Donald Trump has been flayed alive by Western media and leaders for saying Ukraine started the war. Here are facts, not myths, says Joe Lauria.
A clean-shaven Zelensky and Trump meeting for the first at the U.N. in 2019. They have come a long way since. (President of Ukraine/Wikimedia Commons)
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
The outcry spread quickly across the Western world: Donald Trump dared say Ukraine started the war.
The New York Times accused Trump of “rewriting the history of Russia’s invasion of its neighbor.” The paper’s White House correspondent wrote:
“When Russian forces crashed over the borders into Ukraine in 2022 determined to wipe it off the map as an independent state, the United States rushed to aid the beleaguered nation and cast its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as a hero of resistance.
Three years almost to the day later, President Trump is rewriting the history of Russia’s invasion of its smaller neighbor. Ukraine, in this version, is not a victim but a villain. And Mr. Zelensky is not a latter-day Winston Churchill, but a ‘dictator without elections’ who somehow started the war himself and conned America into helping.”
The BBC reported:
“Ukraine didn’t start the war. Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, having annexed Crimea in 2014.
The annexation came after Ukraine’s pro-Russian president was ousted by popular demonstrations.”
CNN howled: “President Donald Trump has now fully adopted Russia’s false propaganda on Ukraine, turning against a sovereign democracy that was invaded in favor of the invader. … Trump wrongly accused Ukraine of starting the conflict.”
“In comments to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump falsely claimed Kyiv had started the conflict, the largest on European soil since the second world,” complained the Financial Times.
It was pretty much the same thing across the Western media landscape, which spoke with one voice.
The media takes speaking with one voice as confirmation that they are right. But it’s often just massive confirmation bias for the story Western intelligence services and political leaders tell them, rather than an independent examination of the facts.
In this case the facts show that Trump is right.
The central question in all this is: when did the Ukraine war actually start? The Western mainstream leads masses of people to believe it began Feb. 24, 2022, when the Russian regular army intervened in what was already an eight-year old civil war that was very much begun by Ukraine, with U.S. help.
That’s the part they don’t tell you.
The key to the falsehood is what the BBC calls “Ukraine’s pro-Russian president” being “ousted by popular demonstrations.” [Emphasis added.]
Of course Trump didn’t explain that. He’s not a great public speaker. He too often fails to lay out the context needed to understand what he’s talking about.
Trump’s fleeting remark at a press encounter at his Florida estate last Tuesday set off the international furor.
“Today I heard: ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited’ [to the talks in Saudi Arabia with Russia],” Trump said about Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelensky. “Well, you’ve been there for three years … you should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
It was those six italicized words that ignited the firestorm. The rest of what he said in that sentence was ignored.
He was condemned by European leaders for those few words. Zelensky, who still leads Ukraine, accused Trump of spreading “a lot of disinformation coming from Russia.”
“Unfortunately, President Trump, with all due respect for him as the leader of a nation that we respect greatly, is living in this disinformation bubble,” Zelensky said.
The only way the West can deal with this is to call what happened Russian propaganda. As if a narrative is wrong, not because the facts are wrong, but because Russia is saying it. Essentially, Russia is never right, and the U.S. and its allies are never wrong.
It’s like the story of the American sitting next to a Russian on a flight from Moscow to Washington. “What brings you to Washington?” the American asks.
“I’m traveling to do research on American propaganda,” the Russian says.
“What American propaganda?”
“Exactly,” says the Russian.
Blowing a Deal
What was left out of the mainstream reporting was that Trump was highlighting opportunities to negotiate peace that Zelensky and Ukraine had squandered. “You could have made a deal,” he said.
But Trump fundamentally failed to explain how the Ukraine war began in 2014 and not on Feb. 22, 2022, three years ago Monday. That’s when Russia directly entered a war that had already been started by Ukraine and especially, Trump didn’t mention, by the United States.
