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On Ukraine, 'progressive' proxy warriors spell disaster
Maté, Aaron
http://mate.substack.com/p/on-ukraine-progressive-proxy-warriors?s=rDate Written: 2022-06-07 Year Published: 2022 Resource Type: Article Cx Number: CX24629 'Progressives" who urge leftists to support the Ukraine proxy war whitewash the US role, attack dissenting voices, and advocate the dangerous militarism that they claims to oppose. Abstract: - Excerpt: The unanimous vote by progressive lawmakers for the $40 billion Ukraine funding bill has been followed by a near-unanimous refusal to defend it. To date, no member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus - with the sole exception of Cori Bush - has publicly explained why they chose to hand over billions of dollars to the weapons industry and intensify a proxy war against nuclear-armed Russia. ... If Duss cannot see evidence of a realistic settlement that Russia could accept, then he is being willfully blind. Russia's explicit proposals, issued before the war and after, including two weeks into the invasion, called on Ukraine to "cease military action, change its constitution to enshrine neutrality, acknowledge Crimea as Russian territory, and recognise the separatist republics of Donetsk and Lugansk as independent states." It is worth noting that the latter is Russia's only new condition: for the eight years before the February invasion, Russia formally accepted the Minsk accords, which, to end the Donbas war, would have kept the Donetsk and Lugansk regions inside Ukraine's borders, with limited autonomy. Duss is free to argue that Russia's terms for ending the war are unacceptable. But to pretend that Russia has not even laid out those terms, is to essentially advocate that the war never end. By omitting Russia's stated terms for a settlement, Duss also allows himself to erase one of the invasion's key causes: the 2014 Maidan coup, and the ensuing eight-year Donbas war that had left more than 14,000 people dead by the time Russian forces crossed the border on February 24th. In his 2500+ word piece, Duss makes no mention of the Donbas war and how it began: the 2014 ouster of a democratically elected Ukrainian president, with new leadership selected by Washington; the coup government's assault on Ukraine's ethnic Russian and anti-coup citizens, who launched a rebellion in the Donbas; the critical role of fascists and neo-Nazis in the Maidan coup and the Donbas war since; the fascist-led sabotage of the 2015 Minsk accords, which could have put an end to the conflict. By omitting this history, Duss can also omit how the US has helped undermine the Minsk agreements by siding with Ukrainian’s far-right and choosing to use the Donbas war to "fight Russia over there" (Adam Schiff) and "make Russia pay a heavier price," (John McCain), because Ukraine's "fight is our fight." (Lindsey Graham). Subject Headings |