... enough of the Minsk Protocol horsesh*t. It was never signed by the Ukrainian government, It was never really signed by the Russian government (signed by the then Ambassador from Russia to Ukraine --- no authority to speak authoritatively for Moscow.) The only people happy with the agreement were the insurgent, Russian puppets. The Ukrainians weren't going to sign it in 2014, or 2015 and aren't going to those terms now. Putin's last word on it was "it no longer exists", then he re-invaded Ukraine. It is dead, Ukraine and the world have moved on.old salt wrote: ↑Wed May 17, 2023 10:58 pm RFK Jr speaks for me on this war, on FoxNews Special Report, 5/16/23 :
I think we're in the Ukraine war for the right reasons. Americans supported it, because of our humanity, because we're a good nation, we're a compassionate nation. My son went to the Ukraine, joined the special forces, fought in the Kharkiv offensive as a machine gunner and risked his life for the Ukrainian people, out of compassion & admiration for their valor.
But the objectives of the war have changed. They've changed from Washington DC, driven by the Neo-Cons in the White House. President Biden himself has said that one of our objectives is to depose Vladimir Putin. His Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has said the objective of America in the Ukraine is to exhaust the Russian Army, to degrade its capacity to fight elsewhere in the world. That is the opposite of a humanitarian mission. That is a mission that is going to use hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian young kids as cannon fodder to achieve a geo-political objective, the aspirations of the Neo-Cons. We've made Ukraine now a pawn in a proxy war between two great powers, to achieve our objective, the vanity objectives...
{so you think a peace deal could be reached ?}
Well, the Russians offered a peace deal in the beginning, in the Minsk Accords. In fact, when Zelensky campaigned in 2019, he was a comedian and actor, he had no political experience. But he won with 70% of the vote because he ran on a peace platform, which was signing the Minsk Accords. The United States went in there and we undermined that Agreement. We then encouraged and provoked them to have a full scale war with Russia. which is something we wanted, but the Ukrainian people clearly did not want.
Regarding the Minsk Protocols, this was published just before the invasion.
https://www.salon.com/2022/02/09/hey-am ... -protocol/
Hey, America: There's already a diplomatic solution in Ukraine — the 2015 Minsk Protocol
Joe Biden and Tony Blinken claim they want a diplomatic solution in Ukraine. A path to reach one already exists
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 9, 2022
While the Biden administration is sending more troops and weapons to inflame the Ukraine conflict and Congress is pouring more fuel on the fire, the American people are on a totally different track.
A December 2021 poll found that a plurality of Americans in both political parties prefer to resolve differences over Ukraine through diplomacy. Another December poll found that a plurality of Americans (48 percent) would oppose going to war with Russia should it invade Ukraine, with only 27 percent favoring U.S. military involvement.
The conservative Koch Institute, which commissioned that poll, concluded that "the United States has no vital interests at stake in Ukraine and continuing to take actions that increase the risk of a confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia is therefore not necessary for our security. After more than two decades of endless war abroad, it is not surprising there is wariness among the American people for yet another war that wouldn't make us safer or more prosperous."
Most Republicans in Congress are criticizing President Biden for not being tough enough (or for focusing on Russia instead of China) and most Democrats are afraid to oppose a Democratic president or be smeared as Putin apologists (remember, Democrats spent four years under Trump demonizing Russia).
Both parties have bills calling for draconian sanctions on Russia and expedited "lethal aid" to Ukraine. The Republicans are advocating for $450 million in new military shipments; the Democrats are one-upping them with a price tag of $500 million.
But sending more weapons and imposing heavy-handed sanctions can only ratchet up the resurgent U.S. cold war on Russia, with all its attendant costs to American society: lavish military spending displacing desperately needed social spending; geopolitical divisions undermining international cooperation for a better future; and, not least, increased risks of a nuclear war that could end life on Earth as we know it.
Negotiations regarding Ukraine are not limited to Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken's failed efforts to browbeat the Russians. There is another already existing diplomatic track for peace in Ukraine, a well-established process called the Minsk Protocol, led by France and Germany and supervised by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
The Normandy Contact Group (France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine) for the Minsk Protocol has met periodically since 2014, and is meeting regularly throughout the current crisis, with its next meeting scheduled for this week in Berlin. The OSCE's 680 unarmed civilian monitors and 621 support staff in Ukraine have also continued their work throughout this crisis. Their latest report, issued Feb. 1, documented a 65% decrease in ceasefire violations compared to two months ago.
But increased U.S. military and diplomatic support since 2019 has encouraged President Volodymyr Zelensky to pull back from Ukraine's commitments under the Minsk Protocol, and to reassert unconditional Ukrainian sovereignty over Crimea and Donbas. This has raised credible fears of a new escalation of the civil war, and U.S. support for Zelensky's more aggressive posture has undermined the existing Minsk-Normandy diplomatic process.
Zelensky's recent statement that "panic" in Western capitals is economically destabilizing Ukraine suggests that he may now be more aware of the pitfalls in the more confrontational path his government adopted, with U.S. encouragement.
The current crisis should be a wake-up call to all involved that the Minsk-Normandy process remains the only viable framework for a peaceful resolution in Ukraine. It deserves full international support, including from members of Congress, especially in light of broken promises on NATO expansion, the U.S. role in the 2014 coup, and now the panic over fears of a Russian invasion that Ukrainian officials say are overblown.
On a separate, albeit related, diplomatic track, the U.S. and Russia must urgently address the breakdown in their bilateral relations. Instead of bravado and oneupmanship, they must restore and build on previous disarmament agreements that they have cavalierly abandoned, placing the whole world in existential danger.
Restoring U.S. support for the Minsk Protocol and the Normandy Format would also help to decouple Ukraine's already thorny and complex internal problems from the larger geopolitical problem of NATO expansion, which must primarily be resolved by the U.S., Russia and NATO.
The U.S. and Russia must not use the people of Ukraine as pawns in a revived Cold War or as chips in their negotiations over NATO expansion. Ukrainians of all ethnicities deserve genuine support to resolve their differences and find a way to live together in one country — or to separate peacefully, as other people have been allowed to do in Ireland, Bangladesh, Slovakia and throughout the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.
In 2008, then-U.S. ambassador to Moscow William Burns, who is now CIA director, warned his government that dangling the prospect of NATO membership for Ukraine could lead to civil war and present Russia with a crisis on its border in which it could be forced to intervene.
In a cable published by WikiLeaks, Burns wrote, "Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face."
Since Burns' warning in 2008, successive U.S. administrations have plunged headlong into the crisis he predicted. Members of Congress, especially members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, can play a leading role in restoring sanity to U.S. policy on Ukraine by championing a moratorium on Ukraine's membership in NATO and a reinvigoration of the Minsk Protocol, which the Trump and Biden administrations have arrogantly tried to upstage and upend with weapons shipments, ultimatums and panic.
OSCE monitoring reports on Ukraine are all headed with the critical message: "Facts Matter." Members of Congress should embrace that simple principle and educate themselves about the Minsk-Normandy diplomacy. This process has maintained relative peace in Ukraine since 2015, and remains the UN-endorsed, internationally agreed-upon framework for a lasting resolution.
If the U.S. government wants to play a constructive role in Ukraine, it should genuinely support this already existing framework for a solution to the crisis, and end the heavy-handed U.S. intervention that has only undermined and delayed its implementation. And our elected officials should start listening to their own constituents, who have absolutely no interest in going to war with Russia.
RFK Jr. is a nutter!
