I’m Pro-Ukraine

And Have Been Right on How to Save It

In my writing, I don’t want to give the impression that I’m anti-Ukraine. In fact, I’m pro-Ukraine, and far more so than anyone supporting this war – which is destroying Ukraine. For one thing, like most people in Western Ukraine, I’m Catholic. It’s well known the major division in Ukraine is between the largely Catholic West and the largely Russian Orthodox East, the latter being more likely to be Russian-speaking and identify more with Russian culture.

And while I’m not pro-Russian, I’m not anti-Russian, either. And I think I understand Russia and Russians pretty well, having studied them for more than 50 years, even learning Russian while in the U.S. Army at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey.

Here’s a fact you may not have been aware of: Ukraine’s birth rate is just 1.2 per woman; 2.1 is needed for replacement. Even before the war, that meant ethnic suicide. With the war, as at least 300,000 young men have been killed so far, it’s insane.

Ukraine’s only hope, as I have urged in Fleming.Foundation (see below) and elsewhere not just during the year of this war, but for six years, is absolute neutrality. No war. No NATO membership. Ukraine should have made sure there was no war, and it boosted its birth rate, such as by reducing corruption and encouraging religious observance.

Of course, Ukraine’s people didn’t have much say. In 2014, Victoria Nuland infamously went to Kiyv with $5 billion of the U.S. taxpayers’ money to perpetrate a putsch against its democratic government, installing the dictatorship that still runs the place under Zelensky. But to make sure Zelensky still knows who’s boss, CIA Director Burns traveled there a month ago, after which most of Zelensky’s regime was purged.

Ukraine’s government also is highly compromised by the Nazi ideology of the influential Banderists. For proof, see here (scroll down).

My father, U.S. Army Capt. John C. Seiler, fought the Nazis in France and Germany in World War II. So did my Uncle Art and my Cousin Danny. In the Pacific, my Uncle Wally and Great Uncle Fred fought Hitler’s ally, Hirohito’s Japan. I hate Nazis. Why has Joe Biden allied my country with them?

Ukraine has only a slight chance to survive as a nation and as a people, and with only one thing: peace. It probably could happen now if Biden cedes the areas Russia already has taken, and which any case, to repeat, largely are linguistically and culturally Russian. Then the boys, what’s left of them, can go home, marry Ukrainian girls, and save their country.

But I’ll tell you who doesn’t care about Ukraine: Biden, Blinken, Sullivan, Nuland and the other neocons who pushed this unnecessary, and potentially nuclear war. They don’t care about the Ukrainians in Ukraine any more than they care about the Ukrainian Ohioans (and everybody else) in Ohio contaminated but the toxic chemicals from the train wreck due to this administration’s vast incompetence.

Almost two years ago, Biden’s incompetence brought us the disastrous departure from Afghanistan. Now, it’s looking like he will become one of the few people in history to destroy an entire country, Ukraine.

For six years’ I’ve told them how to save Ukraine – total neutrality.

Below is something I wrote for Fleming.Foundation on Feb. 9, 2017, just after Trump was inaugurated, with a couple of typos corrected. I was right on everything. But so much else happened: the Russiagate fake news/Establishment attack on Trump; his impeachment over his asking Zelensky to investigate Biden’s corruption; Hunter’s laptop; the war.

They should have listened to me.

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Peace for Ukraine?

BY JOHN SEILER, Feb. 9, 2017

Will Donald Trump work out a “deal” with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko that finally brings peace to the longsuffering Ukrainian people? First, a little history.

No country has suffered more in the past 100 years than Ukraine. Not even Cambodia and Rwanda, the sites of huge massacres, which at least were of limited duration. Living under the czars was no bowl of warm borshcht to begin with, although Ukraine was so fertile it was the “breadbasket of Europe.” Then World War I hit, with much of the worst fighting on the Eastern Front occurring in Ukraine. The Brusilov Offensive, from June to September 1916, largely was fought there, costing up to a million casualties each for the Russians and the Central Powers, with untold devastation to civilians.

