Ukraine, Starmer and his flock of headless chickens
DONNA RACHEL EDMUNDS
MONDAY marked three years to the day since Russia rolled into Ukraine, and what better way to mark the occasion than with a lavish conference? In scenes more resembling a Hollywood awards ceremony than a political conclave, Sir Keir Starmer told his fellow luminaries at the ‘Support Ukraine’ event that the whole of Britain stands behind the beleaguered nation, ‘from His Majesty the King to the NHS workers volunteering in hospitals in Ukraine to the communities that took Ukrainian refugees to their heart’. He stopped just short of making a heart sign with his hands.
But just like the best Tinseltown spectacles, behind the performance there was very little of real substance. Tomorrow, Starmer is set to fly to Washington to present his grand plan for Ukraine: Up to 30,000 British and European troops on the ground backed by spy planes, drones and satellites to monitor Russian troops, and warships in the Black Sea to deter further attacks. All, of course, supported by the US, which is to act as a backstop.
Never mind that the number of fully deployable military personnel in the British army has been dropping steadily over the last few years, down from 22,749 in 2020 to 18,398 today. No wonder that one European official has already told Reuters that 30,000 troops is on the ‘high side‘.
A French military official said there was little sense in talking numbers at this stage, because the plans are so embryonic. As has been highlighted in these pages, 30,000 would in any event fall woefully short of the numbers needed to enforce lines on the ground, making the plans toothless from the get-go.
France’s President Macron, adding to the bluster, told an audience at a social media Q&A session ahead of his meeting with Trump on Monday that he planned to tell the American President not to be weak: ‘Trump, I know him. I respect him and I believe he respects me’, Macron postured. ‘I will tell him: deep down you cannot be weak in the face of President [Putin]. It’s not you, it’s not what you’re made of and it’s not in your interests.’ No wonder body language between the two leaders at the press event was so awkward.
Even the Ukrainians aren’t keen on the idea of Western troops in their country. Over the weekend Mikhail Podolyak, the top adviser to Ukrainian President Zelensky, told Polish radio that plans for a Western peacekeeping force ‘do not seem very realistic scenarios for now’. Rather, he called for the money and weapons to keep flowing.
For his part, Zelensky has called for the creation of an ‘armed forces of Europe’, and for Ukraine to be granted admission to Nato, even offering to resign his position in exchange if that’s what it takes. Clearly he was put up to such demands by his pals in Europe – plans for a European army have been in the Brussels pipeline for decades; former Defence Minister Liam Fox called it a ‘vanity project’ in these pages as long ago as 2016.
The phrase ‘like headless chickens’ springs to mind.
By contrast, the Americans have been crystal clear: No Nato membership for Ukraine; Ukraine may have to give up some territory; Europe must manage defence in its own region.
Echoing President Eisenhower’s concern, following World War II, that Europe was making ‘a sucker out of Uncle Sam,’ in mid-February Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told the press: ‘Like President Eisenhower, this administration believes in alliances. But make no mistake, President Trump will not allow anyone to turn Uncle Sam into Uncle Sucker.’
Hegseth’s much-overlooked Q&A, which followed a Nato Ministers of Defense Meeting in Brussels, was heavily laden with the words: realism, realistic, reality.
‘I think realism is an important part of the conversation that hasn’t existed enough inside conversations amongst friends,’ he said. ‘But simply pointing out realism, like the borders won’t be rolled back to what everybody would like them to be in 2014, is not a concession to Vladimir Putin. It’s a recognition of hard power realities on the ground after a lot of investment and sacrifice first by the Ukrainians and then by allies and then a realisation that a negotiated peace is going to be some sort of demarcation that neither side wants.
‘Reality exists.’
Hegseth’s tone was echoed by Vice President JD Vance on Friday, in a spat with historian and columnist Niall Ferguson on X.
Ferguson had tweeted, comparing the invasion of Ukraine with aggression against Kuwait. In the parlance of the younger generation, Vance quickly ‘clapped back’, excoriating Ferguson with a lengthy and detailed reply spelling out the facts on the ground.
‘What is Niall’s actual plan for Ukraine?’ Vance asked. ‘Another aid package? Is he aware of the reality on the ground?
‘President Trump is dealing with reality, which means dealing with facts.’
One of those facts was painfully obvious: ‘Ending the conflict requires talking to the people involved in starting it and maintaining it.’ This used to be a left-wing talking point. After all, it’s the very essence of democracy. But in their panicked bid to be taken seriously on the world stage, to ‘act tough’, Starmer’s government announced on Monday that they would be rolling out yet more sanctions on Russia-linked individuals, even banning them from the UK.
