Above photo: Putin with Trump, 2019. Russian Presidential Press and Information Office.
Vladimir Putin told Donald Trump on the phone Monday the Ukraine war can only end after addressing its “root causes.”
Which the Western media have been tirelessly rooting out of public discussion since the war began.
After a two-hour telephone call between the presidents of Russia and the United States on Monday, President Vladimir Putin said:
I would like to emphasize once again that the conversation was very constructive, and I rate it highly. The question, of course, is for the Russian and Ukrainian sides to show maximum desire for peace and find compromises that would suit all parties. At the same time,I would like to note that Russia’s position is generally clear. The main thing for us is to eliminate the root causes of this crisis.
It should be no mystery to Western leaders, media and the public what those root causes are, as Moscow has been repeating them ad nauseam beginning 30 years ago and especially in the run up to Russia’s 2022 intervention in Ukraine’s then eight-year old civil war.
The problem is the West appears too full of itself to bother listening to what its adversary has to say, which in itself has been one of the root causes of the conflict.
Unlike consumers of mainstream media — the majority of the population — readers of independent news outlets, like Consortium News, are well aware of what those root causes are. For doing its job by reporting on the causes of the conflict, CN and other alternative media, have been branded Russian propagandists.
The root causes bear repeating here. 1) NATO expansion; 2) Forward deployment of NATO troops and missiles in Romania and Poland; 3) NATO training and equipping Ukraine as a proxy with the intention of bringing Ukraine into NATO; 4) the 2014 unconstitutional change of government leading to attacks against Russian speakers in the south and east of Ukraine; and 5) the outsized influence of Neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine.
Many useful analogies have been made about a Russian-backed overthrow of the Mexican or Canadian governments and Russian missiles pointed at the U.S. being deployed in either country. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis showed how the U.S. reacted when missiles were deployed near its borders.
Meanwhile, establishment media have worked overtime to root out the root causes from the public’s mind.
They bury them by airbrushing out of the story
- a) NATO expansion;
- b) the U.S.-backed unconstitutional change of government in Ukraine in 2014;
- c) Ukraine, with NATO backing, starting the war against ethnic Russian Donbass the same year;
- d) Ukraine and the West’s failure to abide by the Minsk accords in 2015 to end the war;
- e) Ukraine pulling out of the Istanbul agreement in 2022 under U.S. and U.K. pressure; and
- f) ditching its 2014 coverage of the role of Ukrainian Neo-Nazis in this.
After The Phone Call
The big questions emerging from today’s telephone conversation are 1) After two hours of, no doubt, careful explanation by Putin to Donald Trump, did the American president finally allow these root causes to penetrate his mind? Is he prepared to instruct U.S. negotiators to address these causes in a final peace agreement?
Trump has made fleeting remarks before that seem to indicate some sort of understanding of the Russian perspective, such as when he said in January:
A big part of the problem is, Russia – for many, many years, long before Putin – said, ‘You could never have NATO involved with Ukraine.’ Now, they’ve said that. That’s been, like, written in stone. And somewhere along the line [Joe] Biden said, ‘No. They should be able to join NATO.’ Well, then Russia has somebody right on their doorstep, and I could understand their feelings about that.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on X @unjoe.
