The outcry spread quickly across the Western world: Donald Trump dared say Ukraine started the war.
The New York Times accused Trump of “rewriting the history of Russia’s invasion of its neighbor.” The paper’s White House correspondent wrote:
“When Russian forces crashed over the borders into Ukraine in 2022 determined to wipe it off the map as an independent state, the United States rushed to aid the beleaguered nation and cast its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as a hero of resistance.
Three years almost to the day later, President Trump is rewriting the history of Russia’s invasion of its smaller neighbor. Ukraine, in this version, is not a victim but a villain. And Mr. Zelensky is not a latter-day Winston Churchill, but a ‘dictator without elections’ who somehow started the war himself and conned America into helping.”
The BBC reported:
“Ukraine didn’t start the war. Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, having annexed Crimea in 2014.
The annexation came after Ukraine’s pro-Russian president was ousted by popular demonstrations.”
CNN howled: “President Donald Trump has now fully adopted Russia’s false propaganda on Ukraine, turning against a sovereign democracy that was invaded in favor of the invader. … Trump wrongly accused Ukraine of starting the conflict.”
“In comments to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump falsely claimed Kyiv had started the conflict, the largest on European soil since the second world,” complained the Financial Times.
It was pretty much the same thing across the Western media landscape, which spoke with one voice.
The media takes speaking with one voice as confirmation that they are right. But it’s often just massive confirmation bias for the story Western intelligence services and political leaders tell them, rather than an independent examination of the facts.
In this case the facts show that Trump is right.
The central question in all this is: when did the Ukraine war actually start? The Western mainstream leads masses of people to believe it began Feb. 22, 2022, when the Russian regular army intervened in what was already an eight-year old civil war, which was very much begun by Ukraine, with U.S. help.
That’s the part they don’t tell you.
The key to the falsehood is what the BBC calls “Ukraine’s pro-Russian president” being “ousted by popular demonstrations.” [Emphasis added.]
Of course Trump didn’t explain that. He’s not a great public speaker. He too often fails to lay out the context needed to understand what he’s talking about.
Trump’s fleeting remark at a press encounter at his Florida estate last Tuesday set off the international furor.
“Today I heard: ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited’ [to the talks in Saudi Arabia with Russia],” Trump said about Ukrainian president Volodmyr Zelensky. “Well, you’ve been there for three years … you should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
It was those six italicized words that ignited the firestorm. The rest of what he said in that sentence was ignored.
Hellbound and Down 