By Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War – Feb 25, 2022
The US and NATO created this crisis because they tossed aside the reasonable demands of the Russian Federation in two draft treaties submitted on December 21, 2021. One of the key demands was for a neutral Ukraine and a binding pledge that it would never join NATO.
For his part, Ukrainian President Zelensky dismissed the Minsk Protocols, which was the only formula to solve the impasse over the breakaway republics in Donetsk and Luhansk. The Minsk Protocols required the Ukrainian government to negotiate with the breakaway region concerning the restoration of its previous autonomy as well as language and cultural rights, prior to the Maidan coup in 2014.
These failures left the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass alone to suffer the increasing military onslaught of a Ukrainian government, riddled with neo-Nazi parties, egged on by Western arms and money.
All of the above are the festering sores of three decades of betrayal by the US and NATO of their pledges in the early 1990s to Gorbachov, the last Soviet president, that NATO wouldn’t expand “one inch eastward” of a reunited Germany. However, in the past 30 years, rather than dissolving itself (because it was set up to protect North Atlantic countries from the alleged danger of communism), NATO expanded 800 km. to the east, and admitted 14 states which had been broken away from the former Soviet Union or were former members of the Warsaw Pact. Western (including Canadian) military and naval forces were stationed in these new NATO member countries and NATO installed missile systems and held massive drills close to Russia’s diminished borders. Clearly, the US plan was for its aggressive military alliance, NATO, to expand right up to all of Russia’s border with a view to further dismembering Russia and consolidating US hegemony over the entire European continent.
Another festering sore for Russia was the US-inspired coup in Kiev of 2014 whose junta thought it could impose its will on the Russian-speaking minority in the Donbass.
Russia, in its desire to protect the people of the Donbass Region, decided quite reasonably to recognize their governments and to create a demilitarized zone in the rest of Ukraine.
We believe that the Trudeau government should mind its own business and get out of Ukraine. It has already caused enough damage by supporting the 2014 Maidan coup and arming and funding the junta to the teeth, not to mention by leveling coercive economic measures against Russia for many years.
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Canada should quit the gang of thieves and land destroyers known as NATO and end all of its participation in provocative military adventures in Ukraine, Latvia, Romania, and the Black Sea.
In addition, the Trudeau Government should redirect the $350 billion CAD, proposed for new NATO-inspired fighter jets, warships, and predator drones, towards social programs and defensive weapons for Canada’s sovereign territory.
It should also sign and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) and refrain from admitting as refugees anyone associated with Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.
Featured image: Cartoon showing Russia and NATO in conflict. Cartoon by Sergey Elkin.
(Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War)
- November 30, 2024