This Russian useful idiocy masquerading as peace advocacy is filled with ahistorical and ignorant anti-Ukrainian neo-imperial prejudice with embedded Russian imperial assumptions. Code Pinkos are too ignorant of Russian-Ukrainian history to be aware of the sources of their appeasement, so I'll dismantle them for their readers.
First a quick list of factual inaccuracies:
1. Putin was a KGB Trojan Horse appointed on December 31, 1999 in a get out of jail free deal by Yeltsin. The idea that he was elected like Obama or even Dubya is laughably inaccurate.
2. No treaty promising no NATO expansion was ever signed. It was a verbal deal voiced by James Baker in 1990 at the time of German reunification. Even if there had been a written promise, NATO is an open door alliance that ALL the former Warsaw Pact states and the Baltics were just itching to join, knowing Russia's history of conquest as they do.
1. "but this also exacerbated Russia’s security concerns about the ambitious and aggressive military alliance gathering around its borders,": The idea that Russia's Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian victimes of mass deportations from occupation posed a threat to Russia is laughably inverted. Code Pink uncritically accepts that a resource-cursed land-based colonial empire with a five century long history of genocidal conquest has valid "security concerns" and that its formerly occupied Baltic and ex-Warsaw Pact neighbors desire for geopolitical shelter in NATO pose a threat.
2. "United States backed the violent overthrow of President Yanukovych in Ukraine in 2014"
CodePink's and other useful idiots' ahistorically assume that Ukraine is a passive American and NATO pawn without agency. Ukraine is a non-sovereign object within Russia's sphere of influence and "security concerns", not a sovereign subject.
This neo-imperial prejudice about Ukraine defines the Maidan Revolution of Dignity, which began as non-violent student demonstrations, as just another CIA coup. Viewing the Netflix documentary of the months' long bottom up pluralistic Maidan revolution, Winter on Fire, debunks this lie. Whataboutistan's left province shares KGB agent Putin's:
Exaggeration of the CIA's competence and omniscience. We should expect this from a veteran practitioner of Bolshevik "active measures", but it's a mystery when coming from left-wing activists.
This is a top-down hierarchical view of Ukraine as an enserfed pawn on a geopolitical chess board.
But Ukraine stubbornly insists on existing and winning its disruptive startup war against Russia with a bottom-up whole of society mobilization strategy. This reality confounds those who've drunk from the Russian bottle of neo-imperial vodka about Ukrainian weakness, corruption and state failure.
In Russified Whataboutistan's left half it's possible to tune out DPR leader, Pavel Gubarev, Medvedev and Ria Novosti's Putin mouthpiece, Timofey Sergeytsev, promising mass purges and extermination of Ukrainians and the kidnapping of 11000 Ukrainian unorphaned children into adoption by Russian families. Total deafness to the flood of Russia's announcements of genocidal intent and practice are the geopolitical equivalent of taking hydroxichloroquine and bleach for COVID.
3. "All sides have convinced themselves they can or must win": This is the phony symmetry of morally inverted bothsides-ism. For Ukraine, the alternative to victory is not existing, as Putin, Medvedev, Lavrov and Peskov and their Ria Novosti and chat show mouthpieces have repeatedly said. It also ignores a simple fact: the war stops if Russia stops fighting and withdraws to its 2013 borders. If Ukraine stops fighting, it ceases to exist and genocide, with its hellscape of mass deportations, purges, Ukrainian language bans, child kidnappings, wins.
4. "cease-fire and peace agreement to stop the carnage"--Faced with a failed military that spends thousands of lives to conquer a garbage dump in Bakhmut, Putin is desperate to have a frozen conflict like South Ossetia or Transnistria. The Ukrainians won't fall for this scam. But Code Pink does because it uncritically accepts Russia as permanent and Ukraine as contingent and negotiable. The reverse in our post-imperial age of empires dead and buried since 1918 (Tsarist Russian, Soviet, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German, UK, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Belgian) is much more likely to be true. The Tatars, Bashkiris, Chechens not paid by Kadyrov, Dagestanis, Karelians, Uralis, Yakuts are just itching to finish the breakup of the kleptocratic Russian empire that began in 1917 and continued in 1991.
