Thomas Palley

The Kakhovka dam was a massive two-mile-long structure that dammed the Dnieper River which bisects Ukraine. It was built by the Soviet Union in 1956 and raised the Dnieper by 16 meters (52 feet), creating the Kakhovka Reservoir. The dam was destroyed on 6 June 2023, resulting in massive flooding downstream on both sides of the river which created a social and environmental disaster. The city of Kherson, located near the river’s mouth with the Black Sea, was also flooded.

Both Ukraine and Russia deny blowing up the dam and blame the other. At this stage, all the evidence is circumstantial and conjectural, but a forensic assessment of that evidence overwhelmingly suggests Ukraine destroyed the dam. Despite that, US and Western European politicians and media have uniformly sought to implicate Russia as the perpetrator.

In multiple ways, the dam’s destruction echoes the 2022 destruction of the Russian-owned Nord Stream 2 pipeline. That pipeline was a piece of civilian infrastructure; was destroyed by an explosion; its destruction caused a massive environmental disaster; Ukraine denies any role; many European governments claimed Russia had blown up its own pipeline; and Western media either explicitly claimed Russia had done it (Time) or tendentiously sought to implicate Russia (New York Times, Guardian).

(1) The origins of the Ukraine conflict lie in the ambitions of US Neocons. Those ambitions threatened Russian national security by fuelling eastward expansion of NATO and anti-Russian regime change in the Republics of the former Soviet Union.

(2) The Ukraine conflict is now a proxy war. The US is using Ukraine to attack and weaken Russia.

(3) Russia will eventually prevail. We may already be approaching “game over” because Ukraine’s forces have been eviscerated. Ukraine is now press-ganging military conscripts in Kiev and Lviv.

(4) Once Russia imposes its will, the US will be forced to step back but it will have achieved its strategic goal of weakening Russia and separating Western Europe (especially Germany) from Russia.

(5) Ukraine will be effectively destroyed. It will be half-occupied by Russia; hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians will have died; millions will have fled; and the Ukrainian Nazis will be in charge of what is left.

(6) We have all been played by the Biden administration and the US Neocons.

The biggest losers are the ordinary people of Ukraine. They were cheated by the US Neocons of the possibility of a peaceful accord with Russia.

But we have all lost, especially Western Europe. Higher inflation and energy prices today; lost future economic opportunities; a worsened outlook for climate change; a dangerously deteriorated global security outlook that includes risk of nuclear war; and renewed militarism that will disfigure our societies for decades to come.

(7) Western Europe’s political elites are deeply culpable for their capitulation to US Neocon pressures.

(8) The US is guilty of covertly provoking the war. But it will never be charged because this is a proxy war and it tacitly controls the International Court in The Hague. Instead, the court is being politically pressured to indict Russia, the goal being to foster anti-Russian public sentiment and make a political settlement more difficult. However, that also diminishes the court’s international legitimacy and standing.

Mikhail Gorbachev died on August 30, 2022. Since then, praises have flowed from Western leaders. Those praises obscure how the West betrayed Gorbachev after he fell from power, and how that betrayal seeded the Ukraine conflict.

The story is complicated because Gorbachev’s fall was triggered by Communist Party hardliners, so the troubles which befell Russia thereafter are also significantly due to Russian actions. That said, Gorbachev sought a partnership for peace, prosperity, and democracy. After he fell, the West reneged on its handshake agreement with him.

A tribute to Gorbachev’s inspiring vision

Before turning to the details of that betrayal, a tribute to Gorbachev is warranted. Gorbachev sought to transform the Soviet Union from a closed repressive system into an open consultative socialist system that would be part of the European family. That aspiration was described as glasnost (openness) and was pushed through the Perestroika reform movement.

Preamble/Postscript:

While rightly condemning Russia for its invasion, the mainstream media continues to selectively report the history behind these events. In my view, its omissions are intentional and contribute to the tragedy. They inflame public understanding, render a diplomatic resolution more difficult, and lock us into a worse trajectory.

Let me make further clear my argument: (1) President Putin is head of the Russian state which is under slow-motion implacable attack by US-led NATO. (2) After failing to secure a satisfactory diplomatic resolution, he has taken action to head off that attack.

If you accept those two propositions, the Ukraine story is massively more complicated than simply claiming Putin is an aggressor and we (the US) are good. There will be no lasting peace until that complexity is fully engaged.

What will be done and what should be done?

The inevitable has happened. Russia has invaded Ukraine. It was inevitable because the US and its NATO partners had backed Russia into a corner from which it could only escape by military means.

In effect, Russia confronted a future in which the US would increasingly tighten the noose around its neck by further eastward expansion of NATO, combined with military upgrading by the US of its Eastern European NATO proxies.

Accompanying that militarization was the prospect of a ramped-up propaganda war in which western media fanned the flames of public animus against Russia. Side-by-side, US government financed entities (such as the National Endowment for Democracy and the German Marshall Fund) would seek to influence European and Russian politics with the goal of regime change.

At this stage, there are two questions. What will be done? And what should be done?