[See: Biden Confirms Why US Needed This War]
‘Popular Demonstrations’
Protesters clash with police in Kiev, Ukraine, February 2014. (Mstyslav Chernov, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
On Feb 20, 2014, Viktor Yanukovych, who was elected president of Ukraine in 2010 in a popular vote certified by the OSCE, was violently overthrown.
Yanukovych’s base in the Russian-speaking parts of Eastern and Southern Ukraine refused to recognize the unconstitutional government that took over, defending their democratic rights.
Majority ethnic-Russian Crimea, a huge base of Yanukovych’s support, voted little more than a month later, on March 16, 2014, to leave Ukraine and rejoin Russia. The Ukrainian government had also declared that it would not extend beyond 2017 Russia’s lease on a Black Sea naval base in Sevastopol, Crimea.
Street violence broke out in other parts of Ukraine. Five days after extreme right-wing Ukrainian gangs burned alive 48 Russian speakers in a trades union building in Odessa, two of the Eastern provinces declared independence from Ukraine and took over government buildings.
With U.S. backing, the unconstitutional government on April 16, 2014 launched a military attack against those two provinces in the Donbass region.
This is how Ukraine stated the war and the date they did it on.
Trump didn’t mention the instrumental part the U.S. played in Yanukoych’s ouster and Kiev’s subsequent war on Donbass.
US Role in Starting the War
John McCain addressing crowd in Kiev, Dec. 15, 2013. (U.S. Senate/Office of Chris Murphy/Wikimedia Commons)
Think of an encampment of protesters in Lafayette Park, some of whom are violent. They are calling for the ouster of the U.S. president from the White House across the street.
Two senior Russian lawmakers then show up in the park. They appear with protest leaders and address the crowd, encouraging them, telling them Russia is with them.
Then the Russian deputy foreign minister in charge of North American affairs appears in Lafayette Park handing out food to the encamped demonstrators.
Later the minister is caught on an open telephone line discussing with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. the composition of the new American government once the president is overthrown. This minister had also made a speech saying Russia spent $5 billion to bring democracy to the United States.
The elected American president is then overthrown violently and flees the country. Russia installs the government it has selected. California rejects the Russian-installed regime and says it is breaking away from the United States. The new coup government then launches a war against California.
If this actually happened in Washington, do you think anyone in the U.S. would say that Russia had anything to do with overthrowing the U.S. government? Or would they have just said he was ousted by “popular demonstrations?”
But this is precisely what happened in Ukraine in 2014. The role of the legislators was played in real life by Senators John McCain and Chris Murphy. The deputy foreign minister was played by Victoria Nuland, the then U.S. assistant secretary of state for Eurasian affairs.
Obama Tries to Contain the War
Russia came to Donbass’ defense with arms, equipment, ammunition and the quasi-independent Wagner mercenaries. To cover up Kiev’s aggression, and to justify it, Western governments and their media falsely called Moscow’s help to ethnic Russians an “invasion.”
After the illegitimate government began its attack on the breakaway Russian regions, President Barack Obama tried to limit its escalation. The New York Times reported on March 10, 2015:
“The president has signaled privately that despite all the pressure, he remains reluctant to send arms. In part, he has told aides and visitors that arming the Ukrainians would encourage the notion that they could actually defeat the far more powerful Russians, and so it would potentially draw a more forceful response from Moscow.
Mr. Obama continues to pose questions indicating his doubts. ‘O.K., what happens if we send in equipment — do we have to send in trainers?’ said one person paraphrasing the discussion on the condition of anonymity. ‘What if it ends up in the hands of thugs? What if Putin escalates?’”
First, Obama is talking about a war that was ongoing, that had started the year before, not seven years later. Second, Obama is keenly aware that U.S. lethal aid to Ukraine, while fighting a civil war against Russian-speakers, would provoke Russia.
