Ukraine is being punished for wanting to join the most aggressive and destructive military alliance on earth, led by a country that has inflicted an endless holocaust against the third world since the end of WW2.
The third world needs Russia’s geopolitical weight to counter US warmongering, sanctions, and political intimidation. Therefore, an enemy of Russia is an enemy of the general interests of the third world. While the West is busy crying about Ukraine, the third world is busy setting up alternative payment systems with Russia to evade the sanctions, which will become impotent once every country has its own digital currency.
When a country joins NATO, they are signing up to a geostrategy that was historically aimed at weakening the USSR/Russia and keeping the formerly colonised nations across Asia, Africa and Latin America in poverty. Don’t believe me, believe these guys:
According to US foreign policy advisor George Kennan (1948): “we have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population… Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity”.
Kennan (1946) also recognised that: “toward colonial areas and backward or dependent peoples, Soviet policy, even on official plane, will be directed toward weakening of power and influence and contacts of advanced Western nations”.
According to former US National Security Advisor Walt Rostow (1958): “the location, natural resources and populations of the underdeveloped areas are such that, should they become effectively attached to the Communist bloc, the U.S. would become the second power in the world …the economic and military strength of Western Europe and Japan will be diminished… Our military security and our way of life as well as the fate of Western Europe and Japan are at stake in the evolution of the underdeveloped areas”.
In the post-WW2 era, the US-led alliance was confronted with a world in which they would have to purchase imports from the newly liberated postcolonial world, rather than simply expropriating them by administrative means as Britain had previously done.
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was aware of this factor, declaring in 1958 that: “we realise that the countries of Western Europe are interested in the raw materials which they are getting from countries of the East. But this does not in the least mean that the imperialists may impose by force their own predatory terms for the exploitation of the wealth of these countries”, instead, such “raw materials for the Western nations must be ensured …by developing mutually beneficial trade relations, so that those countries may be properly compensated”.
There is no “inter-imperialist rivalry” after WW2 because the former empires lost control of their exploited colonies, so they stopped fighting each other, and huddled under the leadership of the US into a single unified imperialist camp, defined as such by inheriting an interest in keeping the rest of the world poor.