I debunk conspiracy theories about the Ukraine war

FIRST FALSE STATEMENT. The US started the war in Ukraine when we overthrew the elected government that favored close relations with Russia. Obama and Victoria Nuland confirmed our involvement led to that 'revolution'. Yes, that overthrown government was corrupt, but so is the current government of Ukraine.

 

This was an easy statement to debunk, since the well-respected Politifact addressed this claim. Excerpts from their Pants on Fire conclusion.

It’s a conspiracy with mainstream crossover: The United States bankrolled the bloody political uprising in Ukraine.

We saw the claim pop up recently in a story on RT (the Russian-funded English language cable network), and found lots of talk about it on reddit, Facebook and other websites.

The claims have the same basic structure. While President Barack Obama publicly said Ukrainians have the right to determine their own future, the U.S. government pumped $5 billion into the country to promote regime change.

In a Facebook meme, someone put it this way:

Obama "spends $5 billion paying Ukrainians to riot and dismantle their democratically elected government."

So is there any truth to this claim? PunditFact dove in.

…Our ruling

Contrary to claims, the United States did not spend $5 billion to incite the rebellion in Ukraine.

That’s a distorted understanding of remarks given by a State Department official. She was referring to money spent on democracy-building programs in Ukraine since it broke off from the Soviet Union in 1991.

We rate the claim Pants on Fire.

 

SECOND FALSE STATEMENT. We also started the war when we broke our promises to not move NATO east after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Politifact also examined this claim. Here's some excerpts from their Mostly False conclusion. 

Two days before Russia invaded Ukraine with an assault that intelligence officials had warned was coming, conservative commentator Candace Owens insisted that the U.S. was "at fault."

"NATO (under direction from the United States) is violating previous agreements and expanding eastward," Owens said in the Feb. 22 tweet, which directed her more than 3 million followers to remarks from Russian President Vladimir Putin that she said showed "what’s actually going on." 

Owens’ comment echoed a grievance claimed by Putin and other Russian leaders regarding the West’s negotiations with the Soviet Union after the Cold War. 

The subject of the grievance is whether the U.S. and its Western allies promised the Soviet Union during negotiations over the reunification of Germany that they would not allow NATO to expand its membership east of the Cold War border.

…Our ruling

Owens said, "NATO (under direction from the United States) is violating previous agreements and expanding eastward."

There is an ongoing historical debate over comments that Western leaders, including Baker, made during post-Cold War negotiations, and whether what they said amounted to assurances that NATO would refrain from welcoming in countries closer to modern-day Russia. 

But NATO as an organization made no such pledge, and the formal agreement signed at the end of those negotiations said nothing about the alliance not expanding eastward.

We rate this claim Mostly False.

THIRD FALSE STATEMENT. This war and most of our other wars are primarily profit generators for our arms and oil industries.  Our inflation was caused by price gouging by the oil industry and not by the slightly higher pay for employees. The war gave us an excuse to blowup Nordstream 2 so that we could sell more gas to Europe. 

 

What's almost certainly false in this statement is the claim that the United States blew up the Nordstrom 2 pipeline.

 

I also disagree that the Ukraine war is primarily a profit generator for our arms and oil industries, since our motivation for supporting Ukraine is to protect a democratic nation against an unprovoked invasion by Russia. I do agree that price gouging by the oil industry is a primary reason for our high gasoline prices, but other countries also have higher fuel prices caused by Putin's war.

 

Snopes looked into the claim that the United States blew up the Nordstream 2 pipeline. It found that this claim was based on a single anonymous source, so it isn't very credible. Excerpts:

On Feb. 8, 2023, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh published on Substack a theoretically blockbuster revelation: A covert U.S. military operation in June 2022 was responsible for the September 2022 destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines that run natural gas from Russia to Germany. The claim has been met with skepticism by other journalists, denials from U.S. government officials, and credulous promotion in Russia.

In this article, Snopes explores the controversy, separating the factual background in Hersh's reporting that provides an air of plausibility to his blockbuster claims from the anonymously sourced assertions of a single person that hold — however weakly — those claims together. By email, we asked Hersh to respond to criticism that his article's claims are based on a single source. We also asked if any undisclosed parties verified or vetted any of that source's assertions as part of his reporting. In response, he told Snopes, "I protect my sources."

…The Bottom Line

This story, when deconstructed, is merely a pile of purported second-hand information allegedly collected by someone connected in some unknown way to deliberations of a highly secret, multi-agency task force. Such a story falls prey to the same criticisms of other more recent work published by Hersh, which has relied on similarly questionable anonymous sources.

If the U.S. did conspire to destroy the Nord Stream pipeline, Hersh's reporting has not proved that case. Hersh has, instead, made a very successful blog post that essentially transcribes a compelling story someone unknown to the general public told him.

Hersh was asked by the Russian news agency TASS about the identity of his source. He told them that, "It's a person, who, it seems, knows a lot about what's going on." 

FOURTH PARTLY FALSE STATEMENT. For evidence that this is a war for profit not for Ukraine note that Ukraine desperately needs tanks now, but instead of sending a few of the 4800 tanks we currently have, we are building new tanks at $10 million each to be sent in August.  Oil and arms guys love this war and do not want it to end.  We spend billions on weapons, killing Russians and civilians, and we have no body bags coming home.