Don't get it wrong: Ukraine and "Israel" are both tools of US-EU imperialism
Don't get it wrong: Ukraine and "Israel" are both tools of US-EU imperialism
If you like this article, please don’t hesitate to click like♡ and restack🗘 ! It’s a quick way to make sure more people will get to enjoy it too.
And don’t hesitate to subscribe to my newsletter for free to receive my new articles right in your inbox!
Propelled by the media machine, Ukraine and “Israel” are certainly the two trending topics of the early 2020s. Ukraine for its war with Russia, and “Israel” for defending itself against the scary Palestinian terrorists — that’s if you believe the media, at least.
There is not a day that went by in 2023 where major worldwide outlets such as Reuters, the BBC or The Guardian (to name just three) did not remind us that Ukraine was fighting a war of survival against the demented Putin who had expansionist aims in Ukraine, while at the same time defending “Israel’s” routine crimes against humanity with their pen.
It’s come to a point where I’ve seen people point out that we should stop funding war criminals (“Israel”) so we can give the money to people “getting genocided” (Ukraine).
So clearly the propaganda is not taking towards “Israel” — people know better, because they have access to unfiltered news from the ground. We all saw the dead children of Gaza, each with their name, their dreams and their favorite things in the world. We all saw the burning bodies. We know “Israel” is committing a genocide.
But while the PR didn’t take for “Israel”, it certainly took — at least in the Western world — with Ukraine.
I have to admit the propaganda machine worked like clockwork when it came to Russia, almost as if everything had been set up beforehand to be deployed the moment Russia invaded. As soon as the invasion began in February 2022, Russia found itself ostracized from innocuous events such as Eurovision, sports events, scientific communities and even cat shows!
Meanwhile, our rulers have decided that everything “Israel” is doing is perfectly fine and dandy and they should keep getting billions of dollars worth in weapons to keep killing children with.
There is clearly a double standard. And our governments’ insistence on supporting “Israel” at any cost should call into question everything else they’ve ever decided.
So let’s set the record straight on this conduct.
The reason Russia is being absurdly ostracized from international events is not because we think that what they’re doing in Ukraine is very very bad and they need to be taught a lesson.
It’s the same reason we support “Israel” and deny their war crimes at every turn.
Both countries are tools of the imperial core.
That’s why the EU and US keep sending Ukraine and “Israel” more weapons. It’s not to defend Ukraine. The EU doesn’t care about Ukrainian lives — in 2014, they supported a far-right coup that saw democratically-elected President Yanukovych ousted, and far-right dictator Porochenko installed. Then, 9 years of civil war in the Donbass followed.
It started in late 2013 when the so-called “Euromaidan” protests popped up (named after their pro-EU position and the Maidan square in which they took place in Kyiv).
Weirdly, they started after the Yanukovych government refused an IMF loan that would have forced him to slash the healthcare and education budgets and stop subsidies for natural gas, which helped keep energy costs low for all Ukrainians.
Many people believe that since the IMF a huge international organization, it must be doing good, or working for the common good. But no, The IMF’s M.O. is to make these kinds of loans: they come with strings attached and require intensive austerity and privatization. Then, when the already fragile state’s economy can’t repay the impossible loan, clauses force them to sell state assets and close down public services so that Western capital can pour into it and buy up public properties on the cheap. In the case of Ukraine, austerity measures would have allowed US and EU companies to swoop in to fill the void left by a lack of healthcare and energy and “provide” those services to Ukrainians at a premium.
Yanukovych was of sound mind and said this was the worst loan offer he’d ever received (or so I imagine). Instead, he turned to Russia for a better loan — this earned him the reputation of being “Pro-Russia”, which is a contentious topic in Banderite Ukraine. Bandera will come back up later.
Apparently, the people of Ukraine simply hated cheap healthcare and energy. They started protests, demanding the government step down and elections be held. These are known as color revolutions and I wrote about them before as well as the IMF’s role here. It’s nothing new for Eastern Europe, color revolutions have been used (successfully) for decades.
