"Russia's Unprovoked Invasion"
Not according to the OSCE, Angela Merkel, Petro Poroshenko, and François Hollande
Volodymyr Zelensky and wife pose for photo shoot for Vogue amid war
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is the only international civilian observer mission allowed to collect information from both sides of the contact line, and its data is the best available. The OSCE is a European organization headquartered in Brussels and has observers on-the-ground monitoring the situation in the Russian speaking Donbas since the outbreak of open conflict began during the US backed “Maidan coup” in 2014, when Ukraine’s neutral government led by President Viktor Yanukovych was replaced with an anti-Russian regime.
The OSCE observer mission provides maps in daily reports documenting the location of ceasefire violations and explosions along the contact line between the Ukrainian armed military military forces and the Donbas republics.
OSCE maps clearly show that Kiev began mass artillery strikes against the Donbas republics beginning on February 14th, 2,022—10 days before Russia’s invasion on February 24, 2022. Explosions documented by the OSCE increased from 41 on February 14, 2022 to 2,028 on February 20, 2022. In other words, Keiv launched a full-scale war on Russians living in the Donbass 10 days before Russia invaded Ukraine.
Feb 14: 174 ceasefire violations, 41 explosions
Feb 15: 153 ceasefire violations, 76 explosions
Feb 16: 509 ceasefire violations, 316 explosions
Feb 17: 870 ceasefire violations, 654 explosions
Feb 18: 1,566 ceasefire violations, 1,413 explosions
Feb 19-20: 3,231 ceasefire violations, 2,026 explosions
Feb 21: 1,927 ceasefire violations, 1,481 explosions
Feb 21: Russia recognizes independence of Donetsk and Luhansk
Feb 22: 1,710 ceasefire violations, 1,420 explosions
Feb 24: Russia launches a ‘special military operation’
February 11, 2022: White House National Security Advisor Says Russia Could Invade Ukraine Before Olympics End
White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan: "We are in the window when an invasion could begin at any time should Vladimir Putin decide to order it...it could begin during the Olympics...We are ready either way." He says, "Any American in Ukraine should leave as soon as possible and in any event in the next 24-48 hours...the risk is now high enough; the threat is now immediate enough that this is what prudence demands." He adds that there is "no prospect of a U.S. Military evacuation in the event of a Russian invasion."
February 13, 2022: Biden’s national security adviser says Russia could invade Ukraine ‘any day now’. “We cannot perfectly predict the day, but we have now been saying for some time that we are in the window, and an invasion could begin, a major military action could begin by Russia in Ukraine any day now – that includes this coming week, before the end of the Olympics,” (February 20, 2022) Sullivan told Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union”.
As a retired detective, I wondered what explained the certitude of Jake Sullivan’s predictions. Why would Sullivan risk the credibility of the Biden administration if he wasn’t certain that Russian would invade? Did the CIA have “moles” within the Russian military or was Ukraine, under the direction of the Biden administration, deliberately and exponentially escalating its attacks on the Donbas to the point where Russia would be forced to intervene to prevent the Russian speaking population in the Donbass from being slaughtered?
Jacques Baud, a former NATO intelligence analyst wrote about the OSCE reports, “On February 17, 2022 President Joe Biden announced that Russia would attack Ukraine in the next few days. How did he know this? It’s a ‘mystery’. But since the 16th, the artillery shelling of the population of Donbas had increased dramatically (50 fold -ed.), as the daily reports of the OSCE observers show. While the western media spent the last year reporting on Russia’s troop buildup at the Ukrainian border, they failed to inform the public about Ukraine amassing half of its army, or 125,000 troops, along the Donbas conflict zone during this same time period.”
Who started the war in Ukraine? Victoria Nuland (2014): "US has invested some $5 billion in Ukraine, since 1991. That money has been spent on supporting the aspirations of the Ukrainian people to have a strong, democratic government that represents their interests." Days before her address, she and then US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, distributed “freedom cookies” to Ukrainians occupying Kiev’s Maidan Square in protest of President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to, in Nuland’s words, “pause on the route to Europe.” (i.e. remain neutral—Ed.)