And third, Obama admits here what Western orthodoxy now denies, (but which was widely reported in the mainstream at the time), namely that “thugs” were a big problem in Ukraine. By thugs Obama clearly meant extreme right-wing and neo-Nazi groups fighting for Ukraine. [See: On the Influence of Neo-Nazism in Ukraine]
September 2015: President Barack Obama, right, in a pull-aside conversation with Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko outside the U.N. in New York. (White House/Pete Souza)
Trump Gives In to Pressure
During the 2016 Republican Convention a plank in the Republican party platform was found by Democrats that said no lethal aid to Ukraine. Under the deranged influence of Russiagate, this was trumpeted as evidence of Trump’s collusion with Russia, even though it was only the continuation of Obama’s exact policy.
Trying to escape the pressure of Russiagate, Trump listened to his treacherous advisers and armed the Ukrainians, greatly exacerbating the war and provoking the Russians, as Obama feared.
Trump said last Tuesday that Ukraine had many chances to make a deal with Russia. To try to end the war, Russia backed the Minsk accords, which grew out of a Kremlin meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in May 2015. The accords, which were endorsed by the U.N. Security Council with U.S. assent, would have left the breakaway eastern provinces inside Ukraine with autonomy.
However, France, Germany and Ukraine, including three years under Zelensky, blocked its implementation. Merkel, former French President Francois Hollande and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko all admitted they strung Russia along to buy time for NATO to arm and train Ukraine.
This is what Trump apparently meant when he said Zelensky had three years to do a deal, or rather to implement a deal already made.
With signs of a renewed Ukrainian offensive against Donbass, Russia presented NATO and the U.S. two treaty proposals in December 2021. They called for a new security architecture in Europe, namely the withdrawal of NATO troops from former Warsaw Pact countries and U.S. missiles from Poland and Romania minutes away from Moscow.
Trump keeps repeating that the Russian intervention would never have happened had he been president. Perhaps he would have negotiated these treaties. A Daily Mail story last week said Trump is considering withdrawing U.S. troops from the Baltics, part of what Russia wants in a new security arrangement in Europe. It’s part of what Russia has been arguing for decades.
Moscow told the Biden administration that if the treaties were rejected, Moscow could resort to “technical/military means” in Ukraine.
Fully understanding that this meant a new, more deadly phase of the war, Biden rejected the treaties, provoking Russia’s direct intervention in the civil war. Biden needed this to happen to become the “start” of the war — as if history began on Feb. 24, 2022.
Biden and his defense secretary made plain the U.S. aim was to “weaken” and to overthrow the Putin government and return to the dominance the U.S. enjoyed over Russia in the 1990s.
To do this, Biden needed Russia’s invasion in order to launch an information, economic and ground proxy war against Russia. Three years later, the West has lost all three and is still lying about when it all began.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on X @unjoe.
Once, again, Joe Lauria, slays it!!! “Yes, Ukraine Started the War.” 2.23.24, ‘Shake-Down:’ “Donald Trump dared say Ukraine started the war.” Joe Lauria.
BUT, when “we” hear it front the other side, it’s a completely different vibe, i.e., Jo$eph R. Biden, posing as POTUS, “calls Russian moves a ‘premeditated attack,’ announces sanctions against Moscow & says Putin will be turned into an international pariah.’ (2.25.22)
…. “Can we roll the tape back, for a second?” @ hxxps://www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-of-bidens-speech-after-russia-invades-ukraine/
“Did Biden say he’s convinced Putin WILL invade Ukraine; OR, he’s convinced Putin TO invade Ukraine?” Jeffrey St.Clair
….. February 25, 2022, “For weeks — for weeks, we have been warning that this would happen. And now it’s unfolding largely as we predicted. In the past week, we’ve seen shelling increase in the Donbas, the region in eastern Ukraine controlled by Russian-backed separatists. Rus- — the Russian government has perpetrated cyberattacks against Ukraine.”
“[AND], at the very moment that the United Nations Security Council was meeting to stand up for Ukraine’s sovereignty to stave off invasion, Putin declared [HIS] war. Within moments — moments, missile strikes began to fall on historic cities across Ukraine. Then came in the air raids, followed by tanks and troops rolling in.” Jo$eph R. Biden.
“Putin is the aggressor. Putin chose this war. And now he and his country will bear the consequences.” Jo$eph R. Biden, posing as POTUS #46, on February 25, 2022.
