How the West Brought War to Ukraine: Understanding How U.S. and NATO Policies Led to Crisis, War, and the Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe

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The dizzying speed of coordinated global sanctions on an unprecedented scale catalysed a domino effect of mass corporate exits from Russia. Last but not least, considering the poll scope and questionnaire, the results from Russia and China need to be interpreted with caution, bearing in mind possibility that some respondents might have felt constrained in expressing their opinions freely. No, I think it’s multilayered, and I think it ranges all the way from people who are very well-intentioned and, in fact, sometimes knowledgeable and have deep beliefs about the evil and the danger of the Russians. This polling and analysis was the result of a collaboration between ECFR and the ‘ Europe in a Changing World’ project of the Dahrendorf Programme at St Antony's College, University of Oxford. So if you think you’re negotiating with Hitler, any compromise is going to be understood to be appeasement.

Seemingly underestimating a well-organized, uber-motivated Ukraine resistance – armed and trained in using the latest Western-supplied military hardware – has also been key. The most popular view in Russia and China is to expect a more even distribution of global power among multiple countries – namely, for multipolarity to emerge.

Now, our interest is to not send American citizens to get killed, to not spend our tax dollars on a futile war, to not risk nuclear war.

But the swift elimination of the most modern and capable elements of Russia’s land forces isn’t the same as the destruction of Russia’s military overall, warns Keir Giles. While Western figures may depict the conflict in these ways to unify the West, it offers no sure-fire way to appeal to citizens in non-Western countries. Gap-bridging Turkey has also emerged as a major new diplomatic player – helping broker the grain blockade deal, acting as a humanitarian base for hostage swaps, and hosting (to date, failed) peace talks while simultaneously blocking Finland’s, and particularly Sweden’s, NATO accession for its own security reasons.

It’s pretty remarkable that states have agreed to get around the table on these issues because there’s been so much trust and good will lacking, an increase of nationalism and so on.

Ukrainian Russian's, until Russia stepped in to prevent this and remove any possibility of Ukraine becoming a USA/NATO pawn. In his trademark khaki T-shirt and with canny social media lobbying, Zelenskyy has campaigned tirelessly to build a global coalition in support of Ukraine, zooming, quite literally, onto parliamentary screens across the world. They sought NATO and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development membership and even considered joining the EU. This is also what Brazil is currently doing: President Lula speaks in favour of preserving his country’s neutrality vis-à-vis Ukraine and Russia, to avoid “any participation, even indirect,” even as he accepts that Russia “was wrong” to invade its neighbour.In the United Kingdom, the poll did not cover Northern Ireland, which is why the paper refers to Great Britain. The fundamental decision by Germany is something Jamie Shea, associate fellow in the Chatham House International Security programme, says ‘I thought I would never see in my lifetime’, bringing security policy alongside foreign policy for the first time in decades. If you are under 16 and wish to give consent to optional services, you must ask your legal guardians for permission. Perceptions of the European Union and Great Britain are also predominantly positive: Indians see these as either an “ally” or “partner.

And my goal really is — to the extent that I can — to influence people’s thinking by trying to explain the issues as I understand them and to thereby, hopefully, affect policies. Benjamin Abelow’s clear, concise account of the United States and NATO’s largely unreported role in escalating tensions between Russia and Ukraine is an outlier in our discourse about the current conflict. Rather it’s a 60-page political pamphlet, although its only real ideology is being against unnecessary bloodshed.If one wanted to use a loaded term, I could say there’s an awful lot of propaganda, wherein the mainstream media is functioning to a good extent as a propaganda wing of the Washington foreign policy elite.