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In U.S.-and-allied countries, the belief is overwhelmingly widespread that the war in Ukraine was started “by Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine”. However, this widely-circulated belief in The West is clearly and unequivocally false, because the war in Ukraine started in 2014, as both NATO’s Stoltenberg and Ukraine’s Zelensky have said; but Russia responded militarily on 24 February 2022, to this then-8-year-long war on Russia’s doorstep, in order to prevent Ukraine from becoming a NATO member and allowing the U.S. to place a missile there a mere 317 miles or five minutes of missile-flying-time away from The Kremlin and thus too brief a flight for Russia to respond before Russia’s central command would already be beheaded by America’s nuclear blitz-strike.

The war in Ukraine actually began in the very violent coup that the U.S. Obama Administration had actually started planning by no later than June 2011 and started executing inside America’s Embassy in Ukraine on 1 March 2013. Such coup illegally overthrew the democratically elected and neutralist President of Ukraine on 20 February 2014 and installed to take over the new government on 27 February 2014 the man who had been selected by Victoria Nuland — Obama’s agent controlling the coup operation — when she instructed on 27 January 2014 the U.S. ambassador in Ukraine to have “Yatsenyuk” or “Yats”, a rabid hater of ethnic Russians, placed in charge when the coup would be over, which was then done on 27 February 2014.

That coup precipitated or provoked resistance to the coup on the day of the coup, 20 February 2014, when occurred the Korsun Massacre of Crimeans who, on the day of the coup, were fleeing the coup-site at Kiev’s Maidan Square, after holding signs there against the overthrow of that democratically elected President for whom over 70% of Crimeans had voted, and now they were running back into their 8 awaiting buses to return to Crimea, but became blocked en-route and dozens of them were killed by the Right Sector paramilitaries who beat them to death and piled up their corpses, though many Crimeans on those buses survived to record their accounts of the massacre.

So: the war began actually on the very day of the coup, and it was perpetrated by Obama’s hired forces, specifically the Right Sector paramilitaries, who were under the command of Dmitriy Yarosh, who had been in charge of the team of snipers that the U.S. Government hired to carry out the coup. Some of the foreign snipers that were hired from Georgia and elsewhere were under the command of an American Brian Boyenger, but most of the snipers were Ukrainian racist-fascist anti-Russians, who were under Yarosh’s command.

The unrest against the U.S. coup that started Ukraine’s civil war centered in two main regions: Crimea in the far south, in which that overthrown President had gotten 70+% of the votes; and Donbass in the far southeast, where he had gotten 90+% of the votes. The Donbass towns of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk on 15 April 2014 rejected the Obama-junta-installed-by-Yatsenyuk officials, and Yatsenyuk announced the next day that his government was starting an Anti-Terrorist Operation or “ATO” and sending in tanks to eliminate any such ’terrorists’. It was now officially an anti-‘terrorist’ war, in keeping with America’s ongoing war against terrorists, but in this case Russia was being blamed for it, because Donbass is Russian-speaking and had voted over 90% for the overthrown, neutralist, President and therefore needed (from Obama’s perspective) to be depopulated so that in any future elections, only anti-Russian candidates would win Ukraine’s elections.

Then, on 2 May 2014, Yarosh’s people trapped, inside the Odessa Trade Unions Building, dozens of people who had circulated flyers against the Obama-coup-installed government, and burned them alive, to demonstrate to Ukraine’s Russian-speakers that this new Ukraine hated their guts and wanted them gone from Ukraine. The Obama-installed government appointed, to be the new Governor of a region near Odessa, an oligarch, Kolomoyskyi, who had also funded Yarosh’s operation and helped to plan that burning-alive action.

The ATO became the war against Donbass that the Minsk Agreements (which Obama opposed but tolerated) were supposed to stop but failed to stop, because Ukraine’s U.S.-installed government refused to stop its shelling of the breakaway region Donbass. The war was an ethnic-cleansing operation to reduce the population there (by killing some, and by terrorizing the others to flee into Russia, which around a million of them did), which ethnic cleansing to get rid of residents in Donbass continued until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, and which still has been continuing there, though perhaps somewhat reduced now as Russia has joined the residents there to fight against the U.S.-stooge regime in Kiev and against its ethnic-cleansing (or ‘ATO’) operation to reduce if not eliminate the residents in Donbass.

The intent of Obama’s coup was mainly to get Ukraine into NATO so that U.S. missiles could become placed on its border only 300 miles away from blitz-nuking The Kremlin, but was also intended to grab Russia’s main naval base, which since 1783 has been in Crimea, and to turn it into a U.S. naval base (something Obama wasn’t able to do).