The prolonged campaign of CIA inspired riots in the Maidan successfully dislodged Yanukovych’s government, resulting in the installation of a pro-EU and openly pro-Nazi regime in Kiev that would promptly win the title of “most corrupt nation in Europe.” Days before Yanukovych’s ouster, leaked audio revealed that Nuland and Ambassador Pyatt were selecting the politicians that would assume power in Kiev after the Maidan coup, all of whom in fact came to power. “Fuck the EU,” Nuland remarked during that February 7, 2014 phone call, an apparent response to European leaders opposed to the US) destabilization effort in Ukraine.
Victoria Nuland infamous phone call selecting the post-coup leaders:
Ukraine began to reposition its forces along the Donbas on March 24, 2021, one year before Russia’s invasion, when Volodymyr Zelensky issued a decree for the recapture of the Crimea and began to deploy his forces to the south of the country. Source: Crisis Group OSCE Data It’s unlikely that Zelensky would make such an aggressive decree without first receiving the approval of the United States and NATO.
In April 2021, the Ukrainian government publicly announced that they would seek nuclear weapons if they were not given membership in NATO.
On December 17, 2021, a few weeks before Russia’s invasion, Russia presented an official peace treaty proposal listing the security guarantees it sought from the US. Chief among them was a guarantee that Ukraine would never join NATO. However the Biden administration refused to engage on the issue. After the invasion, Derek Chollet, a counselor to Blinken, admitted that the administration made no effort to address Putin’s concerns about Ukraine’s possible NATO membership.
In light of the official OSCE reports showing the exponential increase of Ukraine’s attacks on the Donbas 10 days before Russia’s invasion, and now that former German Chancellor Angela Merkle and former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko admitted they deliberately didn't enforce the Minsk Peace Accords*, and instead used them to “buy time” to arm Ukraine to NATO standards instead of protecting the Russian speaking population in the Donbas from the Armed forces of Ukraine, the phrase "unprovoked invasion" is disingenuous at best and a blatant lie at worst.
October 17, 2014: Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, in talks with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, right, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande.
“Merkel’s ‘confession’ may be grounds for tribunal” – Moscow
A confession by former German chancellor Angela Merkel about the Minsk peace agreements will be used as evidence in a tribunal involving Western politicians responsible for provoking the Ukraine conflict between Moscow and Kiev, the Russian Foreign Ministry warned on Thursday, December 7, 2022. The former German leader admitted in an interview with Die Zeit that the actual purpose of the Minsk agreements was to give Ukraine time to prepare for a military confrontation with Russia.
“France and Germany owe ‘genocide compensation’ to Donbass” – Moscow
“The Ukraine crisis is a result of the EU nations’ deceitful policies”, Vyacheslav Volodin claims. Berlin and Paris should pay reparations to the civilians of Donbass who have been suffering Ukrainian attacks since 2014”, according to Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament.”
These comments came after former German chancellor Angela Merkel admitted that the Minsk peace agreements had been just a ploy to provide Kiev with enough time to build up its military. Merkel’s confession means that Germany and France – who brokered the deal – “bear moral and material responsibility for what is happening in Ukraine,” Volodin wrote on Telegram on Saturday, December 10, 2022.
The premeditated deliberate failure to fulfill obligations under the Minsk accords constitutes “not only a loss of trust, but also a crime for which the signatories of the Minsk agreements – Merkel, former French president Francois Hollande, and former Ukrainian president Pyotr] Poroshenko – must answer,” he stated.”
Poroshenko: "Their children will hole up in the basements - this is how we win the war!"
“While the so-called “collective west” (the U.S., NATO, the E.U. and the G7) continue to claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was an act of “unprovoked aggression,” the reality is far different: Russia had been duped into believing there was a diplomatic solution (the *Minsk Accords”—Ed.) to the violence that had broken out in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine in the aftermath of the *2014 U.S. backed Maidan coup in Kiev.” —Scott Ritter, former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer
With the US destruction of the Nord Stream Pipe Line on September 27, 2022—our European allies primary energy source, and a war crime under the UN Charter, Nuland certainly did “Fuck the EU”.
