Why the Meandering Borders of Ukraine Are No Hill For America First To Die On

Here we go again. The Donald had no more than offered a constructive 28-point plan that correctly identified America’s Homeland Security interest in Ukraine as nichts, nada, nugatory and nyet – when the Washington neocon brigade that he foolishly invited back into his government to sabotage it for the second time, did exactly that. This time it pulled the guts right out of his Ukraine peace plan and did so in plain sight.

To wit, the only thing that mattered in the original gussied-up word salad of 28-points was that –

• Ukraine would be partitioned roughly along the lines of the pre-1918 Novorussiya province of the Russian Empire, meaning that mainly Russian-speaking Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk and the major parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia would be allowed to secede from the tyrannical, corruption-ridden, Nazi-tainted, anti-Russian Kiev regime.
• the rump of Ukraine would forswear now and forevermore any interest in joining NATO. That is, functioning as a Cuba on Moscow’s borders just like Khrushchev foolishly attempted with JFK way back in October 1962.

Neither of these so-called “concessions” to Putin would harm America’s true homeland security by a whit because Russia with a $2 trillion GDP based on oil, grains and metals is no threat whatsoever to America’s $30 trillion high-tech economy. Nor would they have adversely impacted the so-called “rules-based international order” because the latter is but a beard for the Washington-based Warfare State and global empire, which is already bankrupting America and which remains utterly unnecessary for the maintenance of what’s left of its liberty, democracy and capitalist prosperity.

In short, the Donald was – knowingly or otherwise – fixing to make like the long-ago Senator from Vermont, George Aiken. The latter correctly and famously told LBJ the way to get out of the Vietnam morass was to “declare victory and go home”.

That’s essentially what Trump’s 28-point plan did – just like in the case of that comparable 60-years ago folly that had no bearing on America’s security, either.

But apparently to quell the uproar over its correct answer to the $300 billion financial and human catastrophe that the Washington War Party and its NATO footmen have visited upon the ashes of the Ukrainian steppes, the Donald unaccountably sent Little Marco Rubio to Geneva last weekend. His remit was to negotiate an acceptance of his 28-point plan by the crooks, sadists and war criminals who conduct the Ukrainian version of Mafia rule in their woebegone nation. But what he actually did was agree with them to essentially disembowel Trump’s plan by dropping the aforementioned provisions, which were the only thing that really mattered to the Russians.

Still, Rubio’s treachery in plain sight should not have been a surprise to anyone who has actually paid attention (not the Donald) to Washington’s machination during recent decades. After all, sending the fox into the hen house to gather the eggs is a hardly an adequate metaphor for what happened in Geneva.

To wit, Rubio was, is and always will be the enemy of America First because he is an inveterate neocon interventionist. After having hung around the Deep Swamp most of his adult life, he has no clue that the entire machinery of the Washington-based Warfare State is about selling arms and conducting live-action military exercises abroad against anyone who fails to cow-tow to the dictates of the war-makers on the Potomac and their auxiliaries and proconsuls scattered around the planet.

In this case, Rubio has functioned as the veritable hand-maid of the pathetic Euro-politicians who endlessly talk gibberish and urge Washington to keep footing the butchers’ bill. For instance, here is the reprehensible Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, former German defense minister and full-throated war-hawk, recently talking absolute nonsense about what isn’t at stake in Ukraine:

Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to see empires and autocracies back in Europe, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told the European Economic Congress in Katowice.

Speaking alongside Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, von der Leyen insisted that she stands for a European Union that is ready to do whatever it takes to protect Europe, and especially Ukraine.

“Putin’s war is about redrawing the map of Europe, but it is also a war on our Union and on the entire global rules-based system,” she said.

Well, that’s rubbish if there ever was such. The only time the borders of Ukraine have been unjustly redrawn at the point of a gun barrel was when Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev did so between 1922 and 1954. That’s right, this EU half-wit still wants to embroil the world in WWIII in order to enforce borders drawn by a trio of history’s most blood-thirsty tyrants.

