Yes, Vladimir Putin has ordered his military to invade Ukraine. His troops have captured key cities and are methodically surrounding the rest. But he’s not at war with the Ukrainian people. He’s at war with the D.C. empire and its puppet president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Contrary to the propaganda put out by the usual suspects, it is not going badly for the Russians. They are conducting the operation patiently and methodically, reflecting the disposition of their leader. And they’re killing far less civilians and destroying far less civilian infrastructure than the U.S. does during a typical war crime.

Oh, was that unpatriotic? Sorry, not sorry.

The power of the propaganda machine is impressive. Suddenly, everyone has amnesia. Putin has attacked Ukraine “for no reason.” It is an “unprovoked attack” serving only Putin’s imperial wish to reconstitute the Soviet empire or perhaps preserve his own power within Russia.

How can anyone believe this?

For the record, Putin gave two speeches which spell out his reasons for going to war. They are lengthy and full of historical context. For those interested, links are below.

Vladimir Putin: Full Text of February 21, 2022 Speech

Full Transcript of Putin address February 24, 2022

Putin’s argument generally aligns with the story I’ve been writing about for many years. Back in 1991, when Gorbachev agreed to pull his troops out of East Germany and allow reunification of the nation that had invaded his country four decades earlier, killing tens of millions of Russians, U.S. President George H.W. Bush and a host of other NATO leaders promised Gorbachev that NATO “would not move one inch eastward.”

The U.S. government spent years denying this promise was made until declassified documents proved it clearly was. Now, the official story is that since there wasn’t a formal “treaty,” the promise could be broken. But it doesn’t change the fact that the U.S. government lied about this for decades, to the Russians, who knew they were lying, and to U.S. citizens, who didn’t.

If there wasn’t something wrong with what they were doing, why did they lie?

U.S.-led NATO spent the next 30 years admitting country after country into an alliance whose sole purpose is to make war on Russia. This map shows the progress over time.

During the George W. Bush administration, the U.S. government declared an intention to admit Georgia and Ukraine, instigating color revolutions in both countries for that purpose. The coup in Georgia sparked renewed hostilities between Georgia and the breakaway province of South Ossetia. Putin briefly invaded Georgia in defense of South Ossetia and Russia eventually recognized the independence of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia, drawing a rebuke from President Bush and other western leaders but no more.

What else could Bush do? As I wrote in 2014, conventional war between nuclear powers is not a possibility. That makes the gargantuan U.S. military a giant rip off of American taxpayers, since it can never be used to fight a major power, but that’s a subject for another day.

The D.C. empire backed off for a few years, but they basically ran the same drill in Ukraine in 2014. Democratically-elected President Viktor Yanukovych was deposed with John McCain literally on the streets of Kiev encouraging the revolution Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland had been caught planning on a leaked phone call.

That’s when Crimea and the eastern provinces of Ukraine, populated almost exclusively with ethnic Russians, broke away. Note this was a reaction to the U.S. interfering in Ukraine’s elections so overtly that no two-year investigation was necessary. We have firsthand video and audio evidence.

For the next eight years, three successive U.S. presidents have sent arms to Ukraine, ostensibly to put down an internal rebellion and aid Ukraine in its defense against Russian invasion, but in reality to ethnically cleanse Ukraine’s population of its Russian population. The smaller the Russian population within Ukraine, the more unified it is as an anti-Russian state.

As Putin said accurately in his speech, Ukraine has behaved as a de facto member of NATO over the past eight years, with NATO conducting military exercises within Ukraine’s borders.

On Russia’s borders.

Now, we can wax philosophical about what constitutes aggression all we want. Everyone knows if Russia or China tried anything remotely similar in Mexico or Canada, we’d be bombing them before the day was over.

Putin made a last ditch effort appeal for a diplomatic solution via a proposed treaty that amounted to two very reasonable requests: 1) a guarantee Ukraine is never admitted to NATO and 2) stop deploying troops and weapons (including missiles that could carry nukes) in areas of eastern Europe where they could be a threat to Russia’s national security.

President Biden responded with a lukewarm verbal assurance Ukraine wouldn’t be admitted to NATO within the next ten years. Given the history of U.S. promises outlined above, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that wouldn’t be good enough, especially coming from the U.S. Vice President put in charge of Ukraine by the Obama administration when it carried out the 2014 coup.

That was confirmed on February 24, 2022 when Putin invaded Ukraine. He has now gone to war against Washington, D.C. in the country Washington weaponized against him, casting the Ukrainian people as unfortunate pawns.

President Biden has said consistently throughout the current crisis that the United States would not go to war to defend Ukraine. Yet, he has repeatedly ratcheted up the tension and has been dismissive of Putin’s very reasonable proposal to end the conflict diplomatically. One can only assume Biden and NATO just couldn’t conceive that Putin might do what the “exceptional nation” has claimed prerogative to do with far less (or any) justification over the past several decades.

So, we’re now in a situation where Biden and Europe are desperate to keep people from figuring out what Putin’s invasion means: the empire has no clothes. Multiple narratives are being put out in desperation.

One of the more striking is the image of Zelenskyy as the rugged comedian-turned-military hero, bravely standing his post in Kiev. Russian sources say Zelensky left Kiev on February 23, the day before the invasion, and the photos and videos of him in military garb were all taken in advance.

That sounds more likely to be true, but it doesn’t really matter. What is really interesting is the empire’s portrayal of Zelensky as compared to Bashar Al-Assad. It has literally made mirror images of them after running essentially the same operations in their respective countries.

The U.S. ran regime-change operations in both Syria and Ukraine at roughly the same time during the early to mid-2010s. Both countries have economic importance in terms of planned pipelines. Each is home to one of Russia’s only two warm water ports besides Vladivostok, which is on the Sea of Japan.

In Ukraine the regime change was successful; in Syria, it was not. The leaders of both countries spent the next several years fighting civil wars, meaning they necessarily had to make war upon portions of their own populations.

Assad is condemned as a brutal dictator for doing so. Americans are asked to accept that portrayal unconditionally and they mostly do. Anyone who questions it can expect to be assailed by their fellow citizens who are so emotionally attached to this narrative they are unable even to consider evidence to the contrary.

This after no less than General James Mattis admitted there was no evidence Assad perpetrated the alleged chemical attacks that inspired multiple U.S. airstrikes on Syria.

The amnesiac effect of propaganda is at least as impressive as its emotional effect.

Forgotten also is that until February 24, Zelensky was doing precisely the same thing Assad had been vilified for: making war against his own population. In addition, he tried to arrest his political opponent, who is still facing charges, and shut down opposition news media. He has been at least the dictator Assad is accused of being and his abuses are not disputed by anyone.

Yet, upon Putin’s invasion, all of this is forgotten. He is now and presumably forever the gallant hero in military fatigues, on the side of all that is good and just, against a dictator attacking his country “for no reason.”

Americans are asked to believe all this without question by a government that has lied to them over the past several years on a scale that would make Goebbels blush. They are asked to accept as genuine the manufactured, uniform opinions flooding news and social media. They are asked to reject all nuance, all dissent, and to completely forget well-document facts from recent history that flatly contradict the empire’s narrative.

What do you believe?

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?