After the war, the Ukrainian People’s Republic lasted from 1917 to 1921, when the Bolsheviks moved in and made it part of the Soviet Union, complete with Lenin’s terror. Stalin’s Holodomor, from 1932-33, murdered 7 million kulaks, “wealthy” Ukrainian farmers who might own a cow and a couple of acres. “Eliminate the kulaks as a class!” screamed Uncle Joe, as American liberals lovingly called him. The New York Times’ Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for covering up the atrocity. “Fake news” wasn’t invented last year by the Times and other leftist media just to trash Donald Trump.

Then Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, invading the Soviet Union. For four years the Nazi armies and Stalin’s Red Army fought back and forth across Ukraine, as well as nearby areas including Poland and Byelorussia, with Stalin’s secret police unleashed to do their worst. Both sides committed unbelievable atrocities, from the Holocaust to the Katyn Forest massacre. The recent book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin recounts the horrors. Unlike on the Western Front, where some sense of limits and honor still obtained, on the Eastern Front all morality was cast aside. Ukraine really never has recovered.

The Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 irradiated a large part of Ukraine.

Ukraine finally got a break with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991-92. In a rare stroke of common sense, Ukraine’s government destroyed its approximately 1,700 nuclear weapons, which had been one-third of the Soviet total (although Russia always had kept operational control, meaning the nuclear launch codes).

It’s been more calamity since then. Like Russia, the end of socialism after 1991 did not mean a generally smooth transition to a market economy, as happened in Poland and the Czech Republic, but the rule of hideous “oligarchs,” who manipulated the end of socialism to loot the country blind.

Why Ukraine Remains a Disaster Area

But while Ukraine has not found a way out of the oligarchical slough of despond, Russia has.  I think the reasons include:

1) Ukraine was far more devastated than Russia by the events of the past 100 years, as listed above.

2) Ukraine is split largely between Catholic-oriented Western Ukraine, once part of Poland, and Eastern Orthodox and largely Russian-speaking Eastern Ukraine; this is shown in election patterns. See these maps. By contrast, Russia largely is Eastern Orthodox.

3) The Russians had Vladimir Putin to take charge as a quasi-elected czar. Whatever crimes he has committed, as Trump has said, Putin is a leader for his country — a Russia First politician of large talents. He exiled or jailed most of the oligarchs and instituted some pretty good market reforms that quickly lifted Russia from the depression it suffered under the regime of the drunken Boris Yeltsin.

4) Russians know they are a great power, are proud of it, and want to stay that way. Although I haven’t seen it put this way, I believe that’s a major reason they gave up communism in 1991: The Russians could see socialism didn’t work and their vast global empire couldn’t be maintained, so they junked both and went back to being just Russia: still a large continental empire with a lot of smaller ethnic groups, yet dominated by the Russian majority. If you talk to Russian immigrants or visitors to America, you know what I mean.

The 2014 Coup by Obama

Which brings us to the 2014 coup, sparked by the Obama administration, against the legitimate Ukrainian government of President Viktor Yanukovych, who was elected by the people of the country. Yanukovych comes from the Russian-dominant East of Ukraine, Poroshenko from the Ukrainian West. Yanukovych is accused of vast corruption. But if that were a criterion for legitimacy, why was Crooked Hillary almost allowed to become president? And why hasn’t President Trump fulfilled his pledge, during the Second Debate last year, to put her in jail? But I digress.

It’s well known that Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland ordered the 2014 coup. The BBC ran a transcript of the conversation between her and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt hatching the coup. Of Arseniy Yatseniuk, one of the Ukrainian coup plotters, Nuland said, “I think Yats is the guy who's got the economic experience, the governing experience,” to lead the new government. On the involvement of the European Union in the coup government, she infamously shouted, “You know, f*** the EU!” Nuland, summarily fired once Trump took over, is married to Robert Kagan, one of the more fanatical pro-war Neocons.

The coup government immediately included elements of Right Sector, an actual neo-Nazi group that Sen. John McCain, in his never-ending obsession with pushing for a U.S.-Russia nuclear war, met with in 2013. Unable to stop meddling after Trump’s victory last November, McCain again traveled to Ukraine to stir up hatred. And just a couple days ago McCain ordered Trump to give more heavy arms to Ukraine to be used against “Russia-backed rebels.”

