Now that even the Council on Foreign Relations is admitting Ukraine can’t and won’t win its war against Russia, there might be some serious cognitive dissonance for people who’ve not been paying much attention and bought into the official narrative on the war.
If you find yourself faced with the proverbial ignorant uncle at Thanksgiving this year and want to appear fact-based rather than conspiratorial, maybe the following round up of links and sources about the beginnings of the war will help.
It’s bad enough that hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in a losing and pointless effort, but it’s important to rebut the narrative that Russia was the aggressor and not NATO and the US.
- The Nation had an excellent history of the US/UK’s decades long backing of Ukrainian nationalists (not-sees) throughout the Cold War
- The late John Pilger’s work for The Guardian from 2014 stands up well
The work of researcher Ivan Katchanovski is definitive and completely debunks the official US narrative on the Maidan Revolution:
- The Maidan Massacre Trial and Investigation Revelations: Implications for the Ukraine-Russia War and Relations
- The Maidan Massacre Trial Verdict, and Cover-up, Stonewalling, and Evidence Tampering
His work was vindicated in a Ukrainian court in 2024.
Uncle Ignorance should also familiarize himself with the names Stephan Bandera & Yaroslav Hunka. Bandera has been regarded as the “Father of Ukraine” since 2014. Hunka is a Ukrainian SS veteran who received a standing ovation at a session of the Canadian Parliament last year.
That’s not to even get into the consensus reality that NATO expansion backed Putin into a corner and that US foreign policy legend George Kennan called it “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”
The Brookings Institute 1999 history of the post-Cold War efforts to enlarge NATO will read like “Russian propaganda” to anyone whose knowledge of the war came from MSNBC starting from a blank slate in 2022.
Also, your Uncle will want to be beaten about the head and shoulder with this 2008 confidential cable from current head of the CIA and then US ambassador to Russia, William Burns who strongly opposed Bush & Cheney’s offer to invite Ukraine into NATO (revealed by Wikileaks.)
Also the story of the Ukrainian Civil War from 2014 to 2022 has been systematically mistold.
- The ICG has a good corrective in their “visual explainer” of the Donbas War.
Key graphic which shows how Ukraine dramatically upped their shelling of civilians in the independent republics just prior to Russia’s invasion — forcing Putin’s hand.
Source:The Special Monitoring Mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE SMM)
Uncle “Ukraine Is Heroically Resisting Aggression” will also want to learn all about the horrific mass murder of anti-Maidan counter-protestors in Odessa in 2014 that is VERY well known in Russia and Ukraine and almost completely unknown in the US.
This is just scratching the surface but essentially for those who been exclusively following US & UK media, everything they know about Ukraine is wrong.
Enjoy those awkward conversations around the table!