The Washington Post Publishes
a Commentary Full of Lies Against Putin.
Eric Zuesse, January 29, 2022
On January 29th, the Washington
Post published an op-ed by the well-known Yale neoconservative Timothy Snyder, titled “Putin’s case for invading Ukraine rests on
phony grievances and ancient myths”. Key passages in Snyder’s article are:
Last July, Vladimir Putin
supplied the mythical
basis [BAD LINK FROM SNYDER: here is a
functional link to see Putin's article] for Russian war propaganda in an essay
titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” The essential idea
is that Russia has the right to Ukraine because of things that happened a
thousand years ago in Kyiv. … It takes some fanciful thinking to see here a
reason for Russia to invade Ukraine in the 21st century, as it seems prepared
to do. … Putin’s idea is that Ukraine is a fraternal nation because of how he
personally feels about the past. This is known as imperialism. It flies in the
face of the basic legal principle of state sovereignty and the basic moral
principle of democracy.
Putin’s
article did NOT assert
that “Russia has the right to Ukraine because of things that happened a
thousand years ago in Kyiv.” It didn’t even assert that
“Russia has the right to invade Ukraine.” Furthermore, the allegation that
Putin’s view that’s expressed there advocates “imperialism. It flies in
the face of the basic legal principle of state sovereignty and the basic moral
principle of democracy” is likewise a boldfaced lie. Moreover,
Russia’s Government has consistently denied that it has any
intention to invade Ukraine, but instead asserts that if
Ukraine invades Donbass, then Russia will not allow that invasion to conquer
the residents there. Russia’s position has consistently been that only the
people who live in Donbass have the right to determine whether or not — and the
terms under which — they will be ruled by the government in Kiev that was
installed (against the will of over 90% of them) in February 2014 when the
democratically elected President of Ukraine was forcibly overthrown by what America’s
Government calls a “democratic revolution,” and by what Russia’s Government
and the head of the “private-CIA” U.S.
firm Stratfor,
and many historians, call a coup, which was imposed by the Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning
U.S. President Barack Obama’s Administration, in order to replace
Russia’s naval base on Crimea by a new U.S. naval base there (which Obama wasn’t able to do, though his coup conquering Ukraine
otherwise succeeded).
Several of the mercenaries that the U.S. hired (some from Georgia, for example, as shown in these
videos) subsequently
confessed to having participated in it. (And, subsequently, the U.S. regime
charged Putin with ‘aggression against Ukraine’, and with ‘seizing Crimea’, and
issued sanctions against Russia for that.)