The History of Ukraine’s War, vs. U.S-and-Allied ‘News’-Media’s Lies About it

9 August 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

In order to understand the agendas and baggage that Trump and Putin (and their respective ‘news’-media) will be bringing to the Putin-Trump private meeting on Friday August 15th, an honest history of the war in Ukraine is absolutely essential.

As will be documented via the links here, the war in Ukraine started actually on 20 February 2014 when a long-planned bloody 7-day coup by U.S. President Barack Obama’s agents to overthrow the democratically elected internationally neutralist President of Ukraine and replace him by a rabidly anti-Russian leader appointed by Obama’s neoconservative agent who organized the coup, Victoria Nuland (of “Fuck the EU!” fame on that occasion) succeeded at all of the coup’s objectives except capturing and transforming into a U.S. naval base, which still remains Russia’s largest naval base. Ever since 1783, that naval base has been located in Crimea, which since 1954 had been Ukraine’s only independently administered — or “Autonomous” — Province (or “Oblast”) because the people there have, for hundreds of years, considered themselves to be Russians and a part of Russia, which they actually were until 1954, when the Soviet dictator arbitrarily transferred Crimea to Ukraine.

Obama wanted the U.S. Government to control Ukraine so that America could position its nuclear missiles at the Russian border with Ukraine, less than a five-minute striking-distance away from hitting the Kremlin in Moscow so as to decapitate Russia's central command. As both NATO’s Stoltenberg and Ukraine’s Zelensky have said, this war started in 2014, and NOT in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine (as the liars allege that the war in Ukraine started). Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine was instead Russia’s last-ditch effort to PREVENT there ever being ANY nuclear weapon from the U.S. or its colonies (‘allies’) from EVER being able to be positioned in the closest of all nations’ borders to the Kremlin, Ukraine. (Similarly, in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK was determined to prevent any Soviet nuclear missiles from ever being positioned in Cuba, a 15-minute missile-flight from decapitating America’s central command in DC.)

If you want to see a fuller description of the history of this war, click here, a 3,000-word (or ten-minute) article with 48 links to its sources, all online, so that you can immediately access the evidence and evaluate it for yourself. The only thing that I’ve said thus far in the present article that isn’t documented in that lengthier 3,000-word article, is Obama’s plan to change the Russian naval base in Crimea to an American naval base there, which is documented here, as having been a part of Obama’s coup-plan (the only part that he failed to achieve).

Consequently, all of the aggression in the Ukraine war was from the U.S. Government under Obama then Trump then Biden and now again Trump — and NEVER from Russia’s Government under Putin, who instead has been entirely reactive to, and defending Russians against, that U.S.(-and-‘allied’) aggression, which is aimed against, ultimately, Russia. Ukraine is, ever since Obama’s 2014 coup, merely the main tool in America’s long war to seize Russia. (To know the origin of that long war — “the Cold War” — click here. And Ukraine was a central part of the U.S. Government’s plan against Russia ever since America started the Cold War in 1945. So, Obama was actually culminating all of that prior 69-year U.S. Government operation to capture Ukraine — he achieved it.)

That is the real history of the war in Ukraine. However, U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-reporting assumes and presumes very different and largely OPPOSITE ‘history’ of the war in Ukraine, as will be shown by two typical examples of these ‘news’-reports, which will be cited here.

Yahoo News is the best news-site to see lots of U.S.-empire ‘news’-reports published that day from other U.S.-empire ‘news’-media but adding to each such report — which the original site usually lacks — a fully open reader-comments section abut the article, which, comments, if they are read being set to “Sort by Top,” will immediately display the most-up-voted, least-down-voted, of all of the comments about that article, and thus (since Yahoo News serves neither Republican billionaires nor Democratic billionaires but instead bipartisanly all billionaires) is displayed an immediate ‘polling’ of a fair samling of the U.S. public, about the given ‘news’-propaganda article. Here are highlights from two such ‘news’-reports dated August 8th and 9th, regarding the upcoming August 15th U.S.-Russia Summit meeting between Trump (historically-speaking the aggressor) and Putin (historically-speaking the defender), which is set to occur in Alaska:

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https://finance.yahoo.com/news/us-russia-plan-truce-deal-140847014.html

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/CnLyA

“US and Russia plan truce deal to cement Putin’s gains in Ukraine”

8 August 2025

(Bloomberg) — Washington and Moscow are aiming to reach a deal to halt the war in Ukraine that would lock in Russia’s occupation of territory seized during its military invasion, according to people familiar with the matter.