5. "no moral high ground": Maybe a Ukrainian apology for all the kidnapped and bombed Russian children, clearly labeled Russian theaters bombed while filled with children, Russian cities flattened by indiscriminant bombing and mass graves of Russian civilians killed by Ukrainian troops occupying Russian cities would give Ukraine some moral high ground. Apparently Code Pink doesn't give a damn that 88% and 94% of Ukrainians surveyed in Kharkiv and Lviv want the war to continue until final victory as defined in Zelenskiy's 10 point peace plan. But, they must be just pawns in the CIA's hands according to Code Pink.
Benjamin and Davies and the rest of Code Pink need to take Tim Snyder's Yale course, The Making of
Modern Ukraine (go to Yale for free! no tuition!). Class 23 will teach them all about the neo-imperial prejudice embedded in their Russian useful idiocy (the term used by KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov to define the Soviets' western leftist supporters, starting with those who chose not to see the genocidal Holodomor when it stared them in the face).
6. "supporting the breakaway "people's republics" of Donetsk and Luhansk"--Code Pink uncritically accepts the Great Russian chauvinist imperial propaganda that Russian-speaking = Russian nationality and that Russia has a "right to protect" Russian speakers beyond its borders. My Russian-Latvian wife and her entire extended family disagree. The Baltic governments have good reason to worry about Russkiy Mir disinformation media warfare in Narva and Daugavpils. But since Code Pinkos and other Russian useful idiots are utterly ignorant of local geography and history, they, of course, never heard of these cities and are clueless about their geopolitical meaning to Estonia and Latvia.
Ukraine didn't ban the Russian language in Donetsk and Luhansk and if Ukraine's language law justifies Russia starting a secessionist war in the Donbass, then the British should start a secessionist war in the English-speaking parts of Quebec, where the use of English language is far more constrained.
Igor Girkin started the war in the Donbas when the conditions for war did not exist there. He bragged in an interview that the people there did not want to fight until he, Strelkov made war unavoidable:
""I was the one who pulled the trigger of this war," Strelkov said in an interview published Thursday with Russia's Zavtra newspaper, which espouses imperialist views. "If our unit hadn't crossed the border, everything would have fizzled out — like in [the Ukrainian city of] Kharkiv, like in Odessa," Strelkov, who uses that nom-de-guerre meaning "Shooter" to replace his last name Girkin, was quoted as saying. "There would have been several dozen killed, burned, detained. And that would have been the end of it. But the flywheel of the war, which is continuing to this day, was spun by our unit. We mixed up all the cards on the table," he said."
In May 2013 the parliament of Ukraine overwhelmingly approved the association agreement with the EU - 318 votes out of 449 possible. The massive protests in November against Yanukovych's decision to choose the Eurasian Union instead of the EU was not approved by parliament and resulted from interference into the internal affairs of Ukraine by Russia - a violation of the Budapest Memorandum.
Public opinion polls of Crimea in May 2013 showed 53% preference to be an autonomous part of Ukraine, 22% to join with Russia and 20% independence. Crimeans were looking forward to European tourists and had tourism offices in EU cities. The survey can be reviewed here - https://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/pnaec705.pdf
What Code Pinkos and other Russian useful idiots can't swallow is that, in Putin's fascist Russia, the big, bad American empire finally has an enemy that makes it look good by comparison. Whataboutist blame the West denunciations of America's past crimes in Vietnam, Central America and Iraq make the same difference to the current war as talking about America's 1900-02 counterinsurgency crimes in the Philippines, the British mass shooting of peaceful Indian protestors in Amritsar in 1919 or the Bengal famine did during the battles of Leyte Gulf, Manila and Imphal in 1944-45 against Japan: zero. It's bad vs worse and none of the above isn't on the menu.
And the correlation between western behavior and Russia's genocidal ambitions and crimes in Ukraine is a very simple number: zero. But for Code Pink reaching this conclusion would require reading Putin's genocidal July 2021 screed denying Ukraine's existence and all the other Russian genocidal rants it ignores (https://www.justsecurity.org/81789/russias-eliminationist-rhetoric-against-ukraine-a-collection/).
