{"id":313916,"date":"2025-08-19T06:30:23","date_gmt":"2025-08-19T06:30:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=313916"},"modified":"2025-08-20T08:00:19","modified_gmt":"2025-08-20T08:00:19","slug":"russia-did-not-invade-ukraine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=313916","title":{"rendered":"Russia Did NOT Invade Ukraine"},"content":{"rendered":"<h1 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Paul Craig Roberts \u2013 paulcraigroberts.org Aug 18, 2025<\/strong><\/h1>\n<p>A totally transparent blatant lie has been turned into a truth throughout the Western world.\u00a0 The lie is that Russia invaded Ukraine.\u00a0 I will provide the factual history which is easy to verify.<\/p>\n<p>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.\u00a0 Whether or not the Banderites, followers of Stepan Bandera are neo-Nazis, they are certainly hostile to Russians.<\/p>\n<p>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.\u00a0 These street assaults soon grew into artillery attacks on Donbas towns and occupation of Donbas territory by Ukrainian militias sporting Nazi insignia.\u00a0 To protect themselves, Donbas formed into two independent republics\u2013Luhansk and Donetsk\u2013and formed paramilitaries to defend themselves.<\/p>\n<p>In 2014 Donetsk and Luhansk voted overwhelmingly to be reabsorbed into Russia like Crimea, but Putin refused.\u00a0 Instead, Putin relied on the Minsk Agreement, which Ukraine and the independent republics signed, and which Germany and France were supposed to enforce.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n<p>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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The Biden regime, NATO, and the EU flatly refused. \u00a0The conflict followed this\u00a0refusal.<\/p>\n<p>Seeing the writing on the wall and unable to avoid it, Russia gave official recognization to the Donbas republics.\u00a0 This allowed Donetsk and Luhansk \u00a0to request Russia to come to their aid, which Putin did at the last minute eight years too late.\u00a0 As Russia was invited into Donbas, Russia did not even invade Donbas, much less Ukraine.<\/p>\n<p>Putin designated the Russian intervention a \u201cspecial military operation\u201d limited to clearing Ukrainian troops from Russian areas.\u00a0 Seven months into the military intervention on September 30, 2022, Russia reincorporated the Russian areas of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson into Russia.\u00a0 The ground fighting has been limited to clearing Ukrainian troops from territory that is again part of Russia.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Now ask why does it matter?\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n<p>The propaganda that the evil-dictator-war-criminal-Putin\u2019s invasion of Ukraine is the first step in reconstruction the Soviet Empire places restraints on Trump and Putin\u2019s ability to put East-West relations on a less dangerous footing.\u00a0 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\u2019s hands.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Americans have been indoctrinated to think of Russia as the enemy for 75 years.\u00a0 The belief is institutionalized.<\/p>\n<p>Progress toward peaceful relations requires truthful reporting and correction of established beliefs that are false.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It is doubtful that Trump does.<\/p>\n<p>Now ask yourselves a final question?\u00a0 Why is it PCR who is making the case for common sense and for truth?\u00a0 Why isn\u2019t 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?\u00a0 Why aren\u2019t Trump\u2019s supporters making the case?\u00a0 I am only one voice easily shouted down as a \u201cPutin agent\/dupe\u201d by the Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, NPR, BBC, MSNBC, NY Times, Wall Street Journal,\u00a0 The Guardian, and the rest of the whore media and a plethora of internet sites sponsored by war-mongers.\u00a0 The normalization of relations between the West and Russia will take many voices. Where are those voices?<\/p>\n<p>Note: The whores at the BBC and the rest of the presstitute media incorrectly report that Russia\u2019s restoration of Crimea, Donbas, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson to Russian citizenship is illegal. \u00a0The restoration of Russian citizenship is completely legal under the international rules of self-determination. \u00a0There is no effort on the part of Crimea, Donbas, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson to return to Ukraine.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-embedded-content\" data-secret=\"i3dbeUWEen\"><p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.paulcraigroberts.org\/pages\/donate\/\">Donate<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-embedded-content\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts\" security=\"restricted\" style=\"position: absolute; visibility: hidden;\" title=\"&#8220;Donate&#8221; &#8212; PaulCraigRoberts.org\" src=\"https:\/\/www.paulcraigroberts.org\/pages\/donate\/embed\/#?secret=EUXN9V73VQ#?secret=i3dbeUWEen\" data-secret=\"i3dbeUWEen\" width=\"600\" height=\"338\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.paulcraigroberts.org\/pages\/donate\/\">Donate<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.paulcraigroberts.org\/2025\/08\/18\/russia-did-not-invade-ukraine\/\">Source\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Putin designated the \u201cspecial military operation\u201d limited to clearing Ukrainian troops from Russian areas. These were the regions of eastern Ukraine \u2013 Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson \u2013 that had voted overwhelmingly to be reincorporated back into Russia  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":131,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61,91,116],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-313916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Commentary","category-russia","category-ukraine"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/131"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=313916"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313916\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":313919,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313916\/revisions\/313919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=313916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=313916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=313916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}