laura calosso

In his book “Boiling Point,” historian Stephen Kinzer writes, “The US and NATO, not Russia, are primarily responsible for the war in Ukraine.” Beginning in the late 1940s, "the US trained anti-Soviet Ukrainian partisans - parachuting them into the country to foment rebellion." For decades, through dissident media and later nonprofits, Americans funded all manner of oppositionist activity. In the 1950s, the CIA backed a radio station that broadcast from Germany into Ukraine and partnered with a New York publisher, whose pamphlets were dropped into Ukraine by balloon. Much of this was driven, Kinzer argues, by zealous Eastern European refugees or their descendants, like the billionaire philanthropist George Soros, and the former US ambassador to NATO, Victoria Nuland, who, according to Kinzer, had “imbibed anti-Russia passion with her mother’s milk.” Kinzer writes, by the time Putin intervened in the Donbas civil war, the country was a “fully compliant proxy of the US.” Kinzer also stresses NATO enlargement as the taproot of hostility between Russia and the West. Since the end of the Cold War, the alliance had welcomed 16 new members, most of them former Warsaw Pact counties in Eastern Europe. By 1999, Kinzer concludes, "No one in the Kremlin could avoid recognizing that Russia’s ultimate security nightmare - Ukrainian membership in a hostile military alliance - was beginning to become real.” In Kinzer’s view, it was this intolerable possibility, and the West’s cavalier disrespect for Russia’s “security concerns,” that compelled Putin to finally attack #Ukraine on 24 February 2022.