 Let's talk about the heartbreaking war in Ukraine and what we could do to try to end it. Every day the war rages on, civilians and soldiers are being killed. Millions of Ukrainians have been forced to flee and seek asylum in foreign lands. Schools, hospitals, apartment buildings and infrastructure have been reduced to rubble. We wrote this book to try to help people make sense of a war that should never have happened. A war that has raged on for months and might well rage on for years. A war that could lead to a nuclear confrontation. A war that must be stopped. We know that people have very different opinions about this conflict and we hope that our book and this talk will foster respectful dialogue. We have not tried to justify or excuse Russia's invasion of Ukraine because we do not think it is justifiable or excusable. We hope we can help you understand the context, the background and the actions of all the parties that led to this crisis. As U.S. citizens, we have very little hope of influencing the Russian government but we should be able to influence our own government, which is why it's so important to look at the role the United States has played in fomenting the conflict. Let's look at two elements of U.S. involvement that we highlight in our book, NATO expansion and the events of 2014. Western leaders call NATO a defensive military alliance but NATO was formed to defend Western Europe from invasion by the Soviet Union. That mission was accomplished when the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991. NATO should have been dissolved at the end of the Cold War along with the Warsaw Pact, which was NATO's counterpart in the Eastern Bloc. Instead, NATO reinvented itself to justify its continued existence. It expanded all the way to Russia's borders despite many promises that it would not do so and ignoring warnings from experienced U.S. and Western diplomats that this would lead to a predictable yet entirely avoidable crisis with Russia, as in fact it has. You can see the map showing the various waves of expansion in which NATO incorporated former Soviet republics and Russia's European neighbors. In 2018, the antagonism reached new heights when NATO, under U.S. pressure, publicly promised membership to the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia. While no definite date was set, NATO began supplying increased levels of military aid and training to Ukraine, including Ukraine in military exercises. So Russia certainly had legitimate concerns about Ukraine's involvement in an ever-expanding military alliance that was encircling Russia with powerful military forces and had already unleashed aggressive wars and occupations in Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, and Libya and Syria in 2011. The other event that served to set the stage for the Russian invasion in 2022 was the coup in Ukraine in 2014. The 2014 upheavals began with massive peaceful protests against the corrupt pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych. Unfortunately though, these protests turned violent and were co-opted by neo-Nazi groups that refused to go along with an internationally negotiated plan for a political transition and instead they spearheaded a coup. The extent of U.S. support and involvement in this coup is still shrouded in secrecy as are previous U.S.-backed coups in Iran, Chile, and many other countries. But a leaked audio tape of Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Newland and U.S. Ambassador Jeffrey Piat exposed their roles as coup managers as they handpicked what positions each of their Ukrainian collaborators would assume in the post-coup government. Although the original peaceful protests in Ukraine were about wanting to join the European Union, Newland dismissed the European Union's more popular choice for Prime Minister Vitaly Klitschko with her infamous F the EU remark. According to a Gallup poll conducted in April 2014, nearly 50% of Ukrainians rejected the legitimacy of the post-coup government. This led to rebellions in parts of Ukraine that were ethnically and culturally close to Russia. In Crimea, a peninsula on the Black Sea with a mostly Russian-speaking population that was part of Russia from 1783 until 1954, as well as in the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk. In Odessa, 42 anti-coup protesters were burned to death by a mob on May 2, 2014. The new government in Ukraine was rejected by the parliament in Crimea, and a referendum to rejoin Russia passed overwhelmingly and was accepted by Russia but not recognized by other countries. The provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk also passed referendums declaring themselves independent from Ukraine, leading to a civil war that killed an estimated 14,000 people. Many Ukrainian military units based in this region defected to the self-declared People's Republics or refused to fight their own people, so the Ukrainian government formed new National Guard units to fight the separatists. These included units like the Asov Battalion recruited from the same neo-Nazi groups that took up arms to spearhead the coup in Kiev in February 2014. The worst fighting of the civil war ended in February 2015 with the signing of the Minsk-2 Accord. This was drafted by France, Germany and Russia and agreed to by Ukraine and the self-declared Republics. It set up a ceasefire in a buffer zone between the warring parties and was monitored by 1,300 monitors and staff from the OSCE, which is the organization for security and cooperation in Europe. While the ceasefire largely held from 2015 to 2022, the Ukrainian government failed to implement the political aspects of the Minsk-2 agreement. It had agreed to grant Donetsk and Luhans a new autonomous status, but each time the Ukrainian government tried to move forward on this, extreme right-wing forces re-exerted their power and insisted that Ukraine must instead keep fighting to recover its lost territories. NATO and the US also bear responsibility for the failure of Minsk-2. Despite officially claiming to support the agreement, NATO and the US, under both Trump and Biden, kept building up Ukraine's military, encouraging the Ukrainian government to believe it could eventually recover Daumbas and Crimea by force and that the US and NATO would support that. As tensions were reaching a boiling point in December 2021, Russia took the initiative of drafting two mutual security treaties, one between Russia and the United States and the other between Russia and NATO. These were not take-it-or-leave-it demands but drafts for negotiation. Unfortunately, the United States and NATO summarily dismissed Russia's proposals. By building up Ukraine's military, promising Ukraine NATO membership and dismissing negotiations, the US and its allies turned Ukraine into a dangerous weapon in their revived Cold War against Russia. Then, in the days leading up to February's Russia invasion, the OSCE ceasefire monitors documented thousands of explosions around the ceasefire line in Daumbas, mostly on the Donetsk and Luhant side, indicating a major escalation of artillery fire by Ukrainian government forces. So even in the immediate causes of the war, it is deceptive to describe the invasion as unprovoked as Biden and US