Another Letter to Biden

After sending the CODEPINK letter to Biden today I came up with my own additional words: 

Peace doesn't mean destroying Russia (or Ukraine).  It means taking everyone's concerns into account and reaching a compromise.  It means not just trying to achieve our vision with more fighting but accepting much of the vision of others and the military situation more or less as it is right now.

This war was not unprovoked but followed an 80 year history of US meddling in Ukraine (by supporting anti-Russian groups), highlighted by the broken US promise not to extend NATO, the abolition of the IMF treaty, the coup in 2014, and the US arming and encouraging non-compliance with Minsk II agreement.  Leading US analysts including George Kennan and John Mearsheimer said we should not do these things because they would provoke a war with Russia.

We should recognize that Russia had real serious issues about the way things were going.  Ukraine is a country whose boundaries have shifted massively in the past 200 years.  All of the areas occupied by Russian military forces today were historically part of Russia for 200 years and had a majority of Russian speakers.  And Russia had a very good reason to fear the Russian ethnic population was going to be squeezed out by Ukrainian forces who were massively surrounding Donbas and threatening to do just that in late Februrary 2022 while western eyes were fixed on only the Russian troops and never on the things Russia was then saying.

Russia has no designs on Europe or other countries.  Even if they did, they can barely hold onto lands which were historically Russian.

There have been several reasonable settlements nearly reached already but in every case it has been the US and UK telling Ukraine not to accept them and instead fight on.  This must stop.