Here’s the kicker that I purposely left out — the protests actually started over mounting corruption and poverty. This isn’t solely imputable to Yakunovych; since 1991, Ukraine has been in a dire position, with over 1/5th of its population declining from its 1991 figure.
This is how color revolutions work. They attach themselves to legitimate grievances that could be peaceably resolved, and try to steer them towards completely different goals of outright regime change and inviting imperialist interests in their lives.
The US had been embedded in Ukraine for quite a while and had prepared the conditions for such a protest movement. Ukraine, after all, was an ex-USSR country and their meddling back in 1990 was exactly what brought the Soviet Union down. As relayed by The Dissident in their article How A False Flag Massacre Led To The Proxy War In Ukraine:
since 1991 the U.S. has spent 5 billion dollars in propaganda efforts to try to push Ukraine in a more western friendly direction. This spending became far more targeted in the lead-up to 2014 when the U.S. funneled money through the N.E.D. (National Endowment for Democracy), U.S.A.I.D. (United States Agency for International Development) and the security state tied billionaire Pierre Omidyar to think tanks that were generating protests against the pro-Russian leader of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich.
Economist Jeffery Sachs- who was heavily involved in the economic reforms put in place in post soviet states after the collapse of the Soviet Union- was asked to help with economic reforms in the new government in Ukraine. In a recent interview on “Breaking Points”, he revealed how coordinated the think tank funding was […]
Senators John Mcain and Cris Murphy went to Ukraine and stood alongside Oleh Tyahnybok - the leader of the far-right Svoboda party- while he called for violent protest against Yanukovych.
The assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland was caught on tape deciding who of the three opposition figures would be in and out of government.
The Maidan protests started in late 2013, but didn’t go anywhere and were fizzling out by early 2014.
The US thought differently for Ukraine, and they staged a massacre to keep the ball rolling.
Events evolved very rapidly from February 1st to 20. First, it was reported that the police had beat up peaceful student protestors. It turned out that they weren’t students but provocators from Right Sector, a Banderite neo-nazi group, who were waiting on the police to show up along with Western journalists, cameras in hand.
Very quickly, government buildings were taken over by ever-growing violent far-right groups. On February 18, Yanukovych was about to sign a deal with pro-EU leaders to give the protestors what they wanted and put a stop.
So they committed a false flag attack. On 20 February 2014, a group of snipers that somehow acquired automatic weapons took post on the second floor of the Hotel Ukraina while a pro-EU protest was taking place just outside. They fired into the crowd and killed 49 protestors. Even back then, this attack was believed to have been a false flag in some circles, but it was conclusively proven thanks to the work of researchers like Ivan Katchanovski which you can read here.
The false flag worked initially. It galvanized support against the Yanukovych government: he was swiftly named as the mastermind behind the massacre and chased out of office. The investigation was open and shut, and he was held responsible.
49 died and 190 were injured all for an IMF loan.
The false flag massacre was not the real problem by itself. To carry out this massacre, the coup conspirators had to arm and train paramilitary groups, and relied on existing fascist groups to train this.
This meant fascists in Ukraine now had weapons and the training to use them. And fascists never stop after one massacre, as “Israel” shows us every day.
Porochenko was swiftly put in power by the “interim” President after Yanukovych was illegally declared “unfit to be President” in absentia, while members of Parliament on his side were barred from entering the Parliament building, and the rest is history.
One of their first acts was to repeal the language autonomy law which allowed oblasts to choose their official languages (either Ukrainian or Russian), which was definitely a very important problem to think about right after a coup had killed hundreds and left the country in chaos — it was another provocation, trying to provoke Russian oblasts into acting against the coup government, giving them legitimacy to strike back.
