The Ukrainian conflict, presented as a Russian aggression, is only the implementation of the Security Council resolution 2202 of February 17, 2015. If France and Germany did not keep their commitments during the Minsk II Agreement, Russia prepared itself for seven years for the current confrontation.
It had foreseen the Western sanctions well in advance and needed only two months to circumvent them. These sanctions disrupt US globalization, disrupt Western economies by breaking supply chains, causing dollars to flow back to Washington and causing general inflation, and creating energetics in the West. The United States and its allies are in the position of being the hosers hosed: they are digging their own grave.
Meanwhile, the Russian Treasury’s revenues have increased by 32% in six months.
For the past seven years, it has been the responsibility of the guarantor powers of the Minsk II Agreement (Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia) to enforce it. They had been endorsed and legalized by the United Nations Security Council on February 17, 2015. But none of these states have done so, despite the rhetoric about the need to protect citizens threatened by their own governments.
While there was talk of possible Russian military intervention, on January 31, 2022, the Secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, Oleksiy Danilov, defied Germany, France, Russia and the UN Security Council by stating, “Compliance with the Minsk agreements means the destruction of the country. When they were signed under the armed threat of the Russians – and under the eyes of the Germans and the French – it was already clear to all rational people that it was impossible to implement these documents” [1].
When, after seven years, the number of Ukrainians killed by the Kiev government amounted to more than 12,000 according to the Kiev government and more than 20,000 according to the Russian Investigative Committee, only then did Moscow launch a “special military operation” against the Ukrainian “integral nationalists” (as they claim), who were described as “neo-Nazis”.
Russia declared from the start of its operation that it would stick to rescuing the populations and “denazifying” Ukraine, not occupying it. Yet the West accused it of trying to take Kiev, overthrow President Zelensky and annex Ukraine, which they obviously never did. It was only after the execution of one of the Ukrainian negotiators, Denis Kireev, by his own country’s security services (SBU) and the suspension of talks by President Volodymyr Zelensky that his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, announced that he was toughening his demands. From now on, the Federation claims Novorussia, that is to say all of southern Ukraine, historically Russian since Tsarina Catherine II, with the exception of thirty-three years.
It should be understood that if Russia did nothing for seven years, it was not because it was insensitive to the massacre of the Russian-speaking population of Donbass, but because it was preparing to face the predictable Western response. According to the classic quotation of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Tsar Alexander II, Prince Alexander Gortchakov:
“The Emperor is determined to devote, preferably, his solicitude to the well-being of his subjects and to concentrate, on the development of the internal resources of the country, an activity which would be poured outside only when the positive interests of Russia would require it absolutely. Russia is reproached for isolating itself and keeping silent in the presence of facts that are not in accordance with either law or equity. Russia is said to be sulking. Russia is not sulking. Russia is taking stock”.
This police operation was called “aggression” by the West. One thing leading to another, Russia was portrayed as a “dictatorship” and its foreign policy as “imperialism”. No one seems to have read the Minsk II Agreement, which was endorsed by the UN Security Council. In a telephone conversation between Presidents Putin and Macron, revealed by the Élysée Palace, the latter even expressed his lack of interest in the fate of the population of Donbass, i.e. his contempt for the Minsk II Agreement.
Today, the Western secret services are coming to the aid of the Ukrainian “integral nationalists” (the “neo-Nazis” in Russian terminology) and, instead of seeking a peaceful solution, are trying to destroy Russia from within [2].
In international law, Moscow has only implemented the 2015 Security Council resolution. It can be blamed for its brutality, but neither for rushing (seven years), nor for being illegitimate (resolution 2202). Presidents Petro Poroshenko, Francois Hollande, Vladimir Putin and Chancellor Angela Merkel had pledged, in a joint statement attached to the resolution, to do the same. If any of these powers had intervened earlier, they could have chosen other modalities of operation, but none did.
Logically, the UN Secretary General should have called the members of the Council to order so that they would not condemn the Russian operation, which they had accepted in principle seven years earlier, but that they would determine the modalities. It did not do so. On the contrary, the General Secretariat, stepping out of its role and siding with the unipolar system, has just given oral instructions to all its senior officials in theaters of war not to meet with Russian diplomats.
This is not the first time that the General Secretariat has violated the UN statutes. During the war against Syria, it drafted a 50-page plan on the abdication of the Syrian government, involving the forfeiture of Syrian popular sovereignty and the de-Baathification of the country. This text was never published, but we analyzed it in these columns with horror.
In the end, the Secretary-General’s special envoy in Damascus, Staffan de Mistura, was forced to sign a statement acknowledging its invalidity. In any case, the note from the General Secretariat prohibiting UN officials from participating in the reconstruction of Syria [3] is still in force. It is the note that paralyzes the return of the exiles to their country, to the great displeasure not only of Syria, but also of Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.
During the Korean War, the United States took advantage of the Soviet empty chair policy to wage its war under the United Nations flag (at that time, the People’s Republic of China did not sit on the Council). Ten years ago, they used the UN staff to wage an all-out war against Syria. Today, they are going further by taking a stand against a permanent member of the Security Council.
