Caitlin Johnstone: Opposing Peace in Ukraine

Consortium News
Volume 30, Number 53 —Friday, February 21, 2025


Caitlin Johnstone: Opposing Peace in Ukraine


The histrionics over Trump’s moves to end the war are depraved. Everyone who paved the way to this nightmare belongs in a cage, including Trump, who is trying to pin it all on Zelensky.

U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, center right, and Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky, opposite him, meeting in Munich last week. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Vance’s right. (State Department, Freddie Everett)

By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com.au

Everyone from Rachel Maddow to Bernie Sanders is freaking out about the Trump administration’s moves toward ending the war in Ukraine. David Hogg, now the vice chair of the DNC, said on Twitter that “If we abandon Ukraine — Poland is next. You know what’s going to be a lot more expensive than finishing this war and forcing Putin out of Ukraine? A third world war and a second Marshall plan.”

These histrionics are as depraved as they are ridiculous. Obviously the war in Ukraine needs to end. Polls say Ukrainians themselves want the war to end. If you want Ukrainians to keep dying in this war against the will of the Ukrainians themselves while you sit safe at home eating snacks and posting on the internet, you’re a monster.

But saying this really doesn’t go far enough. We should all be raging at everyone who pushed things to this point, especially at the leaders of the Western empire we live under. These psychopaths knowingly provoked an unwinnable war of unfathomable horror by first backing a regime change operation in 2014 and then amassing a proxy military threat on Russia’s border in ways the U.S. would never permit on its own border, then refusing off-ramp after off-ramp both before and after Russia invaded. Everyone who paved the way to this nightmare belongs in a cage.

And that includes Donald Trump. The sitting president is on social media right now trying to pin this whole thing on Zelensky, when Trump himself helped pave the way to this horror by becoming the first president to start openly pouring weapons into Ukraine while ramping up cold war tensions and shredding treaties with Russia.

Trump, former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and all of NATO helped throw Ukraine into the meat grinder while countless Western experts and analysts warned urgently that their actions would result in Ukraine’s destruction. They should all suffer immense consequences.

But of course we all know they won’t. None of the government officials, empire managers, career politicians, pundits and think tank swamp monsters who helped steer Ukraine into the inferno will suffer any consequences of any kind for their atrocities. Nobody will even lose their career.

And what’s worse is knowing that most of them will re-emerge like zombies from the grave to help manufacture support for the next imperial bloodbath. Many of the same people who drummed up support for the war in Ukraine were responsible for helping to destroy Iraq, when they should have been languishing in a prison cell at The Hague this entire time.

We are ruled by the worst among us. Our world will never know peace as long as these freaks are at the steering wheel.

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This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com.au and re-published with permission.