Russia’s 24 February 2022 invasion of Ukraine was intended to prevent Ukraine from hosting U.S. missiles only a five-minute-missile-flight-time away from blitz-nuking The Kremlin. Putin made a mess of his explanations of why he invaded Ukraine.

The fact that it was done in order to block any possibility of U.S. missiles becoming ultimately posted in Ukraine only 300 miles from the Kremlin was almost ignored in his public statements. Therefore, he unintentionally helped to make easy The West’s convincing people that the aggressor here was Russia instead of America. On the surface, it looked that way, if the relevant prior history was ignored — and Putin’s explanations unfortunately distracted from that history, instead of drew attention to it, and thus allowed the relevant prior history behind this war to be, and to remain, ignored by the peoples in U.S.-and-allied countries.

When Putin spoke about the prior history, he talked mainly about Ukrainians being really Russians, and other such irrelevancies, which irrelevancies precipitated in The West distractionary debates as to whether or not Ukrainians actually are Russians, or even why he said that they are: pro-U.S. media were, basically, psychoanalyzing Putin, instead of dealing with America’s coup that had illegally and bloodily grabbed Ukraine, and maybe then psychoanalyzing Obama himself— who had actually started the war in Ukraine. It was started for his purposes, NOT for Putin’s (but very much against his).

The undeniable physical fact is that America’s obsession to get its missiles that close to The Kremlin was intolerable to Russia and to Russians; so, Putin absolutely needed to prevent that from happening.

And the 24 February 2022 invasion had become the only way to prevent it now, because on December 15th of 2021 Putin had given to the U.S. Government Russia’s existential national-security demands never to place its missiles so close to Moscow, and two days later he gave to America’s NATO anti-Russian military alliance Russia’s national-security demands including that Ukraine will never be in NATO. And, then, on 7 January 2022, both America and its NATO alliance formally said no to all of them; and, only then, on 24 February 2022, did Russia invade Ukraine to achieve by military means what the U.S. regime had refused even to consider by diplomatic means and negotiations — America and its NATO refused to negotiate with Russia, regarding what were and still are, for Russia, national-security necessities. They were forcing Russia to invade Ukraine. That’s what they wanted, and they got it.

America started this war. Russia did not.

Another example of Americans’ beliefs being shaped by liars is the current war in Gaza. Israel started this war in 1948 (with a massive ethnic-cleansing of Palestinians in order to bring millions of Jews onto this land); the Gazans did not start it on 7 October 2023 by breaking out of Gaza the world’s largest open-air prison in order to kill Jews in Israel. Israel responded to that Hamas killing of around 1,200, wounding of around 3,400, and taking hostage of 247 Israelis, by a bombing campaign, and siege to destroy hospitals and cut off electricity and food and water to Gazans, in an ethnic cleansing operation by Israel with American weapons, to get rid of the 2.3 million Palestinians who live in that open-air prison, Gaza.

Then, the November 2023 Harvard-Harris-CAPS poll (field dates November 15-16) of 2,851 registered American voters found the following beliefs by Americans, around 40 days afterwards:

pp.58-59

“Do you think the Hamas killing of 1200 Israeli civilians and the kidnapping of another 250 civilians can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians [28%] or is it not justified in any way [72%]?”

“Do you think that the attacks on Jews were genocidal in nature [72%] or not genocidal [28%]?”

p.60

“Do you favor [65%] or oppose [35%] the 14 billion [dollar] aid package to help Israel defeat Hamas?”

So: 72% of the respondents said that the October 7th Hamas attack was “not justified in any way” — not by Israel’s prior ethnic cleansing against Palestinians in 1948 and afterwards, nor by the decades-long imprisonment-without-trial of all Palestinians in Gaza, nor in any other way. And also 72% of the respondents said that the Hamas attack against Israelis was “genocidal” (and the poll didn’t include any question regarding whether Israel’s 75-year-long history of ethnic cleansing against Palestinians, nor the current genocidal campaign against the 2.3 million Gazans, is “genocidal”). So, with these beliefs by Americans (72% of them favoring Israel’s current genocide against Gazans), 65% of Americans are in favor of the U.S. Government’s sending $14 billion to Israel so that Israel’s Jews will be able to complete their genocide against Gazans.

In a ‘democracy’ such as America, it is important to shape the public’s beliefs, so that the ‘democracy’ will continue to exist. This is done by means of lies.

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This article was originally published on The Duran.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is 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. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics