The Real Beginning of the War in Ukraine
The war in Ukraine did not start in February 2022, as NATO propaganda says, but in April 2014 by Kyiv regime, which was called the Donbas war (against ethnic Russians)
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Reading time: 17 minutes (20 with footnotes)
Welcome to the peace initiative for Ukraine in which you can contibute by raising your awareness as well as your consciousness[+] and spirit to the modes[+] of neutrality[*], decency, respectfulness, wisdom[*], objectivity, mastery of the intellect, surrender (ego and mind to God’s will), and finally peace (inner then outer). To properly grasp everything, we recommend reading the articles of this peace initiative in the order that we[*] designed it, which is listed in the Contents. So if you haven’t read the previous articles, we urge you to do it, please. This article is the first in the “Reality Checks” segment.
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When it comes to the alleged Russian invasion, we need to set the record straight here so that all of us may base our conclusions, beliefs, actions, and the provisions of this peace initiative on truth alone. As you will see, there is more than meets the eye. Nothing is as it seems or as we are led to believe.
The war in Ukraine didn’t start at the time when a lot of people think it did, i.e., when Western media started to cover it as such, with the Russian alleged invasion on 24 February 2022, which is why Russia cannot be blamed for starting a war.
The most important primary fact is that the ongoing war or armed conflict didn't start on 24 February 2022 with the Russian military operation in Ukraine but it started eight years earlier in April 2014[»] with Ukraine's “anti-terrorism operation”[+] against Donbas1 residents (mostly ethnic Russians) and even earlier in 2008 with Ukraine violating[*] treaties with Russia by requesting to join NATO.
These events were the consequences of the 2004 Orange Revolution[+] and the 2014 Maidan Revolution[+][+] both of which were funded and orchestrated by the US and its NATO allies to change the regime in Ukraine to install a US-puppet regime with anti-Russian agenda. Today’s crisis in Ukraine cannot be understood without first understanding the US government’s role[*] in the Ukrainian Maidan Coup, which we will explain and give all the evidence in a separate article of this series.
The US has been using Ukraine as a proxy against Russia for many years. Since 2014, during the eight years before Russia's military intervention, Ukraine violated[*] all the treaties it had with Russia, killed almost 14.000[+][+][+] Russian ethnic minorities in Donbas, wounded around 54.000 of them, tortured and tyrannized many more, forced millions to flee, and introduced fascist laws oppressing ethnic minorities such as restricting or banning Russian language (European Parliament[+], the Council of Europe Venice Commission[+][+], UN High Commissioner for Human Rights – OHCHR[+], Human Rights Watch[+], and OSCE[+] condemned Ukraine for enacting the restrictive new educational and language laws), books, TV channels[+], radio, newspapers, and 11 pro-Russian political parties.
These facts are important to consider to stop blaming Russia for the war. Russia didn't launch its SMO2 to occupy Ukraine but to end the war[+][»], defend itself3, and stop the state-sponsored terrorism and tyranny, demanding to demilitarize and denazify the corrupt, repressive, anti-Russian regime backed by the US-led NATO.
➡ Encyclopedias such as Wikipedia and Britannica state on their pages on the Russo-Ukrainian War[+][+][+][+] that it began in 2014. Russian military engaged first in February 2022; thus, Russia didn't start the war by launching its SMO in 2022.
➡ NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg said[+][+][»]: “you have to remember the war didn’t start in 2022. The war started in 2014. And since then, NATO has implemented the biggest reinforcement of our collective defense since the end of the Cold War.”
➡ Zelensky admitted that “We were at war”[+] during Trump's presidency.
➡ United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine determined[+] the beginning of the armed conflict on 14 April 2014 as it counts the casualties since then
➡ French-Algerian Jewish anti-Russian philosopher and journalist Bernard-Henri Levy[+] (French President Sarkozy and Soros’ friend, an adept of militant liberalism, ultra-globalism, and Russophobia, a.k.a. "director of Euromaidan”) wrote: “Today’s war did not begin on February 24, 2022. It began in 2014.”
➡ US professor of political science at the elite Rutgers University, Alexander Motyl, in his interview[»] with The Hill reminded everyone in November 2023: “Remember the war in Ukraine began not in 2022 but in 2014.”
➡ There was martial law in Ukraine in 2018[+], which was imposed by then-President Petro Poroshenko in response to the naval standoff with Russia. The occurrence of martial law is another clear evidence that there was a war there before 2022.
Let there be no confusion about the place and date in 2014. This war did not start in Crimea (there had been no armed conflict there until 2022) but in Eastern Ukrainian provinces when in April 2014[»], the Ukrainian military launched an ironic “anti-terrorism operation”[+] against Donbas residents (mostly ethnic Russians), which was a US-masterminded farce because it was the Ukrainian military (filled with neo-Nazis) that was terrorizing the locals, mostly targeting civilians.
The absence of clear definitions of terrorism in international law enables oppressive regimes to label political opposition or minority groups engaged in non-violent or violent acts as terrorists, and to apply an excessively securitized counter-terrorism response. Ukraine responded to protesters by applying a military instead of a law enforcement framework. Their acts of violence would not be permitted under the law enforcement approach, which is applicable during peacetime. Like Ukraine, Russia also previously denied the armed conflict in Chechnya and qualified this as a counter-terrorism operation.
Even though the armed conflict started in April 2014[»] between ethnic Russians in Donbas and new unelected US-appointed[+][+][+][+] government, it was planned by the US long before[+]. On 23 June 2011, according to WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange and his article “Google Is Not What It Seems”[+], the Obama regime managed to fool him into providing crucial information about how the internet could be used in order to help stir Ukrainians to overthrow their President. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt and US foreign-policy establishment (Lisa Shields, Jared Cohen, Scott Malcomson – a US foreign-policy think tank with close ties to the US State Department) met together with Assange during Assange’s involuntary house-arrest by the UK regime inside Ecuador’s Embassy in London, and Assange, at that time, had no idea at all, that he was actually telling this to coup-plotters, instead of to democracy-champions, as he revealed.
President Vladimir Putin said[+] that the current conflict began not in 2022 or 2014 but in 2008 when the West provoked the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine by luring Kyiv (US-puppet Yushchenko regime) with the prospect of NATO membership. According to him, this move drastically changed the security situation on the continent, threatening the security of Russia. At other time, he said[»] that “the tragedy in Ukraine started with the coup d'état” in early 2014 (a.k.a. Maidan revolution).
NATO states have been hostile towards Russia (apart from the times of Cold War, the history of attempts at dismembering Russia by backing the separatists in Chechnya and at regime change by funding the protests led by Navalny and other Western puppets and traitors) as well as Russia's allies, some of whom NATO bombarded (Syria, Libya, Serbia…) and taken territory from (Syria – partly under US occupation, Serbia – Kosovo).
When Ukraine became an independent state in 1991, it proclaimed its neutrality in its “Declaration of Independence” but in 2008, under US-puppet Kyiv regime of then-President Yushchenko (anti-Russian, neo-Nazi Bandera follower4), Ukraine violated its own Declaration as well as several treaties[*] with Russia in which it promised to stay neutral (no military alliance with NATO). In 2014, the Ukrainian parliament adopted amendments to its laws, in which its neutral status was abandoned, despite legally-binding treaties[*] with Russia. The amendments were introduced by then-president Poroshenko (anti-Russian, neo-Nazi Bandera follower[*]) who sent troops to kill ethnic Russians since spring 2014. Moreover, in June 2017, the parliament passed a law making integration with NATO a foreign policy priority[+], despite the fact that the majority of the public did not support it as polls showed that only 40% people were for it at that time[+][+][+], and in February 2019, Ukrainian parliament amended the Constitution to state Ukraine's strategic objective as joining the NATO[+][+] and on 30 September 2022, Zelensky submitted the application to join NATO without even asking the public, without a referendum (all polls[+] showed disapproval). Deploying NATO military bases and missiles across Russian borders is logically unacceptable for Russia, which is why it had to resort to a SMO to prevent it.
And even if we consider just the escalation of the Donbas war[+][+] (2014-2022) in February 2022, then again, according to OSCE daily reports, it was Ukraine that started the escalation by violating ceasefire since 14 February 2022 and then intensifying the attacks since 18 February with attacking ethnic Russians in Donbas.
So, in mid-February 2022 (before Russian attack), OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine reported[+][+] a massive spike[+] in Ukrainians shooting at Russian ethnic minorities in Donbas, thus on 13 February 2022, OSCE had to withdraw from Donbas due to deteriorating security conditions as Ukraine was violating the Minsk accords[+][+]. Ukraine began artillery strikes against the Donbas republics on 16 February 2022. In other words, OSCE reports and Patrick Lancaster’s on-the-ground reporting[»][»][»][»][»] clearly show that Ukraine began[+] shelling the independent republics of Donetsk and Luhansk nine days before Russia announced its ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine.
This was in accordance with the plan of Kyiv regime5, as on 24 March 2021, Ukraine’s President Zelensky issued a decree[+] for the recapture of the Crimea[+] and on 23 August 2021, further disregarding the will of people of Crimea and their right to self-determination, at a (initiated by Zelensky) summit of the Crimea Platform for the “deoccupation of Crimea” in Kyiv (attended by delegations from 46 countries)[ꚛ], Zelensky pledged[+][+] to return Russia-annexed Crimea and subsequently gathered troops for an offensive – by early December 2021, the NATO-backed Armed Forces of Ukraine deployed 125.000 troops[+][+] at the borders of Donbas[?] with intent to attack the Russian ethnic minorities in Donbas (700.000[+] of whom were also Russian citizens with Russian passport) and retake Crimea from Russia (with 2 million Russian citizens[+]) by military measures[+][+]. Before Russian attack, on 1 February 2022, Ukraine formed[+] the Territorial Defense Forces (TDF) as the new branch of the Armed Forces serving as a military reserve force – what for? Of course, Russia would not allow Ukraine’s plan to “deoccupy” Crimea nor let ethnic Russians to be killed and terrorized.
Prior to Russia’s military intervention in February 2022, approximately 17.000 fighters[+] from 55 countries, predominantly from Russia, had already joined the conflict in Ukraine since 2014, supporting either the pro-Russian separatists or the Ukrainian side. Naturally, as any other nation would do, Russia helped their terrorized folk in Ukraine and many Russian volunteers joined the Donbas militia to help them defend themselves from the attacks of the Ukrainian military.
In Ukraine, an armed conflict began in April 2014[»] when the new unelected Kyiv regime, which came to power by force, launched a military operation against ethnic Russian Donbas residents who protested against those NATO-backed, anti-Russian, radical revolutionaries who hijacked government and imposed anti-Russian policies, whereby breaching the 1997 Treaty with Russia and many other legally binding agreements.
In 2014 in Crimea, there was no military confrontation, no armed conflict – neither Ukraine nor Russia resorted to armed force as not even a single shot was fired much less any intense military violence (Russian troops were legally present in Crimea for centuries and per a Treaty[+], Ukraine allowed Russia to station 25.000 troops there). Soon afterward, in mid-April 2014, first, a non-international armed conflict (NIAC) erupted in the provinces Donetsk and Luhansk (jointly called Donbas) in eastern Ukraine, which after Odesa massacre[+][+][»] claimed independence in May 2014 (but Russia didn't acknowledge them until February 2022).
This armed conflict (civil war) started in April 2014[»] when Ukraine deployed troops against ethnic Russians in Donbas launching a so-called “anti-terrorism operation”[+] in which the Ukrainian army started killing anti-government protesters labelling them as “terrorists” (6 million ethnic Russians natives of Donbas region whom the new undemocratically-appointed anti-Russian US-puppet Kyiv regime denied the representatives in parliament and fundamental human right to freely use their mother tongue). Consequently, intense military violence erupted between the state and non-state armed groups that consisted of local residents who only defended themselves at their homes but were labelled as terrorists[+][+][+]. Ukraine violated international humanitarian law by targeting civilians and civilian targets but none of the Western regulatory institutions held Ukraine accountable nor did they protect ethnic Russians in any way, which is why Russia felt compelled to intervene.
The ethnic Russian natives of Donbas region have suffered 8 long years of shelling by Kyiv regime just as Palestinians in Gaza have suffered the terror from Israeli army. The question is not about obvious dehumanizing ethnic Russians and calling them terrorists. It's about asking why the West is supporting Ukraine against what they call "occupation" while they are supporting the Israeli occupier who continues to occupy Palestinian territories. It's also about asking why the West is supporting Ukraine in defending their territorial integrity and retaking Crimea but are doing the opposite in the case with territorial integrity of Serbia where they stand on the side of Kosovo. These are only a couple of evidence of Western double standards and attempts to impose the Western rules-based order[»] at the cost of lives of other nations – applying the US mantra[»] “rules for thee and not for me”[+][+] “or my allies” – Israel[»].