As explained below, there never was a country even remotely resembling modern Ukraine until the Soviet communists decreed its existence. Before that, the pieces and parts of the country’s history go back to the 1650s when one of the more powerful and brutal rulers of the Cossack Hetmanate, which occupied a small part of today’s central Ukraine, abandoned his tribe’s historic fealty to the Polish kings and switched his loyalty to the Russians.

After that, the “borderlands” (i.e.”Ukraine” in Russian) were all about vassalage in the Russian Empire and the Soviet one which followed.

During that 375 year span the borders shifted all over the lot and back, as the Mongol, Turkish and Polish-Lithuanian empires arrived and receded, even as the Russian and communist ones in the end expanded. So what’s so sacrosanct about the very last version of the map – one that hosted both the murderous regime of Stalin and Hitler’s Wehrmacht, too?

Indeed, Europe is rife with borders redrawn again and again. While von der Leyen was in Poland preaching for border wars in Ukraine, in fact, it might well be asked, which sacrosanct Polish borders did she have in mind?

For 700 years “Poland” has cavorted around the rivers, plains, mountains and forests of central Europe like a traveling minstrel show. This includes its disappearance entirely at the hands of the Prussians, Russians, Hapsburgs and other long-gone lesser powers during the later years of the 18th century and the entirety of the 19th century.

Only in 1919 was it resurrected as an in tact nation – in part upon German lands seconded to it at Versailles. And that utterly foolish planking for German revanchism, Hitler and WWII happened for the not so noble reason of American electioneering.

That is to say, US President Woodrow Wilson, who was the Grand Poobah at Versailles, was keen on pleasing the millions of voters among the fair part of the Polish nation which had migrated to Chicago, Cleveland, Gary and elsewhere in the industrial Midwest. So he insisted that the long gone nation of their Old World kin be resurrected, and with ample geographic aspect, too.

At length, of course, Hitler and Stalin redrew Poland’s borders yet again under the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1938, cancelling Wilson handwork and returning the German-populated Danzig Corridor to its previous owner. And then, seven years later, Poland’s borders were redrawn still another time by a new set of victors, who realigned the borders of “Poland” at the Yalta Conference in a way that satisfied Stalin’s aim to recover eastern lands the Soviets lost in the post-1918 civil war.

So all along during the course of the misbegotten NATO expansion and Ukraine intervention adventure, someone should have told the Washington and NATO warmongers to take a long jump off a short pier. That is to say, the picture below reminds not only how the latest borders of “Poland” were drawn, but how over the last several centuries of history most of Europe’s present borders came to be.

They were not drawn by God’s deputies on earth or even the statesman of the day—but by the victors of the most recent wars. And in the case of “Ukraine” it is even worse than that, as we amplify below.

The Border Men of 1945

Moreover, even a glance at today’s map reminds that the border-drawing work of victorious generals and politicians, and occasionally statesman, has always been subject to revision without necessarily making a war about it. And that kind of revisionist work – negotiation of a Ukrainian partition – is exactly what Trump had now offered to Putin – only to see it kicked to the curb by the perfidious former Senator from Florida.

Still, if the Donald is to rescue his Nobel Peace Prize he might well take inspiration from the several major European boundary adjustments of recent times that remind that the shibboleth of sacrosanct borders has no roots in actual history.

Thus, the statesman at Versailles decreed the existence of Czechoslovakia in 1919 as a potpourri of nations including a lot of Slovaks, Czechs, Hungarians, Romani people, Silesians, Ruthenians, Ukrainians, Poles, Jews and most especially millions of Germans. So it was subsequently –

• Dismembered by Hitler to bring the Sudetenland Germans home.
• Re-assembled by the Yalta winners to provide a security buffer demanded by Stalin.
• Divided yet again between Slovakia and the Czech Republic on peaceable terms in 1993 to allow mismatched peoples to go their own ways.

