The long road to war in Ukraine
by Wolfgang Effenberger,* Germany
(28 September 2022) Wolfgang Ischinger, former US ambassador and chairman of the foundation board of the Munich Security Conference, published on 10 August 2022 in “Foreign Affairs”, the internal newsletter of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the article entitled “Germany’s Ukrainian Problem – Europe’s Largest Country Needs Time to Adjust to a Dangerous New World.”1
What an understatement! We are talking about the third world war in the making.
This “dangerous new world” was outlined as early as September 2014 – just months after the Western-orchestrated Euromaidan coup – in the U.S. Training and Doctrine Command’s (TRADOC) long-term strategy document 525-3-1 and titled “Win in a Complex World 2020-2040.”2 In it, U.S. armed forces were instructed to be ready for the reduction of the threat represented by Russia and China.
In February 2017, TRADOC 525-2-1 entitled “The U.S. Army Functional Concept for Intelligence 2020-2040” was published. It addresses synergistic intelligence capabilities and proposed solutions “to support the understanding of the situation required to win in a complex world.” The Army must produce agile, adaptable, innovative, and culturally aware leaders and Soldiers, “providing commanders and units with the information they need to win against adaptable adversaries.”3
Everything revolves around the Anglo-Saxon principle of “The Winner takes it all”. But this will be resisted by the rest of the world.
Planned armament
On 5 September 2019, the strategic plan of the “Rand Corporation”4 was presented to the US House of Representatives. Under the title “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia”,5 the think tank shows how Russia can be destroyed in a targeted manner:
Russia is to be attacked on its most vulnerable flank. The plan is to impose trade and economic sanctions, replace Russian gas imports from Europe with American liquefied natural gas, and encourage internal protests while defaming Russia abroad.
On the military side, the United States should invest mainly in strategic bombers and long-range missiles directed against Russia, and encourage NATO countries to increase their armed forces in an anti-Russian capacity.
New medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe, targeting Russia, guarantee a high probability of success. Russia would end up paying the highest price in the confrontation with the United States.
On 8 November 2021, the 56th U.S. Artillery Command was reactivated for the first time since the end of the Cold War – a large U.S. Army unit based in the Mainz-Kastel district of the city of Wiesbaden and under the command of a two-star general.
The commander, Major General Stephen Maranian, stated on 3 November 2021, “The reactivation of the 56th Artillery Command will provide U.S. forces in Europe and Africa with significant capabilities for multi-domain operations... It will also enable the synchronisation of joint and multinational strikes and effects, as well as the deployment of future long-range ground-to-ground fires.”6
On 10 November 2021, the British newspaper “The Sun” reported, under the title “Dark Eagle has Landed”,7 the reactivation, for the first time since the Cold War, of an American nuclear formation equipped with long-range hypersonic missiles of the “Dark Eagle” type in Germany.
Another aspect of the Rand Corporation’s strategy was the arming of Ukraine in order to increase the costs for Russia. As the West expected, Moscow responded to the political, economic and military stranglehold on 24 February by launching a military operation in Ukraine. Two weeks after the Russian attack on Ukraine, Italian geographer and geo-politician Manlio Dinucci wrote:
“We are paying for it now, we the peoples of Europe, and we will pay for it even more if we continue to be sacrificed pawns in the US/NATO strategy.”8
In this context, Ischinger’s article appears to be a blueprint for Germany’s mission as an auxiliary force in the 2020–2040 victory march envisioned by the Pentagon:
Berlin must help bridge the growing gap with the global South9 and “restore the credibility of the Western-led order. In order to seize these opportunities, however, the German government must overcome the country’s aversion to the use of military force and its deep resistance to change.”10
Over the past 30 years, the West has lost credibility with a large part of the world’s population because of its illegal wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria) and its regime changes contrary to international law. In order to regain credibility, the so-called “Western values” must finally give up its double standards and the division of the world into good and bad.
There is no substitute for peace! And in times of war, anything else has no validity! The prerequisite for peace in freedom is – as the German philosopher Karl Jaspers has taught us – truth. Thus, the motives for a war must be ruthlessly exposed and the profiteers stigmatised. For all parties, the approach to the truth could thus be a painful process.
The war in Ukraine has been going on for more than eight years: until 24 February 2022 as a civil war with almost 14,000 casualties and for more than six months as a war between Russia and Ukraine. In this case, the number of deaths could be well over a hundred thousand.
Instead of supporting the war, it is a question of thwarting the plans of the Pentagon and the Rand Corporation and to show the way towards peace. To do this, it will be essential to look back at the events of Euromaidan with an open view.
A necessary retrospective
In December 2004, the “orange revolution” instigated by the West was successful with the election of pro-Western Victor Yushchenko. But in 2010, Viktor Yanukovych won, to the great disappointment of the West.
After the reforms in Ukraine were not implemented as planned, the officials of the European External Action Service (EEAS) were under great pressure to show successes despite this. The European Union had planned to successfully sign the association agreements with Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia at the Eastern Partners (EP) Summit on 28-29 November 2013 in Vilnius.
On the Russian side, however, there was concern that the association agreement would violate the 1997 Ukraine-Russia Strategic Partnership and Friendship Treaty. Article 13 of this treaty provided for a common free trade area, including legal harmonisation. The two sides also agreed to refrain from any activity that could be economically harmful to the other.11
On 21 November 2013, Yanukovych officially announced that he would not sign the association agreement (not the economic part here, but the political-military part) at the Eastern Partnership summit in Vilnius on 28-29 November 2013.
According to the decree, the government made this decision for “reasons of national security.”12 The EU and Ukraine first had to discuss with Russia the consequences of the agreement.
On 22 November 2013, the day after Ukraine withdrew, the protests now known as Euromaidan13 began.