Biden-Harris, Blinken, Sullivan, Nuland, Austin, et al., are M.I.A. GONE! No doubt, Biden’s-Harris’ deception, destruction, deaths per their wars, in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Iraq, from the West Bank of Jordan to the GAZA Strip, Ukraine, will follow them to their graves. Their, U.S. Presidents’, 42’s-46’s, currency, “Hate & War” lives, large! Their legacy, “Freedom From Accountability.” Done & Dusted!!!
“Yes, Ukraine Started the War;” AND, “Orange, you glad,” Trump & Putin are “Ending the War?!?” Keep It Lit! TY.
Jonathan Cook asks:
“How was Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine entirely ‘unprovoked’, when the British leader in charge at the time, Boris Johnson, now admits NATO viewed Ukraine as the battlefield for a ‘proxy war’ against Russia?”
hxxps://x.com/i/grok/share/HPLj2fsmCC7MttiItW1ts2sHU
I have been reading Consortium daily for over ten years. I was curious about what Grok would say.
I was surprised to see a somewhat unbiased opinion. What do you think?
The Maidan protests represented 10% of the Kiev population; hardly a voice of all of Ukraine.. President Yanukovych, who was not necessarily pro-Moscow, should have nipped it in the bud, by whatever means necessary, as any other leader would have done.. His abandonment of his country allowed for everything which followed..
The protests were financed by the NED. This is a script followed by the USA in all of the color revolutions.
What we see here is a Civil War amongst the American oligarchy to determine which crime family will be in charge of the American government.
What would you call killing 100 protestors? Not nipping it in the bud?
Thanks Joe! This important analysis has been censored as much as anything I’ve seen in my lifetime. If it wasn’t for truth tellers like you and a few others I don’t think there would be much hope. U.S. led imperialism is the world’s biggest obstacle to real progress.
Any way you look at it, the US has a lot of blood on its hands. Even if, technically, Ukraine started the fighting, it did it with the US’ full support. The US could have stopped it at any time, but it didn’t – it did the oppositive.
Trump won’t acknowledge that part, or the part that the US has been plotting and planning for years to weaken and Balkanise Russia – to exploit its vast natural resources, as well as removing the perceived threat.
He now has to deal with a much stronger Russia, a much weaker US, Europe and NATO, and a totally changed geopolitical landscape.
If Trump did acknowledge it, how many Americans would believe it?
We now know how, what, when, where, who and why. The truth here matters little unless the reason for this madness is recognized and addressed. Agreed upon by we the people, We the people are running low on O2 – H2O and t. Figure it out.
The energy for this totally unnecessary mess was created by NATO continually expanding towards the Russia border. Energy in the form of pressure on the Russian leadership by NATO members and the NATO Gang leader the U.S. Government. When grown men play words games with the truth very bad things happen. Remember the results of 911 anyone?
In this event everyone in their right mind should have known the U.S.leadership was playing with “Wet Dynamite”, the nuclear type. The idea is beyond ludicrous. Corrupt, greedy, insanely ludicrous hardly cover the description for this slaughter of human beings.
We now know this also. The question is have the leadership in the U.S. learned anything from failing this most resent exercise in futility? Before anyone starts belly aching remember the definition of futility. The answer is No, a resounding ‘No’, absolutely nothing has been learned.
This entire episode, which I will remind everyone could have been handled much differently, has resulted in death and destruction beyond belief. These exercises in burning up U.S. ordnance, equipment and the most precious commodity of war, warm bodies, are exactly the same as, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq , is not in the name of ideology but to vanquish the appetite of greedy war mongers whose claim to any ideology is trumped and driven by the lust for power. All we have to do is look around with an unjaundiced eye, which is not happening, instead we have a wanna be king still playing word games. Drew Hunkins is 100% correct!
This madness by the U.S. Government must stop immediately. For the sake of Dog! I have not lost my senses but many among the U.S. population seem to struggle hopelessly with our current reality daily. As citizens responsible for our government it’s time to put a Dog Damned Stop the madd ness.
