US State Secretary Antony Blinken and UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy hinted during their recent joint trip to Kyiv that the US would lift restrictions on Ukraine using long-range missiles to strike deep into Russia. Still, when both men added that their bosses would have to make the final decision, no one doubted that it had already been made, and the only thing left to confirm was the specific list of Russian targets.
Here we are on the eve of the final act of this tragicomedy, which is expected during the upcoming UN session in the last week of September 2024. This is when the odd couple of lame-duck and expired presidents of the US and Ukraine will tell the world its fate.
On one side, there will be Joe Biden, who, according to former CIA head and secretary of defense in several Republican and Democratic administrations, Robert Gates once said: “He has been wrong on nearly every major issue during his political career.”
Next to him will be Volodymyr Zelensky, whose presidential term expired last May. The former comedian was catapulted to the presidency by corrupt oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, whom the US State Department has previously accused of using his “political influence and power for personal benefit.” In fact, the State Department sanctioned Kolomoisky in March 2021 for his alleged involvement in “corrupt acts that undermined the rule of law and the Ukrainian public’s faith in their government’s democratic institutions and public processes.”
Now, let’s review what this odd couple has done to bring humanity to the edge of the abyss, starting with the one whom his son called the “Big guy.”
After the end of the Cold War, every US president, starting with Bill Clinton, has contributed in one way or another to closing the short historical window of opportunity for integrating Russia into the West. Of course, many pragmatics or idealists in the US government, congressional, media, and public circles have been trying to promote this integration. Regrettably, they lost to more powerful forces, often called the Deep State, who, for their political, economic, or ideological reasons, preferred to have Russia as a foe rather than a friend.
However, no one has done so much damage to the US and the world as Joe Biden during his eight years in the White House as Vice President and President with his Ukrainian project. It is not just the close to $200 billion taken out of US taxpayers’ pockets, or using his son Hunter to make millions abroad for his family, but provoking the war in Ukraine and preventing its end that might bring us to Armageddon.
Here are three key dates to remember (there were other important dates, but I believe these three were crucial): February 2014 – Biden coordinated the regime change coup in Ukraine to replace an administration that preferred the country’s neutral status with a pro-NATO one; December 2021 – Biden rejected Russia’s call for strategic stability negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutral status that could have prevented the February 2022 war; April 2022 – the president derailed with the help of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson Istanbul peace negotiations that took place in the weeks after the start of the war, from March to April of 2022, and prevented resumption of these negotiations since then.
The second participant, Zelensky, should be credited with taking his popular but provincial comedy show “95th Quarter,” funded by the above-mentioned criminal Kolomoisky, onto the world stage with the audience representing Who is Who in the West and others. To achieve such huge success, Zelensky paid with Ukrainian lives and bodies by the hundreds of thousands, displaced millions more, overseen the destruction of his country’s infrastructure, ruining its economy, and potentially selling off the remaining Ukrainian wealth to BlackRock’s collective sharks.
Now, he wants to do what he did to Ukraine to the rest of the world by involving the US and NATO in a direct military confrontation with nuclear Russia, basically plagiarizing the classic Barry Levinson story “Wag the Dog.”
Actually, the Russia-West war is already on, when the West is training Ukrainian troops, supplying them with money, weapons, advisors, and intelligence, but so far not the regular military. It looks like no one cares about killed mercenaries, while Ukraine, in the words of John Wight, is “merely a convenient and blood-soaked proxy — a cat’s paw whose manhood has and is being sacrificed on the altar of US-led Western hegemony.”
Additional grim context of this story is not just what this odd couple and the Deep State are doing by pushing us to the brink but the obedient flock of sheep that is called the leadership of the collective West that applauds and follows them. What happened to their dignity, traditions, culture, and values that we admired?
Many in the US and Europe understand what is happening and, like John Wight, are unafraid to speak out. However, their voices have not been heard widely due to unprecedented censorship in the Western media. As a result, the threat of nuclear war is not the main subject bothering the electorate, including the one in the US, where elections are very close.
We are lucky that so far, Moscow has exercised strategic patience, but do we want to keep poking the bear in the eye and check when his patience runs out or try to deescalate and avoid catastrophe?
Such a way exists, and Russia is ready to negotiate with Ukraine based on the Istanbul agreements mentioned above. Although we cannot precisely tell on which terms, roughly one month into Ukraine’s NATO-backed invasion of Russia’s Kursk region, President Vladimir Putin declared his government has never refused ending the war with a diplomatic solution.
“Are we ready to negotiate with them? We have never refused to do so,” Putin insisted earlier this month. The Russian leader added, “However, not on the basis of some ephemeral demands, but on the basis of the documents that were agreed upon and inked in Istanbul.”
For humanity’s sake, our best bet is to start the diplomatic process immediately. The alternative is to continue following the “Odd Couple” wherever they take us.
If they succeed and all restrictions on using long-range missiles are lifted, negotiations will likely be impossible.
Edward Lozansky is President of American University in Moscow.