Or take the case of the meandering borders of the six autonomous republics of the vanished state of Yugoslavia and particularly its anchor in Serbia. Wikipedia explains the border-making process there as well as can be done:

(Serbia) achieved de facto independence in 1867 and gained full recognition by the Great Powers in the Berlin Congress of 1878. As a victor in the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, Serbia regained Vardar Macedonia, Kosovo and Metohija and Raška (Old Serbia). In late 1918, with the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Serbia was expanded to include regions of the former Serbian Vojvodina. Serbia was united with other Austro-Hungarian provinces into a pan-Slavic State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs; the Kingdom of Serbia joined the union on 1 December 1918 and the country was named the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.

Serbia achieved its current borders at the end of World War II, when it became a federal unit within the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia (proclaimed in November 1945). After the dissolution of Yugoslavia in a series of wars in the 1990s, Serbia once again became an independent state on 5 June 2006, following the breakup of a short-lived union with Montenegro.

So, puleeze. Enough of the sacrosanct border bull shit!

Moreover, this whirling dervish tale of meandering borders and disappearing and reappearing “nations” also brings us to the aforementioned former Serbian province of Kosovo. Washington and its NATO retainers decreed the latter’s independence after 75 days of persuasion with the Serbs.

These messages of persuasion were apparently written on the bombs dropped from a range of NATO aircraft that included about everything in NATO’s polyglot winged arsenal that was air-worthy:

A large element of the operation was the air forces of NATO, relying heavily on the US Air Force and Navy using the F-16, F-15, F-117, F-14, F/A-18, EA-6B, B-52, KC-135, KC-10, AWACS, and JSTARS from bases throughout Europe and from aircraft carriers in the region.The French Navy and Air Force operated the Super Etendard and the Mirage 2000. The Italian Air Force operated with 34 Tornado, 12 F-104, 12 AMX, 2 B-707, the Italian Navy operated with Harrier II. The UK’s Royal Air Force operated the Harrier GR7 and Tornado ground attack jets as well as an array of support aircraft. Belgian, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese and Turkish Air Forces operated F-16s. The Spanish Air Force deployed EF-18s and KC-130s. The Canadian Air Force deployed a total of 18 CF-18s, enabling them to be responsible for 10% of all bombs dropped in the operation.

The fighters were armed with both guided and unguided “dumb” munitions, including the Paveway series of laser-guided bombs.The bombing campaign marked the first time the German Air Force actively attacking targets since World War II.

The US B-2 Spirit stealth bomber saw its first successful combat role in Operation Allied Force, striking from its home base in the contiguous United States.

At length, the Serbian borders were redrawn via the persuasive, rule-of-law abiding powers of NATO missiles, bombs and artillery!

In the process, Serbia’s president was captured as a war criminal. Just before he died prior to his trial in a NATO prison from “natural causes” he undoubtedly did not view this particular NATO-sponsored border drawing incident as an exercise in the rule of law.

In any event, notwithstanding the historic fluidity of borders, there is no case whatsoever that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was “unprovoked” and unrelated to NATO’s own transparent provocations in the region. The details are arrayed below, but the larger issue needs be addressed first.

Namely, is there any reason to believe that Russia is an expansionist power looking to gobble up neighbors which were not integral parts of its own historic evolution, as is the case with Ukraine? After all, if despite Rubio’s treachery President Trump does manage to strike a Ukraine peace and partition deal with Putin you can be sure that the neocons will come charging in with a false Munich appeasement analogy.

The answer, however, is a resounding no!

Our firm rebuke of the hoary Munich analogy as it has been falsely applied to present day Moscow is based on what might be called the double-digit rule. To wit, the true expansionary hegemons of modern history have spent huge parts of their GDP on defense because that’s what it takes to support the military infrastructure and logistics required for invasion and occupation of foreign lands.

For instance, here are the figures for military spending by Nazi Germany from 1935–1944 expressed as a percent of GDP. This is what an aggressive hegemon looks like in the ramp-up to war: German military spending had already reach 23% of GDP, even before its invasion of Poland in September 1939 and its subsequent commencement of actual military campaigns of invasion and occupation.

Not surprisingly, the same kind of claim on resources occurred when the United States took it upon itself to counter the aggression of Germany and Japan on a global basis. By 1944 defense spending was equal to 40% of America’s GDP, and would have totaled more than $2 trillion per year in present day dollars of purchasing power.