In what can only be described as the ultimate irony, security minister Dan Jarvis said: ‘Border security is national security, and we will use all the tools at our disposal to protect our country against the threat from Russia.’
Surely this was not the sort of border control JD Vance had in mind when, during his Munich speech, he urged European leaders to get a grip on mass immigration. That speech was all about the need to remember the values that we fight for when we defend Europe from threat. Yet in its zeal to protect our country against Russia our governments have abandoned those most basic values, and nowhere is this more painfully apparent than in the 1,700 sanctions levied against individuals.
Take the case of Graham Phillips, a British citizen sanctioned by the British government for nothing more than criticising Ukraine on YouTube. Taking up his case in the Daily Mail, Peter Hitchens wrote: ‘Mr Phillips seems to be the only British person living who does not have any human rights. The penalties he suffers are unlimited. No date has ever been set for his release from them.
Hitchens added: ‘A punishment which can be imposed without a jury trial, and which has no knowable end, is surely just the sort of thing Vladimir Putin likes. Do we fight Mr Putin by behaving like him? Surely not. Free the Mariupol One. His treatment is a stain on our justice.’
It’s also turning Britain’s judicial system into kabuki theatre. Phillips attempted to fight the measures in the High Court, only for the case to collapse when the judge set to preside found that he himself had been placed by the Kremlin on a sanctions blacklist that prevented him from entering Russia – proving that these measures do much more to escalate tensions than they do to bring about peace.
Others have argued that sanctions are nothing more than ‘government-backed discrimination’, not least as they are often levelled against the relatives of designated individuals, as well as the individuals themselves.
‘This is collective punishment, which would be impermissible if the UK were at war,’ wrote Michael Swainston KC in The Times.
One such target is Anzhelika Khan, wife of Russian businessman German Khan, who in January this year lost her appeal to have sanctions against her overturned on the grounds that they were unlawful because she has no connections to the Kremlin. The judge simply disagreed that they were unlawful, and that was that.
As Swainson noted: ‘Gone are convention rights to quiet enjoyment of property, respect for family life and livelihood, freedom of thought and expression, access to justice and effective remedies. Discrimination is fine, if the Foreign Office says so.’
Another is the family of Uzbek businessman Alisher Usmanov, whose two sisters and nephews were placed on the sanctions list for nothing more than the ‘crime’ of being related to a rich man with Russian citizenship. The UK followed the EU’s lead in placing sanctions on the family, yet the EU quietly dropped sanctions on one sister, Saodat Narzieva, just six months later.
The other sister, Gulbahor Ismailova, remains on the sanctions list to this day, despite British legal experts finding that Ismailova never owned any assets through trust set up by her brother, and her taking steps to waive any rights to those assets in the future.
Even Politico has pointed out that the evidence used to place individuals on the sanctions list is often ‘slipshod‘ at best, based on little more than media articles about the individuals. It found that many of those articles were machine-translated and are therefore open to misinterpretation, while others were written by AI chatbots.
It is time that European leaders read the room and got real. If Starmer had an ounce of political acumen, he would look for an easy way to align Britain more closely with Washington without losing any strategic ground. Dropping these reputation-harming sanctions would be a great place to start. Instead we get bluster and pomposity and sabre-rattling. We get tweets from the Home Office brashly proclaiming: ‘Today and every day for the next 100 years: we stand with Ukraine and will stop at nothing to safeguard the UK’s national security.’ Every day for the next 100 years? Is there a land border in Europe which hasn’t shifted in the last 100 years? Does Starmer imagine he will still be in power then?
Bluster and pomposity won’t change facts on the ground, nor will lecturing the leader of the free world on the need to act tough. If Europe is to avoid a hot war with Russia, our leaders must start by listening – to their enemies, yes, in diplomatic talks, but more importantly to their friends. The Trump Administration is sign-posting loudly and clearly which direction it would like to lead the free world in taking. America is taking active steps to reclaim democracy, free speech and human rights; we should do the same. After all, without those, what is peace good for?
This article (Ukraine, Starmer and his flock of headless chickens) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Donna Rachel Edmunds
See Related Article Below
Ukraine Timeline Tells the Tale
Without historical context, which is buried by corporate media, it’s impossible to understand Ukraine. Historians will tell the story, but journalists are cut short for trying to tell it now.
