Western mass media must be the envy of doting editors, once in charge in the former Soviet Union, not only for obsequiously echoing their governments, but also for ripping it off. One can’t help but marvel at the willful complicity, given that the Ukraine crisis they are trying to inflame involves tricky nuclear powers. each of which can incinerate half the planet and turn the rest into hell.

During World War II, the Allies (which, let’s not forget, included the Soviets) referred to the various regional spheres of military activity as “theatres of operations”. Theater is quite the right word when witnessing shamelessly staged events such as the Vietnam War and the invasion of Iraq with their fabricated pretexts, respectively, the Gulf of Tonkin incident and WMD, and what is happening now in Ukraine and around. Given all the bluster we hear about Russia’s violation of Ukrainian sovereignty, innocent bystanders might assume that the United States tried hard to be strict in its respect for the sacred sovereignty of other countries, and they would be terribly and spectacularly wrong.

A simple list of the long and sad record of the readiness of American interventions abroad would exceed the space of this entire article. Cuba in 1962 had the sovereign right to defend itself against American assaults, of which there were many, but the gringo superpower didn’t see it that way and the whole world was one or two nervous ends away from going up in smoke radioactive. Although the United States galloped to the brink of apocalypse to prevent the installation of missiles 90 miles from its shores, today’s foreign policy experts cannot imagine why Russia would be upset by similar NATO projects along their border.

The United States in 1824, before deploying a powerful navy, issued the Monroe Doctrine claiming the Southern Hemisphere for itself without permitted outside interference, whether Latin American nations welcomed it or not. Russia, however, is not allowed to require, let alone impose, a buffer zone of any kind.

The Soviet Union lost 25-30 million souls after the Nazi invasion in World War II. What are they complaining about now, US and European officials are scratching their heads and professing to wonder? Would the United States sit idly by while the Russians secretly backed a coup in Canada or Mexico, as the United States did in Ukraine in 2014, and then accept a Russian military buildup along its border? Mexico and Canada would be turned into American protectorates in a jiffy before this scenario came to pass.

When the United States needed a channel through Central America, they concocted a separatist force in order to separate Panama from Colombia. Russia, however, is not allowed to help Russian-speaking areas of southeastern Ukraine whose language was banned by an ultranationalist government (with genuine fascists) after a coup that US officials are bragged about helping. Additionally, in the early 1990s, the United States, through then-President George HW Bush, verbally promised not to force NATO into the countries of the former Soviet bloc. Once the Russians left, such oral agreements, as movie studio mogul Sam Goldwyn observed, were no longer worth the paper they were printed on.

Probably not, but the instantaneous abandonment of the promise by an ostensibly opportunistic United States gave the wary Russians little reason to trust the West. When American politicians quietly admit that the only thing Putin’s Russia understands is force, it’s because that’s the only thing they understand and have ever been stopped by. When American leaders claim that Russia is a compulsively expansionary state, it is because they are displaying the exact same crude coercion themselves, even if it is in the holy name of self-defense.

Measure NATO’s expansion against Russian terrain since 1991 and see who has taken over the big game lately. If Russia ends NATO recruitment in and around Ukraine, outraged expansionists will cry foul. A ritualized, dance-like element permeates these familiar geopolitical maneuvers, which savvy diplomats understand and, if allowed, can elaborate on. The highly combustible ingredient is the hysterical media chorus of “imminent invasion,” stoked assiduously by Western states.

Austrian wit Karl Krauss observed long ago that statesmen usually tell lies and then believe them after reading them in the newspapers. This is the ultimate danger ~ a stray spark generating a fire ~ and not the objective situation, which can be remedied by old-fashioned diplomacy. A return to the implementation of the Minsk protocols of 2014-2015 is a good starting point.

The rich benefits of the crisis for Western elites are easy to discern: redirecting public attention to foreign monsters rather than the task of readjusting an unsustainable and relentless concentration of wealth at home, multiplying sanctions against Moscow until that there are none left, justify high military budgets, and test how far a fearful population will go with media narratives. Then pretend after mutual disengagement that the virtuous West has once again repelled the voracious Russian bear. How can the elites resist the tightrope under these advantageous conditions?

In this dark geopolitical game, Ukraine itself is almost off the mark and is suffering severely from the economic and psychological effects of an unnecessarily explosive environment. Consider who benefits more from the false flag operations that President Biden says are happening in the region – the Russians or the far-right Ukrainian paramilitaries? In this restless theatrical quagmire lurks the slim possibility of starting a war by a myopic miscalculation. Donbass does not deserve to become the next Sarajevo.

(The writers are well known political commentators and the authors of No Clean Hands, Parables of Permanent War and many other books)