Ukraine is not a flame. It is a burnt-out shell that the Western powers have torched and will eventually discard when their sordid games are spent.
The "independence day" events this week in Kiev were a theater of the absurd. The commemoration was based on grotesque lies and propaganda. The truth is its people have been brutally violated by corrupt elites under the sway of Western imperial ambitions that have nothing to do with independence, sovereignty or democracy.
On Monday, August 24, European officials gathered in the Ukrainian capital to mark 35 years since the country declared independence as a state, amid the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The sad reality is that there is nothing to celebrate despite hackneyed efforts to contrive the event as something positive and meaningful. The awful truth is that a country and its people have been willfully destroyed by pitting it against a brotherly nation in Russia.
Remarkably, and tellingly, the turnout of foreign dignitaries in Kiev this week was lackluster, belying the lame attempts to bestow pomp and ceremony on the date.
The proceedings rang hollow and seemed to be a perfunctory matter, bereft of substance or credibility. There were reportedly no U.S. officials representing the Trump administration and the European attendees were second-rate. The highest-ranking EU representative was European Council President António Costa (Antonio who?). Absent were European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas. France's Emmanuel Macron and Germany's Friedrich Merz did not show up, either. These political figures are usually keen to visit Kiev to express solidarity. Their absence on such a supposedly momentous occasion suggests a whiff of defeatism about Ukraine as a proxy against Russia.
The biggest name in Kiev this week was Britain's Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who addressed a crowd outside St Sofia's Cathedral, standing alongside Ukraine's unelected president Vladimir Zelensky. The latter continues to refuse to hold elections since his mandate expired in May 2024, yet his corrupt regime is extolled as a European democracy.
It was Burnham's first overseas trip, and his address was supposed to be a setpiece opportunity to make an international impression. The British premier had the demeanour of a schoolboy reading every word by rote from a script that lavished praise on Ukraine for its delusional achievements. The speech was a confection of corny distortions, which garnered much ridicule from ordinary Brits who scorned Burnham for not prioritizing domestic economic problems, as he had promised.
As it turned out, the cast of non-entities in Kiev was rather appropriate to reflect the real, threadbare significance of Ukraine's past three and a half decades.
Despite the narrative of Ukrainian ultranationalists and Western indulgence, the country's "statehood" is a recent artificial construct. The borders created in 1991, after separating from the Soviet Union, were not centuries old, as claimed, but rather largely the result of gerrymandering and horse-trading by the Soviet leadership over previous decades. Crimea, for example, was made part of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in 1954 by order of the Kremlin as a way to counterbalance Russophobic ultranationalists. The Crimean Peninsula and other parts of Ukraine had been part of the Russian Empire for centuries. Ukraine itself (from the Russian word "ukraina") was known as "the borderland" or simply a region of Russia.
The 1991 declaration of independence was therefore always something of a fabrication. What is happening today with the reversion of Crimea and other regions, the Donbass, Kherson, Zaporozhye, as part of the Russian Federation, is the return to a historically natural configuration. Arguably, Russian territorial rights include further integration of Odessa, Nikolaev, Kharkhov and Sumy.
What is referred to as "Ukraine" is a rump statelet that is breaking up, disintegrating under the weight of war and false territorial claims that had been declared in 1991 and cynically manipulated by Western powers.
However, what the tawdry pomp and speeches cannot conceal is that Ukraine has been reduced to a miserable, failed state. Its population has dwindled by more than half, from a figure of 52 million in 1991 to an estimated 20-25 million today, as people flee the country, mostly to Russia, but also across Europe.
This collapse has been underway since 1991, although the NATO proxy war with Russia since 2022 has certainly accelerated the trends.
Britain's limp-minded Burnham obediently mouthed his scripted fantasy speech claiming that Ukrainians had "taken control of their destiny" 35 years ago. In a travesty of history, he compared Britain's presumed victory in World War Two over Nazi Germany with Ukraine's fight against "Russian aggression."
Clueless Burnham is reading comic books instead of history. Does he not realize that the Kiev regime, which he exalts as a democracy, renames streets and army regiments in honor of Nazi collaborators?
Since 1991, the fact is that the United States, Britain, and other NATO powers targeted Ukraine to become a Western proxy for confronting Russia. The so-called Orange Revolution of 2004 was the culmination of Western infiltration and massive funding to cultivate anti-Russian politics. This involved suppression of the Russian language and culture and the revival of Ukrainian fascism that had collaborated with Nazi Germany.
The 2014 Maidan "popular uprising" was another fictive cover for a Western-sponsored coup against democracy in Ukraine to further the covert agenda for confrontation with Russia. The regime was weaponized and trained by NATO for the eventual proxy war that escalated into open hostilities in 2022.
Ukraine is not a "vibrant democracy with a bright future," as Britain's Burnham ridiculously proclaims. These Western lies are a cause of Ukraine's misery, misleading the country into a dead end.
It is a country that has been sacrificed by Western imperialist ambitions, a country which is ruled over by a corrupt regime that glorifies Nazi collaborators and imprisons any legitimate political opposition. Every day, Ukrainian civilians are dragged off the streets by Zelensky's goon squads to be sent to a front line meatgrinder. At least 1.5 million Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in nearly five years of the NATO proxy war with Russia.
Russian forces are advancing to take control of a quarter of the territory that was part of the Ukrainian state in 1991.
The only thing keeping the Ukraine side hanging on is the billions of taxpayers' money that the European Union and Britain keep throwing at the Kiev regime.
The independence that Ukrainian politicians declared in 1991 has turned into an evil theater of the absurd whereby the West ruthlessly exploits total dependence. That dependency has been cultivated over 35 years to the point where Ukraine has no sovereignty; its people have been slaughtered; its resources raped by Western corporations; its territory has been shattered - all because its traitorous politicians chose the destiny of being a proxy for geopolitical schemes against Russia. What has befallen Ukraine is a huge crime authored by Western imperial powers.
To rub salt into the gaping wound, we see political hacks like Andy Burnham (Andy who?) turn up in Kiev spinning utter drivel about Ukraine being a flame for freedom and a protector of Europe from Russian aggression.
Ukraine is not a flame. It is a burnt-out shell that the Western powers have torched and will eventually discard when their sordid games are spent.
To paraphrase Henry Kissinger: to be an enemy of Western imperialism is dangerous; to be an ally is fatal.
Ukraine has found this out the hard way.