NEW YORK, May 28 (RIA Novosti) – Against a backdrop of mounting tensions in Ukraine, a group of history professors from the United States were set to hold a forum on Wednesday laying responsibility for the Ukrainian crisis on the West’s broken promises and aggressive eastward military expansion.
Gary Leupp of Tufts University and Mark Solomon of Simmons College were to hold a pro-peace seminar in Cambridge, Massachusetts – home of the oldest US higher education institution, Harvard University – and demand an end to bloodshed in Ukraine.
Violence continued some 8,000 km away in eastern Ukraine, where federalists were battling pro-Kiev forces in Donetsk and the likely president-elect Petro Poroshenko has vowed to end the rebellion.
"Regardless of the legality of the annexation of Crimea, the basic issue is not Russian aggression, but the aggressive expansion of a military alliance [NATO] designed to oppose a USSR that dissolved 23 years ago, along with the Warsaw Pact," Leupp told RIA Novosti.
"The crisis is the result of the relentless eastward expansion of NATO, in violation of [former US president] George H. W. Bush’s promise to [former Soviet leader] Mikhail Gorbachev that this would never happen, and Russian fear of the prospect that the Crimean Peninsula would someday soon fall into NATO hands and the Black Sea transformed into a NATO lake,” he added.
Leupp cited a number of Western policies designed to encircle Russia, including the US-led involvement in the former Yugoslavia, Eastern Europe’s missile defense shield, militarism in Afghanistan and Libya and support for purportedly pro-democratic revolutions.
"The peace movement should focus on opposing NATO expansion and indeed demand the alliance’s dissolution, while also challenging the mainstream media’s depiction of events in Ukraine, in particular the whitewash of the crucial involvement of neo-fascist groups," he said.
Solomon warned that Kiev’s assault on rebels at Donetsk airport, which claimed as many as 100 lives, and other aggressive acts were pushing the eastern European country ever-deeper towards all-out conflict and a rekindling of the Cold War.
"The stakes in Ukraine are truly global," Solomon told RIA Novosti. “The tragic conflict can easily ignite a far wider conflict. However, it is not too late to pull back from the abyss and embark on a road to peace and progress. Peace activists in the US have a vital role in preventing further bloodshed and helping restore sanity,” he said.
"It has to demand that our government supports negotiations between contending forces; that it cooperates with Russia in advancing talks; that it withdraws provocative missile-armed warships from the Black Sea and that it stops the forward movement of NATO deeper into Eastern Europe and Russian borders,” he added.
"With constructive efforts by all who support peace – peace can prevail," Solomon concluded.