May 18, 2015: Remains of an Eastern Orthodox church after shelling by the Ukrainian Army near Donetsk International Airport. Eastern Ukraine. (Mstyslav Chernov. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
JOE LAURIA
The way to prevent the Ukraine war from being understood is to suppress its history.
A cartoon version has the conflict begining on Feb. 24, 2022 when Vladimir Putin woke up that morning and decided to invade Ukraine.
There was no other cause, according to this version, other than unprovoked, Russian aggression against an innocent country.
Please use this short, historical guide to share with people who still flip through the funny pages trying to figure out what’s going on in Ukraine.
The mainstream account is like opening a novel in the middle of the book to read a random chapter as though it’s the beginning of the story.
Thirty years from now historians will write about the context of the Ukraine war: the coup, the attack on Donbass, NATO expansion, rejection of the Minsk Accords and Russian treaty proposals — without being called Putin puppets.
It will be the same way historians write of the Versailles Treaty as a cause of Nazism and WWII, without being called Nazi-sympathizers.
Providing context is taboo while the war continues in Ukraine, as it would have been during WWII. Context is paramount in journalism.
But journalists have to get with the program of war propaganda while a war goes on. Journalists are clearly not afforded these same liberties as historians. Long after the war, historians are free to sift through the facts.
THE UKRAINE TIMELINE
World War II— Ukrainian national fascists, led by Stepan Bandera, at first allied with the German Nazis, massacre more than a hundred thousands Jews and Poles.
1950s to 1990 – C.I.A. brought Ukrainian fascists to the U.S. and worked with them to undermine the Soviet Union in Ukraine, running sabotage and propaganda operations. Ukrainian fascist leader Mykola Lebed was taken to New York where he worked with the C.I.A. through at least the 1960s and was still useful to the C.I.A. until 1991, the year of Ukraine’s independence. The evidence is in a U.S. government report starting from page 82. Ukraine has thus been a staging ground for the U.S. to weaken and threaten Moscow for nearly 80 years.
November 1990: A year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Charter of Paris for a New Europe (also known as the Paris Charter) is adopted by the U.S., Europe and the Soviet Union. The charter is based on the Helsinki Accords and is updated in the 1999 Charter for European Security. These documents are the foundation of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. The OSCE charter says no country or bloc can preserve its own security at another country’s expense.
Dec. 25, 1991: Soviet Union collapses. Wall Street and Washington carpetbaggers move in during ensuing decade to asset-strip the country of formerly state-owned properties, enrich themselves, help give rise to oligarchs, and impoverish the Russian, Ukrainian and other former Soviet peoples.
1990s: U.S. reneges on promise to last Soviet leader Gorbachev not to expand NATO to Eastern Europe in exchange for a unified Germany. George Kennan, the leading U.S. government expert on the U.S.S.R., opposes expansion. Sen. Joe Biden, who supports NATO enlargement, predicts Russia will react hostilely to it.
1997 :: The only thing that could provoke a “vigorous and hostile” Russian response would be needless NATO Expansion Far East right till the border of Russia – Sen. Joe Biden pic.twitter.com/hRW47hLL5y
— Rishi Bagree (@rishibagree) June 17, 2022
1997: Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. national security adviser, in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, writes:
“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state.”
New Year’s Eve 1999: After eight years of U.S. and Wall Street dominance, Vladimir Putin becomes president of Russia. Bill Clinton rebuffs him in 2000 when he asks to join NATO.
Putin begins closing the door on Western interlopers, restoring Russian sovereignty, ultimately angering Washington and Wall Street. This process does not occur in Ukraine, which remains subject to Western exploitation and impoverishment of Ukrainian people.
Feb. 10, 2007: Putin gives his Munich Security Conference speech in which he condemns U.S. aggressive unilateralism, including its illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq and its NATO expansion eastward.
He said: “We have the right to ask: against whom is this [NATO] expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them.”
Putin speaks three years after the Baltic States, former Soviet republics bordering on Russia, joined the Western Alliance. The West humiliates Putin and Russia by ignoring its legitimate concerns. A year after his speech, NATO says Ukraine and Georgia will become members. Four other former Warsaw Pact states join in 2009.
2004-5: Orange Revolution. Election results are overturned giving the presidency in a run-off to U.S.-aligned Viktor Yuschenko over Viktor Yanukovich. Yuschenko makes fascist leader Bandera a “hero of Ukraine.”