Military Spending As A Percent Of GDP In Nazi Germany

• 1935: 8%.
• 1936: 13%.
• 1937: 13%.
• 1938: 17%.
• 1939: 23%.
• 1940: 38%.
• 1941: 47%.
• 1942: 55%.
• 1943: 61%.
• 1944: 75%

By contrast, during the final year before Washington/NATO triggered the Ukraine proxy war in February 2022, the Russian military budget was $65 billion, which amounted to just 3.5% of its GDP.

Moreover, the prior years showed no build-up of the kind that has always accompanied historic aggressors. For the period 1992 to 2022, for instance, the average military spending by Russia was 3.8% of GDP – with a minimum of 2.7% in 1998 and a maximum of 5.4% in 2016.

Historical Russian Military Spending As a Percent Of GDP

Needless to say, you don’t invade the Baltics or Poland—to say nothing of Germany, France, the Benelux and crossing the English Channel – on 3.5% of GDP! Not even remotely.

Since full scale war broke out in 2022 Russian military spending has increased significantly to 6% of GDP, but all of that is being consumed by the Demolition Derby in Ukraine—barely 100 miles from its own border.

That is, even at 6% of GDP Russia has not yet been able to subdue its own historic borderlands. So if Russia self-evidently does not have the economic and military capacity to conquer its non-Ukrainian neighbors in its own region, let alone Europe proper, what is the war really about?

In short, it is rooted in territorial disputes and civil strife in lands which have been vassals or integral parts of greater Russia for several centuries. As indicated, Ukraine actually means “borderlands” in the Russian language, connoting stateless areas that were first assembled into a coherent polity by Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev by force of arms after 1920.

In fact, prior to the communist takeover of Russia, no country that even faintly resembled today’s Ukrainian borders had ever existed. So what NATO’s proxy war actually amounts to is an insensible attempt to enforce the dead hand of the Soviet presidium, as we amplify below.

For avoidance of doubt here are sequential maps that tell the story, and which make mincemeat of the Washington/NATO sanctity of borders malarkey. The first of these is a 220-year-old map from 1800, where the yellow area depicts the approximate territory of the five regions – Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia plus Crimea – that will be allowed to go their own way, including back to Mother Russia, if the key ingredients of the Donald’s 28-point peace place can be resurrected.

As it has happened, these regions have voted overwhelmingly during referendums in 2023 and 2014, respectively, to separate from Ukraine in favor of affiliation with Russia.

Collectively, the five regions were historically known as the aforementioned Novorossiya or “New Russia” and had been acquired by Russian rulers, including Catherine the Great between 1734 and 1791.

The red markings within the yellow areas of the map designate the year of acquisition. Self-evidently, therefore, the Russian Empire had gradually gained control over this vast area north of the Black Sea before the end of the 18th century. It signed peace treaties with the Cossack Hetmanate (1734) and with the Ottoman Empire at the conclusion of the various Russo-Turkish Wars of that era.

Pursuant to this expansion drive – which included massive Russian investment and the in-migration of large Russian populations to the region – Russia established the “Novorossiysk Governaorate” in 1764. The latter was originally to be named after the Empress Catherine, but she decreed that it should be called “New Russia” instead.

The To Be Partitioned Provinces Of Ukraine Were Part Of Russia Before The US Constitution Was Even Written

Completing the assemblage of New Russia, Catherine forcefully liquidated its aforementioned century-long Cossack ally known as the Zaporizhian Sich (present day Zaporizhia) in 1775 and annexed its territory to Novorossiya, thus eliminating the independent rule of the Ukrainian Cossacks. Later in 1783 she acquired Crimea from the Turks, which was also added to Novorossiya, as shown in yellow area of the map above.

During this formative period, the infamous shadow ruler under Catherine, Prince Grigori Potemkin, directed the sweeping settlement and Russification of these lands. Effectively, Catherine had granted him the powers of an absolute ruler over the area from 1774 onward.

