EU Foreign Affairs ‘High Representative’ Joseph Borrell is being reported as announcing the ‘good news’ that the EU will finally deliver 1,000,000 million shells to Ukraine by the end of this year.
He is also reported as saying:
Here comes Russian propaganda, which falsely claims that ‘by supporting Ukraine, you are continuing the war. If you love peace, you should stop supporting Ukraine’.
To counter this propaganda, we must explain to people that peace is not just the end of war. Peace through the surrender of Ukraine, or a story that will lead to the establishment of a puppet government in Kyiv, as in Belarus – then we will get the disintegration of Ukrainian society and see the Russian army on the Polish border. This is against not only our values, but also our interests.
It is true that Russia often says that if the West stops arming Ukraine the war will be over and that means peace. Obviously, peace in this sense means peace on Russian terms. That much is true. But the rest of the discourse here is what John Mearsheimer would probably refer to as being based on non-credible theory. The underlying theory is that of a revanchist Russia intent on re-creating the Russian Empire. But this is their own propaganda. They create propaganda theories and then use them to explain events – which, for them, in their delusions, confirm the theories!
Russia’s intentions in Ukraine are unambiguous and not hidden. They want to block Ukraine from joining NATO. They want to hold onto Crimea and, now, a large chunk of territory in the East, originally to protect the pro-Russian section of the population there but also as a strategic buffer. They also want to see the end of the current “Nazi regime” in power in Kiev. They would probably be happy to see any government in Kiev so long as it was committed to neutrality, (such as the elected pre-coup one was). There is no evidence that Putin wants to control Ukraine as a puppet state. There just isn’t any evidence to support such a claim. There is no evidence that Putin wants to send forces to the Polish border. True; some ‘hotheads’ in Moscow from time to time threaten something like this, but there is no evidence that this is part of Russian policy. As Mearsheimer points out; Russia would have a very, very hard job occupying and pacifying Western Ukraine where a clear majority of the population are opposed to Russian influence in Ukraine. This idea of Putin wanting to push his forces to the Polish border is just floated out there without any supporting empirical evidence.
But – there is another aspect of Borrell’s comments which make one wonder about his sanity. It seems he believes that the supposed Russian forces on EU (Polish) are “against our interests”. And, so “against our interests” that he wants to prolong the war indefinitely, at the cost of tens of thousands more Ukrainian lives and the permanent risk of escalation to a nuclear exchange. Stop. If this, Russia on EU borders, is so existential for Borrell, how can he not see that that this is just what the problem is for Russia? Or, why is he allowed to be concerned about Russian forces on his border but Russia is not permitted to be concerned about NATO forces on theirs? Why is the possibility (fantastical, but anyway), of Russian forces on the Polish border a reason to continue a war, but NATO forces on the Russian border something the Russians should just accept? It is really hard to understand how intelligent people, (he must have some intelligence to have risen to his position), can be so incredibly stupid. But, this ‘logic’ or rather, lack of logic, is characteristic of most Western discourse on Ukraine. This faulty logic and dearth of empirical data to support their narratives is just how the West operates these days.
If the point is that this is not a logical error but an assertion of (colonial?) supremacy, we have the right to object to Russian forces on our border but they do not have an equivalent right to object to our forces on their border that would at least have some kind of logic to it. But, if this is the actual position, then it is a recipe for permanent war. No one else will ever accept our colonial supremacy, there will be permanent resistance, and he is planning a permanent war.