After becoming an organization sponsored by multinationals under Kofi Annan, the UN has become an annex of the State Department under Ban Ki-moon and António Guterres.
Russia and China are aware, as are all other states, that the UN is no longer fulfilling its function. On the contrary, the Organization is aggravating tensions and participating in wars (at least in Syria and the Horn of Africa). So Moscow and Beijing are developing other institutions.
Russia is no longer focusing its efforts on the structures inherited from the Soviet Union, such as the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Eurasian Economic Community, or even the Collective Security Treaty Organization; nor is it focusing on the structures inherited from the Cold War, such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. No, it is focusing on what can redraw a multilateral world.
First of all, Russia highlights the economic actions of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). It does not claim them as its achievements, but as joint efforts in which it participates. Thirteen states hope to join the BRICS, but they are not, for the moment, open to membership. Already, the BRICS have much more power than the G7, they act, while for several years the G7 has been declaring that it will do great things that we never see coming and awarding good and bad points to those who are absent.
Above all, Russia is pushing for greater openness and a profound transformation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Until now, it was only a contact structure for the countries of Central Asia, around Russia and China, to prevent the troubles that the Anglo-Saxon secret services were trying to foment there. Little by little, it allowed its members to know each other better. They extended their work to other common issues.
In addition, the SCO has expanded to include India and Pakistan, and later Iran. In practice, it now embodies the Bandung principles, based on state sovereignty and negotiation, as opposed to those of the West, based on conformity to Anglo-Saxon ideology.
The Westerners are ranting, while Russia and China are moving forward. I say “ranting” because they believe their ranting is effective. Thus, the United States and the United Kingdom, then the European Union and Japan have taken very tough economic measures against Russia. They did not dare to say that this was a war to maintain their authority over the world, so they called them “sanctions”, although there was no court, no defense case, no sentence. Of course, these are illegal sanctions because they were decided outside the United Nations. But the West, which claims to be the defender of “international rules”, has no use for international law.
Of course, the right of veto of the five permanent members of the Council prevents sanctions from being taken against one of them, but this is precisely because the aim of the UN is not to conform to Anglo-Saxon ideology, but to preserve world peace.
I come back to my point: Russia and China are moving forward, but at a very different pace than the West. Two years passed between the Russian commitment to intervene in Syria and the deployment of its soldiers there; two years that were used to finalize the weapons that ensured its superiority on the battlefield. It took seven years between the Russian commitment to Minsk II and the military intervention in Donbass; seven years that were used to prepare the circumvention of Western economic sanctions.
This is why these “sanctions” did not succeed in bringing the Russian economy to its knees, but deeply affect those who issued them. The German and French governments are anticipating very serious energy problems that are already forcing some of their factories to idle and soon to close. In contrast, the Russian economy is booming.
After two months in which the country was living on its stocks, the time has come for abundance. The Russian treasury’s revenues have boomed by 32% in the first half of the year [4]. Not only did the West’s rejection of Russian gas drive up prices to the benefit of the leading exporter, Russia, but this departure from liberal discourse frightened other states, which turned to Moscow for reassurance.
China, which is presented by the West as a seller of junk that sends its prey into a spiral of debt, has just cancelled most of the debts owed to it by 13 African states.
Every day we hear the noble Western speeches and accusations against Russia and China. But every day we also see, if we look at the facts, that the reality is the opposite. For example, the West tells us without proof that China is a “dictatorship” and that it has “imprisoned a million Uyghurs”. Although we do not have recent statistics, we all know that there are fewer prisoners in China than in the USA, even though the US has four times less population. Or we are told that homosexuals are persecuted in Russia, while we see bigger gay discos in Moscow than in New York.
Western blindness leads to ubiquitous situations where Western leaders no longer perceive the impact of their contradictions.
Thus, President Emmanuel Macron is currently in Algeria. He is trying to reconcile the two nations and to buy gas to counteract the shortage he has helped to cause. He is aware that he is a little late, after his allies (Italy and Germany) have done their shopping. On the other hand, he tried to believe wrongly that the main Franco-Algerian problem was colonization. He does not realize that trust is impossible because France supports Algeria’s worst enemies, the jihadists in Syria and the Sahel. He does not make the link between his lack of diplomatic relations with Syria, his eviction from Mali [5] and the coldness with which he is received in Algiers.
It is true that the French do not know what jihadists are. They have just judged, in the biggest trial of the century, the attacks on Saint-Denis, the terraces of Paris and the Bataclan (November 13, 2015), without being able to ask the question of state support for jihadists. In doing so, far from showing their sense of justice, they have shown their cowardice. They have shown themselves to be terrorized by a handful of men, while Algeria experienced tens of thousands during its civil war and still does in the Sahel.
While Russia and China are advancing, the West is not standing still, it is retreating. It will continue to fall as long as it does not clarify its policy, as long as it does not put an end to its double standards of moral judgment and as long as it does not stop its double dealing.
This is the most insightfull analysis of the current situation that I have ever read. Thanks for your help.