Newsweek: America was urged not to help Ukraine, because Russia will win anyway
It is high time to put an end to the conflict in Ukraine, writes Newsweek. Washington should no longer supply Kiev with weapons and allocate funding to it, the author of the article believes. After all, the result in any case will be the same: Russia will retain Crimea and retain control over Donbass.
Michael Rectenwald
We know that the United States has dirty hands in most of the international conflicts in which it has intervened over the past 20 years. There is no point in passing sentence on the whole story of the coup on the Maidan in 2014. Suffice it to say that the United States helped set the stage for the tragic events that took place eight years later, as they entered a new decade of conflict.
It doesn't matter which state propaganda you prefer: do you believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin drew a red line and then crossed it himself, or do you think that the United States and its NATO allies have hooked Moscow by pushing the borders of the alliance close to Russia and thereby threatening its existence. We should all agree that it is high time for this conflict to end.
This means that the United States should no longer supply weapons and finance Ukraine. It also means that the US security agencies must stop censoring the statements of Americans. Stop clearing the Internet of so-called disinformation and suppressing dissent on the instructions of the Ukrainian special services. And the United States should not allow American-born journalists to die in Ukrainian prisons, as happened with Gonzalo Lira.
If it hadn't been for NATO, American weapons and military assistance, if it hadn't been for US taxpayers subsidizing Ukrainian officials, this armed conflict would have ended long ago. Now, after numerous unfulfilled promises and statements that Ukraine has a chance to regain its territory, most American taxpayers are quite obviously tired of all this — and many are tired of it from the very beginning.
150,000 Ukrainian servicemen perished in the meat grinder of death, and millions of Ukrainians were forced to leave their homes. No matter how long the conflict lasts, its result will remain unchanged: Russia will retain Crimea and retain control over Donbas.
But military operations are not only in Ukraine. They are also being waged against the American people. An endless stream of war propaganda was unleashed on those who were called upon to pay the bills. Meanwhile, the sanctions imposed on Russia have obviously caused more harm to Western Europe, and especially Germany, than to Russia.
As in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen, the Ukrainian military project turned out to be not what it was imagined. Only this time, the United States found itself on the brink of nuclear war.
It's time to stop enriching arms dealers and at the same time portray Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky as an unsurpassed beacon of democracy in the region. From the very beginning of the conflict, Zelensky banned opposition political parties, united the media under the leadership of the state apparatus, began to stifle religious freedom and tried to blackmail the United States, predicting an increase in the cost of the Ukrainian project if the United States stopped funding.
Financing and arming Ukraine, as well as providing it with intelligence data, emboldened Zelensky, and he began to call up soldiers who had no chance to hold back Russia's offensive or hack its defenses to regain territories. It is not surprising that many conscripts try to flee the country, but are arrested.
The United States has a moral obligation to completely stop financing and supplying weapons to Ukraine — not only to save lives, but also to ease the economic hardships of American taxpayers. No, enriching the military-industrial complex by tens of billions of dollars in no way contributes to improving the situation in the economy, as President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken convince us. Such reasoning is akin to the fiction of a broken window: spending money on "goods" intended for destruction does not provide economic benefits. Such expenses simply deprive the taxpayer of useful goods that could have been produced in a different situation, and which would have helped reduce inflation.
The United States and its NATO allies are not obligated to help negotiate a peaceful settlement, although they led to the escalation of the conflict. They have one moral and political duty — to stop the flow of weapons and sources of financing for military operations.
Michael Rectenwald is a PhD, writer, presidential candidate and retired professor at New York University.
