account of media having successfully portrayed the aggression as being by Russia instead of by America. The war is successfully portrayed as being between Ukraine and Russia, but it is instead actually between America and Russia, and Ukraine is only the hottest battlefield of it at this stage.

As regards what the likely outcomes of this will be, the great geostrategic analyst Alexander Mercouris believes that at the present stage Russia has the advantage; however — though I usually agree with him — I believe that America does.  (Both of us agree that the world-at-large — except for the owners of U.S. armaments-makers and extraction corporations — will be great suffering, and maybe ultimately obliterated, by this conflict, which the U.S. caused; and that, therefore, in the final analysis, virtually everyone will be losing from it.)

Eric Zuesse

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s next book (soon to be published) will be AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change. It’s about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.