After Gaza I figure I might not live long enough to be proud of America again. First lots of things are going to have to happen. And that my friends if very TRUTHFULLY how I feel. I refuse to roll with this absolute madness, which is exactly what it is. The ‘new normal’ my ass!
Thank you, Joe. As We expected NPR was right on it today to give the “other side” of the story. Thank you also to those who wrote the many comments on the Truth.
“What sounded like a great idea to Neo-cons in the United States has revealed the US’s manifold bankruptcies.
Imagine Mr. Zelensky’s predicament. Mighty America conned the former comedian to thinking that if he went along with their genius scheme to knock off Putin, his sad-sack country would be transformed into something like Ukro-Disneyworld. He would be lionized and made rich beyond his wildest imaginings.
The poor schlemiel fell for it. He let NATO (that is, the USA) set-up, equip, and train the largest army in Europe, including battalions of bad-ass, hard-core Ukro-Nazis who had previously been so useful in the American-sponsored 2014 Maidan “Color Uprising.” His country received billions of US dollars without audit oversight, just screaming to be creamed off by Ukraine’s corrupt leadership.
After 3+ years of America’s genius scheme to maintain world dominance it has all gone to custard.
600,000+ men have been killed. America is broke. US$36-trillion in debt.
The West is depleted of ammunition. Rusia has won the “war”.
And US and European taxpayers are baulking at seeing any more of their tax dollars going to the corrupt Ukrainians.
And Zelensky is hiding, flitting from one country to another begging for money. Because the game is drawing to a close and he may find himself fatally unpopular back on the home front. He has managed to send hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainian men to their deaths in the meat-grinder. And millions more have hightailed it for other countries.
Ukraine will now be a land of mostly women, children, and old folks. With just enough surviving soldiers left looking to hunt down the comedian who turned Ukraine into another one of history’s sick jokes.”
– attributed to James Howard Kunstler.
Good summary of this debacle. My take is that Blinken and Sullivan just would not give up on their goal of getting this war started. Russia made very reasonable requests, especially in the 90 days prior to the beginning of the war. I still find it hard to believe that Western governments can be led by so many warmongers at one time. Worrisome to say the least. Zelinsky, like Biden, share considerable blame but that’s like blaming a 10 year old for criminal activity. Zelinsky will (should) go into the history books as the biggest sucker of the 21th century.
So called mass media always count on forgetfulness of the public in shaping their propaganda narrative to ensure the public is purposefully brainwashed into believing lopsided and distorted views on historical facts..I remember for instance very clearly the events of the putsch on the Maidan 2014 where US and EU high ranking politicians interfered blatantly in the internal affairs of a then still kind of geopolitical neutral Ukrainian affairs…for all to see on national and international TV news and mass media..bottom line if one is not forgetful and historically well informed than no amount of propaganda narrative can dispute the fact that the US, EU, and NATO encouraged Ukraine to go to war against Russia starting in 2014 (as far as the current war is concerned at least) as proxy to weaken and break up Russia for colonial exploitation by the US colonial hegemon and its EU vassals…it has been a core part of US foreign policy at least since 1945…it is of utmost importance to study history to understand reality of current events..
Joe is accurate, but to make his analogy even more apt, one needs to add these details:
Assume people in California mostly use Spanish as their native language, and that the new government in Washington passes laws limiting the human rights of native Spanish speakers, and to banish use of Spanish in the government, education, and media.
This is an accurate account! I would add one point. This conflict has its roots back during the negotiations for the unification of Germany when Gorbachev was falsely promised that NATO would not be expanded beyond the borders of a unified Germany. At the same time western policy planners like Wolfowitz were actively planning for US domination of the planet and laying plans on how to destroy the Soviet Union (Russia). The hubris of western political strategists and their allies in the political establishment brought the world closer to nuclear war during the last administration than at any other time in my life.
Thanks Joe, so much for breaking this down to “crayons”, as we often hear over at The Fifth Column’s utub channel, “Belle of the Ranch”, which is pretty much dedicated these days to giving us the real news and (crayon (easy to understand – breakdowns) of the real news.
