The United States and its allies are guilty of perpetrating a deliberate war of aggression against Russia that has long been in the planning works.

A study by the Rand Corporation published more than three years ago demonstrates incontestably that the war in Ukraine is in fact the manifestation of a bigger willful confrontation against Russia whereby the United States is attempting to weaken and subjugate Moscow.

What is happening is without doubt the culmination of U.S. long-held planning. That puts a wholly different meaning on the current conflict in the Ukraine – now in its eighth month. This is not, as the Western governments and media would make out, an “unprovoked” assault on Ukraine and “Western democratic values” by “Russian aggression”. The conflict has been deliberately fomented, stoked and now exacerbated by policy choices made by Washington and its NATO partners.

The Rand Corporation is one of the oldest think tanks in the U.S., established in 1948. One of its cofounders was air force commander General Curtis LeMay, the architect of the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo and the atomic holocaust at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. LeMay was an arch-Cold War hawk who advocated preemptive nuclear strikes on the Soviet Union to President John F Kennedy in the early 1960s. The corporation he set up, Rand, is funded by the U.S. government and in some ways can be seen as the public brains and mouth of the Pentagon and CIA.

The study cited above, entitled ‘Overextending and Unbalancing Russia’ and published in April 2019, has caught the attention recently of many independent observers (see, for example, a recent episode of the Jimmy Dore show in the U.S.). What makes it topical is how real, current events are unfolding in a way that the American planners envisaged.

Among a list of “cost-imposing options” (see our SCF graphic) urged by the Rand authors to be meted out against Russia were:

• Providing lethal military aid to Ukraine
• Mobilizing European NATO members
• Imposing deeper trade and economic sanctions
• Increasing U.S. energy production for export to Europe
• Expanding Europe’s import infrastructure to receive U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) supplies

The U.S.-backed coup d’état in Kiev back in February 2014 was the key event to make all this subsequent planning possible. The regime that came to power was rabidly anti-Russian and infested with Neo-Nazi ideology. It was a zealous tool for American and NATO policy to antagonize and threaten Russia. For eight years, the Kiev regime repudiated peace treaties and waged a genocidal war with full U.S. and NATO backing against Russian-speaking people in the self-declared Donbass republics. Those republics have now joined the Russian Federation, along with two other former Ukrainian regions.

Russia’s military invasion of the Ukraine on February 24, 2022, was precipitated by relentless NATO-backed aggression not just against ethnic Russians in Ukraine but against Russia itself. Arguably, it became a war of necessity for Russia to defend its national interests, prompted by a proxy war of choice engendered by the United States and its NATO allies.

The Rand Corp study makes it abundantly clear that the incipient dangerous conflict between nuclear powers has been orchestrated from the outset by the U.S. The world is witnessing an abysmal situation that amounts to a quasi-World War Three, as our columnist Declan Hayes wrote this week.

Atrociously, the U.S. and its NATO partners keep piling ever-more lethal weapons into Ukraine that are making possible direct attacks on Russian territory. Under the nefarious tutelage of Washington and London, the Kiev regime spurns any diplomatic effort to find a political solution for peace. Well-meant proposals for peace put forward by international figures like entrepreneur Elon Musk or music artist and Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters are met with derision and death threats.

There seems to be a spiral of insanity that the U.S., European elites and the Kiev regime are beholden to.

The Kremlin has warned that it will use “all means necessary” to defend itself if Russia’s existential security is threatened even by “conventional weapons”. The dynamic here is perilous for catastrophic nuclear all-out war in a way that makes the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 pale by comparison.

It needs to be emphasized that the present dangerous dilemma has been consciously driven by U.S. policy choices.

Recall that Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former U.S. presidential strategist to Jimmy Carter (1977-1981), hailed Ukraine as the “pivot” for hegemonic control over Eurasia and a bridgehead to destabilize Russia in his 1997 book entitled ‘The Grand Chessboard’.

Brzezinski was also the architect of the “Afghan Quagmire” which the U.S. covertly instigated to draw in Soviet troops into a ten-year war (1979-1989). That war was deliberately engineered by massive American weaponization of Afghan proxies (who later evolved into Al Qaeda and other Islamist terror networks) to give the Soviet Union “their Vietnam”. The debilitating drain on Moscow from the “Afghan Trap” was arguably a causal factor in the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

What is happening currently in Ukraine has unerring parallels. As the Rand Corp eagerly anticipated, the conflict is aimed at “overextending and unbalancing Russia”. It is no doubt heavily invested that the military, economic and political pressures being generated and imposed on Moscow will lead to the weakening of the Russian state, the collapse of governing structures, regime change and the splintering of the national territory into disparate mini-states over which the U.S. can exert hegemonic dominance for exploitation of Russia’s vast natural wealth. Russian President Vladimir Putin recently pointed out that this geopolitical objective of defeating Russia is the touchstone of our time.

Other sources corroborate the conclusion that this conflict is a war of choice. NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg disclosed – probably unintentionally – in an opinion article for the Financial Times last month that the U.S.-led military bloc has been weaponizing the Ukraine since 2014 for the purpose of agitating tensions with Russia.

Thus, NATO weapons being pumped into the Ukraine are not a “response” to “defend” against Russia. The offensive military aid is merely being accelerated after years of provocative arming of the former Soviet republic and Russia’s immediate western and historically close neighbor.

Last month, another senior NATO commander, Admiral Rob Bauer, chairman of the bloc’s military committee, made the brazen admission that: “The planning for that [the current war] began years ago but we’re now implementing it.”

It is therefore indisputable that a legal case can and should be made. The United States and its allies are guilty of perpetrating a deliberate war of aggression against Russia that has long been in the planning works.

That’s not only a supreme war crime, according to Nuremberg principles. It is also placing the very existence of the entire planet at grave risk. Can anything be more God-damn evil?