That same year, far-right paramilitary squads set their sights on the Donbass. After the coup government replaced Yanukovych with Petrochenko (who was entirely pro-EU), the Donbass started getting uneasy. Due to the long shared history between Ukraine and Russia — which dates back to before the USSR and stretches even to the founding of Russia — it happens that the people of the Donbass, traveling down the coast and into Crimea, are largely ethnically Russian. They are of Ukrainian nationality and certainly (until 2014 at least) considered themselves Ukrainian, but spoke Russian as their first or only tongue and had Russian customs.
The Donbass also happens to historically be the industrial center of Ukraine, and the Crimea is a very strategic place with a perennial port in the Black Sea reaching into the Meditterranean.
In May of 2014, far-right groups entered the coastal city of Odessa. They locked a trade union building with everyone inside and then set fire to it. Dozens died in the flames.
The goal was to provoke a war, and it worked. This sparked the separatist movement in the Donbas, who organized militias and proclaimed the separatist Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics to defend themselves against paramilitary groups shelling them with mortars (you might also find the source for this reference very funny; in 2018 the Washington Post had no problems calling out the conflict in the Donbass what it is).
One of the groups killing Ukrainians in the Donbass was the Azov Battalion, a favorite of NAFO trolls, who doesn’t hide their fascist affiliations. They were incorporated into the regular UA army in 2022, shortly after the war with Russia broke out. They uphold Bandera, like much of post-coup Ukraine (though the beliefs were also there before the coup, they were just dormant). Another group is the Georgian Legion, which NAFO trolls originally supported — Kamil Dyszewski, the neo-nazi founder of NAFO (this is information freely available in the media), originally drew the ugly dogs if one made a donation to the Georgian Legion.
Bandera was plainly a Nazi collaborator. Ukraine today upholds him as a “freedom fighter” for Ukrainian independence, but Lenin was the one who promoted the use of the Ukrainian language and their independence from a Russian oblast into their own country as part of the Soviet Union. With his OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists), Bandera was responsible for the massacre of Jews in Ukraine, helping the SS, and fighting against the Allies on the Eastern Front. Today, Ukraine erects statues in his honor.
At the same time, Crimea joined Russia in 2014. They saw what was happening in Odessa and other cities, and blocked the roads and bridges into Crimea to avoid the same situation. Additionally, Russian troops were present in Crimea due to treaties signed in 1995 and 1997, which certainly helped prevent the paramilitary groups from attacking. A referendum was then ran inside Crimea to secede and join Russia so as to receive protection, as Ukraine was clearly unwilling to give it — in fact, Ukraine was actively arming the neo-nazi groups.
If one’s own state is actively trying to ethnically cleanse them, they are justified in seeking protection elsewhere. A referendum was held in Crimea, in which Crimeans voted to join the Russian Federation.
The fights in the Donbass led to the Minsk I and II accords in the following years, but without success. At every turn, as soon as Ukraine signed the accords, they instantly turned around and broke them. It came out only recently that Germany was sabotaging the accords to provoke a war against Russia and give Ukraine time to “arm itself” (i.e. for NATO to send it weapons). Just last year, Zelensky admitted that he never had any intentions of upholding Minsk II, despite being elected in 2019 on a platform of working towards peace in the Donbass. His platform also included fighting against corruption in Ukraine, while he was named in the Pandora Papers as owning millions in offshore accounts as well as properties in London.
Everything that happened since 2014 in Ukraine was meant to provoke Russia into a war. Russia originally didn’t take the bait — they knew what the EU was attempting. Remember that when Putin was first running for President of the Russian Federation in 1999, Western leaders such as Tony Blair and Clinton were trying to court him and buy him out. He accepted these invitations and played along, and, when he was elected in 2000 to replace the other Western puppet Boris Yeltsin, he instantly turned around and proclaimed a sovereign Russia. He knows how imperialists work, certainly because he worked for the KGB before the overthrow of the Soviet Union and learned some lessons from that time.
Why would Ukraine want a war with Russia? Well, Ukraine doesn’t really want it. At least, not all of Ukraine.
