What’s Really Behind the Ukraine War? Stream Editors Break It Down
The Stream's John Zmirak talks with Editor in Chief Karla Dial.
Karla Dial: Last Friday, millions of Americans (including you and I!) experienced our collective jaws hitting the floor as we watched Ukraine President Volodomyr Zelenskyy getting combative with both President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance right in front of reporters about their efforts to end the war between Russia and Ukraine diplomatically. Zelenskyy was essentially kicked out of the White House until he can adjust his attitude regarding peace with Russia, rather than using the United States as his older brother to bully the Kremlin into submission.
On Monday, you had a very interesting take in The Brew on what was going on behind the scenes leading up to that explosion. Jason Jones offered a poignant perspective as well, apologizing to Ukraine’s people for our Deep State’s lethal meddling. What do you know about those things that most of our readers don’t?
John Zmirak: I know that our elites allied with their foreign allies are playing the voting public of all their countries the way the Bush administration played the American people and lured them into the Iraq War. All of it with the same purpose: to transfer trillions of dollars from American taxpayers into the bank accounts of our country’s oligarchs, from Dick Cheney’s defense industry buddies to investors in corrupt energy companies such as Hunter Biden’s Burisma.
KD: Wow, that’s a lot to take in. Let’s back up a few hundred steps, and break this down for people so they can explain to their kids, who may have heard all kinds of woke or warmongering nonsense in school. What lies at the core of the war between these two countries? Give us their history so we understand it from their perspective.
A History Lesson
JZ: Ukraine and Russia have a long, complicated history, being deeply entwined with each other over many centuries. The first society to bear the term “Russian” was based in Kiev around the year 1000. As he explained at length to Tucker Carlson, Vladimir Putin is convinced that Ukraine is fundamentally part of Russia and shouldn’t be independent.
That argument might be convincing if the Russian-run Soviet government hadn’t imposed a genocidal famine on Ukraine in the 1930s, starving between four and eight million people while exporting their food; Stalin sold that to pay for building industries elsewhere in Russia. That historic crime was enough to convince most Ukrainians that they needed their own country — just as the Holocaust won many Jews over to Zionism. When the Soviet Union broke up into its constituent parts in 1991, Ukraine seized its opportunity.
Two flies remained in the ointment. First, the borders of Ukraine had been redrawn in 1960 by the Communists, transferring millions of Russian speakers to Ukraine, including the residents of Russia’s crucial warm-water port, Sevastopol, in the Crimea. Second, Ukraine had inherited hundreds of Soviet nuclear weapons.
Since America has a compulsive urge to fix everything, the U.S. government under Bill Clinton intervened in the worst possible way, convincing Ukraine to give up the nukes that would have guaranteed its independence in return for a nonbinding, unconstitutional nontreaty which Clinton offered them. He strong-armed the then-bankrupt Russian government led by the unstable Boris Yeltsin into recognizing Ukraine’s ongoing control of the strategic Russian-inhabited regions, including Crimea. It was a recipe for disaster, especially since the bipartisan War Party insisted on expanding NATO right up to Russia’s borders — violating the agreement George H.W. Bush had made with Gorbachev in return for disbanding the Warsaw Pact.
Gambling with World War III
KD: That sounds like a hot mess that doesn’t benefit anyone but the U.S. ruling class. We gained power by shrinking our Cold War enemy, Russia, slightly — but only slightly — and reducing the list of nuke-capable countries by one. But Ukraine wasn’t truly bound by anything.
JZ: It sounded like a hot mess to most Russians, too. As soon as any Russian government not plundered by oligarchs and pressured by America arose, it was bound to challenge the territorial lines Yeltsin had signed off on and bristle at the expansion of NATO. Ordinary, patriotic Russians regard the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO as being every bit as provocative as Soviet missiles were in Cuba. We almost started a nuclear war over that, and there’s no guarantee the Russians wouldn’t do the same today. That’s what President Trump meant when he told Zelenskyy in the White House last Friday that he was “gambling with World War III” and with “the lives of millions of people.” Since then, Zelenskyy has insisted that an end to the war with Russia is “very far off,” so it sounds like he intends to go on bluffing until the bitter end.
KD: It’s interesting that right after that meeting in the White House, Zelenskyy went to Europe, where the heads of many states declared increased support for his efforts. But late Monday, Trump froze all U.S. financial support for Ukraine, and earlier today, he stopped sharing intelligence with them as well — so it’s clear he isn’t going to let the U.S. be dragged into this, and he said last Friday there’s no way Zelenskyy can pull that off without U.S. support.
