Supporters of NATO’s war in Ukraine ignore inconvenient facts egregiously and repeatedly. Russia’s invasion is always described as “unprovoked,” when we did everything possible to cause this war. The NYT’s recent “The Spy War, How the CIA Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin” (2/25) is only the most recent documentation of U.S. efforts to foment war. Claims that this war is about democracy and freedom cannot be made with a straight face, given the inconvenient fact of the 2014 coup and the draconian laws passed in its wake. The coup overthrew a democratically elected president, and was successful thanks to the murderous violence of the most extreme far-right segment of Ukraine, whose adherents we fought against in WWII.

Also inconvenient are the facts about NATO expansion to Russia’s border, which NATO head Jens Stoltenberg admitted is the root cause of the war. William Burns warned in 2008 that NATO expansion was a “redline” that risked war with Russia. NATO’s involvement in Kosovo, Iraq, and Libya dispels any notion of its defensive nature. And who was really behind the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline, by any definition a singular act of terrorism blamed on Russia. Seriously? The demonization of Putin as the next Hitler and Russia as Nazi Germany rely on repeated distortions of fact and outright falsehood to promote a new Cold War. We have ignored all the lessons of the first Cold War, abandoned diplomacy and almost all hard-won nuclear weapons agreements. Today, we are the real aggressors.

Bruce Currie

Concord