The cat is now out of the bag. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s admission that the Minsk 1 and Minsk 2 peace protocols that sought to solve the problem of the Donbas region in Ukraine was not really meant for what it was supposedly intended to do: to have peace in that Russian-speaking populace. It was actually designed to rearm Ukraine.
That is what Merkel had admitted in an interview with German weekly Die Zeit in what is now evolving as a ruse from the West to build the military capability of Ukraine. We have to admire Merkel for her candid statement about Minsk that has now been pounced upon by those who saw the fakery that attended the supposed peace protocols for Donbas.
And what a letdown it was to know that the Minsk peace agreements that were forged in Belarus’ capital that took into accounts the voice of the two separatist leaders in Luhansk and Donetsk was not really aimed at resolving the then ongoing conflict in the Donbas region, which by the way was the birthplace of two Soviet leaders, Nikita Khruschev and Leonid Brezhnev.
According to Merkel, who reigned for 16 years in Germany, the Minsk agreement served to buy time to rearm Ukraine. “The 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give Ukraine time,” Merkel told the weekly Die Zeit. “It also used this time to become stronger, as you can see today.” Now that the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, what can the West say about this clear admission of deceit?
Sad to say, what is happening because of the effects of the Ukraine crisis that has engulfed much of the world—from inflation spikes to higher energy prices to food insecurity—began from what can be viewed as a proxy war that the West wants to wage against Russia for reasons known only to them, much like in the then narrative that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Well, Iraq was in shambles but the weapons were nowhere to be seen, supposedly the reason for the invasion of that Middle Eastern country. And now comes this Merkel admission that has been pounced upon by the World Socialist Website, which had been postulated long ago as the real reason for the Ukraine crisis.
For Peter Schwarz, what was all the more remarkable is her admission that the Minsk agreement served to buy time for Ukraine’s rearmament. “It was clear to all of us that this was a frozen conflict, that the problem had not been solved, but that is precisely what gave Ukraine valuable time,” Merkel told Die Zeit.
Previously, the Minsk agreement, which Merkel signed together with the-French President François Hollande, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin in September 2014, had been portrayed as an effort towards peace that the Russian president had allegedly later thwarted.
Now, Merkel confirmed that Nato wanted war from the start but needed time to prepare militarily—an assessment WSWS has long held. Schwarz held the view that “since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US has pursued the goal of remaining the “sole world power.”
To this end, Washington has waged numerous criminal wars and expanded Nato into Eastern Europe. Now it also wants to integrate Ukraine, Georgia and other former Soviet republics into Nato and subjugate Russia in order to plunder its resources and isolate China.
What is troubling also, from that Schwarz viewpoint, is the fact that “the German government is using the Ukraine war to press its claim to become the leading European power and a major military power. Merkel’s third government, a grand coalition of the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and SPD, has placed this goal at the center of its program in 2013. In terms of foreign policy, it thus follows the template of the great power plans of the Kaiserreich (Imperial Empire) and the Nazi regime.”
With this perspective that allowed us to view Ukraine from the fakery that is Minsk, is it any wonder that the West continues to pump more weapons into Ukraine in a crisis that actually was meant to be nipped in the bud with Minsk?