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Viktor Yanukovych, who had been called to the White House right after his 2010 electoral win and was asked by Obama to help to push his country toward joining NATO (though all of the opinion polls that had been taken of the Ukrainian public showed that the vast majority of Ukrainians viewed NATO to be their enemy, no friend of Ukraine).
The 2014 coup in Ukraine was about two things:getting Ukraine into NATO, and seizing Russia’s biggest naval base, which ever since 1783 has been in Crimea, which (Crimea) the Soviet dictator had transferred to Ukraine in 1954 while still continuing Crimea as the Soviet Union’s biggest naval base. Obama, already by no later than June 2013, was planning to grab that naval base and turn it into yet another U.S. naval base.
So, promptly as soon as the Obama-installed government received the reins of power in Ukraine, Ukraine’s top generals were replaced by rabidly anti-Russian ones, who planned this ethnic-cleansing of those ‘terrorists’, in what they called their “Anti-Terrorist Operation” or “ATO,” in, especially, Donbass. (Donbass is the farthest-east part of Ukraine’s “East” as shown in slide 26 here, and you can see there that ONLY Crimea was even more anti-U.S. than was Ukraine’s “East.”
Donbass was the most pro-Russian part of that “East.” Those were therefore the two regions where Obama especially needed the ethnic cleansing, the “ATO.”) But it also was done in Odessa, and in other Ukrainian cities that had voted heavily for Yanukovych. This would be the ‘democratic’ way to produce a permanently nazi-controlled Ukraine.
The Obama Administration was demanding that Ukraine quickly conquer Donbass; and, since the only air power over that region was Ukraine’s Air Force, Ukraine relentlessly bombed Donbass. One of their bombers got shot down, but that was only a minor loss for the U.S.-installed regime. Overall, the bombings caused massive devastation in Donbass.
Nonetheless, the U.S. Government’s hopes for a military conquest of Donbass were not fulfilled; and this got us to the current situation.
The U.S. Government not only allows Ukraine to firebomb Donbass, but America’s think tanks that have discussed those firebombings have said the Ukrainian Government needs to do more of it.
This was the situation before Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022.
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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.
Featured image: Members of the Azov Battalion and other far-right groups march through Kyiv during Defenders of Ukraine Day, October 14, 2018. Photo from Leave the West Behind.
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