Russia Reacts to WaPo Attack on Putin

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Written by Eric Zuesse

On January 29th, the Washington Post published an op-ed by the well-known Yale neoconservative Timothy Snyder, titled “Putin’s case for invading Ukraine rests on phony grievances and ancient myths”. Key passages in Snyder’s article are:

Last July, Vladimir Putin supplied the mythical basis [BAD LINK FROM SNYDER: here is a functional link to see Putin’s article] for Russian war propaganda in an essay titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.”

The essential idea is that Russia has the right to Ukraine because of things that happened a thousand years ago in Kyiv. … It takes some fanciful thinking to see here a reason for Russia to invade Ukraine in the 21st century, as it seems prepared to do. … Putin’s idea is that Ukraine is a fraternal nation because of how he personally feels about the past. This is known as imperialism. It flies in the face of the basic legal principle of state sovereignty and the basic moral principle of democracy.



Putin’s article did NOT assert that “Russia has the right to Ukraine because of things that happened a thousand years ago in Kyiv.” It didn’t even assert that “Russia has the right to invade Ukraine.”

Furthermore, the allegation that Putin’s view that’s expressed there advocates  “imperialism. It flies in the face of the basic legal principle of state sovereignty and the basic moral principle of democracy” is likewise a boldfaced lie.

Moreover, Russia’s Government has consistently denied that it has any intention to invade Ukraine, but instead asserts that if Ukraine invades Donbass, then Russia will not allow that invasion to conquer the residents there.

Russia’s position has consistently been that only the people who live in Donbass have the right to determine whether or not — and the terms under which — they will be ruled by the government in Kiev that was installed (against the will of over 90% of them) in February 2014 when the democratically elected President of Ukraine was forcibly overthrown by what America’s Government calls a “democratic revolution,” and by what Russia’s Government and the head of the “private-CIA” U.S. firm Stratfor, and many historians, call a coup, which was imposed by the Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning U.S. President Barack Obama’s Administration, in order to replace Russia’s naval base on Crimea by a new U.S. naval base there (which Obama wasn’t able to do, though his coup conquering Ukraine otherwise succeeded).

Several of the mercenaries that the U.S. hired (some from Georgia, for example, as shown in these videos) subsequently confessed to having participated in it. (And, subsequently, the U.S. regime charged Putin with ‘aggression against Ukraine’, and with ‘seizing Crimea’, and issued sanctions against Russia for that.)

Here are some key passages from Putin’s article (the article that Snyder lies against):

The determination of nationality, particularly in mixed families, is the right of every individual, free to make his or her own choice. But the fact is that the situation in Ukraine today is completely different because it involves a forced change of identity.

And the most despicable thing is that the Russians in Ukraine are being forced not only to deny their roots, generations of their ancestors but also to believe that Russia is their enemy. … And I will say one thing – Russia has never been and will never be ‘anti-Ukraine’. And what Ukraine will be – it is up to its citizens to decide.

Putin, as well as Francois Hollande of France, and Angela Merkel of Germany, brought the Donbass government and the Ukraine government together in 2015 and got the Donbass and Ukraine to sign onto an agreement in Minsk, promising that those two then-warring parties would call a truce until both of them would agree to negotiate together and arrange some degree of autonomy for Donbass within the Ukrainian federation, but after it was all signed, Ukraine (with backing from the U.S.) steadily refused to negotiate at all with Donbass.

Merkel, Hollande, and Putin, had worked together to get the Minsk accords agreed-to and signed by the two sides, but the Ukrainian side then stonewalled, refusing to comply with the agreement. Putin’s consistent position has been the same as Hollande’s and Merkel’s, on this, and remains so to this day: BOTH sides must comply. (Donbass has always been willing, but Ukraine never.)

The rest of Putin’s article is a history of the relationship that has existed between Russia and Ukraine. Snyder’s article that alleges to be about Putin’s article ignores that history, just as he lies about the rest of the article. And that’s from a Professor at Yale.

(The present article is being submitted to over 200 U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media including the Washington Post, for possible publication.)

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4 COMMENTS

  1. Odd how the (Neocon?) Professor makes his case debunking the, as he sees it, Russian purported view, that Russian past doninance, or governance gives Russia the right to reclaim those past rights and occupancy is eerily similar to the Israeli view of past presence and governance as license to occupy, annex and ethnicly split the Christians from their citizenship, rights and land and the entire land of Palestine!

  2. I attended Yale for 6 weeks in 1964 as part of the same class as George W. Bush. Before running away screaming, I got into an argument at a public forum with a professor at the Yale Law School who called me an idiot for not believing Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone nut assassin of JFK. This was right after Mark Lane’s book “Rush to Judgment” came out. In fact the Yale Law School was one of the biggest promoters of the Warren Commission’s cover-up along with the Washington Post. Yale/WAPO=CIA. Nothing has changed since then, and nothing will. The CIA engineered the 2014 Ukraine coup and is engineering the current Biden BS. But at least military weapons firms are back to moving up in the stock market. That’s really all they care about. $$$. Thanks Bezos. Next time you go to space, stay there.

  3. Kiev was the Seat/Capitol of Russia until the 14th Century, before the Tsar moved to Moskow. Remember this ‘war path’ against Russia, by the US. is just the continuation of, ‘The Smoke Screen’ for the past 2 decades, to have an excuse, by the US Congress/Government, not to INVESTIGATE, who are the Demonic Creatures, Foreign and DOMESTIC, responsible for the ‘Greatest Crime Ever’, unleashed on the ‘Land of the Free’, on Our Own SOIL and the murder of some 3 thousand innocent Collateral Victims on, ‘9/11/2001’! That Crime Against the American People, and in retrospect, against the Whole World, must be Investigated! Who are the Criminals behind, ‘The Controlled Demolition’ FALSE FLAG attacks on the, WTC. Towers #1, #2, #7, on ‘9/11/2001’?

  4. The Ashkenazi hatred for Russia goes back to when Sviatoslav I finally succeeded in destroying Khazar imperial power over what is now the Ukraine back in the 960s. “A visitor to Atil [Khazar capital city] wrote soon after the sacking of the city that its vineyards and garden had been razed, that not a grape or raisin remained in the land, and not even alms for the poor were available.” (Wikipedia)

    While Snyder isn’t of the Ashkenazim, his wife is. Long story short, the same folks who brought us 9/11 and all the wars of this century are itching to involve the USA in a catastrophic war with Russia. It will be the end of the USA as we know it and the beginning of God only knows what.

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