officials routinely do. By early 2022, Russia had amassed large military forces near Belarus's border and its own borders with Ukraine, all the while denying that it had plans to invade. It also formally recognized Donetsk and Luhant's People's Republics as independent countries. On February 24, Russia invaded. The invasion was illegal on many counts. It was not an act of self-defense and it certainly was not authorized by the United Nations. Under international law, including the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the UN Charter, the invasion was an illegal crime of aggression. Russia did not just move its invading forces into Daumbas to support the breakaway republics, but it launched offensive towards the capital Kyiv and the second largest city car-Kiv in the northeast and into the southern part of Ukraine from Crimea. Western analysts generally agree that Russia must have hoped to take quickly Kyiv and install a friendly government, but it encountered strong resistance from Ukrainian forces and was forced to withdraw from the north. Ukraine's western neighbors responded to the invasion by granting asylum to millions of refugees while the U.S. and other NATO countries poured billions of dollars worth of weapons into Ukraine, stepped up their training of Ukrainian military and provided it with intelligence to accurately attack important Russian targets. There has been little or no accountability for the weapons flooding into Ukraine. There are reports that as little as 30% of them may be reaching the front lines because they are either destroyed by Russian missiles or siphoned off into the black market where they could end up in the hands of the Islamic State, neo-Nazis, or other dangerous groups around the world. This was precisely why the U.S. Congress prohibited the transfer of U.S. weapons to the Assov Regiment in 2018 as it became a magnet and a hub for international right-wing militant networks. Yet after the Russian invasion, all restraints were lifted and thousands of tons of powerful and advanced weapons have poured in over the Polish border. There was so little debate about this in the U.S. that when Congress passed an enormous $40 billion package for Ukraine with most of the money to be spent on more and more lethal weapons for up to another decade, not a single Democrat voted against it, not even Congresswoman Barbara Lee who cast the lone, wise and prophetic vote against the disastrous war in Afghanistan in 2001. In our book we explain the peace negotiations in Turkey at March that could have already ended this war and the largely unreported role of the U.S. and British governments in killing those talks. The talks during the first month of the war produced the contours of a 15-point peace plan for a ceasefire, a Russia withdrawal, and a future for Ukraine as an independent, peaceful and neutral country. On March 27th, President Zelensky told a national TV audience, our goal is obvious, peace and the restoration of normal life in our native state as soon as possible. Under the draft agreement, Ukraine would neither be a military ally of the United States in NATO nor of Russia with no foreign military bases or installations on its territory. Ukraine would get security guarantees from other countries, Russian speakers in Ukraine would be free to speak, read and study in Russian, and the future of Crimea and Donbas would be determined by an internationally accepted political process during a transition period of several years. But none of that came to pass. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson went to Kiev on April 9th and told Prime Minister Zelensky that the UK would not be party to any agreement between Ukraine and Russia and that the Collective West, as he called it, saw a chance to press Russia and was determined to make the most of it. Turkish diplomats who had been mediating the ceasefire talks reported that US Defense Secretary Austin delivered a similar message to Zelensky and that these messages effectively killed their peace efforts. So early hopes for a negotiated peace were dashed, largely as a result of US and British determination to weaken Russia even at the cost of rivers of Ukrainian blood in an open-ended war that could last for years. The undermining of ceasefire talks was a tragic lost opportunity. Since the talks were abandoned, the slaughter and destruction has continued with hundreds of Ukrainians killed every day. Russia has taken control of more territory and despite the successful Ukrainian counter-offensive, Russia now occupies 20% of Ukraine. The sanctions against Russia have backfired, leading to soaring energy prices worldwide while reduced grain exports have led to widespread hunger, particularly in the global south. Europe is facing an energy and home-heating crisis. Meanwhile, no sign has honestly or publicly explained what its goals are in this war or why they can possibly justify the total destruction of Ukraine and even the greater danger of nuclear war. Even the old Warhawk Henry Kissinger is warning that US policy has blundered to the brink of a world war with no clear purpose or end game in sight. He told the Wall Street Journal, we are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created without any concept of how this is going to end or what it's supposed to lead to. And here at home, we are told we don't have the funds for a decent healthcare system or free college education or housing for the unhoused. We cannot allow our public funds to be squandered on yet another unwinnable war and an even more all-consuming military budget. Governments in the global south are watching the impacts of this war plunge millions of their people into hunger and famine while Europe's energy crisis is already sinking the continent into a recession. We in the US have been relatively unscathed by this war compared to many people elsewhere but we are already facing rising prices which will get worse as the war continues and the US will not be exempt from the impacts of this looming global recession. With climate chaos jeopardizing the very future of life on this planet this war is derailing our efforts to confront the climate crisis instead of a green new deal we are now watching a mad scramble to produce more oil, gas and coal as energy companies reap record profits from their disaster capitalism. And while the climate heats up and governments and corporations shift their already inadequate climate plans into reverse Russia and the US are threatening us with yet another existential disaster a nuclear apocalypse. We understand that some people may disagree with our analysis of this conflict but hopefully we can all agree that we must do whatever we can to bring this war to an end and that's why Code Pink is part of a coalition called Peace in Ukraine we pressure our members of congress and the White House to call for negotiations we call on the media to promote the voice of peacemakers we distribute our messages via social media and we educate the public including getting our book into libraries and classrooms and we encourage you to join us we must act now to say stop the bloodshed stop the bombing stop the madness we must work together to demand a ceasefire and negotiations not more war thank you