Analysis of Putin's War Intentions

What was Putin's intention in the war?

Not the propaganda that's written about this.

Oh, that they failed and he was going to take over Ukraine.

The idea was to keep NATO.

And what is NATO?

It's the United States off of Russia's border.

No more, no less.

When the Soviet Union ended in 1991,

and an agreement was made that NATO will not move one inch eastward.

Now, what happened after 1991, the United States decided

there would be no end to eastward enlargement of NATO.

And the decision was taken formally in 1994,

when President Clinton signed off on NATO enlargement to the east,

all the way to Ukraine and into Georgia.

So the NATO enlargement, as you know, started in 1999

with hungry Poland and the Czech Republic, and Russia was extremely unhappy about it.

But these were countries still far from the border.

So the next round of NATO enlargement came in 2004

with the three Baltic states,

Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, and Slovakia.

At this point, Russia was pretty damn upset.

So as everybody recalls, in 2007, President Putin said, stop,

enough. And of course, what that meant was in 2008,

the United States jammed down Europe's throat enlargement of NATO to Ukraine and to Georgia.

This is right up against Russia.

And Russia protested because if Russia decided to have a military base

on the Rio Grande or the Canadian border,

not only would the United States freak out, we'd have war within about 10 minutes.

And a month later, a war broke out. That

gets Georgia destroyed. And starting in 2010, the US put in Aegis missile systems in Poland and then in Romania.

And Russia doesn't like that.

In 2010, Viktor Yanukovych was elected on the platform of neutrality.

Russia had no territorial interests or designs in Ukraine at all.

What Russia was negotiating was a 25-year lease for Sevastopol Naval Base.

That's it.

Not for Crimea, not for the Donbas, nothing.

In 2014,

the US worked actively to overthrow Yanukovych.

Everybody knows the phone call by my Columbia University colleague, Victoria Nuland,

and the US ambassador, Peter Piat.

Listen to it. It's fascinating.

I don't think cleats should go into the government. I don't think it's necessary.

I don't think it's a good idea. I think Yats is the guy who's got the economic experience, the governing experience, and,

you know, fuck the EU. No, exactly.

And I think we've got to do something to make it.

You don't get better evidence.

Then came Minsk, and especially Minsk 2.

It said there should be autonomy for the Russian-speaking regions in the east of

Ukraine. It was supported unanimously by the UN Security Council.

The United States and Ukraine decided it was not to be enforced.

There were many thousands of deaths in the shelling by Ukraine in the Donbas.

And one of the issues on the table in December 2021, January 2022,

was does the United States claim the right to put missile systems in Ukraine?

And Blinken told Lavrov in January 2022, the United States reserves the right to put missile systems wherever it wants.

So the war started.

What was Putin's intention in the war? It was to force Zelensky to negotiate neutrality.

And that happened within seven days of the start of the invasion.

Ukraine walked away unilaterally from a near agreement.

Because the United States told them to.

The idea was that there would be Ukraine,

Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey,

and Georgia that would deprive Russia of any international status by blocking the Black Sea.

And the American senators,

who are as nasty and cynical and corrupt as imaginable, say

this is wonderful expenditure of our money because no Americans are dying.

It's the pure proxy war.

And since the U.S. talked the negotiators away from the table,

about a million Ukrainians have died or been severely wounded.