No War with Russia! Disband NATO Now!
Speech given by Andrew Josefchak, Anti-War Committee member, on 2/24/22 at the Minnesota Peace Action Coalition protest in front of Senator Klobuchar’s office in Minneapolis.
Given the events of the last day, the Russian Federation’s announcement of special military operations in Ukraine, it’s important that I begin by stating that the Anti-War Committee stands against any and all US interventions, because history has taught us that the US getting involved has never once, not once, improved things for people in other countries. In fact, in the current situation, US intervention has a serious chance of starting World War III.
No matter what happens in the coming weeks and months, we have to remember that this US-manufactured crisis could have been prevented without a major military confrontation. And even now, especially now, diplomacy is absolutely, unquestionably the only way forward. The US has been set on war from the very start; it has placed both Russia and Ukraine in impossible situations, in total deadlock. In the 1990s the US promised Russia that NATO would expand “not one inch east,” but apparently the US would like to take not just an inch but a mile, in fact 600 miles, expanding NATO all the way up to Russia’s doorstep, with Ukraine the last country standing between Russia and NATO forces. The US has imposed deadly sanctions on Russia, has moved nuclear weapons within spitting distance of its borders, and has provided Ukraine with $2.7 billion in arms since 2014. It’s done all this, and then has presented Vladimir Putin as some kind of madman for wanting to preserve his country’s sovereignty, which has been under constant US assault for decades. And the idea that the US has deliberately pushed Russia toward war is not just speculation on my part; in 2019 the RAND Corporation, a pro-war organization of the US military-industrial complex, sent a report to the US Army Chief of Staff in which it stated that the ideal US strategy would be to use sanctions, propaganda, and other measures to push Russia towards war with Ukraine in order to make it overextend itself militarily. When the US treats the world as its playground, when it uses other nations as nothing more than pawns on a chessboard, these are the consequences, and one of the most tragic, disgusting things about these events is we’ve learned that the US really did know what would happen if they didn’t back down and stop trying to expand NATO, that they weren’t being hyperbolic about the consequences, and they let those consequences play out anyway. But that’s easy to do when no US soldiers are being sent to die for the sake of NATO — instead, Ukrainians are paying for NATO expansion with their lives.
The US has forcibly torn down absolutely all barriers to the destruction of Russian sovereignty. I’m 2014, confronted with the problem of a pro-Russian Ukrainian government that had no real interest in cooperating with NATO, the US orchestrated a coup, the Euromaidan coup, which was led by US-backed, US-funded far-right forces which included a neo-Nazi element who are now called the Azov Battalion. When I call these guys Nazis, I mean that they wear the emblem of the Waffen SS Panzer Division. The CIA has been training them for years now. This 2014 coup is key to understanding the deadlock that Ukraine has found itself in. Just like Russia, Ukraine has itself called for peace over and over, and has expressed anger in the past few weeks over US and NATO warmongering. This is difficult to square with their rejection of Russian peace deals, until you consider the possibility that Ukrainian officials have been terrified about what would happen to them, at the hands of the US-backed Nazis within their own country, if they were to make peace with Russia. The US would probably aid the Azov Battalion, and related groups, in performing a second coup. Why not? They did it in 2014, and this time they’d be better-equipped and better-trained. And we’ve now learned that the blood of Ukrainians means nothing to the United States. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the US would have allowed Ukraine to negotiate peace with Russia. We’ve already got our own problem with white supremacist killers stalking our streets, armed with weapons backwashed into our communities from US wars, we don’t need to go create that problem in other countries.
The awe-inspiring degree of irresponsibility that the US and NATO have displayed in the past months means that we in the anti-war movement have to be absolutely ferocious in our opposition to further US intervention in Ukraine or Russia, in opposition to sanctions, to troop deployments, to NATO actions, to more weapons being shipped to Ukraine, to anything other than diplomacy and peace negotiations. Just this morning Amy Klobuchar went on MPR to say that “no options are off the table” with regard to a conflict with Russia. We need her to know that no, they’re ALL off the table, everything except demands for peace. We need to take the streets, we need to increase political pressure on our warmongering leaders, we need to make any support for war with Russia totally politically untenable for US politicians.
No war with Russia! Disband NATO!