Ukraine is an artificial state, of which Zelensky is product

As Trump and Putin meet in Anchorage, Alaska, in what by any metric is a critical point in a conflict between Russia and Ukraine that has seen an entire generation of young and not so young men hurled into the maw of attritional combat, it is necessary to understand why we are where we are, and how.

Ukraine is the very acme of an artificial state and has been from the moment it declared its ‘independence’ from the former Soviet Union in 1991. Its entire mode of existence since then has and continues to be predicated on Russophobia, rooted in an entirely false rendering of history. In many respects, the modern state of Ukraine — post Maidan coup of 2014 — is Russia’s US Confederacy, with the current conflict tantamount to a civil war.

The conflict in Ukraine, let us be clear, did not begin on February 24, 2022 with the start of Putin’s so-called ‘special military operation’, as Western ideologues would have us believe. It is a conflict that began in 2014 with the Maidan coup against the country’s then democratically-elected government in Kiev, leading inexorably to an uprising against the pro-West regime installed in its place by Russian speaking Ukrainians in the south and east of the country.

Since then Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and neo-Nazis have been key in ensuring that the…