After long hesitations and due to the escalation of conflicts from 18 February 2014 between protesters and police, which resulted in more than 80 deaths, the European Union sent the foreign ministers – Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Laurent Fabius and Radoslaw Sikorski – to Kiev for negotiations on 20 February 2014.
The agreements lasted for only a few hours, as part of the opposition decided on the unconstitutional impeachment and announced presidential elections for 25 May 2014. Yanukovych, fearing for his life, had fled to Rostov-on-Don in Russia, but had not resigned from office.14
The “political” side of the association agreement was signed on 21 March 2014 by the heads of state and government of the European Union at an EU summit in Brussels. Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the Prime Minister of the then interim government, signed for Ukraine.
Former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt made some sharp remarks at the time, criticising Brussels for interfering too much in world politics. “The most recent example is the European Commission’s attempt to annex Ukraine,” he said in an interview with the newspaper “Bild”. It is also wrong to try to draw Georgia closer. “This is megalomania, we have no business there.”15
The overthrow in Kiev was planned long in advance by the US and systematically implemented
Obama’s Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who is responsible for Europe and Eurasia at the U.S. State Department, told members of the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., in December 2013 that the United States has invested more than $5 billion since Ukraine’s independence in 1991 to help Ukraine with emergencies and other things.16
This took place in parallel with the gradual eastward expansion of NATO and the EU since 1991, including the colour revolutions of 2003/4/5 (Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan), the deployment of interceptor missiles directly on Russia’s borders, etc.
Only five days after Yanukovych fled, the interim government led by Arseniy Yatsenyuk began to function. One of its first initiatives was to introduce a law to abolish Russian as a regional language. This provoked protests from the Russian-speaking population of eastern Ukraine and Crimea. Since the Party of Regions, which is widely elected in the eastern regions of Ukraine, remained excluded from the interim government, ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking Ukrainians felt under-represented. It was now only a small step to civil war.
Ukraine, the hub of land grabbing and the lowest wages in Europe
Ukraine’s agricultural sector is among the priority targets for private foreign investment. Agricultural reforms required by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have facilitated foreign investors’ access to agricultural land.17
While ten multinationals already controlled 2.8 million hectares of arable land in 2016, it is estimated that they now own up to 6 million hectares. This would correspond to about one-fifth of all agricultural land in Ukraine.18 An existing moratorium on land sales was suspended in 2020 by President Zelensky, much to the satisfaction of the U.S. State Department, IMF, and World Bank.19 Thus, foreign companies such as biotech companies Monsanto, Cargill, and DuPont are expanding their influence over Ukraine’s agricultural sector and are taking control of profitable agricultural sectors.20
The exploitation of Ukrainian workers, contrary to human rights, benefits companies such as Porsche, VW, BMW, the automotive suppliers Leoni and Schaeffler, as well as Bayer, BASF, Henkel and Ratiopharm. When a legal minimum wage was first introduced in Ukraine in 2015, it was 34 euro-cents per hour. It was then increased, “in 2017 it rose to 68 cents and since 2021 it is 1.21 euros.”21
Since the Euromaidan coup, the Ukrainian population has become systematically impoverished and some parts of the country have experienced unimaginable suffering. Human trafficking and prostitution are flourishing. This did not stop the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, from declaring on the ZDF [German 2nd TV channel] program “maybrit illner” on 19 May 2020 that it was “impressive to see how they defend our values, with everything they have, even their lives.”22
In Ukraine, people are losing their lives for the geopolitical goals of the United States and for the maximisation of profits of insatiable groups – primarily Western arms corporations.
According to Ischinger, Germany should – and not only with regard to Ukraine – assume the role of a decisive leader in a period of uncertainty. “To be able to seize these opportunities, however, the German government must overcome the country’s aversion to the use of military force and its deep resistance to change.”23
Wolfgang Ischinger’s indirect invitation to risk an interruption of gas supplies or even a nuclear war in order to maintain “Western values” in Ukraine (corruption, human trafficking and exploitation) is utterly cynical.
Source: https://apolut.net/der-lange-weg-in-den-ukraine-krieg-von-wolfgang-effenberger, 18 August 2022
(Translation “Swiss Standpoint”)
1 https://www.foreignaffairs.com/germany/germanys-ukraine-problem
2 https://ntrl.ntis.gov/NTRL/dashboard/searchResults/titleDetail/ADA611359.xhtml
3 https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=799269
4 The Rand Corporation, based in Washington, D.C., is a global think tank that develops solutions to policy challenges.
5 https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_briefs/RB10000/RB10014/RAND_RB10014.pdf; James Dobbins, Raphael S. Cohen, Nathan Chandler, Bryan Frederick, Edward Geist, Paul DeLuca, Forrest E. Morgan, Howard J. Shatz, Brent Williams, Rand Corporation, April 2019.
6 https://www.janes.com/defence-news/news-detail/us-army-reactivates-56th-artillery-command-in-europe
7 https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/16695568/us-nuclear-germany-eagle-hypersonic-missiles-moscow/
8 https://www.voltairenet.org/article216066.html
9 The majority of these countries are in Africa, Latin America and Asia.
11 Stewart Dale: The Russian-Ukrainian Friendship Treaty and the Search for Regional Stability in Eastern Europe, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California 1997, http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a341002.pdf.
12 https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/abkommen-mit-eu-gestoppt-ukraine-rueckt-naeher-an-russland-100.html
13 The protests were named after Maidan Square in central Kiev, where the activists had set up camp.
14 BBC News Europe: Ukrainian ex-leader Viktor Yanukovych vows fightback, 02.24.2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26386946
18 https://report24.news/ukraine-westliche-und-chinesische-konzerne-decken-sich-mit-agrarland-ein/
23 https://www.foreignaffairs.com/germany/germanys-ukraine-problem