Time for New Borders Again as Another POTUS Does Yalta
Well, the Trumpian box of chocolates continues to yield its surprises. Just as Forest Grump once averred.
We are referring to the news that Donald Trump may acknowledge the obvious in his peace negotiations with Putin. To wit, that the Russian-speaking, Russian-settled, centuries-long Russian territory of Crimea does not have to be returned to the Ukrainian interlopers as a condition of peace after all—the loud insistence since the Maidan coup of February 2014 by Zelensky, the Bidenestas and the neocon blob in Washington, London, Brussels and Berlin to the contrary notwithstanding.
The Trump administration is considering recognizing Ukraine’s Crimea region as Russian territory as part of any future agreement to end Moscow’s war on Kyiv, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Administration officials have also discussed the possibility of having the US urge the United Nations to do the same, according to both people. Such a request would align the Trump administration with the position of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has long seen Crimea as his nation’s territory.
The administration’s previously unreported openness to those options comes as Trump prepares for a Tuesday call with Putin, with a potential 30-day ceasefire deal on the table. Trump told reporters Sunday evening aboard Air Force One that negotiators had already discussed “dividing up certain assets.”
So we are now finally getting to the meat of the matter. The thin fig-leaf justification for the Washington/NATO intervention in Ukraine all along has been some vague nonsense about the “sanctity of borders”.
The latter, of course, is a sacred virtue except when NATO determines otherwise. For instance, when it bombed Serbia to smithereens in 1999 that was presumably to help its leader better understand that borders were not at all sacrosanct: Not when the thugs wh0 had seized power in its breakaway province of Kosov0 had promised NATO land to establish the fine military base depicted below upon the achievement of its “independence” from Belgrade.
NATO Camp Bondsteel In Kosovo
As it happened, Ukraine was apparently next in line to house a similarly swell NATO installation, but Putin issued a “not on my border you don’t” demarche early on at the Munich Security conference in 2007. Shortly thereafter even the hard-pressed, post-communist Ukrainian electorate fairly and squarely chose a Russian-friendly president in 2010, who got a better deal for his people from Moscow in late 2013.
At that point, of course, the sanctity of borders and sovereignty got another hall pass from the Washington keepers of the Empire led by the detestable duo of Senator John McCain and Victoria Nuland—along with their phalanx of imperial gendarmes at the CIA, State Department, NED, USAID, Agency for Global Media and more. The fact is, the Maidan coup of 2014 was instigated, funded, championed and peremptorily recognized by Washington with blatant disregard for every semblance of the “rules-based international order” that they bray about when it’s convenient.
All that has transpired since then is fictionalized narrative, plain and simple. Most especially an unhinged demonization of Putin that bears no relationship whatsoever to the true facts on the ground. Indeed, the endless whining about the Ruuskies and Putin is just plain pathetic because—-
- Russia bears no hallmarks of an expansionist imperial power.
- The Russia-Ukraine conflict is none of Washington’s business—since it’s essentially a territorial and civil war within the borders of historic czarist and communist Russia.
- If EU officialdom was really concerned about the purported Russian threat it would have taken up arms long ago and would have proceeded to spend far more than the current pittance of GDP on defense.
Instead, the Europeans just talk gibberish and urge Washington to keep footing the butchers’ bill. For instance, here is the reprehensible Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, former German defense minister and full-throated war-hawk, talking absolute nonsense:
Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to see empires and autocracies back in Europe, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told the European Economic Congress in Katowice.
Speaking alongside Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, von der Leyen insisted that she stands for a European Union that is ready to do whatever it takes to protect Europe, and especially Ukraine.
“Putin’s war is about redrawing the map of Europe, but it is also a war on our Union and on the entire global rules-based system,” she said.
Well, that’s rubbish if there ever was such. The only time the borders of Ukraine have been redrawn at the barrel of a gun is when Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev did so between 1922 and 1954. That’s right, this EU half-wit wanted to embroil the world in WWIII in order to enforce borders drawn by a trio if history’s most blood-thirsty tyrants.
