Volodymyr Zelenskyy won the Ukrainian Presidential elections on a platform of peace. Donetsk, Crimea and Lugansk had separated from the rest of Ukraine in 2014. It was expected that the new government taking over in Kiev would understand that attempting to roll back the influence within the Russian-speaking eastern provinces of a country that comprises half the land area of Eurasia was a thankless task. Instead, persuaded by key policymakers in the United States and in the European Union, he adopted a policy of seeking to get back control of lands that had been independent of the Ukrainian government in Kiev through military force since the Maidan Coup—sorry, Maidan Revolution—of 2014 that substituted a central government friendly to Russia with another that was explicitly Russophobic. It was that coup which motivated President Putin to assist some of the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine to break away and become autonomous in a country where even the Russian language had been outlawed since 2014, and to seize back control of a territory that, if in the control of Russophobes, would be a kinetic dagger capable of entering the heart of critical Russian interests. This was Crimea, and by then, Putin had become aware that the US, together with some of its European allies was accelerating overt and covert efforts at regime change in Moscow with the replacement of Vladimir Putin with a contemporary who had the same defeatist mentality where Russian interests were concerned. Since 2014, after which Ukraine was ruled by Russophobes, planning commenced for a Ukraine-Russia war that would end with the defeat of the bigger power and the retaking of Crimea, Donetsk and Lugansk by the Ukrainian military.
By the final months of 2021, the Ukrainian military began positioning and stockpiling its military in a manner that indicated an imminent attack on the Russian-speaking territories lost to Ukraine in 2014. Artillery fire and armed skirmishes increased in frequency, reaching a crescendo by the close of 2021. On 24 February 2022, the Russian military entered the regions that had broken away from Ukraine to a welcoming population that had for years previously been under Ukrainian fire. Those in NATO who sought the defeat of Russia through a war involving Ukraine saw an opportunity to switch partly overt military backing of the Kiev regime to open backing for a military operation and to exponentially ramp up kinetic support to the Kiev regime. NATO, which was born out of Cold War 1.0, ensured that the West ignored the reality that the world had transited from Cold War 1.0 to Cold War 2.0, to the detriment of not just members of NATO but to democracies across the world. President Biden has fought hard to get an additional $60 billion and counting on assistance to Ukraine, and this is likely to cost him victory in the US Presidential election on 5 November 2024. Spending so much of taxpayer dollars, not on disadvantaged US citizens but on a hopeless war conducted through a European power could cost Biden substantial support among African-Americans in particular in the polls. Certainly, the pittance of actual assistance and the ridiculously low numbers of defence equipment sold to Taiwan indicates that the PRC led by Xi Jinping is hardly a priority for Joe Biden, who apparently remains fixated on Russia in a world where by far the principal threat to US interests is the PRC, the country under Xi that has been the only beneficiary of the Russia-Ukraine war. Exactly the way it is following the war that has followed the 7 October 2023 terror attack on Israel by Hamas, a terror organisation that is being presented in CCP media as the victim of a “terrorist” attack by the Israeli Defense Forces against “freedom fighters”. Should Biden continue to live in denial about the reality of Cold War 2.0, the sooner he exits the White House, the better for US interests, something that voters in that country are increasingly sensing as they prepare for the Presidential elections.