The US needs to sit down with Russia and Negotiate an end to the Ukraine War!
Friday October 14, 4:30 – 6 p-m
Federal Plaza, 230 S. Dearborn
President Biden admitted the world faces ““the prospect of Armageddon” for the first time “since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis.” The present Ukraine proxy war between the US and Russia, the world’s top nuclear powers, must end with negotiations between the two. So far the US has blocked attempts at a negotiated solution, and the war continues to escalate with the people of Ukraine paying the price.
On three separate occasions peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia were sabotaged by the United States and the European Union: in February, in March, and again in August.
Biden called for overthrowing the Russian government last March: Vladimir Putin, who possesses 6,257 nuclear weapons, “cannot remain in power.” This follows the US plan as laid out in the 2019 Rand Corporation document Overextending and Unbalancing Russia. Now, “White House and military leaders are transitioning to a sustainable model Kyiv can depend on for an open-ended war with Russia”… “roughly modeled on U.S. train-and-assist efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past two decades,” the New York Times reported. This inflicts even greater suffering on the peoples of the targeted nations.
This year the US government has allocated $66 billion to continue this war, now a stalemate, like the Western Front in World War One. The New York Times on September 30 noted, “Congress has now committed more military aid to Ukraine than it has to any country in a single year since the Vietnam War, reflecting a remarkable bipartisan consensus in favor of pouring huge amounts of American resources into the fight.”
Ukraine President Zelensky signed a decree ruling out peace talks with Moscow so long as Putin is in power and called for further escalation with military strikes inside Russia.
With the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline, the European Union is warning that the continent faces heating and electricity blackouts this winter. Germany is accusing “friendly” US gas suppliers of profiting off the crisis by charging “astronomical prices.” The Nord Stream bombing is often blamed on Russia, as if it would blow up its own $20 billion pipeline when it can simply close the valves. On the day before the pipeline explosion, protests were reported in multiple German cities calling for an end to the Russia sanctions and Nord Stream’s reopening.
The US government and mainstream media have not been honest about the war. This was not an unprovoked invasion by Russia. The US organized the 2014 coup in Ukraine which replaced a neutral government with a pro-US one that sought, despite US promises, to expand NATO forces right up to Russia’s border, something Russia repeatedly said it would not tolerate. The new coup regime began enacting laws attacking the democratic rights of Russian-speaking Ukrainians (1/6 of Ukrainians are ethnic Russians, and 1/3 of Ukrainians speak Russian as a native language).
In response, the more Russian speaking areas of eastern Ukraine (Donbass and Lugansk) voted to separate from Ukraine in 2015. The Ukraine and US governments refused to implement the 2014 Minsk Accords, which would have ended the conflict. Instead, Ukraine began attacking these areas, resulting in an eight-year civil war that killed 14,000 by the end of 2021. This led to the present war.
We are also not told that for 8 years after the 2014 coup the US-NATO military alliance pumped tons of weapons and US advisors into Ukraine. We are not told that the US and NATO ignored Russia’s security demands that Ukraine not join NATO and return to being a neutral state, as it was before the US coup.
Last spring the US blamed the massacre in Bucha on Russia, even though they were not killed until after Russian troops had left and Ukrainian forces had reoccupied the town.
The shelling of Ukraine’s Zaporizhia nuclear power plant was blamed on Russian forces, as if Russia shelled the nuclear plant while also occupying it.
Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland admitted the US has military biolabs in Ukraine, as Russia claimed.
And, if they were telling us the truth about the war, they wouldn’t be censoring Russian media, nor would they be censoring anti-war media here.
We have nothing to gain from this war. Only the big banks and the arms industry benefit. President Eisenhower warned us about this military-industrial complex more than 60 years ago.
US sanctions on Russia are hurting us, not just the Russian people. We now have the highest inflation in over 40 years. We fund the military and subsidize military contractors $814 billion a year, not including the $66 billion spent for war in Ukraine.
Shouldn’t the US spend billions on ending global warming, not on funding a new war? We need money for health care, for jobs, $15 an hour minimum wage, modernized infrastructure, good quality education, affordable housing.
Call CONGRESS – 202-224-3121; WHITE HOUSE – 202-456-1111 Demand they negotiate an end to this war!
Chicago ALBA Solidarity 