In 2019, former actor and comedian President Zelensky was elected as the head of state through an overwhelming support by the residents of eastern Ukraine (the separatist Donetsk and Lugansk, of course, were not included in the election). Seen as a “peace president” that would bridge the gap between western and eastern Ukraine that had divided the nation for far too long, it would appear that light was finally at the end of the tunnel.

And yet, Zelensky would soon find himself disobeyed by the civil and military bureaucracies, which have since been staffed with fascist sympathizers since the Ukrainian Civil War had entered its truce.

In 2021, President Biden assumed office and vowed to undo the shame and humiliation that his predecessor, Trump, had brought to the nation. After visiting the White House and met with President Biden, President Zelensky would return to Ukraine a changed man, whose charged and aggressive rhetoric betrays the peace candidate he had once promised to serve his electorate. Explicit announcements about joining NATO, abandoning Budapest Memorendum that had promised the nuclear non-proliferation status of the nation, as well as the mobilization of Ukrainian army towards the Donbass front.

These inexplicable behavior that Zelensky exhibited sent Moscow into high alert. Deeply concerned about the breaking down of truce in Ukraine, Russia called for a serious discussion about its security concerns with the United States. This was the final plea from Russia to the US, and culminated in the Russia-US Summit held in Geneva in June 2021, a direct meeting between President Biden and President Putin. Russian diplomats prepared hundreds of pages of proposal that laid out their concerns explicitly, and proposed various measures to address them. Unfortunately, these would fall on deaf ears. In less than two months after the Russia-US Summit, in August 2021, the US would begin to ship Javelins and Stingers to Ukraine. A second shipment would follow in December 2021.

If there was an illusion before, it no longer is the case. For Russia, it became all too clear that the US is preparing for a war against Russia through Ukraine. Worse, a direct Ukrainian assault on Donetsk and Luhansk would cost significant civilian casualties, and spiral into a full scale crisis that could have adverse repercussions for many years to come.

And so, as the Ukrainian Armed Forces continued to mobilize towards the Donbass front, and with the shelling of Donbass intensified by an order of magnitude, it was now or never for Russia. They either take the initiative and foil the Ukrainian invasion, or they wait until the inevitable Ukrainian assaults on the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk.

While mainstream media would often blame Russia for denying Ukraine from signing the EU Association Agreement that would otherwise have economically “benefited” the Ukrainian state, what is little known is that Ukraine did sign the EU Association Agreement in 2015 as the Ukrainian Civil War was on a pause.

Just as Russia had predicted and warned from the start, the EU was never going to let Ukraine benefit from the arrangement. While Ukraine had anticipated that their heavy industrial products (aviation, space technology) could be exported to the EU, the European states instead enacted protectionist measures to stop Ukraine’s industrial products from gaining ground in the European market. Rather, Ukraine was relegated to exporting cheap agricultural products to Europe, while its heavy industry was wiped out in the process, having lost its former trade relationship with Russia and betrayed by the EU free trade agreement.

The story of post-Soviet Ukraine and Russia is a story of how Western imperialism, neoliberal economic colonialism, and the tried-and-tested regime change doctrine that traced its roots back to the post-war Gladio operations, continue to enforce the unequal exchange of value between the Imperial Core and the Periphery, even years after countries were supposedly “decolonized” and gained independence.