The spirit and importance of “New Russia” at this time is aptly captured by the historian Willard Sunderland,

The old steppe was Asian and stateless; the current one was state-determined and claimed for European-Russian civilization. The world of comparison was now even more obviously that of the Western empires. Consequently, it was all the more clear that the Russian empire merited its own “New Russia” to go along with everyone else’s New Spain, New France and New England. The adoption of the name of New Russia was in fact the most powerful statement imaginable of Russia’s national coming of age.

In fact, the passage of time solidified the borders of Novorossiya even more completely. One century later the light-yellow area of the 1897 map below gave an unmistakable message: To wit, in the late Russian Empire there was no doubt as to the paternity of the lands adjacent to the Azov Sea and the Black Sea: They were now part of the 125 years-old “New Russia”.

Where’s Waldo Ukraine on This Map Circa 1900? 

After the Russian Revolution, of course, the pieces and parts in this region of the old Czarist Empire were bundled-up into a convenient administrative entity by the new red rulers of Moscow, who christened it the “Ukrainian SSR” (Soviet Socialist Republic). In a like manner, they created similar administrative entities in Belorussia, Georgia, Moldavia, Turkmenistan etc. – ultimately confecting 15 such faux “republics”.

During the course of this communist state-building, here is how and when these brutal tyrants attached each piece of today’s Ukrainian map to the territories acquired or seized by the Russian Czars over 1654-1917 (yellow area):

• The old Novorossiya of the Donbas and Black Sea rim was added to the Ukraine SSR by Lenin in 1922(purple area).
• The western territory around Lviv (blue area) that been known as Little Poland or Galicia were captured by Stalin in 1939 and thereafter when he and Hitler carved up Poland.
• Upon the death of the bloody Stalin in 1954, Khrushchev made a deal with his Presidium allies to transfer Crimea (red area) from the Russian SSR to the Ukrainian SSR in return for their support in the battle for succession.

In a word, Ukraine is the bastard spawn of communist blood and iron. Yet during the last decade the Washington and the NATO warhawks have spent upwards of $300 billion to ensure that the handiwork of autocratic Czars and Commissars remains intact into the 21st century and presumably beyond.

It is ironic, therefore, that the historically illiterate Donald Trump has the good sense to dispense with one of the stupidest crusades that the War Machine on the Potomac has yet concocted. So doing, he will enable the failed handiwork of communist tyrants to make right with history – and outcome that will now happen if and only if the Donald can get the Rubio digression back on track.

Modern Ukraine: Born In Communist Blood and Iron

Of course, had the above-mentioned 20th century communist trio been benefactors of mankind, perhaps their subsequent map-making handiwork and reassignment of Novorossiya to Ukraine might have been justified. Under this benign counterfactual, they would have presumably combined peoples of like ethnic, linguistic, religious and politico-cultural history into a cohesive natural polity and state. That is, a nation worth perpetuating, defending and perhaps even dying for.

Alas, the reason that Trump is right to attempt to end this bloody catastrophe via partition is that the very opposite was true. From 1922 to 1991 modern Ukraine was held together by the monopoly on violence of its brutally totalitarian rulers. And that became more than evident when the Kremlin temporarily lost control of Ukraine during the military battles of World War II. During that especially bloody interlude, the communist administrative entity called Ukraine came apart at the seams.

That is, local Ukrainian nationalists joined Hitler’s Wehrmacht in its depredations against Jews, Poles, Roma and Russians when it first swept through the country from the west on its way to Stalingrad; and then, in turn, the Russian populations from the Donbas and south campaigned with the Red Army during its vengeance-wreaking return from the east after winning the bloody 1943 battle of Stalingrad that turned the course of WWII.

Not surprisingly, therefore, virtually from the minute it came out from under the communist yoke when the Soviet Union was swept into the dustbin of history in 1991, Ukraine has been engulfed in political and actual civil war. The elections which did occur were essentially 50/50 at the national level but reflected dueling 80/20 vote breakouts within the regions. That is, the Ukrainian nationalist candidates tended to get vote margins of 80% + in the West/Central areas, while Russian-sympathizing candidates got similar pluralities in the mainly Russian-speaking East and South.

