Waving flag of the country of the European Union. 3d illustration

THIRTY LOST YEARS

Why are European politicians and diplomats so allergic to peace initiatives, to proposals to start negotiations and to demands to end the Russian-Ukrainian war? And who has thrown the first stone into Ukraine!?

In 1990, after the collapse of the USSR, the inter-war Western allies made an (admittedly unsigned) promise to Russia that NATO would not expand to the East if the Warsaw Pact was dissolved. It did, and NATO strengthened and began to expand to the East!

A broken promise which started a new relationship between West and East, and which prevented the historic possibility of building a peaceful, beneficial coexistence between the two poles and of “healing” the previously divided continent into a political and economic whole, the entity of Eurasia. Worse still: external pressure was internalised by Russian policy as a threat to the country and increasingly established and strengthened the authoritarianism of the political system – internally towards its own citizens, and externally towards countries that might threaten it (Chechnya, Georgia). So we were right! Russia is a hostile country! Every gesture of refusal to the Russians and its reaction should prove that betraying the promise was a far-sighted, useful, ultimately moral act. Instead of a policy based on a given commitment, instead of a policy based on truth, a lie was put forward. In place of truth, lies have divided the world into good and evil, ours and theirs, us and them, right and wrong. In the place of the fallen Berlin Wall and in its place, an imaginary cross-section has been installed, deeper than the height of the Berlin Wall! And it split the continent in two again, into Here and There.

his must continue to be hidden – the betrayal of a promise! To hide the fact that the West first closed, and then closed and closed more and more the door; and shut Us and Them, each into his own truncated world. We are now two worlds without a door in between, formerly physical, now spiritual. It was the promise of a different, common world… We know of this betrayal, but the awareness of its meaning has disappeared into a blind spot: we do not “see” it. Only the historical memory flickers: how different our lives could have been …

And what has this “moral act” done fundamentally? It has raised “us”, the people of the West, to the level of “the good” as opposed to “them”, who are not to be trusted because they are more or less evil. The human world is thus divided in two: The former can command the latter, bring them democracy, change their governments, exploit their wealth, in short: rule them. This Right of theirs has to be proved over and over again, because underneath this orchestrated “truth” lies the truth that a broken promise has prevented the Russian Federation from presenting itself at all outside the ideological mask still being applied to it by the West; it has not enjoyed the carefree freedom and has not had the chance to prove that it is serious about coexistence with Western Europe! How could it prove that, when it was increasingly surrounded by countries that had been taken into NATO, with arms? If they were to admit that the broken promise was immoral, harmful, that the Russian Federation is not an enemy in its own right that will one day have to be crushed, the US (with NATO) would lose the semblance of legitimacy that it has been right all along in its relationship with the Dons! And further, that they are right when they bring democracy to countries all over the world, even on bayonets. We who are good can do anything; We are who we are!

He who wants to be the One suffers no one beside him who is in any way his rival. He may be his co-worker, but only as a useful servant. If it were to become publicly apparent that the West, with the USA at its head, had deceived the Russian Federation, that the USA had then arbitrarily taken for itself the Right to be Master of the World, the sole Subject of world politics, doubt would be dangerously raised about the axiom of its power: the lie is “truth” because the lie has replaced the truth. If there is one thing that the USA, as the willing Hegemon of the world, cannot afford, it is to have the myth on which it has built its world empire demolished: the myth that it is the sole bearer of Truth and Justice in the world, for the world. Its legitimacy is illusory. And this must not be exposed! That is why covering up the broken promise and its immorality is the conditio sine qua non of American politics. It is its metaphysical foundation which guides all its actions.

The West’s promise not to extend NATO to the East was a crossroads of history, it could be a symbol of a possible new beginning! But as broken, it marks the beginning of the decline of Europe as a co-determinant of world politics – and at the same time the beginning of the march of the USA as an Entity which has proved itself countless times to be the world’s bringer of upheaval and violence. With the broken promise to Gorbachev, the first stone has been thrown, or more precisely: the first shot has been fired at Ukraine!

Peace-building initiatives are unacceptable to the Subject, because they remind us that there is a possibility, another truth – not only of this war, but of Europe and of a possible different world – and the Subject cannot bear this, because it is fundamentally concerned with it. For him, not to be a Subject is not to be! The epigones and the servants feed on crumbs, they deserve it, and that is why they are so loud, to cover the truth…

If the USA would stop behaving like an Entity, an unscrupulous Master, seeking at all costs (always paid by others!) to become a Hegemon in planetary terms, a space would open up for real cooperation between countries: for the building of world peace. A new time would begin, a time of peace and reconciliation. Thus, the West still “owes” that “signature” – that is to say, a renewed or new agreement on cooperation between the West and the East, the US or the EU and the Russian Federation. For the benefit of all!

