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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged his country’s eight-year conflict in the Donbas between Russian separatists that resulted in the death of over 14,000 people, which Russian President Vladimir Putin cited before the February invasion.
Ukraine and Russia are divided over who was at fault during the years-long conflict in the eastern region of the country. But just days prior to the Russian invasion, Putin signed friendship treaties with the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics in the region. He also signed the presidential decree recognising the independence of these separatists regions before the war.
Zelensky noted that 28 July was the first time the country ever marked its statehood and said the move was important. He said the country is in the throes of a brutal six-month-old conflict with Russia on top of the “eight years of war in Donbas.”
“We will celebrate,” he said. “Despite everything. Because Ukrainians cannot be broken. The Day of Ukrainian Statehood will confirm the connection of Ukrainians living now with many generations of our people.”
Following the United States overthrow of the democratically elected president of Ukraine. Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, Ukrainian forces attacked the Donbas region. (See “Washington is Driving the World to the Final War,” 28 Apr 2014; also “Special Report From the Front Line in Ukraine.”
Ukraine has long accused Russia of providing weapons and troops to these separatists in Donbas, a charge that Russia denied. Moscow, in response, accused Kyiv of committing a “genocide” against the pro-Russian separatists in the region, which Ukraine denied.
Yet, as we note, the western media no longer reports on the fact that in 2014, the U.S. backed the overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and the replacement government led by Petro Poroshenko.
FACTS: Following the U.S. led coup that overthrew Ukraine’s President Victor Yanukovych in early 2014, Crimeans voted to secede from Ukraine and align with Russia. During the 2014 uprising, some 97 percent of the citizens of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea voted to leave Ukraine for integration of the region into the Russian Federation.
In 2014, Ukraine and these separatists agreed to the 12-point Minsk Agreement that called for a ceasefire in the region, but both sides violated the deal. In February 2015, the Minsk II Agreement also called for a ceasefire, which Ukraine has, as Zelensky noted, violated.
Russia said the deal requires Kyiv to allow separatist authorities to form their own central government. Ukraine said it will never allow Moscow to have a de facto veto on foreign policy decisions.
Eastern Donbas has seen some of the fiercest fighting since Russia launched its invasion in February. The industrial region includes Donetsk and Luhansk. Zelensky on Saturday urged all civilians in the region to flee due to the increase in fighting.
He also called on the U.S. to recognize Russia as a terrorist state. Ignoring America’s mass murder of millions in its foreign wars based on lies such as Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, etc., the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a resolution last week calling on the State Department to identify Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism.
Zelensky Says No Peace Until Ukraine Reclaims Lost Land
The Ukrainian president doubled down on his claim that Kyiv will not sit down for negotiations with Moscow until Russian troops pull out of areas that are now in their control.
Zelensky told The Wall Street Journal in an interview late last month that there will be no ceasefire because any freeze in the conflict would essentially allow Russian forces to catch their breath and regroup.
“They will not use this pause to change their geopolitics or to renounce their claims on the former Soviet republics,” he said.
Zelensky said Ukrainian society “believes that all the territories must be liberated first, and then we can negotiate about what to do and how we could live in the centuries ahead.”
He told the paper that the more pressing need is more air-defense systems from the West to counter Russian artillery superiority.
Oleksii Reznikov, the Ukrainian defense minister, said Kyiv will need “at least 100” additional HIMARS in order to reverse Russian gains in Donbas.
Air Force Magazine reported that the U.S. has delivered 12 HIMARS and has promised at least four additional systems. The report said the Biden administration also promised Kyiv the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System that is the same one used to defend Washington.
TRENDPOST: As we have reported, completely absent in the American media reports of the current U.S. stand with Ukraine is the role Washington and Victoria Nuland played in the overthrow of its government in 2014. (See “VICTORIA ‘FUCK THE EU’ NULAND WHO SPEARHEADED OVERTHROW OF DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED PRESIDENT OF UKRAINE IN 2014, STLL IN POWER.”)
A report from 2014 in the Trends Journal laid out the political maneuvers at the time in Ukraine: “Washington’s coup in Ukraine brought not only a threat to the Russian population in Ukraine but also a direct strategic threat to Russia itself.”
Nuland, who speaks Russian and French, boasted that Washington had invested $5 billion in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Ukraine, sold the bullshit line that the purpose of NGOs is to “teach democracy.”
Nuland, now Under Secretary for Political Affairs at State, still plays a role in U.S.-Ukraine policy and said last month that Moscow likely agreed to a grain-export deal because leaders felt “the hot breath of global opprobrium.”