This pattern transpired because once the iron-hand of totalitarian rule ended in 1991, the deep and historically rooted conflict between Ukrainian nationalism, language and politics of the central and western regions of the country and the Russian language and historical religious and political affinities of the Donbas and south came rushing to the surface.

Accordingly, so-called democracy barely survived these contests until February 2014 when one of Washington’s “color revolutions” finally “succeeded”. That is to say, the Washington fomented and financed nationalist-led coupe d état ended the fragile post-communist equilibrium.

That’s the true meaning of the Maidan coup. It ended the tenuous cohesion that kept the artificial state of Ukraine intact for barely two decades after the Soviet demise. So save for Washington’s destructive intervention, the partition of a communist-confected state that had never been built to last would have materialized all on its own–perhaps like in Czechoslovakia – and likely sooner than later.

The evidence that the Maidan coup was actually the coup ‘d grace for the makeshift Ukrainian state is apparent in the maps below. These maps tell you all you need to know about why this is a civil war, not an invasion of one neighbor by another.

The first map is from the 2004 presidential election, which was won by the Ukrainian nationalist candidate, Yushchenko. The latter predominated in the orange areas of the map, over the pro-Russian Yanukovych, who swept the blue regions in the east and south.

2004 Ukraine Election Results – National Divorce In The Making

The second map is from the 2010 election. It shows the same stark regional split, but this time the pro-Russian candidate, Yanukovych, won.

In the map below, the dark blue parts to the far east (Donbas) indicate an 80% or better vote for Viktor Yanukovych in the 2010 election. By contrast, the dark red areas in the west (Lviv) voted 80% or more for the Ukrainian nationalist, Yulie Tymoshenko. That is to say, the skew in the Ukrainian electorate was so extreme as to make America’s current red state/blue state divide seem hardly noteworthy by comparison.

As it happened, the sum of the pro-Yanukovych skews from the east and south (Donbas and Crimea) added up to 12.48 million votes and 48.95% of the total, while the sum of the extreme red skews in the center and west (the lands of old eastern Galicia and Poland) amounted to 11.59 million votes and 45.47% of the total.

Stated differently, it is hard to imagine an electorate more sharply divided on a regional/ethnic/language basis. Yet it was one which still produced a sufficient victory margin (3.6 percentage points) for Yanukovych – so as to be reluctantly accepted by all parties. That became especially clear when Tymoshenko, who was the incumbent prime minister, withdrew her election challenge a few weeks after the run-off in February 2010.

At that point, of course, Russia had no beef with the Kiev government at all because essentially Yanukovych’s “Regions Party” was based on the pro-Russian parts (blue areas) of the Ukrainian electorate. But when Washington essentially put the anti-Russian regions (red areas) in charge of Ukraine’s government by orchestrating, funding and immediately recognizing the Maidan coup in February 2014, everything changed on a dime. That was especially the case when the new, illegal government enshrined in its constitution a requirement to join NATO at the earliest possible opportunity.

In effect, Washington’s 2014 Maidan coup was the equivalent of Khrushchev’s emplacement of missiles in Cuba during 1962. Even had Putin been as erudite and civilized as JFK, rather than the ruffian he actually is, he would have had little choice except to insist that the prospective presence of NATO missiles 30 minutes from Moscow cannot stand.

201o Ukraine Presidential Election Vote Split

In a word, the slaughter in Ukraine is not about an “unprovoked invasion” by Moscow of the transitory artifact known as the Ukrainian state. The latter effectively began and ended with the Soviet Union.

Moreover, with respect to the actual underlying reason for intervention in Ukraine – NATO’s proxy war against Russia– a simple question recurs: Besides restocking the NATO arsenals depleted by the demolition derby in what remains of Ukraine, what’s the reason for NATO’s war?

Alas, the question answers itself. The War Capital of the World on the Potomac insists upon it, and its vassals in Europe like Ursula von der Leyen have nodded, jawohl!