Thirty years are overdue!

What would Europe look like today with Russia? A Russia rich in minerals, oil, gas, with great intellectual capacity – in free cooperation with Western Europe? What a luxury of creativity that could be! Europe, the cradle of Western civilisation, also called “Christian” because both the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches are Christian, would reaffirm its life force, the identity of the cultural diversity of the civilisation that originated and developed in it. For Europeans themselves, it would be like a new birth!

Ukraine’s complicity in the Russian attack

The obfuscation of the truth about who was originally responsible for the Russian attack on Ukraine logically requires insisting on the untruth that the Russian aggression against Ukraine was unprovoked, i.e. arbitrary, and therefore Russia was absolutely to blame.

But Ukrainian politics – compared to the Nazi-fascist attack on Slovenia in 1941 – is not innocent, the Russian attack on Ukraine was not “unprovoked”! It was also provoked by the Ukrainian authorities themselves: by their treatment of the Russian minority of more than five million! The Russians of Donetsk, Lugansk and Crimea did not originally want to secede from Ukraine until they were forced to do so by Ukrainian nationalist policies!

In 2004, Viktor Yanukovych (who wanted to work with both the Russians and the EU) won the elections, and after the Orange Revolution, the nationalist Yushchenko, who, among other things, made himself famous by being decorated with the Order of National Hero Stepan Bandera, the symbol of the Nazis, guilty of the execution of 33. He has also introduced a national holiday in his honour, monuments … . The internet is full of photos of playful armed neo-Nazis with Ukrainian flags and swastikas.

When Yanukovych won re-election in 2010, there was a chance for Ukraine to move away from ultra-nationalism, but he did not get the support of the West (IMF credits). Therefore, in 2013, he proposed a pause in the negotiations – but then the West interfered in Ukrainian politics, publicly, directly, and financed the opposition generously, and the nationalist opposition took power. Again, widespread protests and violence followed. Terror, which the current authorities have refused to investigate and punish, has been followed by resistance: in 2014, referendums were held: on the annexation of Crimea to Russia, and in Donetsk and Lugansk on the creation of independent republics.

The Ukrainian authorities did not recognise the results of the referendums; they rejected the decision of the referendum to secede from Crimea, and the Nazi hordes, which the authorities had conscripted into the regular army and thus legalised, took revenge on Donetsk and Lugansk. The eight-year war (before the Russian invasion!) claimed some 14 000 victims, including 250 children. In order to end this civil conflict, negotiations between Ukraine, Russia and Ovse were organised in Minsk in 2014, with France and Germany as mediators. However, as the fighting had not yet stopped, the Minsk 2 agreement was signed the following year, but this too was not respected by Ukraine. If Germany and France, as guarantors of the agreement, had reacted immediately after the breach, as is the rule for breaches of international agreements, and had ensured compliance, Putin would have had no reason to attack Ukraine! Worse still: the former German Prime Minister recently said that that negotiation was just a way of buying time to prepare for war with the Russians, another betrayal of the West!

Ukrainian nationalism has been cleverly exploited and fuelled by US policy all along. In 2016, the US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Euro-Asian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, said that the United States had financed the preparations for the fateful Ukrainian elections with five billion dollars, and in the same year, US General Jack Keane admitted that the US had financed the Ukrainian regime and the arming of its army with 66 billion dollars, while US Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham assured Ukraine that Washington would support Ukraine in its war with the Russians….

Instead of the government initiating a process to constitutionally guarantee legitimate minority rights, as envisaged in Minsk 2, the Ukrainian Parliament adopted the Law on Education in 2017, removing the right of minorities to be taught in their mother tongue. The Law on Autonomous Minorities did not grant this status to the Russian minority. In January 2022, the Law on the State Language was adopted, enthroning Ukrainian as the state language (Russian was banned as an official language.)

The Ukrainian authorities were not only unwilling to implement the Minsk 2 agreement, but in response to Putin’s last expressed expectations of security guarantees for the Russian Federation, they even bombed the Donbas in early February 2022 (!), causing many civilian casualties among the predominantly Russian population, including children. And finally encouraged the Russians to attack Ukraine. President Zelenski had the opportunity to prevent the bombing, but he did not do so.

