THE COUP THAT CAUSED THE UKRAINE CONFLICT
According to the prevailing narrative, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was an “unprovoked Russian aggression” against a democratic country, and Putin is a “murderous dictator” who desires to resuscitate the defunct Soviet empire and may even seek to subjugate other European countries to achieve this objective.
However, careful consideration of the Ukrainian crisis reveals that there are more sides to this story, only one of which is being told.
John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He argues that the United States, in pushing to expand NATO eastward, “increased the likelihood of war between nuclear-armed powers and laid the groundwork” for Russia’s aggressive position toward Ukraine.
With regards to Ukraine, rofessor Mearsheimer comments that up until 2014, no one envisioned the NATO and EU expansion as policies aimed at containing Russia and nobody seriously thought Russia was a threat before February 22, 2014.
Mearsheimer continues, stating:
“What happened is that this major crisis broke out, and we had to assign blame, and of course we were never going to blame ourselves. We were going to blame the Russians. So we invented this story that Russia was bent on aggression in Eastern Europe. Putin is interested in creating a greater Russia, or maybe even re-creating the Soviet Union.”
It is therefore instructive to ascertain as constitutional law academics what really happened to Ukraine in2014 — a coup supported by the American government, more specifically, by the then Obama administration.
With the victory of the pro-Russian candidate, Victor Yanukovych, in the Ukrainian presidential elections of 2010, its parliament voted in that same year to abandon NATO membership aspirations.
However, President Yanukovych, a democratically elected leader, was arbitrarily and unconstitutionally removed from office in February 2014.
Prior to that coup, in December 2013, the late Senator John McCain, then a leading Republican voice on U.S. foreign policy, told leaders of the Ukrainian opposition that “the destiny you seek lies in Europe.”
On that occasion, Putin quibbled that this was an unconstitutional overthrow of a democratically elected president. He labelled it a “coup” and questioned the legitimacy of the process at his press conference on March 4, 2014.
By contrast, when that “coup” succeeded in expelling the country’s elected president, then American President, Barrack Obama, misled the international community by hiding the imposition of a pro-Western government on “Russia’s most neuralgic and politically divided neighbour.”
Soon after a new government was established, it declared itself unable to control the popular reaction to that coup in the country’s east. The American government then conveniently accused Russia of destabilising Ukraine, thus aiming to turn Russia into a “pariah state.”
Ukraine has never been able to have a functional government since.
The reality is that the eastward expansion of NATO has triggered the current Ukrainian crisis, primarily because of Washington’s attempt to pull Ukraine decisively into its orbit and defence structure by building an explicitly anti-Moscow association and supporting a notoriously corrupt government.
Despite this important context, speaking to reporters in Adelaide, on February 24 the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, stated: “We should be taking every step we can to ensure Russia pays a price in the international community for the violent and aggressive acts of invasion against Ukraine.” Asked what he thought of the Russian president, Morrison replied: “I call him a thug.”
This sort of language is unwise and belligerent. The Australian prime minister has completely denied that Putin’s actions might be “motivated by legitimate security concerns.”
According to Seumas Milne, a British journalist and former Labour Party’s Executive Director of Strategy and Communications:
“No Russian government could have acquiesced in such a threat from territory that was at the heart of both Russia and the Soviet Union”.
The Russians had already been seriously humiliated by NATO’s decision to expand the Alliance to include former Warsaw Pact countries. And now they sense that NATO is dangerously moving right up to their border by turning one of their most formidable former states into a de facto member of the American military alliance.
Clearly, the Russians have reached the limits of their willingness to tolerate NATO’s expansionist policies.
The consequences of the unconstitutional coup of 2014 should be blamed, at least in part, for Russia’s disastrous military invasion of Ukraine.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-coup-that-caused-the-ukraine-conflict_4337549.html