And yet and yet. The White House is now being run by a new sheriff who has absolutely no clue as to the history recited above. Still, he has gotten it in his head that he is more deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize than was Obama and now stands at the precipice of history.

He can allow himself to be horns-waggled once again by Washington’s Deep State war-mongers and neocons, led by the treacherous Secretary of State, Marco Rubino, or he can man up and a make a deal to end not only Washington’s foolish proxy war against Putin, but the entire, obsolete notion of the rule-based international order that was, is and will remain anything but that.

It is said that the gods of history work in strange ways. And a still possible Trump-Putin peace deal, which still may be just days away, would surely evidence of just that.

In the meanwhile, hopefully the Donald will demand of the Deep State shills who still surround him and who will surely attempt to sabotage any agreement he reaches with Putin, simply this: Where is it documented that Putin has ever threatened Bulgaria or Hungary or  Slovakia or Lithuania or any of the other so-called European dominoes?

After all, what in the world could Putin gain by attacking these nations and occupying what would be hostile populations and damaged economies? A tremendous fiscal drain on his already beleaguered finances would be the only certainty.

The fact is, prior to Trump’s return for a second go round, Washington had become so crazed with anti-Putin war fever that it didn’t even ask, let alone answer, that foundational questions. Instead, it has just lapsed into grade school reasoning by analogy. If Putin attacked the government of Ukraine, why then it’s a sure bet that the nine yellow dominoes highlighted in the map below are next on the list to fall.

No, not at all.  As we have shown, Ukraine is sui generis. It is a hodge-podge of variant histories, ethnicities and religious traditions that never belonged under the roof of a single state.

Moreover, its propinquity to things Russian is an unassailable matter of history. As we have also shown, prior to the arrival of communist rule after WWI, its various regions had marinated for centuries as vassals under the tutelage of Czarist Russia. Ukraine’s historically meandering boundaries, in fact, were only finally frozen in current form by the brutal dictates of Lenin, Stalin and  Khrushchev.

During the long amalgamated history of these neighboring, mainly Slavic populations the eastern and southern portions of the current Ukraine map became populated and economically developed by Russian speaking migrants. At length, they converted the largely empty, herder-dominated steppes into the flourishing bread basket, mining district and industrial work shop of old Russia.

This arrangement was essentially continued by the communist commissars after they consolidated control in 1922, save only for an arbitrary administrative re-arrangement which put the old “Novorossiya” (New Russia) of Catherine the Great’s time into a wholly unnatural state rechristened as the aforementioned Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine.

To repeat: These artificial borders and the ethnic hodge-podge within them were held together at the gun point of Ukraine’s local communist rulers until 1991, when the scourge of Soviet Communism perished from the earth. And almost immediately thereafter, the elections showed that the state confected by Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev had never been built to last; and that the verdict of Ukraine’s nascent democracy was that partition would someday be the only answer.

And that’s why at present the territorial partition of Ukraine is the only thing crucially necessary for a peace agreement with Russia from among the odds, sots and puffery of Trump’s 28-point plan.

So to return to our red state/blue state analogy we go back to  former president Viktor Yanukovych, who was the last democratically elected politician before Washington essentially took-over the country. Of course, by the writ of the Ukraine’s de facto rulers on the Potomac he was illegally deposed and driven out of the country via the coup d’ etat in February 2014.

Needless to say, Yanukovych had been the champion of the Russian speaking populations of the Donbas and southern rim of the Black Sea – the very areas that now wish to depart the embrace of their illegitimate, Washington-NATO funded rulers in Kiev. As previously indicated, he ran on what was called the “Regions” party platform in both 2004 and 2010, against vehemently pro-Ukrainian candidates, whose bases of support were in the central and west geographies.

As shown in the two maps below, both elections were a case of red state versus blue state electoral division on steroids. Indeed, these electoral maps are the road maps to the just and right conclusion of peace through partition.

Except unlike the US where a GOP gubernatorial candidate actually got a 47% showing in the deep blue state of New York this past election, the vote split in the most hard core of the respective regions (dark red and dark blue) was upwards of 90/10 in many localities.