The coup government wants a war because they were assured Western support — and indeed, Ukraine is now fighting against Russia almost entirely with NATO mercenaries and equipment. The coup government also certainly found more base benefits to this war, such as money that can go directly into their pocket.
Until the war in 2022, Ukraine was considered the most corrupt European country. Suddenly overnight, it became a bastion of European values fighting against the invading Russian “hordes”.
11,520 Ukrainian civilians died since the beginning of the war in 2022, all to line the pockets of Von der Leyen and Ukrainian officials.
The reason the EU is fighting Russia is because Russia doesn’t accept selling its vast natural resources to speculators and equity traders who only look at their bottom line. Do the Russian capitalists do everything right? No, certainly not. But they are held to the law. Russia under neoliberal EU capital would be doing far worse than it is today, e.g. the 20% poverty rate like in Romania (Romania’s share of capital is also mostly foreign over domestic).
In 2023, the major gas pipeline NordStream was destroyed. Everybody knew who did it at the time already, but it’s now come out that US Navy ships were present at the site before the explosions and quarantined it (what US Navy ships were doing so far from their coast is another matter that is not lost on us). NordStream provided cheap Russian gas to Europe through Germany. As soon as NordStream was destroyed, the EU immediately agreed to buy their natural gas from the US at more than twice the price.
The point is to dismantle Russia through Ukraine. And that’s precisely the reason the EU (and US, of course) is sending unlimited money to “Israel” too. “Israel” serves the same role towards Palestine that Ukraine does to Russia.
The role of “Israel” is to dismantle peace and stability in West Asia [the Middle East] in a state of constant war, which allows US and EU companies to swoop in and steal all their natural resources with their own companies, reinforcing their domestic finance capital. There are many examples to choose from, but perhaps this picture, from the 2003 invasion of Iraq, will suffice for now:
This is blatant imperialism, of which the US is currently the main perpetrator. Ukraine is not fighting for its independence; it chose to invade the Donbass and it knowingly worked against ceasefire agreements. It chose to provoke Russia and in doing so batter itself for EU interests. Ukraine was doing fine under Yanukovych, and had better deals with Russia than with the EU; it had no reason to change camps, especially at the cost it did, except if to enrich a select few. While Ukrainians are dying en masse at the frontlines in the trenches and worrying about their safety, Zelensky is having a casual stroll through Europe’s capitals, enjoying the sights while he repeats the same coked-out lines he’s been saying since 2022.
This is why this essay calls both Ukraine and “Israel” tools of imperialism. A tool is meant to be used, it has no agency of its own. A tool left to its own devices does nothing, solves nothing. One needs to wield the hammer to make it nail boards. One needs to wield Ukraine to make it attack Russia.
Ukraine has a way out of this. It’s going to be difficult after Euromaidan, but now that they realize — two years too late — that the war is lost, everything will hinge on the terms Russia dictates to Ukraine. The entire Donbass region down to the Crimean border is on the table, whereas original war goals were to recognize the independence of the separatist republics and disarm Ukraine’s army. Beyond that, it’s doubtful that Russia will try to let an independent Ukraine remain, at least not one that entertains ideas of joining NATO or the EU.
“Israel” is different. I wrote about their nature before; “Israel” was created to colonize and settle Palestine.
In settler-colonialism, settlers are sent by their home country (in this case, much of Europe participated together) to displace and replace the native population forcefully. The expectation is that settlers will live on the land that they occupy permanently and eventually extinguish (genocide) the natives to replace them entirely, creating their own state. This is different from traditional colonialism; in the colonialism we usually think of, a class of administrators is sent from the home country to take over economic production and everything that goes with it (laws, police, etc) and extracting profits that are sent towards the home country.
Ukraine is today neither colonial nor settler-colonial. While it did try to ethnically cleanse the Donbass, the goal was to get rid of people seen as disloyal and problematic to the coup regime and the establishment of a fascist Ukraine.
For “Israel”, there is no other fate but complete dismantlement in such a way that nobody will ever think to attempt Zionism again.