Now, knowing that Russia was not the one that started the killing and war, can we still blame it for its military intervention to defend millions of tyrannized Russians living in Ukraine and to defend all 144 million Russians who were under threat of NATO military bases on its borders, after trying eight long years to solve the issues diplomatically, nly to realize that Ukraine never meant to implement the provisions of the 2014 Minsk agreements as president Poroshenko[+], Merkel[+], and Hollande[+] admitted that they double-crossed Putin and Donbas leaders with faking agreements to buy time to arm Ukraine to fight Russia, to kill Russians?! Also Zelensky admitted[+] that he sabotaged Minsk peace deal with Russia and here[»] is he recorded ridiculing the Minsk Accords in 2019 in Paris.
Now, let’s contemplate for a moment what this crucial fact means and how that changes everything. The ill-informed Western public condemns Russia for supposedly invading Ukraine and starting the war in 2022 and thus expresses solidarity (in the form of mostly military aid that kills Ukrainians rather than helps them) for poor Ukrainians who are alleged victims of the Russian “invasion” since 2022, even though ethnic Russians were first victimized by Ukraine ever since 2014[+] (as we already explained[*], Crimea was not invaded as not a single shot was fired, Crimeans were not attacked but liberated as they are mostly Russians and 97% of them voted[+] to join Russia – UN Charter[+][+] acknowledges peoples' right for self-determination, and Russian troops have been there legally for centuries, also per a Treaty[+]).
In the light of the facts and evidence we provided so far (in previous articles), it is clear that it was not a Russian invasion[*] but a defense operation on invitation by the Ukrainian local (Donbas) authorities, it was not unprovoked[*], and the war didn't start in February 2022 but eight years earlier (when Ukrainian National Guard recruited neo-Nazis[+] in its ranks and in April 2014[»] invaded Donbas by killing and terrorizing anti-government protesters – ethnic Russians, Russophiles, and Russophones – who resisted the new undemocratically appointed anti-Russian US-puppet regime[+]).
In other words, most people in the West jumped to the conclusion that Russia is an evil invader and Ukraine a poor victim based on the disinformation campaign from NATO states’ media deliberately perpetrated to deceive the public (to gain public support) because the war in Ukraine is a de facto NATO proxy war against Russia[*][+]. As the war started in 2014 but the general public found out about it only in February 2022 (when Russia militarily intervened), this is like starting to read a novel from the middle and making a fatal (millions of Ukrainians got killed, wounded, or displaced because the Western public supports the war effort) decision to support Ukraine (by arming it) based on ignorance, without knowing anything about it, history, and the context.
All of you who put up blue-and-yellow flags on your social media posts since February 2022, why didn't you show the same type of solidarity for the Russians since 2014 when they were being killed and terrorized? Ignorance, double standards, or what? It is time to make up for it. And to boycott the mass media that obscured Ukrainian atrocities against protesters and civilians since 2014.
This war started in 2014 as a hybrid war – combining military and non-military as well as covert and overt means, including disinformation, cyber-attacks, sanctions, economic pressure, and deployment of irregular and regular military forces – all of which commenced with the 2014 Maidan revolution[+] by the US and Ukraine, not Russia. Before the Russian military intervention, during the economic and information war declared by Ukraine and NATO states against Russia in 2014, NATO states-sponsored mainstream media became a weapon as part of (dis)information and psychological warfare[+][+], therefore, all the killings and ethnic cleansing by the Ukrainian forces (funded and trained by Russophobe NATO officers) between 2014-2022 went unreported in the mainstream media, covering up the fact that the hybrid war in Ukraine was started in 2014 by the US-puppet Kyiv regime and its US-funded Ukrainian National Guard with its US-backed neo-Nazi Azov battalion and Right Sector paramilitary death squads against Russian ethnic minorities in south-eastern Ukraine (around eight million people with Crimea).
Hatred is a great unifier. This is a conflict in which an interconnected group of state and non-state actors, unified in their hatred, pursue overlapping goals with a weak and corrupt Ukrainian government against Russia.