April 3, 2008: At a NATO conference in Bucharest, a summit declaration “welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO”. Russia harshly objects. William Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Russia, and presently C.I.A. director, warns in a cable to Washington, revealed by WikiLeaks, that,
“Foreign Minister Lavrov and other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat. NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains ‘an emotional and neuralgic’ issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene. … Lavrov stressed that Russia had to view continued eastward expansion of NATO, particularly to Ukraine and Georgia, as a potential military threat.”
A crisis in Georgia erupts four months later leading to a brief war with Russia, which the European Union blames on provocation from Georgia.
November 2009: Russia seeks new security arrangement in Europe. Moscow releases a draft of a proposal for a new European security architecture that the Kremlin says should replace outdated institutions such as NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
The text, posted on the Kremlin’s website on Nov. 29, comes more than a year after President Dmitry Medvedev first formally raised the issue. Speaking in Berlin in June 2008, Medvedev said the new pact was necessary to finally update Cold War-era arrangements.
“I’m convinced that Europe’s problems won’t be solved until its unity is established, an organic wholeness of all its integral parts, including Russia,” Medvedev said.
2010: Viktor Yanukovich is elected president of Ukraine in a free and fair election, according to the OSCE.
2013: Yanukovich chooses an economic package from Russia rather than an association agreement with the EU. This threatens Western exploiters in Ukraine and Ukrainian comprador political leaders and oligarchs.
February 2014: Yanukovich is overthrown in a violent, U.S.-backed coup (presaged by the Nuland-Pyatt intercept), with Ukrainian fascist groups, like Right Sector, playing a lead role. Ukrainian fascists parade through cities in torch-lit parades with portraits of Bandera.
Protesters clash with police in Kiev, Ukraine, February 2014. (Wikimedia Commons)
March 16, 2014: In a rejection of the coup and the unconstitutional installation of an anti-Russian government in Kiev, Crimeans vote by 97 percent to join Russia in a referendum with 89 percent turn out. The Wagner private military organization is created to support Crimea. Virtually no shots are fired and no one was killed in what Western media wrongly portrays as a “Russian invasion of Crimea.”
April 12, 2014: Coup government in Kiev launches war against anti-coup, pro-democracy separatists in Donbass. Openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion plays a key role in the fighting for Kiev. Wagner forces arrive to support Donbass militias. U.S. again exaggerates this as a Russian “invasion” of Ukraine. “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pre-text,” says U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who voted as a senator in favor of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 on a completely trumped up pre-text.
May 2, 2014: Dozens of ethnic Russian protestors are burnt alive in a building in Odessa by neo-Nazi thugs. Eight days later, Luhansk and Donetsk declare independence and vote to leave Ukraine.
Sept. 5, 2014: First Minsk agreement is signed in Minsk, Belarus by Russia, Ukraine, the OSCE, and the leaders of the breakaway Donbass republics, with mediation by Germany and France in a Normandy Format. It fails to resolve the conflict.
Feb. 12, 2015: Minsk II is signed in Belarus, which would end the fighting and grant the republics autonomy while they remain part of Ukraine. The accord was unanimously endorsed by the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 15. In December 2022 former German Chancellor Angela Merkel admits West never had intention of pushing for Minsk implementation and essentially used it as a ruse to give time for NATO to arm and train the Ukraine armed forces.
2016: The hoax known as Russiagate grips the Democratic Party and its allied media in the United States, in which it is falsely alleged that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to get Donald Trump elected. The phony scandal serves to further demonize Russia in the U.S. and raise tensions between the nuclear-armed powers, conditioning the public for war against Russia.
May 12, 2016: U.S. activates missile system in Romania, angering Russia. U.S. claims it is purely defensive, but Moscow says the system could also be used offensively and would cut the time to deliver a strike on the Russian capital to within 10 to 12 minutes.
June 6, 2016: Symbolically on the anniversary of the Normandy invasion, NATO launches aggressive exercises against Russia. It begins war games with 31,000 troops near Russia’s borders, the largest exercise in Eastern Europe since the Cold War ended. For the first time in 75 years, German troops retrace the steps of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union across Poland.
German Foreign Minister Frank Walter-Steinmeier objects. “What we shouldn’t do now is inflame the situation further through saber-rattling and warmongering,” Steinmeier stunningly tells Bild am Sontag newspaper. “Whoever believes that a symbolic tank parade on the alliance’s eastern border will bring security is mistaken.”
