Dear CCI Followers,
Seldom, if ever, does an American Ambassador release an article to the public that deals as directly with the facts as the message below. This must speak for the deep concern felt today by Ambassador Matlock.
Read it carefully and send to as many friends and colleagues as possible. We America citizens must better understand the Ukraine issues and weigh in with President Biden, et al, or face the prospect of an all-out war which may go nuclear in minutes. There is no other issue as pressing as this one.
Ambassador Matlock is our quintessential living Ambassador, he knows from which he speaks. The bolding below comes from Matlock himself.
Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives
Ukraine: Tragedy of a Nation Divided
December 14, 2021
By Jack F. Matlock, Jr.
Interference by the United States and its NATO allies in Ukraine’s civil struggle has exacerbated the crisis within Ukraine, undermined the possibility of bringing the two easternmost provinces back under Kyiv’s control, and raised the specter of possible conflict between nuclear-armed powers. Furthermore, in denying that Russia has a “right” to oppose extension of a hostile military alliance to its national borders, the United States ignores its own history of declaring and enforcing for two centuries a sphere of influence in the Western hemisphere.
The fact is, Ukraine is a state but not yet a nation. In the thirty years of its independence, it has not yet found a leader who can unite its citizens in a shared concept of Ukrainian identity. Yes, Russia has interfered, but it is not Russian interference that created Ukrainian disunity but rather the haphazard way the country was assembled from parts that were not always mutually compatible.
The territory of the Ukrainian state claimed by the government in Kyiv was assembled, not by Ukrainians themselves but by outsiders, and took its present form following the end of World War II. To think of it as a traditional or primordial whole is absurd. This applies a fortiori to the two most recent additions to Ukraine—that of some eastern portions of interwar Poland and Czechoslovakia, annexed by Stalin at the end of the war, and the largely Russian-speaking Crimea, which was transferred from the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic (RSFSR) well after the war, when Nikita Khrushchev controlled the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Since all constituent parts of the USSR were ruled from Moscow, it seemed at the time a paper transfer of no practical significance. (Even then, the city of Sevastopol, the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet, was subordinated directly to Moscow, not Kyiv.) Up to then, the Crimea had been considered an integral part of Russia since Catherine II “the Great” conquered it in the 18th century.