News Release

U.S. Pouring Gasoline on Ukraine Fire, Risking Armageddon

Share

Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at Yalta, February 1945. Photo: US Army.

RICHARD FALK, rfalk@princeton.edu

Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, chair of Global law, Queen Mary University London, and research associate, Orfalea Center of Global Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara.

He recently wrote the piece “Ukraine War Evolves: Slouching Toward Armageddon,” which states: “Ever since the Ukraine War started on February 24, 2022 the NATO response, mainly articulated and materially implemented by the U.S., has been to pour vast quantities of oil on the flames of conflict, taunting Russia and its leader, increasing the scale of violence, the magnitude of human suffering, and dangerously increasing the risk of a disastrous outcome. …

“The U.S. did all it could at the UN and elsewhere to build a punitive coalition hostile to Russia but coupled this with a variety of sanctions and the demonization of Putin as a notorious war criminal unfit to govern and deserving of indictment and prosecution. This perspective of state propaganda was faithfully conveyed by a self-censoring Western media filter that graphically portrayed on a daily basis the horrors of the war experienced by the Ukrainian civilian population, something to be avoided when dealing with U.S. regime-changing interventions or Israel’s violence inflicted on the long-suffering Palestinian people.”Such inflammatory behavior is underscored by a newly discovered West-oriented enthusiasm for the International Criminal Court, urging the tribunal to gather as much evidence as quickly as possible of Russian war crimes. …

“Antony Blinken may tell the media that spheres of influence became a thing of the past after World War II, but he must have been asleep for decades not to notice that the Yalta Agreement on the future of Europe reached in 1945 by the Soviet Union, United States, and the United Kingdom was premised on precisely the explicit affirmation of such spheres, which in retrospect, however distasteful in application, deserve some credit for keeping the Cold War from becoming World War III. Such compromised sovereignty of these borderland countries is descriptive of the prerogatives claimed by so-called Great Powers throughout the history of international relations, not least by the United States through the Monroe Doctrine and its extensions.”