McCain and others still are miffed that Putin brought Crimea back into Russia’s polity, even though it was a part of Russia since the days of Catherine the Great. Only a drunken Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 “gave” it to Ukraine, then one of the Soviet “republics.” No way Russia ever will give Crimea “back” to Ukraine. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluded — like John McCain.

Enter Donald Trump

Fortunately, President Trump has been working toward a real “deal” to bring peace to Ukraine. As the pro-Russian site The Duran notes, despite some anti-Russian statements by Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and Vice President Pence, between the lines maneuvering is going on.

The Duran highlighted this part of Haley’s statement: “Cooperation on this issue is possible. Earlier this week, both Russia and Ukraine supported this [U.N. Security] Council’s unanimous call to return to a ceasefire. It was the first time in years that this Council was able to come together on Ukraine. The parties on the ground should heed this signal and hold their fire.”

Anyone who knows Russians, or their history, cannot doubt this: There’s no way they’ll let Ukraine out of their sphere of influence to join NATO. This is serious: Russia rather would suffer a nuclear war than let go of Ukraine, the place of origin of the “Kievan Rus”–originally 9^th Century Vikings who settled there and established a trading empire, while intermarrying with the local Slavs.

In 988, Valdamarr Sveinaldsson / Vladimir the Great / Prince Vladimir adopted Eastern Orthodoxy as the religion of the Kievan Rus. Today, although the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is self-governing, it remains a part of the Russian Orthodox Church, whose primate now is in Moscow, not Kiev, and is Kirill, patriarch of Moscow and all Russia. Kirill announced last November, “Our Church will never leave its brothers in Ukraine in trouble and will never disown them.”

Pat Buchanan has pointed out this really has nothing to do with the United States. We have enough of our own problems here back home. As Oliver Hardy would say: This is another fine mess the Neocons got us into. The globalists want Ukraine, whose pipelines bring Russia’s natural gas to Western Europe, to join and be controlled economically by the European Union. But in just the past year, the United Kingdom voted to leave the EU, Trump won on a plank of nationalism and France looks like it might vote for France First under Marine Le Pen. So the EU absorption of Ukraine now is less of a threat. And Trump has criticized NATO as a bunch of freeloaders.

For Trump, this is a chance for a “deal” that really can help America. First, as Buchanan also keeps pointing out, the two big nuclear superpowers need to get along so they don’t fulfill McCain’s death wish and nuke one another. Second, as Trump has pointed out all along, he and Putin need to work to rid the world of the ISIS terrorists. Whether they do that in a sensible way that doesn’t produce another Middle Eastern quagmire, or even can do it all, is another question. Third, Trump, as he writes in “The Art of the Deal,” just loves to make deals. It’s what he lives for. What a great accomplishment if he pulls off peace for Ukraine for the first time in more than a century.

What’s a Good Deal?

What would a good deal look like? Pretty much what was being accomplished before Nuland intervened, due to the laziness and incompetence of President Obama, three years ago. Ukraine becomes a neutral country, like Finland and Austria were during the Cold War–Finlandization it was called. Finland was allowed to be a Western country, with a capitalist economic system, but did not join NATO, nor challenge Soviet/Russian foreign policy. A 2014 article in the National Interest suggested the similar Austrian model of neutrality for Ukraine.

Internally, Ukraine would become a federation, allowing the predominant Ukrainians/Catholics in the West and the Russians/Eastern Orthodox in the East to co-exist, with full religious freedom for everyone in all areas. It would adopt market reforms combining the best of those in Russia (low taxes) and Poland (decent property rights). Democratic elections would be restored, and respected.

I hope “foreign aid” would be avoided, as it always has proved a disaster for the countries “helped,” and nowadays comes with strings such as mandating abortions. Market reforms are enough to attract investment capital, and ought to include effective safeguards against the oligarchs taking over everything. Ukraine’s fertility rate already is well below replacement level and its population has been declining since 1991. Instead of Catholics and Eastern Orthodox fighting, how about competing on fertility? Make babies, not war!

Peace at last for Ukraine: What a great accomplishment that would be for our new president.