West rightly fed up with US proxy war against Russia

The Chicago Tribune once again begins its editorial history of the Russian Ukraine war on February 24, 2022, the day Russia launched its criminal war on Ukraine.

That allows the Trib, in its July 14 editorial “In the long haul against Putin, the West must not succumb to Ukraine war fatigue”, to present the war as “unprovoked”. It further justifies the preposterous charge that “A victory for Putin in Ukraine would embolden the Russian leader to set his sights farther westward, onto eastern European nations within the NATO fold, such as Poland, Romania and the Baltic states.”

A media outlet as storied and historic as the Tribune owes its readership a full explanation, however unpleasant, of decades of US, NATO provocations that led to the current war.

While those provocations began 31 years ago with refusal of the US to halt eastward NATO expansion after the Soviet Union disbanded, they escalated in 2008 when the West floated NATO membership to Ukraine and Georgia. That was a red line of provocation to Russia they’ve been warning us to withdraw now for 14 years.

The past eight, beginning with the US inspired and supported coup against Russian leaning Ukraine president Victor Yanukovych in 2014, have been a virtual demand by the West for Russia to attack. That was because it unleashed a civil war between the new central government and Russian speaking Ukrainians in the Donbas. To unify Ukraine under a pro West, anti Russian national identity, the Donbas Ukrainians were brutalized, indeed murdered by the US brokered anti-Russian government elevated to power by that coup. Coupled with the threat of NATO placing weapons and troops on Russia’s borders, Russia framed the crisis as an existential threat they decided, after years of warning, to defend against.

This makes current US support for Ukraine simply a continuation of the proxy war against Russia going back to that 2014 coup. Rather than save Ukraine lives, it sentences thousands more to a needless death so the US can inflict a defeat upon Russia.

A sensible policy would promote negotiations to achieve a neutral, NATO free Ukraine to protect Russia’s borders, and autonomy for Donbas to end Ukraine central government warfare upon those beleaguered Ukrainians.

The people of European NATO countries and the US understand this, which explains their Ukraine war fatigue. They understand the war has no connection to their national self-interests, nor that of any other country outside of Ukraine. They further realize Ukraine could easily have avoided attack had they simply rejected NATO overtures and refrained from waging war against their own people on Russia’s border.

Indeed, the now likely endless proxy war driving up gas, food and other prices results from their governments boxing them into a war that can’t be won short of nuclear destruction, much less one that should not have been provoked in the first place.

The sensible citizenry will never heed the false claims of their governments which have squandered their credibility with lies, erasure of pertinent facts and hysteria of a new Hitler, Stalin world conqueror to eradicate.

The Ukraine war fatigue the Trib laments is here to stay with the people. Time for Ukraine war fatigue to reach US and Western European governments and the media, including the Trib, to set up the negotiating table for sensible, compromise fostering diplomacy.

Walt Zlotow

President, West Suburban Peace Coalition

Glen Ellyn IL

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TRIB EDITORIAL

In the long haul against Putin, the West must not succumb to Ukraine war fatigue

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s barbaric, indiscriminate bombing of apartment buildings, schools and other civilian targets in Ukraine hasn’t waned. In Kharkiv, the country’s second largest city, recent Russian missile strikes have hit a school, a shopping center and apartment buildings. Elsewhere in eastern Ukraine, Russian fighter jets have been dropping cluster bombs on villages, raining shrapnel onto wooden cottages and killing anyone unfortunate enough to be outside at the wrong moment.

These latest reports of civilian carnage, however, haven’t drawn the same degree of disgust and indignation from America and its European allies that was seen in the early weeks of the war. Why?

It appears as if Ukraine war fatigue is seeping into the collective consciousness of the West.

Nearly five months after Putin’s audacious, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, the conflict increasingly looks like a grinding, bloody stasis that could endure for many more months, if not years. The Kremlin has refocused its troops and resources on the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, after grossly miscalculating that it could roll through the capital, Kyiv, with relative ease. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s forces defied skeptics and held off Putin’s initial attempt to blitzkrieg his way across the country, but, at the current level of support, they can’t match the firepower that the Russians have in the Donbas.

For Ukraine, the war is existential. Putin has made it clear he believes Ukraine has no right to its own sovereignty and belongs firmly under the shadow of Kremlin rule. For his part, the Russian leader can’t reverse course now. He has wholly committed himself to a despotic, high-stakes gambit that risks lasting harm to his country’s economy and to the beleaguered Russian people.

So far Ukraine has been buoyed by the steadfast unity that America and its allies in Europe have mustered against Putin’s belligerence. Western leaders have just added bans on the import of Russian gold to a long list of sanctions that hamstring Russia’s energy sector and financial institutions, and take aim at Putin’s oligarch allies. The U.S. and other NATO nations have also tried to keep Ukraine’s military well-supplied — recent shipments of U.S.-built, multiple-rocket launchers known as HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) have proved to be particularly effective against Russian military targets.

Lately, though, murmurs of “Ukraine fatigue” have been coursing through Europe.

Nathalie Tocci, director of Italy’s Institute of International Affairs, recently told Los Angeles Times columnist Doyle McManus that in Europe, Ukraine fatigue “is here already. The pain (from sanctions) is far higher in Russia than in the West, of course, but our tolerance of pain is lower. So the question is which curve is steeper — Russia’s ability to wage war or our ability to endure economic pain.”

French President Emmanuel Macron certainly raised concerns about a crack in Western unity when he said in June that the West should take care to avoid trying to “humiliate” Russia. Macron and other European leaders may be getting nervous about this fall, when their countries’ dependence on Russian natural gas for heating becomes painfully vulnerable to Putin’s hand on the shut-off Valve.

Even in the U.S., Ukraine fatigue may be setting in. An Associated Press poll in May found that the majority of Americans prioritized limiting damage to the U.S. economy over imposing effective sanctions against Russia. That was in May. With inflation now reaching a four-decade high of 9.1%, the share of Americans disengaging from the crisis in Ukraine is likely to grow.

That would prove costly for America and the rest of the world, particularly in the long run. A victory for Putin in Ukraine would embolden the Russian leader to set his sights farther westward, onto eastern European nations within the NATO fold, such as Poland, Romania and the Baltic states. Putin has repeatedly demonstrated a resolve to capitalize on Western disunity. He not only thrives on dissent within Western nations, he desperately needs it.

Putin is banking on Western nations to grow weary of the conflict in Ukraine and disengage. He has no qualms about sacrificing thousands of lives of Russian soldiers, or about allowing sanctions to ratchet up the hurt on the lives and livelihoods of millions of Russians. He is fully prepared to outlast the West.

And if the U.S. and its European allies allow their resolve to ebb, he will.