Violence is a central fact of human experience. History records the use of force, or the threat of force, in relations between men and their communities in all epochs, civilizations, cultures, and geographic spaces. Inherent in mankind, violence reflects his immutable nature regardless of the cultural context or the level of technological development. We have always lived in a Hobbesian world and always will.

The war in Ukraine, far from being a shocking aberration in the post-Cold War era, is “unique” only because it involves two eastern Slavic nations with shared historical, cultural, and spiritual roots. In broader terms, this war confirms that there is no linear march of history toward an ever-improving humanity, let alone toward eternal peace. Nor is the war a Manichaean morality play, as absurdly presented in the legacy media. It is a conflict that Russia started when its leaders concluded that the cost of not responding to Western challenges might be higher than the risk of military action and the political and economic ramifications.

Those challenges included the Maidan regime-change operation; the ensuing massive influx of NATO arms and instructors; the premeditated fraud—as admitted by Merkel, Hollande and Poroshenko—of the Minsk Accords to buy the Kiev regime time to rearm; the relentless shelling of civilians in the Donbas; and the clampdown on the rights of Ukraine’s 14 million Russian speakers, which included closing their schools, media outlets, and canonical churches.

Russia’s “special military operation” is illegal, but not more so than America’s interventions, over the past quarter-century alone, against Serbia, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. It is, for now, less costly in human lives than the war in Iraq or the proxy war in Yemen. For both Russia and the U.S., borders are not inviolable separators of sovereignties but impermanent military-political arrangements that are subject to changes depending on power relations. They shift in favor of the stronger and at the expense of the weaker, regardless of rights and “justice.” Legal signatures, sooner or later, merely verify any given outcome of the struggle itself.

READ MORE