Two decades from the outset of the United States’ war in Iraq a 2023 opinion survey found 61% of Americans disagree with the decision to launch the ill-fated invasion.
The finding is the culmination of years of soul searching on the part of the American public, which has grown increasingly wary of US military intervention in recent years. A large majority of Russian citizens, on the other hand, have indicated they approve of the country’s special military operation against Ukraine with healthy military recruitment figures serving as the latest evidence the citizenry is united behind President and Commander-in-Chief Vladimir Putin.
International relations and security analyst Mark Sleboda joined Sputnik’s The Final Countdown program Wednesday to discuss the latest developments in the Western proxy war on Russia as well as the curious case of the Nord Stream pipeline explosion as the German government claims to have found a suspect for the crime.
“The German news that broke is pretty interesting,” said Sleboda, referring to the German government’s release of the name of a supposed suspect behind the presumed sabotage of the Russo-German Nord Stream Pipeline in 2022. “This Volodymyr Z – according to German privacy laws, the full name is not released… this is the absolutely complete bull feces, cockamamie cover-up story that the United States and Germany have centered on.”
“They can’t admit that the United States blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, because that would mean the end of NATO,” the analyst added. “It would be a member of NATO attacking a member of NATO. They can’t admit that. So they came up with this.”
In a case of reality sometimes proving to be stranger than fiction, the German government has claimed an amateur Ukrainian scuba diver by the name of “Volodymyr Z” is responsible for the explosion that blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that formerly transported cheap natural gas from Russia to Europe.
But critics claim the “discovery” of the alleged culprit, whose last name is purportedly “Zhuravlev,” is itself another fiction of Western intelligence agencies, which insist on offering an alternative explanation for the environmental disaster which is widely presumed to be the work of the United States.
“It [was] a methane release,” Sleboda noted. “And methane is a greenhouse gas some 28 times more potent than carbon. So, yes, it is also the largest man-made release of carbon environmental catastrophe [of] that scale. But these things go by the wayside when geopolitics is concerned.”
“As far as I'm concerned the Seymour Hersh version of events is probably very close to the actual story,” he added, referring to the investigative journalist’s analysis of the incident.
“To believe that a group of rando Ukrainians on a rent-a-day little pleasure dinghy out of Poland managed to lay serious military explosives at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, a NATO lake just off an island in Denmark that NATO routinely does military exercises [in] – in fact amazingly enough, just a week earlier, there [were] US ships involved in military exercises, military ships that may very well have actually been involved in leaving some explosives on the bottom of the Baltic Sea – I mean, this story is so ridiculous and, conveniently enough, their mysterious Volodymyr Z just disappeared.”
Western governments’ refusal to implicate the United States in the incident and reluctance to investigate the matter has further damaged support for the Ukraine proxy war as European leaders fear former President Donald Trump would end US support for the conflict if reelected in November.
Meanwhile, Russian citizens remain united behind Moscow’s war effort, with Ukraine’s attempt to mount an incursion onto the Kursk region of Russia only heightening Russians’ patriotic fervor.
“It's just further cementing support for the [special military operation],” noted Slebeda. “By all domestic accounts the number of young men signing up as volunteer contract soldiers for the SMO – which was already around 1,000 a day, at least at the last word by the minister of defense – has jumped again because people feel that Russia has been attacked and Russia has been insulted.”
“The statements in the press make it quite clear that the US and Europe were at some level completely behind this. So that increases Russian society's anger and desire for getting some payback.”