OPINION — By: Ben Norton

• Source: Al Mayadeen Net

The US-led NATO military alliance has made it clear that it is willing to fight to the last Ukrainian in order to bleed Russia and advance Western geopolitical interests.

In a shockingly blunt admission, The Washington Post acknowledged that some NATO member states want “Ukrainians to keep fighting, and dying” in order to prevent Russia from making political gains.

In an April 5 report on peace talks between Ukraine and Russia, the major US newspaper disclosed that NATO is afraid that Kiev may give in to some of Moscow’s demands.

The Washington Post wrote explicitly: “For some in NATO, it’s better for the Ukrainians to keep fighting, and dying than to achieve a peace that comes too early or at too high a cost to Kyiv and the rest of Europe.”

Anonymous Western diplomats emphasized that “there are limits to how many compromises some in NATO will support to win the peace,” and that they would rather prolong the war in Ukraine if they can prevent Russia from having its security concerns met.

The newspaper said that NATO members are desperate not to give “Russian President Vladimir Putin any semblance of victory,” and are more than willing to force Ukrainians into the meat grinder to do so.

US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan noted that the administration of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is closely coordinating with Washington, and is in “near-daily contact” with the White House. It is evident who is really in charge.

The newspaper likewise revealed that the US military has more than 100,000 troops deployed in Europe.

The Washington Post has a close relationship with the US government. The newspaper is owned by $200-billionaire Jeff Bezos, one of the richest human beings in history.

Bezos is also the founder and executive chairman of mega-corporation Amazon, which has tens of billions of dollars worth of contracts with the CIA, Pentagon, NSA, FBI, ICE, and other US government agencies.

If The Washington Post is disclosing this information about NATO, with quotes from senior White House officials, it clearly got the green light from its handlers in Washington.

This report is a semi-official confirmation that NATO sees Ukrainians as mere cannon fodder in its imperial proxy war on Russia.

In fact, some Western officials have stated this openly.

A former senior State Department official, hard-line right-wing war hawk Eliot A. Cohen, boasted in an article in The Atlantic magazine that the “United States and its NATO allies are engaged in a proxy war with Russia.”

He effused proudly, “They are supplying thousands of munitions and hopefully doing much else—sharing intelligence, for example—with the intent of killing Russian soldiers,” adding, “the more and faster the better.”

The State Department veteran declared that the “stream of arms going into Ukraine needs to be a flood.”

This is exactly what NATO member states are doing: flooding Russia’s neighbor with weapons.

Instead of supporting peace talks with Russia, the United States and European Union have been actively escalating the war, sending Ukraine billions of dollars worth of weapons, including tens of thousands of anti-tank missiles, thousands of anti-aircraft missiles, and hundreds of kamikaze drones, as well as tanks and armored vehicles.

What goes unmentioned is how US and European arms corporations have heavily profited from the war. The stocks of private military contractors skyrocketed after Russia sent its troops into Ukraine on February 24, as Western governments pledged to substantially increase their military expenditure.

The Joe Biden administration immediately delivered $350 million in weapons in late February, before pledging an additional $13.6 billion in aid for Ukraine in March, of which $6.5 billion in military support.

The foreign ministers of NATO met at the military alliance’s headquarters in Brussels on April 6 and 7 and pledged to escalate the war in Ukraine even further.

The Western politicians were joined by representatives of several non-NATO members, including Japan, South Korea, Georgia, Finland, Sweden, Australia, and New Zealand.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba traveled to Brussels for the meeting, where he dispelled any doubt that NATO wants more war instead of peace.

“I came here today to discuss three most important things: weapons, weapons, and weapons,” Kuleba summarized.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg similarly declared, “After the invasion, allies stepped up with additional military support, with more military equipment, and it was a clear message from the meeting today that allies should do more and are ready to do more to provide more equipment, and they realize and recognize the urgency.”

Stoltenberg boasted that direct NATO military support for Ukraine goes back to 2014 and that tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers were trained by NATO in the past eight years, long before Russia invaded.

NATO transparently prefers that Ukrainians keep sacrificing their lives in hopes of weakening and destabilizing Russia.

Meanwhile, Ukrainians who think peace should be the solution, not more war, face dire consequences.

A Ukrainian negotiator who had participated in peace talks with Russia, Denys Kyreyev, was murdered, reportedly by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), which is notorious for being influenced by neo-Nazis and other far-right extremists.

All of this extreme violence and warmongering flies directly in the face of NATO’s claim to be a supposed “defensive” alliance.

The reality is NATO has never been devoted to defense, let alone democracy. Among the military alliance’s founding members in 1949 was the fascist dictatorship of Portugal.

During the first cold war, NATO supported former Nazi collaborators and fascists in its infamous Operation Gladio. With NATO support, far-right extremists carried out terrorist attacks in Europe to try to repress the left-wing, especially during Italy’s notorious Years of Lead.

When the first cold war ended, NATO continued to expand onto Russia’s borders, repeatedly violating promises made by the United States, Britain, and France that the military alliance would not move “one inch eastward” after the reunification of Germany in 1990.

In bombing campaigns in the 1990s, NATO destroyed and carved up the former Yugoslavia, which no longer exists as a country.

Then NATO helped the United States launch its war in Afghanistan in 2001, and maintained a joint military occupation until 2021.

In 2011, NATO waged war on Libya, the most prosperous country in Africa. The Western military campaign shattered Libya’s state. Foreign fossil fuel corporations soon pillaged the North African nation’s massive oil reserves.

Still today, in 2022, Libya has no unified central government. It does, however, have open-air slave markets for Sub-Saharan African refugees.

The ruins of Libya, Afghanistan, and former Yugoslavia show what NATO truly offers the world.

And the US-led military alliance is now prepared to sacrifice Ukraine to advance the interests of Washington and Wall Street.