Peace could have been achieved before the war started, & several times since, had the West & Ukraine not spent 20 years provoking an invasion.

Not doing the below would have done the trick:

- Breaking numerous written promises to Gorbachev & his team not to expand NATO to the east

- The US-backed coup in 2014, that overthrew a democratically elected Ukrainian leader

- US advisors (post-coup) embedded in 12 Ukrainian ministries, US-trained police in 18 cities, $266 million spent on training Ukrainian soldiers—to provoke Russia.

- Banning use of the Russian language in eastern Ukraine

- The West’s failure to speak out against Ukraine jailing dissidents, & drawing up assassination lists for critical Western journalists

- Signing the Minsk accords ‘just to buy time’ (Angela Merkel)

- Trashing the Minsk Accords once Ukraine had had time to re-arm

- Refusal to talk with Russia pre-invasion

- Sabotage of the Istanbul peace talks post-invasion

“The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path and the end result is Ukraine is going to get wrecked.”

- Prof John Mearsheimer, 2015

(2015 would be ten years ago.)

Ultimately this is a problem of state capture in the West. Our elderly constitutions (penned long before political contributions & monopoly media) can no longer ‘see’ the schemes by which that capture is achieved.

Put simply, Western politicians are paid to go to war.

*Data cribbed from my book, The Mechanics of Changing the World: Political Architecture to Roll Back State & Corporate Power. (Constitutional structures to oligarch-proof society.)