The Washington Post asked: “Why is there tension between Russia and Ukraine?” Its answer:
In March 2014, Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine. A month later, war erupted between Russian-allied separatists and Ukraine’s military in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas. The United Nations human rights office estimates that more than 13,000 people have been killed.
But that account is highly misleading, because it leaves out the crucial role the US has played in escalating tensions in the region. In nearly every case we looked at, the reports omitted the US’s extensive role in the 2014 coup that preceded Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Focusing on the latter part only serves to manufacture consent for US intervention abroad.
The backdrop to the 2014 coup and annexation cannot be understood without looking at the US strategy to open Ukrainian markets to foreign investors and give control of its economy to giant multinational corporations.
A key tool for this has been the International Monetary Fund, which leverages aid loans to push governments to adopt policies friendly to foreign investors. The IMF is funded by and represents Western financial capital and governments and has been at the forefront of efforts to reshape economies around the world for decades, often with disastrous results. The civil war in Yemen and the coup in Bolivia both followed a rejection of IMF terms.
Fair
2 comments:
The economics is part of the picture but not all. Michael Hudson elaborated on this a while back.
There was— and still is — a strategic component to it as part of encircling Russia (and China) to isolate them and eventually break them up, thereby solidifying US global hegemony, a euphemism for world domination by the US and comprador elites.
Russia saw what was happening and acted. So the US labeled Russia the aggressor in the narrative it spun.
It's pure evil!
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