As explained below, there never was a country even remotely resembling modern Ukraine until the Soviet communists decreed its existence. Before that, the pieces and parts of the country’s history go back to the 1650s when one of the more powerful and brutal rulers of the Cossack Hetmanate, which occupied a small part of today’s central Ukraine, abandoned his tribe’s historic fealty to the Polish kings and switched his loyalty to the Russians. After that, the “borderlands” (i.e.”Ukraine” in Russian) were all about vassalage in the Russian Empire and the Soviet one which followed.
During that 375 year span the borders shifted all over the lot and back, as the Mongol, Turkish and Polish-Lithuanian empires arrived and receded, even as the Russian and communist ones in the end expanded. So what’s so sacrosanct about the very last version of the map—one that hosted both the murderous regime of Stalin and Hitler’s Wehrmacht, too?
Indeed, Europe is rife with borders redrawn again and again. While von der Leyen was in Poland preaching for border wars in Ukraine, in fact, it might well be asked, which sacrosanct Polish borders did she have in mind?
For 700 years “Poland” has cavorted around the rivers, plains, mountains and forests of central Europe like a traveling minstrel show. This includes its disappearance entirely at the hands of the Prussians, Russians, Hapsburgs and other long-gone lesser powers during the later years of the 18th century and the entirety of the 19th century.
Only in 1919 was it resurrected—in part upon German lands seconded to it at Versailles. And that planking for German revanchism, Hitler and WWII happened for the not so noble reason of American electioneering. That is, Wilson was keen on obtaining the millions of votes to be had among the fair part of the Polish nation which had migrated to Chicago and the industrial Midwest.
At length, of course, Hitler and Stalin redrew Poland’s borders yet again under the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1938, cancelling Wilson handwork and returning the German Danzig Corridor to its previous owner. And then, seven years later, Poland’s borders were redrawn still another time by a new set of victors, who realigned the borders for “Poland” at the Yalta Conference in a way that satisfied Stalin’s aim to recover eastern lands the Soviets lost in the post-1918 civil war.
So all along someone should have told the Washington and NATO warmongers to take a long jump off a short pier. That is to say, the picture below reminds not only how the latest borders of “Poland” were drawn, but how over the last several centuries of history most of Europe’s present borders came to be. They were not drawn by God’s deputies on earth or even the statesman of the day—but by the victors of the most recent wars.
The Border Men of 1945
Moreover, even a glance at today’s map reminds that the border-drawing work of victorious generals and politicians, and occasionally statesman, has always been subject to revision without necessarily making a war about it. And that kind of revisionist work–negotiation of a Ukrainian partition—is exactly what is on the table before Trump and Putin now.
Indeed, they might well take inspiration from the several major European boundary adjustments of recent times that remind that the shibboleth of sacrosanct borders has no roots in actual history.
Thus, the statesman at Versailles decreed the existence of Czechoslovakia in 1919 as a potpourri of nations including a lot of Slovaks, Czechs, Hungarians, Romani people, Silesians, Ruthenians, Ukrainians, Poles, Jews and most especially millions of Germans. So it was subsequently—-
- Dismembered by Hitler to bring the Sudetenland Germans home.
- Re-assembled by the Yalta winners to provide a security buffer for Stalin.
- Divided between Slovakia and the Czech Republic on peaceable terms in 1993 to allow mismatched peoples to go their own ways.
Or take the case of the meandering borders of the six autonomous republics of the vanished state of Yugoslavia and particularly its anchor in Serbia. Wikipedia explains the border-making process there as well as can be done:
(Serbia) achieved de facto independence in 1867 and gained full recognition by the Great Powers in the Berlin Congress of 1878. As a victor in the Balkan Wars of 1912– 1913, Serbia regained Vardar Macedonia, Kosovo and Metohija and Raška (Old Serbia). In late 1918, with the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Serbia was expanded to include regions of the former Serbian Vojvodina. Serbia was united with other Austro-Hungarian provinc
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