The point is, no one is innocent. No one. However brave, Ukrainians are not innocent and Russians neither, as well as NATO officials and you and me. It is not correct to keep portraying Ukraine as the good guys, victims, and supermen while portraying Russians as evil, aggressors, and subhumans[+][ꚛ][+]. Nothing is straightforward in this conflict. We are not living in a black-and-white world, so we all should stop judging the belligerents in those dualistic terms and overcome the whole “them against us” attitude of polarization. The NATO propaganda pushes the villain-victim-hero narrative in which they portray themselves as heroes supporting and saving poor victim Ukraine from villain Russia. Most of the people of the world, people of color, know better than to believe this tale because they have been victims of American and Western aggression for centuries.
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Thank you for reading this article and participating in this peace initiative by raising your awareness and, hopefully, your consciousness and spirit. To properly grasp everything, we[*] recommend reading the articles of this peace initiative for Ukraine in the proper order, which is listed in the Contents. So if you haven’t read the previous articles, we recommend that you do. This article is part of the “Reality Checks” segment. When you are ready, please proceed to the next article in this series: Fallacy of Democracy vs. Autocracy Narrative
Donbas[+] is a coal mining region that was part of eastern Ukraine from 1922-2022 (now part of Russia) consisting of two Republics - Donetsk and Luhansk - where most residents have been Russians for centuries. In 2022, after Bolsheviks defeated the Ukrainian nationalists, Lenin gave that part of former Russian Empire with mostly ethnic Russian residents to the Soviet Republic of Ukraine under condition that it remains part of the Soviet Union and under Moscow governance (Kyiv administration) but in 1991, Ukraine violated that agreement by breaking off from the Soviet Union and from Moscow, and since 2014, Ukrainians had been demolishing all Lenin's monuments, therefore they have no rights to claim the territories he conditionally granted them. Since Ukrainians hate Lenin and Stalin so much that they demonize them, then in the Russian view[+], it is only fair to give back all the land[ꚛ] that Lenin and Stalin allocated to Soviet Ukraine, without even asking the locals’ permission (the majority were Russians in Donbas).
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SMO = Special Military Operation
Russia launched its SMO to defend itself[+] — as per Article 51 of the UN Charter, to defend the independent Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic with ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, and to defend Russia from NATO's threatening expasion to Russian borders
former President Yushchenko is anti-Russian, neo-Nazi Bandera follower, a.k.a. Banderite[*] one who subscribes to the ideas of, the political movement of Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera, who was a convicted murderer, a WWII war criminal, and an anti-Semite leader of the ultranationalist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its paramilitary wing, Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)[+][+][+] with Nazi ideology collaborating with Nazi Germany in executing ethnic cleansing & genocide of Jews and other perceived subhumans including Slavs, Gypsies, gays, etc. massacring around 100.000 civilians in World War 2. After the war, Bandera collaborated with CIA and MI6 against the Soviets until a KGB agent assassinated him in 1959.
Bandera has millions of followers (Banderites) in Ukraine today, especially in military and police forces, as well as former (2014-2019) President Poroshenko[+][+][+][+][+] and former Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine General Zaluzhny[+][+][+][+]. Despite the world condemnation, millions of modern day Ukrainians glorify Bandera and his neo-Nazi followers as national heroes and since 2014 revolution, new Kyiv regime has installed hundreds[+] of monuments of WWII Nazi collaborators, including 40 monuments[+][+] just of Bandera and not one but 5 museums[+] dedicated to him, as many as 94 streets[+][+], 2 avenues[+], 5 lanes[+], and bridges were renamed after him, issuing postage stamps[ꚛ] with his portrait, and he was named an honorary citizen of many western Ukrainian cities. Since 2014, more than a thousand settlements and more than 50.000 streets have been renamed after those Nazi collaborators in Ukraine[+] – in 2022 alone, 237 streets, squares, avenues and boulevards were renamed just in Kyiv. In May 2015, they passed a law[+][+] that gave the OUN-UPA Banderites the honorary status of "fighters for independence" of Ukraine, making it also a crime to “publicly exhibit a disrespectful attitude” toward them, and in December 2018, they gave the original Banderites (1.201 people) a full recognition and the status of veterans[+][+] with all the benefits, such as the right to social security, and accolades. Ukrainian schoolbooks[»][»][+][+][+] glorify them while all other countries in the world consider them war criminals. And they teach[»][»] school-kids to be and salute like neo-Nazis and to hate and kill[»] Russians.
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