In the 2004 election, Yanukovych narrowly lost the overall count, even as he dominated overwhelmingly in the east and south.

2004 Election Results in Ukraine

By contrast, in 2010 Yanukovych retraced the same massive domination of his own Russian-speaking regions while striking out in the west. But this time with the help of Washington-based election consultants (i.e. the infamous Paul Manafort) he managed to accumulate enough incremental votes to come out on top in the nation-wide tally.

2010 Election Results in Ukraine

Needless to say, when the foolish neocons led by the detestable Victoria Nuland fomented the coup against Yanukovych in February 2014 they had no clue as to the tenuous political balance they were upending.

But it didn’t take long to strike the match. In short order the followers of the WWII Hitler ally, Stephan Bandera, who dominated the unelected, Washington-installed government in Kiev, made two destructive moves that amounted to a signal to “let the partition begin”.

The first of these was to abolish Russian as an official language in the Donbass and elsewhere. And the second was the massacre by fire of pro-Russian trade unionists in a building in Odessa by supporters of the Kiev government.

It was only a matter of time, therefore, before most of the red-colored territories on the maps above declared their independence. It was also in short order that the people of what had been the Russian province of Crimea after Catherine the Great purchased it from the Ottoman’s in 1783 voted overwhelmingly to re-join the Russian Federation. That ended their brief sojourn in the Ukrainian state, which had been Khrushchev’s 1954  gift to the communist thugs in Kiev who had helped him seize power after Stalin’s death.

Also, in short order the new proto-Fascist government in Kiev moved to deeply antagonize its historic neighbor and former fealty overlord in Moscow by seeking to join NATO and launching a brutal, unrelenting war on the breakaway Republics of the Donbas. This onslaught ended up killing upwards of 15,000 civilians during the eight year run-up to Russia’s “invasion” in February 2022.

Needless to say, Putin was no more interested in having nuclear missiles planted even closer to his own border than was President John Kennedy in October 1962. Nor was he about to countenance the continued slaughter of Russian speakers in the Donbass after Kiev launched a drastically stepped up shelling and bombing campaign on these beleaguered areas one week before the February 24, 2022 invasion.

At the end of the day, therefore, the necessary impending partition of the rogue state of Ukraine is not a case at all of legitimate sovereign borders being violated. Nor does it involve an assault on the hypocritical notion of a “liberal international order” that has not actually ever existed and which, instead, has been a cover for Washington’s global hegemony all along.

But the lessons are nonetheless profound. History accumulates and eventually leads to destructive, but wholly unnecessary outcomes.

That is the case today with the utterly foolish action of Washington during the 1990s and 2000s to bring former Warsaw Pact Nations, and even breakaway Soviet Republics into a NATO alliance whose mission was over and done in 1991.

It should have been dismantled then and there. When the old Soviet monster with its 50,000 tanks and 7,000 nuclear warheads disappeared into the dustbin of history, there was no longer a threat to the east. There was no “front line” to defend.

At that point Washington should have and easily could have led the world to disarmament and to a revival of the lasting peace that had disappeared in the “Guns of August” in 1914.

But now the NATO section 5 mutual defense commitment to these 31 nations is equivalent to a stupid charity that the nearly bankrupt Federal government cannot afford in any case.

There is absolutely nothing in it for the enhancement of America’s homeland security, and huge incentives for the politicians of these nations to caterwaul against Russia rather than seek peaceful accommodation.

So here is the historic moment before us: The Donald can tell Rubio to take a hike, return to the essence of the 28-point plan and agree with Putin to a partition of Ukraine. So doing, he would not only end the utter stupidity of NATO’s proxy war on Russia, but in the process defenestrate the neocons, official Washington, NATO, the rules based international order and all the other globalist humbug that has saddled America with $1.5 trillion per year Warfare State and Global Empire that it cannot afford and doesn’t need.

David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back, and the recently released Great Money Bubble: Protect Yourself From The Coming Inflation Storm. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.