Ambassador Chas Freeman was interviewed by Aaron Maté of the Grayzone on March 22. He reviewed the NATO expansion and refusal to work with Russia on a new security architecture after the fall of the Soviet Union, the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders, and that “Russia had warned for 28 years that it would eventually snap” as they have now. Freeman thinks the military move into Ukraine was a mistake, adding that “to understand it is not to condone it.” But he denounced the “triumphalists” who imagined the West had “won the Cold War,” when in fact it was a “default” by the Russians.
Zelenskyy’s landslide election victory in 2019 was primarily due to the lack of any competent candidates, and he never had the power to make decisions. Worse, he has been deployed on a series of speeches to the Western legislators to the purpose of preventing him from making any deal with Russia to stop the war. On the other hand, Freeman said, Zelenskyy could use the “political capital” he has gained in the West to compromise with Putin. The declaration by Biden that Putin is a “war criminal,” and Boris Johnson’s declaration that the sanctions must stay even if the war ends, in order to punish Russia, are also aimed at preventing a resolution to the war.
Freeman ridiculed the argument that Ukraine could not be fascist because Zelenskyy was Jewish, that “anti-Semitism is not the definition of Nazism.” He strongly warned against the lie that Russia was planning to use chemical weapons, pointing out that the “false flag” operation in Syria “almost worked” to start full-scale war on Damascus, and that neither Assad nor Putin had any reason whatsoever to use chemical weapons.
