Strategic Review – Jan 24, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump was inaugurated this week for a second non-consecutive term in the White House, and among a whirlwind of executive orders, he highlighted that ending the conflict in Ukraine would be a priority for his administration.
He may not achieve a resolution within 24 hours as he had promised during his election campaign, but he is showing a welcome preparedness to try.
Fair play to Trump. At least, he is willing to engage diplomatically with Russia – unlike his predecessor, Joe Biden, and Democrat presidential contender Kamala Harris. The Biden administration recklessly escalated the war in Ukraine to the point where a disastrous nuclear confrontation with Russia was greatly at risk. Unlike the Washington establishment, Trump is not encumbered with an insulting attitude toward Russian President Vladimir Putin or the Russian people.
However, if Trump is serious about ending the three-year war in Ukraine, then his administration will need to show an understanding of the roots of the conflict. Admittedly, such an understanding might be a big ask given the type of hawkish figures in Trump’s cabinet and the abundance of historically illiterate Russophobes in Washington.
This week marked another presidential inauguration. Twenty years ago, on January 23, 2005, Viktor Yushchenko became president of Ukraine on the back of the U.S.-sponsored Orange Revolution. This article by Odessa-born journalist Petr Lavrenin provides a detailed overview of the events and sinister consequences. Consequences that led to the present conflict in Ukraine and the potentially catastrophic tensions between the United States and Russia.
That Ukrainian election two decades ago was just one of several so-called color revolutions in the former Soviet Union countries where U.S. finance and intelligence were deployed covertly to win elections for pro-Western parties, thereby making trouble for neighboring Russia.
Ukraine was always a prized target for U.S. imperialism to turn it into a cat’s paw against Russia, as Cold War strategists like Zbigniew Brzezinski had keenly recommended.
The forerunner of events in Ukraine was the Rose Revolution in 2003 in Georgia. The Western-backed candidate Mikhail Saakashvili won power and immediately oriented the former Soviet republic towards the European Union and NATO. That color revolution is still playing out today where Western-backed opposition parties are contesting the election of the Georgian Dream party at the end of last year, whose victory was based on a platform of seeking friendlier relations with Russia.
In a similar pattern of foreign interference, the Ukrainian presidential election in 2004 was won by pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovich. The result was thrown into controversy by the U.S.-backed Orange Revolution mobilized to support rival Viktor Yushchenko. Purportedly, civic society groups financed by U.S. American International Development (USAID, a well-known front for CIA funding) and billionaire pro-Western investor George Soros pitched tents and occupied government buildings in Kiev until the Western-backed candidate Yushchenko won the day through public disturbances and a subsequent election run-off. There is a clear echo of the tactics in Georgia today to overturn the election of the Dream party.
As Lavrenin’s article makes clear, the inauguration of Yushchenko was a fateful turning point for Ukraine. The new president emerged to be something of an imposter, implementing controversial policies that were divisive and inflammatory. The former central banker promptly turned the country into an enemy of Russia. He shed his previous image of a moderate and unifier to embark on policies of polarizing and alienating large sections of Ukrainian society. (Echoes of incumbent expired president Zelensky who reneged on his peace campaign after his election in 2019.)
With Yushchenko’s dubious rise to power, there then followed a years-long program of repressing Russian culture and language, glorifying Nazi collaborators, and orientating Ukraine for NATO and EU membership.
Yushchenko’s policies caused his popularity to plummet. He eventually lost the presidential election in 2010 to his former rival Viktor Yanukovich.
However, the radical nationalist politics, rehabilitation of Nazi elements and Russophobia that Yushchenko had unleashed would surge again in 2014 in the guise of the Maidan Revolution to violently overthrow the Yanukovich government. Yanukovich had slowed the dynamic towards NATO and EU membership and sought a more balanced relationship with Moscow.
The 2014 CIA-backed coup brought to power Petro Poroshenko (a former member of the Yushchenko government) and subsequently the former comedian Vladimir Zelensky. Poroshenko and Zelensky reinforced the policies of suppressing Russian cultural identity and turning the country into a NeoNazi staging post for NATO hostility towards Russia. The hostility buried peace initiatives like the Minsk Accords that Moscow had endorsed in 2014 and 2015.
The path to proxy war against Russia can be traced back to the Orange Revolution that the CIA had engineered in 2004, resulting in the inauguration of Viktor Yushchenko 20 years ago this week.
As Lavrenin writes: “By the time of the 2010 presidential election, Ukraine was deeply divided on cultural, linguistic, and national issues. A ticking time bomb had been set into motion back in 2004 when Yushchenko’s team chose to support radical nationalists and Neo-Nazis. This strategy granted him a tactical victory but ultimately led the country to a strategic defeat.”
One would think that President Trump should have an open mind about the nefarious interference in elections by the U.S. intelligence apparatus and Washington’s deep-state forces. After all, he has repeatedly complained that his own election campaigns in 2016, 2020 and 2024 were actively opposed by deep-state enemies. If these forces are capable of sabotaging U.S. elections, what more would they do in foreign nations?
This week, Trump also said he would release all classified state papers related to the assassinations of President John F Kennedy in 1963, the latter’s brother and former presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy, and civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King, both in 1968. The implication is that Trump is aware that U.S. deep-state actors were involved in these killings.
Thus, Trump seems to have an open mind about the sinister culpability of the U.S. political establishment in foreign and domestic matters.
If he genuinely wants to resolve the conflict in Ukraine and create a lasting peace with Russia, then Trump and the best of his advisors can study the documented history leading up to the war. He might then appreciate that Russia’s criticism of NATO expansionism and its destabilization of Ukraine is entirely valid and must be remedied.
