NEW – February 18, 2023
Throughout the year that the Special Military Operation has been going on, Western minorities, as well as their agents inside Russia, tirelessly repeat the same mantra: “Russia attacked Ukraine, Russia is an aggressor, and it must leave”, and then there are many variations on this theme. However, from the point of view of geopolitical science, which is strictly followed by Western strategists, it is the West that has attacked Russia and is waging a war with it on the Eurasian chessboard, sacrificing one piece after another. Everything else is just informational noise to cover up Western aggression.
What is the West
A small digression on the concept of the West, or, as Russian officials are now increasingly expressing it, the collective West. This is, of course, not a geographical region, but a civilisational community. Civilisation in this case is a whole set of states and nations that has developed and is developing on the basis of a single value base, which, in turn, is the result of a highly differentiated culture that has developed on the basis of the historical experience of a particular region of the planet.
In other words, Western civilisation includes everyone who shares the values of the West, is a bearer of its culture, worldview, ideological attitudes, accepts the will of its political and financial elites, and follows its laws and rules. At the same time, geographically, a state that is part of Western civilisation can be located anywhere, such as, for example, the former British colonies of Australia and New Zealand, or Japan and South Korea occupied by the Americans. The West itself arrogantly considers its values “universal” for the rest of humanity (why – it is unclear). Hence the idea of globalisation: the whole world is the West (or the half-baked-West, which is trying very hard to become the West); concepts of world government or the so-called non-polar world (what can be the poles when there is no alternative to the West?).
However, despite the conviction of the Western elites that they have already won, that all of humanity is already subordinate to them, and that it is only a matter of technology to adapt the “backward” regions to Western standards, subordinating them to global control centres – the rest of humanity, which is seven billion out of eight, does not share this point of view at all. And even quite the contrary, the West does not accept with its arrogance, treachery, lies, arrogance and perversions. Strictly speaking, the West is just the G7, plus a few remaining colonies under their control and a couple of occupied states. Everything else is not the West, but mostly the anti-West (Latin and South America, Africa, the Arab world, most of Eurasia, India, and China are not the West, but the majority of humanity). So, from a geopolitical point of view, Russia is the Eurasian heartland, or as the English geopolitician Halford Mackinder called it — the geographical axis of history is not the West, but its antipode, again, from the point of view of geopolitics, and, as the Englishman himself used to say: “Whoever controls the heartland controls the world.” The West is a maritime civilisation, Russia-Eurasia – a land one. This is a geopolitical axiom.
Buffer zone or war
According to the laws of geopolitics, there must be a buffer zone (grey zone, neutral zone, whatever you call it) between two civilisations that belong to two opposite types – sea and land – so that war does not break out immediately. The wider it is, the less likely war is, and the narrower it is, the more likely it is. The absence of a buffer zone means that war (in our case, between Russia and the West) is inevitable. As in any other law, there is a caveat here: there may not be a war between the sea and land civilisations, even in the case of their direct contact, but only if there is strict power parity. As soon as this parity is broken, war is inevitable. Or the retreat of one of the parties to create a buffer zone at the expense of its territory.
When Russia (at that time still the USSR), feeling weak, tired, exhausted, left Eastern Europe (it should be emphasised, absolutely voluntarily), the Soviet leadership expected that the entire wide strip of Eastern European, former Soviet and socialist countries that we were leaving would remain neutral. At least that’s what our Western “partners” promised us. Such a wide band of neutral countries guaranteed the conflict-free existence of Russia and the West for an infinitely long time. But as soon as we left, the West, represented by NATO and the EU that was formed a little later, began to inexorably creep into the countries we left behind, rapidly reducing the width of the buffer zone.
As the first Russian geopolitician Aleksey Efimovich Vandam-Edrikhin wrote in 1912, about our interaction with the Anglo-Saxons – “both in the theatre of operations and in the theatre of the fight for life, the enemy follows the retreating”, referring to the events of the beginning of the 19th century, when Russia voluntarily, without any conditions, retreated from the western coast of North America discovered by the Russians. Exactly the same thing happened this time. In the most extreme case, we had the last “stronghold of the world” in reserve – the neutral status of Ukraine. This, in fact, was the main condition for sending it into free floating on our part – a neutral non-nuclear status with the preservation of trade and industrial cooperation ties. Neutral Ukraine, plus conditionally “allied”, but, in fact, neutral Belarus – this is the last narrow fragment of the cordon sanitaire that separated us from the war with the West.
The West started a war at Maidan
For all eight years – from the Kiev Maidan-2014 to the beginning of the Special Military Operation in February 2022 – Russia, grasping at the notorious Minsk Agreements as the last straw, tried to return the neutral status of Ukraine in exchange for the special status of Donbass, but within Ukraine. This, in turn, was to become a guarantee of security for Russia. After the disruption of “Minsk”, to which, as we were rightly told for eight years, “there is no alternative” (because the alternative to “Minsk”, as we now know, is war), Vladimir Putin made one last attempt to avoid war – to conclude a kind of “pact” on non-aggression” with NATO. This was, as we remember, shortly before the Special Military Operation, which began after NATO’s defiantly arrogant silence on all Russia’s proposals to sign a security treaty.
What we have: it was possible to avoid a war between Russia and the West only if we maintained a buffer zone between us, that is, while maintaining the neutral status of Ukraine. At the time of the beginning of the Special Military Operation, there was no question of any neutral status of a country whose army was trained by NATO instructors for war with Russia. Moreover, no one even wanted to talk to us about peace and security. Complete disregard against the background of the silent and methodical pumping of the Ukrainian military machine. Thus, if we proceed from geopolitical logic, the Maidan of 2014, initiated by the United States, was already the beginning of the war: it started the process of absorbing the remaining fragment of the buffer zone – Ukraine – by the West. Moreover, the successful (in favour of the United States) completion of the Maidan in 2014 immediately challenged our security, because it formally transferred Crimea, where our fleet was located at that time, to Washington’s external control. Hence the rapid return of Crimea to Russia.
Another attack
Such a blatant violation of the terms of peace between Russia and the West – the US’ invasion of Ukraine – initiated the negotiation process known as the “Normandy group” or “Minsk”. Putin’s main message in these negotiations is that let’s keep Ukraine neutral. How did the West react to this extremely reasonable and verified peace proposal from all points of view (including the geopolitical level)?
That is, according to the laws of geopolitics – namely, their strict implementation we see in Ukraine – it was the United States that first treacherously started a war with Russia on Maidan 2014: they invaded the formally neutral grey zone of Ukraine, thereby eliminating the last hope for peace. The takeover of Ukraine by the West is the contact of the West and Russia, which (see the beginning) means an imminent war, to which we – Russia – were doomed after Maidan 2014. As the same Vandam-Edrikhin wrote in 1912, “simple justice requires recognition of one indisputable quality for the world conquerors and our vital rivals the Anglo-Saxons < … > the earth’s surface is for them a kind of chessboard, and the nations carefully studied [by them] are living pieces and pawns, which they move with such calculation, that their opponent, who sees every pawn in front of him as an independent enemy, is finally lost in the confusion of how and when they made the fatal move that led to the loss of the game?”
Actually, Ukraine became for the Anglo-Saxons the very pawn that they easily exchanged by attacking Russia. For we cannot be weak.
Valery Korovin
Copyright © 2023. All Rights Reserved.