Instead Steinmeier calls for dialogue with Moscow. “We are well-advised to not create pretexts to renew an old confrontation,” he warns, adding it would be “fatal to search only for military solutions and a policy of deterrence.”
December 2021: Russia offers draft treaty proposals to the United States and NATO proposing a new security architecture in Europe, reviving the failed Russian attempt to do so in 2009. The treaties propose the removal of the Romanian missile system and the withdrawal of NATO troop deployments from Eastern Europe. Russia says there will be a “technical-military” response if there are not serious negotiations on the treaties. The U.S. and NATO reject them essentially out of hand.
February 2022: Russia begins its military intervention into Donbass in the still ongoing Ukrainian civil war after first recognizing the independence of Luhansk and Donetsk.
Before the intervention, OSCE maps show a significant uptick of shelling from Ukraine into the separatist republics, where more than 10,000 people have been killed since 2014.
Ukrainian troops in the Donbass region, March 2015. (OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
March-April 2022: Russia and Ukraine agree on a framework agreement that would end the war, including Ukraine pledging not to join NATO. The U.S. and U.K. object. Prime Minister Boris Johnson flies to Kiev to tell Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to stop negotiating with Russia. The war continues with Russia seizing much of the Donbass.
March 26, 2022: Biden admits in a speech in Warsaw that the U.S. is seeking through its proxy war against Russia to overthrow the Putin government. Earlier in March he overruled his secretarry of state on establishing a no-fly zone against Russian aircraft in Ukraine. Biden opposed the no-fly zone, he said at the time, because “that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.”
September 2022: Donbass republics vote to join Russian Federation, as well as two other regions: Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
May 2023: Ukraine begins counter-offensive to try to take back territory controlled by Russia. As seen in leaked documents earlier in the year, U.S. intelligence concludes the offensive will fail before it begins.
June 2023: A 36-hour rebellion by the Wagner group fails, when its leader Yevegny Prigoshzin takes a deal to go into exile in Belarus. The Wagner private army, which was funded and armed by the Russian Ministry of Defense, is absorbed into the Russian army. The Ukrainian offensive ends in failure at the end of November.
September 2024: Biden deferred to the realists in the Pentagon to oppose long-range British Storm Shadow missiles from being fired by Ukraine deep into Russia out of fear it would also lead to a direct NATO-Russia military confrontation with all that that entails.
Putin warned at the time that because British soldiers on the ground in Ukraine would actually launch the British missiles into Russia with U.S. geostrategic support, it “will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.”
November 2024: After he was driven from the race and his party lost the White House, a lame duck Biden suddenly switched gears, allowing not only British, but also U.S. long-range ATACMS missiles to be fired into Russia. It’s not clear that the White House ever informed the Pentagon in advance in a move that risked the very World War III that Biden had previously sought to avoid.
February 2025: The first direct contact between senior leadership of the United States and Russia in more than three takes place, with a phone call between the countries’ presidents, and a meeting of foreign ministers in Saudi Arabia. They agree to begin negotiations to end the war.
This timeline clearly shows an aggressive Western intent towards Russia, and how the tragedy could have been avoided if NATO would not allow Ukraine to join; if the Minsk accords had been implemented; and if the U.S. and NATO negotiated a new security arrangement in Europe, taking Russian security concerns into account.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange. He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter @unjoe
This article (Ukraine Timeline Tells the Tale) was created and published by Consortium News and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Joe Lauria
••••
The Liberty Beacon Project is now expanding at a near exponential rate, and for this we are grateful and excited! But we must also be practical. For 7 years we have not asked for any donations, and have built this project with our own funds as we grew. We are now experiencing ever increasing growing pains due to the large number of websites and projects we represent. So we have just installed donation buttons on our websites and ask that you consider this when you visit them. Nothing is too small. We thank you for all your support and your considerations … (TLB)
••••
Comment Policy: As a privately owned web site, we reserve the right to remove comments that contain spam, advertising, vulgarity, threats of violence, racism, or personal/abusive attacks on other users. This also applies to trolling, the use of more than one alias, or just intentional mischief. Enforcement of this policy is at the discretion of this websites administrators. Repeat offenders may be blocked or permanently banned without prior warning.
••••
Disclaimer: TLB websites contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, health, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” you must request permission from the copyright owner.
••••
Disclaimer: The information and opinions shared are for informational purposes only including, but not limited to, text, graphics, images and other material are not intended as medical advice or instruction. Nothing mentioned is intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of The Liberty Beacon Project.
Leave a Reply