Can we imagine the Slovenian army, under orders from the Slovenian authorities, shelling a Slovenian town and thus destroying the civilian population of one of our provinces? A state shooting at its own citizens!?

On 23 February 2022, the people’s republics of Donetsk and Lugansk are requesting Russian military assistance. This was the trigger for the Russian army to invade Donetsk and Lugansk. Subsequently, violence escalated. .. Here we are now!

Peace initiatives

There have been several peace initiatives to end the war in Ukraine. One of them was the initiative of a group of Slovenian intellectuals, which was shamefully attacked by the ambassadors of the EU Member States hosting our country. Why did not, for example, the ambassadors in Germany take on the initiative of German intellectuals entitled “TITLE THE WEAPON, NOW!”? It is worth presenting briefly! Signatures were obtained from the writer Joseph Haslinger, the writer Juli Zeh, the philosopher Svenja Flasspoehler, the philosopher Richard Precht, Johannes Varwick, professor of international politics, and General Erich Vad, former adviser to Angela Merkel. It was published in the German newspaper Die Welt on 30 June 2022.

The signatories of this appeal argue that Europe “has a task to restore peace on the continent and to ensure it in the long term”. To this end, it “needs to develop an urgent strategy to bring the war to an end as quickly as possible”. They make a direct appeal to the Western countries that are supporting Ukraine militarily to “ask themselves what goal they are actually pursuing and how long will they stay on track with their arms supplies”? Because: ‘Continuing the war, with the aim of a complete Ukrainian victory over Russia, means thousands more war dead for a goal that is proving to be unrealistic’. Moreover, the consequences are being felt all over the world! “Famine threatens millions of lives in Africa”.

Our ambassadors here, and our war apologists, could learn a lesson from the German intellectuals! They say: ‘Negotiation does not mean, as is sometimes stated, telling Ukraine to capitulate. Negotiation also does not mean deciding past the participants.” And the task of the international community? “The international community must do everything possible to create the conditions under which negotiations are even possible”. For this, economic sanctions and military support “must be woven into a political strategy that will lead step by step to de-escalation, to a ceasefire”. Negotiations are therefore “a necessary means to prevent suffering here and the consequences of war around the world”. And emphasis: “Both in view of the looming humanitarian catastrophes and the obvious risk of escalation, we need to find a way out as quickly as possible to restore stability.” Apparently, our war apologists and our ambassadors here do not read and think enough.

But despite the terrible consequences of the war in Ukraine and in the world, despite the many human casualties and, last but not least, despite the many peace-building initiatives, the US, the EU and NATO are not giving up! And they sacrifice Ukrainians to bleed in their place! Proof of the hypothesis that the main instigator and maintainer of the war in Ukraine is not the Russian Federation, but its allies: the USA, the EU and NATO, is revealed by their decision to produce one million artillery shells ‘enough to last for a year’, in advance! With this decision, Ukraine’s ‘allies’ arbitrarily announced the prolongation of the war in Ukraine! Not the Russians, but the Ukrainian “benefactors”! For at least one planned year, the spiral of violence will continue, with ever-increasing needs for weapons: tanks, helicopters, planes, missiles … for a war of attrition, more or less on the spot. Or to the “decision” for the atomic bomb? The stakes are too high, stop it!

Don’t give up! Our government has put its little finger on it too! Has anyone asked us anything about this, or do we agree that Slovenian citizens are profiting from killing!?

Meanwhile, a major, tectonic political change is taking place: the convergence of Russia and China, the bear and the dragon, which are putting the USA on the back foot. The United States of America is already seeing the pyramid of its will to power/power, built by violence and foreign suffering, being torn down. China will get from Russia everything that the EU, under pressure from the US, has rejected – including, for example, the destroyed Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Only now can we understand the far-reaching implications of the truth of US policy towards the EU, as expressed in two statements by Victoria Nuland: first, that the Americans are happy that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is a pile of crumpled iron at the bottom of the sea, and second, from her 2014 exclamation: Fouck the Europe! Europe and the Russian Federation, with the natural wealth and intellectual strengths of both, would create their own political and cultural subjectivity, Eurasia. Now this is an infinitely distant possibility! A strong Eurasia would benefit the whole world, including the USA. But what will the US do now against the Russia-China tandem? In the light of the Russia-China agreement, the USA has – in principle – already lost its position as the Hegemon of the world and thus the fundamental purpose of the provoked war with the Russians (at the expense of Ukrainian casualties and increased world hunger)!

Is the time ripe to sober up from the drunkenness of a triumph that will not be?