ACTION ALERT:
Don’t Let Biden Go to War with Russia over Ukraine!
(January 25, 2022) — This is URGENT! President Biden has just ordered 8,500 US troops to be on heightened alert for possible deployment to Eastern Europe, exacerbating a conflict that could easily result in war between the world’s two most heavily armed nuclear states — the United States and Russia. We must immediately demand that NATO, the US, Russia and Ukraine pursue vigorous diplomacy for a negotiated solution.
Congress must pressure President Biden not to go to war with Russia over Ukraine. Congress must demand that NATO, the US, Russia and Ukraine pursue vigorous diplomacy for a negotiated solution.
ACTION: Contact your senators and representative now!
The US and NATO, whose Response Force is composed of some 40,000 international troops, are exacerbating a conflict that could easily result in war between the world’s two most heavily armed nuclear states — the United States and Russia.
We must immediately demand that NATO, the US, Russia and Ukraine pursue vigorous diplomacy for a negotiated solution. There is every reason to believe that a compromise can be made with Russia, including a guarantee that Ukraine will not become a member of NATO.
Since 2015, the Minsk II Accord has successfully prevented a new escalation of the civil war in Ukraine. But the United States and NATO have encouraged the Ukrainian government to ignore its obligations under Minsk II, and to instead reassert absolute sovereignty over the Donbas region. They have supplied powerful weapons, which Ukraine has deployed and used in Eastern Ukraine.
Russia has always been opposed to NATO’s eastern expansion to its borders, and it is determined to stop Ukraine from entering NATO. In 2008, when Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko first applied for NATO membership, President Putin called Ukrainian membership “a direct threat” to Russia.
NATO is a military alliance that should have dissolved with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. It should certainly not be expanding to include Ukraine.
Rather than NATO dissolving with the Warsaw Pact, as it should have done, it has violated the agreements that brought the original Cold War to an end and reunified Germany. Instead of keeping its promise not to expand eastward, it has added 11 member countries that were once either Soviet republics or members of the Warsaw Pact.
ACTION: Now the situation is teetering on the brink of a massive war. The time to speak out is now! Tell Congress not to let Biden send troops to Eastern Europe!
Towards peace,Medea and the entire CODEPINK team: Alice, Allison, Ann, Ariel, Carley, Danaka, Emily, Farida, Jodie, Justina, Kelly, Lauren, Leonardo, Madison, Marcy, Marissa, Mark, Michelle, Nancy, Olivia, Paki, Teri, Shea, and Suzie
Emergency Webinar: Is the US
Going to War with Russia over Ukraine?
CODEPINK with Medea Benjamin and retired Army Colonel Larry Wilkerson
Washington’s Role in Creating
The Tension Behind the Ukraine Stand-off
Environmentalists Against War
(January 25, 2022) — In 2014, a US-backed coup installed an anti-Russian government in Ukraine. Since the end of the Cold War — despite US/NATO promises not to extend “one inch eastward” toward the Russian border — NATO has annexed eleven former Warsaw Pact nations and now has troops and weapons massed along Russia’s Western border. The US has installed medium-range missiles across these NATO countries.
History’s lessons are clear — around the world, from the Middle East to South America to Africa and Europe — the US has been acting like an imperial aggressor and claiming a singular role as “the World’s Policeman.” Allowing NATO to recruit Ukraine as its newest member is not worth risking a war between two nuclear-armed nations.
]NATO is a Cold War relic that should have been dismantled alongside the dissolution of the pro-Russian Warsaw Pact. After centuries of increasingly deadly warfare — warfare that has brought the horrors of conflict from the battlefield to some of the world’s largest cities — today’s nations should have learned to respect neutrality and avoid hostility.
The US and NATO promised not to expand eastward and threaten Russia. Like too many other US vows, that promise was broken. The US needs to stop behaving like a Global Empire obsessed by the need to remain “all-powerful” at all costs.
The planet is collapsing because of Climate Change. Instead of meddling with the future of Ukraine and Taiwan — and trying to overthrow other countries like Honduras, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba — we need to focus our energies and wealth on dealing with two, overriding existential issues — climate change and nuclear weapons.
As Colonel Larry Wilkerson observes in the CODEPINK video, the real answer to the continuing expansion of the scourge of war is “profits.” And it’s the global weapons industry (lead by powerful US-based arms profiteers like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics) that lobbies politicians for ever-more bombs and bullets and promotes the expansion of he Pentagon’s bootprint in the halls of Congress and around the world.
