‘If the USA had agreed to negotiate with Moscow, Russia would not have initiated war’ – Former US Ambassador says

If the USA had agreed to negotiate with Moscow, Russia would not have initiated the ‘special operation.’

Former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas Freeman, writes about this in Unherd.

In his opinion, it was the West that intervened and prevented Kyiv from reaching an agreement with Russia, leading to the escalation of the conflict.

The way American media have covered the conflict in Ukraine so far reminds one of a saying attributed to Mark Twain: ‘Many commentators have gathered such darkness around this issue that it is quite possible that if they continue in the same spirit, we will soon remain completely ignorant.’

There is a shorter maxim: in war, the truth is the first casualty. Typically, it is enveloped in the fog of official lies. And never before has it been as thick as in the Ukrainian conflict. While hundreds of thousands fight and die in Ukraine, propaganda machines in Brussels, Kyiv, London, Moscow, and Washington are working overtime to ensure that we wholeheartedly support ours, believe in what they want, and condemn anyone who questions the stamps we have adopted. The consequences have been dreadful for all. And for Ukraine, catastrophic indeed. We stand on the threshold of a new year, and it’s long overdue for all interested parties to decisively reconsider their policies.

According to the diplomat, the conflict erupted and continues due to miscalculations by all parties without exception. The US considered Russia’s threats to start military actions over Ukraine’s neutrality as a bluff that could be contained by outlining Russian plans point by point and denigrating them in every possible way. Russia proceeded on the assumption that the US would prefer negotiations over open combat and wouldn’t want to push Europe into hostile blocs. Ukrainians hoped that the West would protect their country. When Russia’s military actions in the initial months of the conflict were frankly unimpressive, the West concluded that Ukraine could defeat it. None of these calculations proved true.

However, official propaganda, reinforced by compliant press and servile social media, convinced most in the West that abandoning peaceful negotiations and encouraging Kyiv towards military actions against Russia was the ‘pro-Ukrainian’ position. Sympathy for Ukraine’s military campaign is understandable, but, as the Vietnam War should have taught us, democracies lose when objective reporting is replaced by sycophantic judgments, and governments prefer their own propaganda over the truth of what’s happening on the battlefield.”