For a robust peace to succeed, it must be based on an equally robust premise of justice, honesty, and respect.
Trump can also avail of independent-minded diplomats like former U.S. ambassadors Jack Matlock and Chas Freeman and scholars like Professor John Mearsheimer, among others, who all deplored the baleful policy of NATO expansionism in general and through Ukraine in particular as a recipe for conflict with Russia.
The resource of history is there to help resolve this and other conflicts. The question is: are Trump and his aides prepared to learn and act accordingly?
In the coming months, it will become clear if Trump can assert a more diplomatic policy for peace with Russia or if he is just another tool of American imperialism that is irrevocably wired for war against Russia – and any other perceived rival.
Only problem is its all bunk. There was no US backed ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine. Its just more Russian Commie disinfo. Here’s what happened; various fascist-nationalist Ukrainian groups organized the protests/riots to remove the Commie Yanukovich. Yanukovich was a Commie Jew agent of Russia & they wanted to be free of Russian Commie interference in their society. All these Slav nations (Russia/Hungary/Belarus/Ukraine etc) are governed by the same Jew-Commie cabal setting up whites to die in coordinated wars.
@ Machiavelli
IN 2012, Soros “NGO” groups were lifted out of places like Egypt to work with US intelligence agents and gobs of money to unseat President Yanukovych and his party. The nation was deliberately destabilized by the US-led West for the “coup” in 2014. This was a direct response to the war in Syria started by the US-led West in 2011 to take over that nation in its march through Middle East. Without any value judgement as to communism vrs. capitalism, or even right and wrong, those are the facts, and Russia since that time and until over the past few months was supporting the Assad government and was according to all of the propaganda was designated as the principal “enemy” of the US-led West. The ZOG’s of the West coveted Syria.
The resulting coup in the Ukraine in 2014 likely will eventually be considered by historians as a US-Israel response to Russia’s support for the Syrian government and its only base on the Mediterranean. The entire Russia-bashing campaign in the US began right after the coup in the Ukraine, and since then everything possible was done to start and escalate the conflict in the Donbas. Then with the “s”election of Zio Zelensky in 2019 (who campaigned to end the conflict and make peace), he quickly forgot his fake promises and did everything he could to escalate the war.
On the global chessboard, after the February 2022 invasion of eastern Ukraine by Russian forces, Russia was facing continued conflict against the US-led West in Syria, and an escalating conflict sapping its military resources in the Ukraine. Although it has a lucrative arms industry, and a population of about 160 million, it has a GDP less than a tenth of the US. It is no real match for the West.
The US-led Russia bashing, the economic sanctions against Russia, and the war in the Donbas were all made-in-America and the evidence of the motive appears to focus mainly on getting Russia out of Syria. If the US was interested in the Ukraine then it would not be interested in occupying the mainly Russian-speaking oblasts in the eastern Ukraine, and it is not and there was never any intention to do so. If it wanted to make a “deal” with Russia that it get out of Syria then it would have to give something in exchange. What has happened is that Russia took the Crimea in 2014 which was overwhelmingly Russian anyway, and thereafter upon the deliberately-escalated conflict in the Donbas, Russia very easily trounced the Ukrainian forces which at all times were never properly trained, equipped, or coordinated with anything but outdated weaponry and logistics. Russia met a pathetic resistance with the US-military with all of its sophisticate surveillance equipment eating popcorn as it watched an absolute slaughter, doing nothing really effective to assist the Ukrainian forces duped and forced to go to the front.
The only reason for the actual war in the Ukraine, no matter which way you look at it, was to get the Russians out of Syria, along with the prospect of dividing up the Ukraine. A price had to be paid and it was decided that the Ukraine would be the victim. Most likely there was a secret deal (even as long ago as 2014 or 2013) where Russia would get the Russian-speaking oblasts on its borders in exchange for getting out of Syria.
So why such wars? Why could they not just agree to carve the nations up like they are now doing without all of the bloodshed? The reason is that most of the people on the globe and most of the nations would say they had no right to do such a thing, and with such an open agreement neither of the superpowers could continue to pose as being “protectors” for the various nations in their orbs. They would look like the bully nations which they are, and the entire superpower protection-racket schemes of the past would be exposed. Secondly, but not of any lesser importance, the people in both Syria and the Ukraine would never agree to such an exchange either for Western interests or for those of Russia. Thirdly, it is always better to have a war and an official peace deal after as a result of a war in order to cover up the land transfers, looting, and regime changes to follow.
The backdrop is that the Ukraine has the richest farmlands in the world. It is the “bread basket” of much of Eurasia. Food control is future NWO people control. The Ukraine also has many very valuable natural resources, and because of its location many pipelines run though it from Russia to the EU and to Turkey. Also, it is on route with a designated northern silk road from China to the EU and has a growing north-south trade route through the Back Sea to the Mediterranean. The ZOG money power wanted both vulnerable Syria and the Ukraine, and the evidence is that it staged both wars so it could deliver the spoils to its friends at BlackRock bottom prices.
As for Syria, the same money power wanted lebensraum for the Greater Israel Project including the rich farmlands in Syria around the Euphrates, and ownership of its many resources on and offshore. Hence, they used the powers to start the wars to slaughter, maim, and displace millions of people, and rob tens of millions more – all of which for the weight of their wilful evils and by their own devices, they and their minions will most certainly fall into everlasting darkness and unending restlessness when they pass into eternity. Amen.