With the news that the US is now turning the Black Sea coast of Ukraine into a de-facto giant military base, the mind begins to wonder how such a flagrant occupation of sovereign land by the West can happen in a country that is officially not at war with anybody, and isn’t formally in either the EU or NATO blocs…

Proceeding from the illegal seizure of power in Kiev in 2014, the West promised Ukraine an improved quality of life in exchange for some raw materials, in the style of “you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours”. Except here it was “you massage my back with oil, and I’ll flog yours with a big pole”. The “marvelous” EU was used as a carrot on a stick to pull Ukraine away psychologically from the Russian nation; now the IMF demands deforestation across the country in exchange for more credits. Smiling “butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth” characters tempted the locals to taste the forbidden fruit and chant “Russia go home” on every street corner. The people were played against each other using the “they said this about your mother”style of incitement, exactly like what was done in Yugoslavia vis-a-vis Bosniaks and Serbs. Thanks to the complete manipulation of history by stooges like Vladimir Vyatrovich and by fifth-column NGO nests like the Yeltsin Center, the Ukrainian people (and some of the Ukrainian Russians) are spoon-fed the narrative “the Soviet Union is bad, Uncle Sam is your savior”.

These are only a few drops in the ocean of examples of how the US managed to carve a crevice for itself in Ukraine with the aim of serving as a guarantor (bargaining chip) of a) the West’s diplomatic manoeuvring in Syria either directly or through NGOs, and b) the West’s geographic positioning in relation to conquering more land to feed the ever-increasing number of hungry mouths back home, and to spread Liberalism in general. Generally speaking, the fourth generation “war” in Ukraine can be divided into 3 categories: the media, the ground, the law.

The media: the dissemination – via the media owned by the military-industrial complex (MIC)/oligarchs – of simulacra designed to depict the army of the territory being invaded by Anglo Saxons as the aggressor, and also the civilians fleeing the conflict as seekers of “democracy”. In Ukraine, the oligarch-owned TV channels are“112”, “ZiK”, “Espreso”, “TSN”, and so on, and on the Internet the MIC controls propaganda outlets such as “Euromaidan press”, “Stopfake”, “The Interpreter”, “The Moscow Times”, and so forth. Collectively, they are tasked with keeping the narrative “Russia is the enemy” alive in the minds of the population, while at the same time covering up the war crimes of the Ukrainian Army and its associated Banderist formations.

The ground: the movement of military equipment to different parts of the country to give the illusion that there is a war ongoing against some imaginary enemy, despite the fact that no war was officially declared by the Kiev authorities. For example, columns of tanks on trains can be seen in the Kherson region almost weekly, the movement of “Grad” and other MLRS systems from one village in Donbass occupied by the Ukrainian Armed Forces to another one almost daily, and military exercises in the West of the country and near the Crimean border happen at least monthly. Why? Because companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon need to make money by exploiting Ukroboronprom. No theatre of military operations – no profit. Simple.

The law: the gradual stripping of the country of anything that was left behind after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The current constitution of Ukraine took effect after the coup in 2014 and this decision was taken by Aleksandr Turchynov, who was illegally placed in the Presidents chair by John Tefft and his band of thugs after Viktor Yanukovych fled the country via helicopter. Currently every law that is enacted either forbids something pertaining to the Russian world or tries to pull the country further into the West’s orbit: healthcare and pension reforms, land market, a ban on St. George’s Ribbons and communist symbols as a whole, TV and Radio language quotas, allowing Canadian troops (and NATO in general) to “legally”operate across the entire country, etc. Since the current government in Kiev is illegal, the passing of these bills is also illegal.

And as a result of all three of these categories converging together, we have the current situation in the country. The media, the ground, and the law are all completely controlled by the Washington-London-Brussels axis. And the media, the ground, and the law ensure that the vast majority of Ukrainians perceive the US’ presence on Ukrainian soil as “friendly”. This process was slow to develop – it began in 2014, the inevitable military clashes happened between those who accepted the coup and those who didn’t, but after the signing of Minsk Agreements-2 in February, 2015, these hostilities became less intense. Putin knew very well that the ground operations had to be slowed in order to prevent NATO from establishing a base in Donetsk or Lugansk. As a result, Russia increased the pace in Syria – the heart of the latest US-Russia standoff, and this started the process of the Nazis and Oligarchs in Ukraine devouring each other because of the US’ reduced capacity to feed the fire in Ukraine without firstly reducing its size (allowing the DPR/LPR to have special status and in general shaping Ukraine’s future without Donbass or Crimea). Now the US has not only come away empty-handed from Syria and Iraq, it risks leaving the poker hall without a house to go back to or a car to drive there.

Now the Ukrainian crisis is at its slowest and most critical phase, and nothing is expected to change much until Raqqa in Syria and Anbar in Iraq are liberated from ISIS, much to the Western world’s dismay. That is why Kurt Volker – the US State Department’s special representative to Ukraine – simply repeats the same mantra about “Russia being guilty” and that the crisis is “crippling US-Russia” relations. America is simply buying time, because nothing went to plan in Syria, and nothing went to plan in Ukraine. Currently the US actually can’t leave Ukraine because it needs some form of outpost in order to participate in future energy, trade, and currency wars.

So, referring back to the original question “how such a flagrant occupation of sovereign land can happen in a country that is officially not at war with anybody, and isn’t formally in either the EU nor NATO bloc”, it is possible to say that when the US is very desperate, which it is now more than it ever has been before, such “abracadabra” magic tricks as the entire Ukrainian coast of the Black Sea being occupied by Uncle Sam become more and more frequent. However, the West knows very well that Donbass and Crimea is lost, so, like all good stock traders, there is a time when it’s necessary to cut losses and move on – to Afghanistan, for example!

Ollie Richardson is a Paris-based geopolitical analyst.

All images, except the featured image, in this article are from the author.