To anyone and every one interested the sources here, the one I mentioned and CN are two places we can get a realistic report on our most recent history and what likely to confront us in the near future.
I’m trying hard to soften my comments here so I can make the cut. Here goes again.
This is not a time for softening reports of the activities of war mongers or the rich elites. Navigating through the mine field of public opinion in efforts to get true facts out is becoming more difficult it seems and is directly the result of media organizations becoming participants in the news rather than reporting facts.
Mr. Lauria is to be commended for his strong efforts directed at correcting the record.
I would very highly recommend everyone try and spread the word about venues that deal only in the facts and report them to the public.
mgr – has this right and so does Bo Gates, I’ll be going there to read her posts for 2/19/25 and 2/20/25 and mayvbe more.
We all need to get on board with the facts and do something with the knowledge of the truth. You might be surprised who might start to listen now.
It seems apparent to me those of us here pretty much have got this down, we must spread the word.
Thanks CN
I think the USA started the war with Russia.
Ukraine started the war on April 16, 2014, certainly with US backing. The US was using Ukraine to weaken and overthrow the government in Moscow, but Ukraine cannot escape responsibility for beginning hostilities.
In 2014, the eminent John Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, documented in his brilliant 12-page treatise titled “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is The West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin.” Here are Professor Mearsheimer’s opening and closing paragraphs.
According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest o! Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster o! Ukrainian
President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin’s decision to order Russian forces to seize part o! Ukraine. But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most o! the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same time, the ‘EU’s expansion eastward and the West’s backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine—beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004—were critical elements, too.
The United States and its European allies now face a choice on Ukraine. They can continue their current policy, which will exacerbate hostilities with Russia and devastate Ukraine in the process—a scenario in which everyone would come out a loser. Or they can switch
gears and work to create a prosperous but neutral Ukraine, one that does not threaten Russia and allows the West to repair its relations with Moscow. With that approach, all sides would win.
“The central question in all this is: when did the Ukraine war actually start? The Western mainstream leads masses of people to believe it began Feb. 24, 2022, when the Russian regular army intervened in what was already an eight-year old civil war that was very much begun by Ukraine, with U.S. help. ”
Yes, you’ve got the story exactly right. The truth is complicated. Robert Fisk, the great reporter on Middle-Eastern events, used to say that the mass media, particularly television, can’t handle complexity. In this case simplification happens to coincide with useful propaganda for the established powers.
You can tell which media are reliable and which are misleading by when they date the start of the war: February 24, 2022, being the date of choice for those simplifying the story.
What I happen to give credence to is the taped and leaked phone call between Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt (U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine). This was when post Maidan events were still being resolved by the U.S. in 2014. She was stating which person the U.S. should support: “Yats is the man” or words to that effect. She was referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk, a Ukrainian politician who had made it clear he was going to repudiate the lease of the Soviet fleet at Sevastopol, Crimea. No wonder Putin sent a military force to protect the Russian fleet.
Thank you for setting the record straight. The truth always must prevail.
Only those with blinders – and still too many around…not forgetting ‘brainwashed’, still cling to the notion that it was Russia who started the war. How long has the US supported Ukraine in the mutual aim of ‘finishing off’ Russia? Relax…because it ain’t gona happen. There are 2 different one-hour videos with Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, explaining VERY clearly who started the war. America just can’t quit disturbing the $hit all over the planet.
Thanks to Mr. Lauria for correcting the MSM narrative that is accepted by most American liberals. It’s no surprise that American corporate interests benefitted handsomely from the intervention of their government. As I predicted in a post on Medium, shortly after the Maidan revolt, Big Ag bought huge tracts of rich Ukrainian farmland. In the years thereafter American fossil fuel giants raked in huge profits exporting LNG to Europe. American munitions manufacturers have profited handsomely supply arms to Ukraine, Poland, and allied states. And American Big Finance profited by underwriting much of this activity.
hxxps://medium.com/@rdebacher/whats-really-up-in-ukraine-db58fec7d162
Joe, this is brilliant. I’ve known all this from the beginning. Respectfully I ask:What’s taken so long?
