Russia Did Not Invade Ukraine
Paul Craig Roberts

A totally transparent blatant lie has been turned into a truth throughout the Western world.  The lie is that Russia invaded Ukraine.  I will provide the factual history which is easy to verify.

When Washington overthrew the Ukrainian government in 2014 and installed a puppet, Washington relied on the Banderites to push the government into hostility with the Russian settled areas of Ukraine, areas such as Crimea and Donbas, that originally were part of Russia.  Whether or not the Banderites, followers of Stepan Bandera are neo-Nazis, they are certainly hostile to Russians.  

The conflict in Ukraine began in 2014 with street assaults on Russians in Donbas and government attempts to ban the use of the Russian language and other prohibitions placed on the Russian areas.  These street assaults soon grew into artillery attacks on Donbas towns and occupation of Donbas territory by Ukrainian militias sporting Nazi insignia.  To protect themselves, Donbas formed into two independent republics–Luhansk and Donetsk–and formed paramilitaries to defend themselves. 

In 2014 Donetsk and Luhansk voted overwhelmingly to be reabsorbed into Russia like Crimea, but Putin refused.  Instead, Putin relied on the Minsk Agreement, which Ukraine and the independent republics signed, and which Germany and France were supposed to enforce.  The agreement, sponsored by Russia, kept Donbas in Ukraine but provided some autonomy, such as independent police and courts to protect the rights of the Russian inhabitants. Putin naively relied on the Minsk Agreement, which the chancellor of Germany and president of France later said was used to deceive Putin while the US built and equipped a large Ukrainian army.

By late 2021 this army was prepared to invade Donbas, much of which was already under Ukrainian occupation, and forcibly reincorporate Donbas into Ukraine without any autonomy.  Faced with the abuse and possible slaughter of Russian people, Putin and his foreign minister Lavrov tried during December 2021-February 2022 to obtain a mutual security agreement with the West that would exclude Ukraine from NATO membership and contribute to mutual security by normalizing relations between Russia and the West.  The Biden regime, NATO, and the EU flatly refused.  The conflict followed this refusal.

Seeing the writing on the wall and unable to avoid it, Russia gave official recognization to the Donbas republics.  This allowed Donetsk and Luhansk  to request Russia to come to their aid, which Putin did at the last minute eight years too late.  As Russia was invited into Donbas, Russia did not even invade Donbas, much less Ukraine.

Putin designated the Russian intervention a “special military operation” limited to clearing Ukrainian troops from Russian areas.  Seven months into the military intervention on September 30, 2022, Russia reincorporated the Russian areas of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson into Russia.  The ground fighting has been limited to clearing Ukrainian troops from territory that is again part of Russia. 

Ask yourselves how and why did the truth get replaced by a lie? The answer is that those who profit from war provide the war propaganda.  

Now ask why does it matter?  The answer is that propaganda is a barrier to understanding and to a peaceful diplomatic solution to a conflict that can easily spin out of control into a wider war.

The propaganda that the evil-dictator-war-criminal-Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is the first step in reconstruction the Soviet Empire places restraints on Trump and Putin’s ability to put East-West relations on a less dangerous footing.  Already the Western whore media is screaming that Trump is selling out Ukraine, that Trump is selling out Europe, that Trump is putty in Putin’s hands.  These and other such ignorant slogans will be used by the Zionist neoconservatives and US military/security complex to drive wedges between Trump and his supporters.  Americans have been indoctrinated to think of Russia as the enemy for 75 years.  The belief is institutionalized.  

Progress toward peaceful relations requires truthful reporting and correction of established beliefs that are false.  Can this be achieved when the well-placed neoconservative supporters of US hegemony are defending their interest, and the military/security complex is determined to protect its power and profit? Trump can expect little help from the media.  Naive Russians should not get carried away with their hopes for an accommodation with the West. Powerful barriers are in the way of Russian hopes, and Russians have no means of removing the barriers.  It is doubtful that Trump does.

Now ask yourselves a final question?  Why is it PCR who is making the case for common sense and for truth?  Why isn’t it the US foreign policy community, the Kremlin, the Chinese, the Russian media, the Western media, the German government, the British government, the government of India?  Why aren’t Trump’s supporters making the case?  I am only one voice easily shouted down as a “Putin agent/dupe” by the Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, NPR, BBC, MSNBC, NY Times, Wall Street Journal,  The Guardian, and the rest of the whore media and a plethora of internet sites sponsored by war-mongers.  The normalization of relations between the West and Russia will take many voices. Where are those voices?  

Note: The whores at the BBC and the rest of the presstitute media incorrectly report that Russia’s restoration of Crimea, Donbas, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson to Russian citizenship is illegal.  The restoration of Russian citizenship is completely legal under the international rules of self-determination. There is no effort on the part of Crimea, Donbas, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson to return to Ukraine.

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

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