Russia, Ukraine, and International Law

Recent revelations from France, Germany, Israel, and Ukraine that the Minsk Accord(s) was a deception engineered by the US to buy time for Ukraine to organize a US-led, armed, and funded war against Russia, contradict American assertions regarding the conflict. Readers will recall that it was only after the failure of the Ukrainian government to implement the terms of the Minsk Accord(s) that the Russian military moved into Ukraine. In other words, the Russians waited for 2022 – 2014 = eight years before rising to the American challenge in Ukraine.  Representatives from each of these nations have now claimed that the US was being duplicitous, telling the world that it favored a negotiated settlement while doing everything in its power to assure that no settlement was reached. The former Israeli Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, went so far as to charge that the US said that there were no terms that the Russians might offer that would be acceptable because the Americans wanted a war with Russia. Question: at what point does provocation turn into instigation?… There are now reports of multiple instances where Ukraine had come to terms with the Russians but was subsequently told that there is no deal by the Americans. Is this evidence of Ukrainian sovereignty?… Joe Biden has been a Neocon since former US President Bill Clinton tied his War of Aggression (Kosovo) to his ‘business friendly’ neoliberal economic policies… The fact that the current US President, Joe Biden, was a major participant in the Iraq-WMD deception, as well as a proponent of the US war against Iraq, places the current US political leadership at the heart of the American imperial project. The formula is: 1) create a pretext for taking military action, 2) use political leverage to coerce a coalition from ‘the international community,’ to 3) pursue economic advantage for American oligarchs and corporations using the ruse of ‘keeping the world safe for democracy.”