PARIS, May 19, 2022 (EIRNS) – The room was particularly crowded on May 17, to listen to what Jacques Baud had to say about the war in Ukraine. Here are some of the talking points.
To the question, “Will the war in Ukraine provoke a definitive break between Russia and the West?” Baud, who declared himself to be of a tempered optimism, said no, recalling that “in history, nothing is definitive.”
He then returned to the historical causes of a conflict that he has followed from the inside. Ukraine is only the small, visible part of the iceberg; the submerged part shows that the war is not between Russia and Ukraine, but one led by the United States against Russia, aimed also at undermining Europe. In the discussion period, he went back to the fact that in 1995, it was Kyiv that brutally annexed the Autonomous Republic of Crimea created in 1992 by its inhabitants, who wanted to remain allies with Moscow, after the breakup of the U.S.S.R. in 1991. The Ukrainians had agreed to give up their nuclear weapons, in exchange for security guarantees, which included, according to them, their control over the Crimean republic. This is why Zelenskyy, at the Munich conference, defended Ukraine’s right, in that context, to get nuclear weapons.
For Baud, the causes of the war are to be found in the erroneous perception of the Americans that they were the winners of the Cold War, whereas the reality, according to him, is that the Soviet Union collapsed by itself, out of its own weaknesses. Baud, who was living in the United States at that time, reported that when the Berlin Wall collapsed, he was in a meeting with a top U.S. military advisor, who was authentically surprised by the event, as were many others. Overwhelmed at first, they took control of the situation later.
He thinks that the “victory” in Iraq also confirmed the U.S. belief that they had the right to be a hegemon, and led to their adoption of the “Wolfowitz doctrine.”