Back to what we mentioned earlier about some of the other things people are hearing from the mainstream media and woke war hawks: Isn’t Zelenskyy really fighting a war for democracy and freedom, against Russian fascism and repression?
JZ: No. Those are just happy-clappy fig leaves that arms companies thrilled to sell weapons to any dictatorship on earth use to keep the fighting going so they can keep making money by selling ammo. They’re also virtue signals employed by regimes like Britain’s, which imprisons citizens for political dissent or praying near abortion clinics, and by Deep State operatives in the U.S. that infiltrate churches, fake kidnapping plots (see Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer), and whip up riots to cover up election fraud (see January 6). The Ukrainian and Russian regimes are both corrupt and repressive. Our elites’ real problem with Russia is that the CIA and USAID don’t run Russia behind the scenes, as they do Ukraine.
Of course, Putin has been trying by corrupt and underhanded means to run Ukraine, too. He already grabbed back Crimea in 2014 (Obama wasn’t surprised, and didn’t seem to care), so that’s not an issue for him. He was too afraid of how Donald Trump might react to launch a Russian attack on Ukraine from 2017-20. But once Putin saw the Former Joe Biden surrender in Afghanistan, Putin spotted his opportunity and struck. He wasn’t simply trying to regain Russian-speaking territories, but to conquer all of Ukraine, reunite it to Mother Russia. Ukraine doesn’t deserve that brutal outcome, or the suffering this war inflicted on its people. But it was the American Deep State that kept on poking the bear, and wants to keep on poking it.
The Howard Stern of Ukraine
KD: Most of us never heard of Volodomyr Zelenskyy before this war broke out. Who is he, and how did he become president?
JZ: He is a former raunchy comedian along the lines of Howard Stern. Then he was cast in a TV series like The West Wing, playing Ukraine’s new president. The show was hilarious, apparently, since it depicted Ukraine’s Howard Stern saving the country. Our Deep State spooks, who helped overthrow a too-pro-Russian Ukrainian president in 2013, essentially cast Zelenskyy in a new role, as a supple sock-puppet for Western interests. Suddenly (thanks to a friendly oligarch) there were millions of dollars available for a whole new political party, with him as the candidate. Imagine if suddenly in 2016, to stop Donald Trump, George Soros had founded and funded a “West Wing Party,” running Martin Sheen as its candidate and hoping that voters would trust him because of the TV show.
And Zelenskyy is still reading from a script to this very day — though it’s written by people like Susan Rice, John Brennan, and Victoria Nuland from the American Deep State.
We know that because when Zelenskyy and Putin were engaged in peace talks in 2022 and Putin was already standing down troops, Victoria Nuland and Boris Johnson flew in personally to shut down the talks — like a movie director yelling “Cut!” because his actor had flubbed his lines.
They want war to drag on, to “bleed Russia” (as Gen. Mark Milley admitted), keep on selling weapons, keep on pushing trans propaganda in Kiev, and keep cheap Russian gas out of Europe — since they’re invested in selling expensive gas pumped via Ukraine.
Any politician who’s yelling about our “duty” to Ukraine is on the take, period. Take that to the bank and cash it.
KD: Talk about life imitating art! It’s good that he told Trump before his address to the joint session of Congress last night that he’s willing to do whatever it takes to restart the negotiations, but I guess we’ll have to wait to see how that plays out.
So in your opinion, what is the best outcome now? Other than Trump standing his ground, which he’s doing in hard-nosed Trump style, how do we thread this needle? Other than avoiding World War III, which it’s fair to say everyone wants to do, what do you think needs to happen next?
JZ: Trump should back-channel with Putin, come up with a deal that’s acceptable to both our countries, and then announce it, as the only security guarantee the U.S. will stand behind. Ukraine and Europe can either get behind it, or figure the rest out on their own — without U.S. assistance or involvement. Just watch these Muslim-ridden countries with their midget armies fall into line … after a decent interval of hissy-fits and tantrums. That will have the additional benefit of humiliating the corrupt elitists running Western Europe into the ground, and helping populist parties to (God willing) liberate those countries from the globalist oligarchs currently strangling them.
Karla Dial is editor in chief of The Stream.
John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.