After three years of revelations about President Trump’s peccadillos, large and small, it was going to be difficult for the Democrats to command the air waves twenty-four hours a day for a whole week. The public had heard it all before! In order for him to be ejected from the White House, serious crimes had to have been committed, and what better idea could they come up with than a drumbeat about America’s newest ally, Ukraine, being at war with Russia! The trial ‘managers’ would have Americans believe that Russia’s interest in its neighbor treating all its citizens fairly is on a par with the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Since 2014, when the Russian-speaking inhabitants of the Donbas declared their independence from the US-installed government in Kiev which was openly hostile toward them, the US media has been claiming that Vladimir Putin has invaded Ukraine. Never mind that they have yet to appear in Kiev.
Donald Trump, unlike his appointees, does not want to go to war with Russia or any other country, which may be why he abuses the power of the US to impose commercial sanctions on countries that ‘do not behave’. He is charged with withholding American arms with which Ukraine could fight Russia, until its new anti-corruption president, Vladimir Zelensky, investigates the business dealings of a former US Vice-President, in order to ruin his chances of beating Trump in the up-coming election. As if this were not shocking enough, Trump’s personal lawyer— and ‘fixer’, Rudi Giuliani, flies off to Ukraine and other foreign nations on his own initiative (but perhaps not at his own expense), to further to ensure Ukraine’s compliance.
After a week, the impeachment hearings are getting extremely monotonous, as very smart people try to teach political science to kindergarteners while giving deserving party members a national platform alongside the brilliant lead ‘manager’ of the trial, Senator Adam Schiff. But Schiff should know better than to exhibit his ignorance about Russia and its leader: when the Russian President Vladimir Putin had the temerity to say ‘Thank God’ about something, a righteous Schiff declared he had no right to do so, since he is not a religious man. Apparently, the Senators have never taken the trouble to find out who this man that they regularly excoriate is: a committed Russian Orthodox, who maintains strong ties with the church’s high priests, encouraging religiosity among his people and condemning the ‘anything goes’ morality that American brought to the world along with coca-cola, jazz and nuclear bombs.
In the latest iteration of Russophobia, President Trump should be removed from office for failing to extend a White House meeting to the new, anti-corruption president of Ukraine, depriving him of the ‘proof’ that he enjoys American backing, a photo in the Oval Office being as important as Javelin missiles with which to crush Russian tanks that somehow in six years have not made it to Kiev. The President’s lawyers, whose intellectual level appears to be on a par with that of his base— perhaps purposely — are no match for the brilliant Democratic Senators hammering home the case for removing Donald Trump from the White House.
Given that Ukraine is not a major country on the international chessboard, other reasons for claiming the attention of the average American listener must be put forth. Noblesse oblige requires that the US media pass on 2014, when US-backed beefy descendants of a Ukrainian Nazi ally carrying chains and javelins bolstered crowds fed up with corruption. It requires pundits to pass on the fact that the US chose the successor of the democratically elected ousted pro-Russian Ukrainian president, who subsequently folded the Nazi ‘freedom fighters’ into the regular army attacking the Donbas rebels.
Like European lower echelon nobles who after the demise of royalist parties fell in behind a hard right, the US media faithfully covers the anti-Russian rants of elected officials, one of which was so carried away by patriotic fervor that he referred to Russia as ‘the Soviet Union’. It’s clear that Russia’s sheer size allows American leaders to claim that it is still a threat to our European allies. And the fact that Ukraine is located between Russia and the European Union makes it a ‘no-brainer’ to try to pry it lose. No differently than in the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties, Russia is ‘poised’ to overrun Warsaw, Berlin and Paris. (Neighboring Poland recently revived its centuries-old anti-Russian stance, destroying monuments to the Red Army that liberated it from Nazi Germany, on account of Soviet Russia’s close post-war oversight of the nations that make up Eastern Europe’s invasion corridor that now answers to NATO.)
The complexities of post-Soviet policies toward Europe are unlikely to be analyzed by Voice of America and Radio Free Europe — or whatever they’re called today. Luckily for all of us, French President Emanuel Macron immediately backed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s suggestion that the five founding members of the UN meet to discuss the current state of world affairs. My money is on him wangling a seat at the table in the name of Europe, which lay in ruins at the founding, but what’s most important is that the French President stands with the Russian rather than the American, who is being slowly but surely forced from the City on a Hill.
Not only is it official American defense policy to ‘take down’ Russia due to its mineral wealth, Hillary Clinton, who leads that campaign, although she is not running has accused the one anti-war presidential candidate, Tulsi Gabbard, of being ‘a Russian asset’, forcing Tulsi to sue her for slander.
Deena Stryker is a US-born international expert, author and journalist that lived in Eastern and Western Europe and has been writing about the big picture for 50 years. Over the years she penned a number of books, including Russia’s Americans. Her essays can also be found at Otherjones. Especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