US and Russian officials are working toward an agreement on territories for a planned summit meeting between Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin as early as next week, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations. The US is working to get buy-in from Ukraine and its European allies on the deal, which is far from certain, the people said.

Putin is demanding that Ukraine cede its entire eastern Donbas area to Russia as well as Crimea, which his forces illegally annexed in 2014. That would require Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to order a withdrawal of troops from parts of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions still held by Kyiv, handing Russia a victory that its army couldn’t achieve militarily since the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Such an outcome would represent a major win for Putin. …

It’s unclear if Moscow is prepared to give up any land that it currently occupies, which includes the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe. …

Trump hasn’t implemented any direct measures against Moscow so far. …

Putin has repeatedly insisted that his war goals remain unchanged. They include demands for Kyiv to accept neutral status and abandon its ambition of NATO membership, and to accept the loss of Crimea and the other four eastern and southern Ukrainian regions to Russia.

Parts of Donetsk and Luhansk have been under Russian occupation since 2014, when the Kremlin incited separatist violence shortly after the operation to seize Crimea. Putin declared the four Ukrainian regions to be “forever” part of Russia after announcing that he was annexing them in September 2022. …

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/ukraine-not-land-zelensky-says-072205444.html

https://archive.ph/d00g6

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/us-russia-plan-truce-deal-140847014.html

“Ukraine must be part of peace solution, Zelensky says ahead of Trump-Putin meeting”

9 August 2025, BBC

Zelensky said in a Telegram post on Saturday that "Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier". He reiterated that Ukraine must be involved in any solution for peace, and said he is ready to work with partners for a "real" and "lasting" peace.

Zelensky said Ukraine "will not give Russia awards for what it has done".

"The answer to the Ukrainian territorial issue is already in the Constitution of Ukraine. No one will and cannot deviate from this," he added.

His statement followed comments from Trump at the White House on Friday that there "will be some swapping of territories, to the betterment of both".

Sacrificing land for peace has been the Trump position all along. …

"Any solutions that are against us, any solutions that are without Ukraine, are simultaneously solutions against peace," he said.

"We are ready, together with President Trump, together with all partners, to work for a real, and most importantly, lasting peace - a peace that will not collapse because of Moscow's wishes."

This is what Ukraine, and many European allies, were always worried about - Trump and Putin trying to do a deal without Ukraine present. …

There is little evidence that Ukraine is willing to accept a peace at any price - much less one that will be forced on it without its voice being heard.

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It is obvious from those and the rest of the ‘news’-coverage of Trump’s upcoming, first-ever, meeting with Putin, that the billionaires who control these media (and the U.S.-and-allied Governments) want the public to support their stooge-leader of Ukraine (Zelensky) and oppose anything that Trump would agree to that Zelensky (these billionaires’ agent) opposes. If you will look at the top-most “Sort by Top” reader-comments at each of the two articles, you will see that the public (their minds) have been effectively controlled by these billionaires: the comments are overwhelmingly pro-Zelensky and anti-Trump, and especially anti-Putin. This result displays what Walter Lippmann had referred to in 1922 as “manufactured consent” of the public to the given ‘democratic’ regime, and it is now done throughout the U.S. empire (if not throughout the world), in order to give the superficial appearance of democracy, where none actually exists.

America’s billionaires today are remarkably similar to the elite Southern plantation owners before the U.S. Civil War War who bred Black slaves, farmed them (after 1807), on huge plantations, by forcing female slaves to be constantly pregnant, through rape or otherwise, in order to increase production of that type of livestock, for sale. It produced around an additional million slaves in the northern south to be transported down to the “cotton” south to be auctioned off, without regard to any slave’s family or other personal ties. The basic mentality is the same as that of those slave-producers, auctioneers and other slavery-entrepreneurs. It’s the “libertarian” way: a person’s value is the person’s wealth; so, if all that a given person owns is his/her labor, then that is what the person’s value is. For the wealthiest, this is total freedom. That is the mentality of today’s billionaires, and of yesterday’s slavery entrepreneurs.

In order to provide reasonable hope for a better world, I have several times proposed replacing the “manufactured consent” type of ‘democracy’ that has been described here, and which is based upon elections to choose government leaders, and it replaces elections by using lotteries instead. This method of selecting leaders of the Government would prevent the ‘democracies’ that we have and that actually represent ONLY the few super-rich, and it would install instead authentic democracies, which truly REPRESENT the PUBLIC. That alternative and authentic type of democracy, is outlined here.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.