“In 2014, neo-Nazis played a key role in an American bankrolled ($5.1B) coup against the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was accused of being “pro-Moscow.” The coup regime included prominent “extreme nationalists”, Nazis in all but name.” —John Pilger
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova: “Washington’s dangerous and short-sighted policy has put it on the brink of a direct clash with Moscow”, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said responding to US State Department spokesman Ned Price, who blamed Russia for making relations between the two countries ‘unstable and unpredictable’. “Moscow has genuinely strived to make relations with the US stable and predictable, even as Washington stokes tensions”, Zakharova added. “It is the US’ desire to maintain American hegemony at all cost, as well as its arrogant unwillingness to engage in a serious dialogue on security guarantees that led to the current crisis”, the spokeswoman said.
Julian Assange: "Nearly every war has been a result of media lies"
The OSCE reports are publicly available to anyone, including and especially to US journalists covering the war in Ukraine—and because they’re critically important to understanding the origins of the war, their omission from US and EU mainstream media reportage was obviously misleading.
The current US/NATO “strategy” of refusing to engage in diplomacy and continuing to fund and supply Ukraine with evermore lethal and long-range weapons (e.g. F-16 jet fighters capable of carrying nuclear bombs, the use of illegal “cluster bombs” ) until “we win on the battlefield”, the Biden administration dramatically increased the likelihood of a worldwide nuclear war, placing the whole of humanity at risk.
Under the UN Charter, a nation that initiates a war against a segment of its own population protected by treaty (i.e. the “Minsk Accords*) is legally guilty, and the official OSCE reports clearly indicate that it was Kiev on February 14, 2022—not Russia on February 24, 2022—that started the war.
On February 9,1990, James W. Baker, Secretary of State under George H. W. Bush promised Mikhail Gorbachev that “NATO would not move one inch east of Berlin.” in response to Russia’s dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. Since that date, and in violation of that promise, every nation East of Berlin has joined NATO except Ukraine which now seeks to join NATO, placing US nuclear weapons right on Russia’s 1,000 mile border. Would the US accept Russian nuclear missles on it's border in Mexico? Did it during the 1963 Cuban Missle Crisis?
In light of the official OSCE reports showing the exponential increase of Ukraine’s attacks on the Donbas 10 days before Russia’s invasion, and now that former German Chancellor Angela Merkle, and former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko publicly admitted they deliberately didn't enforce the Minsk Peace Accords and instead used them to “buy time” to arm Ukraine to NATO standards instead of protecting the Russian speaking population in the Donbas from the armed forces of Ukraine attacks, the phrase, "unprovoked invasion" is blatant propaganda.
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*The Minsk agreements: The Minsk agreements were a series of international agreements which sought to end the Donbas war fought between the Armed forces of Ukraine and Russian separatist groups. The first, known as the Minsk Protocol, was drafted in 2014 by the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine, consisting of Ukraine, Russia and the OSCE with mediation by the leaders of France and Germany in the so-called Normandy Format. After extensive talks in Minsk and Belarus, the agreement was signed on 5 September 2014 by representatives of the Trilateral Contact Group and, without recognition of their status, by the then-leaders of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People’s Republic, (LPR). This agreement followed multiple previous attempts to stop the fighting in the region and aimed to implement an immediate ceasefire.
The agreement failed to stop fighting, and was thus followed with a revised and updated agreement, Minsk II, which was signed on 12 February 2015. This agreement consisted of a package of measures, including a ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons from the front line, release of prisoners of was, constitutional reform in Ukraine granting self-government to certain areas of Donbas and restoring control of the state border to the Ukrainian government. While fighting subsided following the agreement's signing, it never ended completely, and the agreement's provisions were deliberately never implemented. —Wikipedia
An excellent and informative article. Kudos! —Jim Gala
Those Vogue photos are obscene.