Well done!
Thank you for an excellent history of the Ukranian conflict. The fact that most people are unaware of this history is attributable to the lick-spittle mainstream misinformant news outlets like the NYT.
On February 22, 2025, professor Jeffrey Sachs delivered a powerful broadside to the ongoing false narrative manipulation in Western countries with a speech to the EU Parliament. In his address, he detailed this history of Ukraine and US policy which was decided, by the “pre-neocons,” in the ’90s. He also gave his firsthand observations in which he was actually on the scene for these events. The audio and also the transcript of his remarks can be found here: hXXps://singjupost.com/transcript-jeffrey-sachs-on-the-geopolitics-of-peace-in-the-european-parliament/.
Now, I expect we shall see how the EU Commission and the other war mongering EU leaders expose themselves when they try to discredit him, liars that they are. It should be a show.
Joe,
” flayed , howled ”
Your flare knows no bounds .
Love it !
Excellent example , you .
Signed , “A Student”
The war in Ukraine begin in 2004 when the USA government interfere on the internal affairs of that country,the consolidation of that process was in 2014 …..guess the big media machine of disinformation & manipulation suffering from some kinda of “amnesia” which block any success prior to 2022…which is not new….along the history…many of those episodes sadly repeat frequently…on the “american history”.
I would suggest the war started even earlier than that when George W Bush signed docs allowing Ukraine and Georgia entry into NATO in April, 2008. This was a deliberate effort
To expand NATO to Russias’ borders nearly 24 years ago. I’m not sure why people don’t understand this move by President Bush.
Wrong. This war did not begin in 2004. US meddling didn’t even begin then. That started in 1948. Ukraine statred this war in April 2014 with US help as the US uses Ukraine to attack Russia. But Ukraine has its own motives. They are not mere puppets.
You honestly believe that Trump was referring to 2014 when he made that comment?? C’mon…you’re smarter than that
No. But it doesn’t matter. He was right. Ukraine started it.
So what do you think he was referring to? As mentioned he’s not exactly the most articulate speaker. That’s exactly why he should have sent out Vance afterwards to articulate what he meant. It’s still not too late. Joe, send this article asap to Vance’s email with a note stating if you’re not aware of this time line either we’re hear to help.
This is so important in order to smack down this lying media.
Mr. Lauria, I am in agreement with the argument and history you present in this article. Especially as the ex US govt. officials that publish on Consortium News say the same thing. I recently read a sub stack by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American either 2/19/25 or 2/20/25. Would you respond to her story that the 2004 Ukrainian election was fraudulent, electing Victor Yanukovych and then nullified. Then Yanukovych had Paul Manafort who was involved with Oleg Deripaska help elect him in 2010. HCR continues to argue that in 2016 Manafort with the help of Konstantine Kilimink were involved in Trump’s campaign and Russian operatives were involved etc. etc. I am just wondering what you would have to say about the history that HCR laid out. Thank you. Bo Gates
Great idea! It could be very helpful if Joe Lauria would respond to HCR articles. She has a huge following among Dems. So many slavishly follow and repeat her clever manipulations of history.
Darn right Ukraine (i.e. its Washington handlers) started the entire war. Russia did the only sensible thing it could after bending over in futility for eight years desperately trying to get a peace deal worked out: it implemented a special military intervention to protect ethnic Russians in the Donbas and root out Russophobic Uke soldiers and dumb mercenaries.
Washington would make the exact same move if Russian or Chinese supported forces were massed on the southern Canadian border poised to invade and kill tens of thousands of U.S. citizens. Kant’s Categorical Imperative applies in spades.
I had said from the start, back in Feb 2022, there was essentially only one possible benevolent outcome: Russia wins the Uke proxy war or the world ends in nuclear war, period. Thankfully Russia has pretty much now been victorious.
The Kremlin was never going to allow a regime change! Those days are over.