Russia/Putin & the West Part 2 (of a 2 Part series)
Ukraine
Ukraine and Russia were so intertwined economically, socially and culturally, especially in the east of the country, that they were almost indistinguishable from one another. Most of Russia’s natural gas pipelines from West Siberia flowed through Ukraine on their way to Germany, France and other European states. In military strategic terms, a non-neutral Ukraine in NATO would pose a fatal security blow to Russia. In the age of advanced US weapons and anti-missile defenses, this was just what Washington wanted.
A look at the map of Eurasian geography revealed a distinct pattern to the CIA-sponsored Color Revolutions after 2000. They were clearly aimed at isolating Russia and ultimately cutting her economic lifeline – her pipeline networks that carried Russia’s huge reserves of oil and gas from the Urals and Siberia to Western Europe and Eurasia-straight through Ukraine.
The unspoken agenda of Washington’s aggressive Central Asia policies after the collapse of the Soviet Union could be summed up in a single phase: control of energy. So long as Russia was able to use its strategic trump card- its vast oil and gas reserves – to win economic allies in Western Europe, China and elsewhere, it could not be politically isolated. The location of various Color Revolutions was aimed directly at encircling Russia and cutting off, at any time, her export pipelines. With more than half of Russia’s dollar export earnings coming from its oil and gas exports, such encirclement would amount to an economic chokehold on Russia by US-led NATO.