The Western narrative is clear about this question: The Ukraine war began with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Alternatively, it began with the Russian takeover of Crimea in 2014.

It is seldom admitted that the present conflict in Ukraine actually began with the Maidan coup of 2014, organised and supported by elements acting on behalf of the United States, in conjunction with far-right Ukrainian nationalists. That fact is in the public record through Victoria Nuland and WikiLeaks.

Another thing that is seldom mentioned since February 2022 is that Kyiv’s effort to repress or drive out the Russian Ukrainians of Donbass between 2014 and 2022, was the primary driver of the conflict, resulting in the launching of the Russian intervention.

Now Benoit Paré, a French military analyst with the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), who worked for the Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine (SMMU) within the developing conflict in Ukraine between 2015 and 2022, makes it clear where the blame lies. This is contained in a newly translated book, What I Saw in Ukraine, 2015-2022, Diary of an International Monitor.

Paré describes how, having set the course toward conflict within Ukraine as a means of luring Russian forces into the country, Washington put all its efforts into frustrating any attempts at a settlement. This left the Russians with a choice between preventative but costly intervention or accepting a humanitarian disaster of the Russian population of the Donbass and Kyiv gaining NATO Article 5 immunity for its actions.

Paré began his time in Ukraine with the standard Western understanding of the Ukraine conflict.

During the course of the conflict, prior to the Russian SMO, Paré interviewed hundreds of people from all corners of Donbass, and from Odessa and Lviv, “frequenting the opposing camps of an extremely polarized country.” Few people, even among Ukrainians, had been able to learn as much as the foreigner Paré did about “the grey areas of Ukraine.” He had access to many confidential files, denied even to his OSCE colleagues.

Disturbed by the media narrative he was reading, being presented by Western politicians and the media, Paré, who personally observed events on the ground, decided he needed to tell the truth from his accumulated, first-hand knowledge of the situation. He was aware that his revelations would mean he would “probably never again be able to work in my original professional environment.” But he determined, nonetheless, that: “Truth was his only compass” in writing the book.

He was also encouraged by the return of President Trump to the White House and signals that there might be a movement toward ending the conflict. He had become convinced that the conflict had been primarily driven by the Biden administration and Trump had not been as enthusiastic about it. In such circumstances the return of Trump meant that the truth would be more palatable than during the period of war hysteria and lies.

Benoit Paré’s book begins with the beginnings of the conflict, which took place prior to his arrival in the country during 2014 and early 2015. In brief, the Yanukovych Government, had bargained between the EU and Russia about its economic future. It was faced with a dilemma. If it linked itself with Russia, its economic development could continue without basic alteration. If it went to the EU, its industrial economy would be decimated, and it would be deprived of the favourable trading links it had already established with Russia. It put itself on offer to the EU for a sum that would compensate for the loss of industries that would not be viable in the EU and for the loss of subsidised energy from Russia. When the EU would not meet its terms, it turned back to Russia and the EU went frantic with rage over the rejection. Its representatives went to Kiev, made propaganda, and helped to build barricades in the centre of the city, around Maidan.

The fact that the Russian Federation would erect tariff barriers against the Ukraine and charge it world market prices for energy if it joined the EU was presented as Russian intimidation of the Ukraine. But it was simply an expression of the fact that the Russian national economy, which naturally protects itself from the EU/US, would have to extend that protection to its borders with the Ukraine if Ukraine joined the EU – an EU which was contemplating a free trade agreement with the US, with NATO in the background.

With the EU expecting the Ukraine to make sacrifices for the sake of being admitted to the European ideal and Russia making it clear that a Ukraine in a free trade relationship with Europe would encounter tariff barriers at the Russian border the Ukrainian Government accepted a Russian offer, which exceeded what the EU would put up. It was an offer that would enable Ukraine to preserve its industrial economy. It looked good business in which the EU approach had been used to get a better deal from the Russians.

The occupation of the central square in Kiev, Maidan, began immediately. Fortifications were built in it and it became a site of pilgrimage for Western democracy. EU personnel went to Kiev in order to enhance the demonstrations into insurrection. Washington poured money in and took control of the insurrection.

Paré notes that the pivotal event at the start of the conflict was the massacre in Maidan of February 2014 in which up to one hundred demonstrators and fifteen police were killed in the vicinity. This event, which was attributed to President Yanukovych’s security forces, was used to justify his ousting in a CIA backed coup, organised by Nuland.

However, when Professor Ivan Katchanovski of Ottawa University analysed the 2 hours of video, he found that the angle of fire revealed that the shooting that killed many demonstrators came not from the police but from a hotel occupied by far-Right Ukrainian nationalist snipers. The evidence was revealed to a wider evidence in Oliver Stone’s Ukraine on Fire film.

Benoit Paré writes:

“The importance of this event must be fully appreciated. Without the Maidan massacre, Yanukovych would probably not have been overthrown. There would have been no anti-maidan movement in the Russian speaking areas of Ukraine. Russia would not have felt the need to appendix Crimea to protect its naval base at Sebastopol. There would have been no uprisings in the Donbass, no anti-terrorist operation by the Ukrainian army, and therefore no special Russian military operation in 2022. It is all linked, and it all starts with the false-banner massacre on Maidan Square, which set Ukraine on fire, sending it into a downward spiral of death.” (p.172)

When he arrived in Donetsk during July 2015, what Paré encountered was a Ukrainian civil war between Ukrainian nationalists determined to make Ukraine a homogenous nation and separatists in the Donbas aiming to preserve their Russian character. If this could not be preserved within the centralised Ukrainian state they wanted some form of autonomy or separation/integration with Russia if things went further.

Brothers and cousins often fought for different sides in the conflict. There was no Russian involvement, beside the participation of some individual volunteers concerned at the fate of Russians in Ukraine. The feeling in the Donbass was that Putin had let down these people despite his public promises to protect them. Putin was, in fact, desiring an internal Ukrainian solution for the Donbass that ended the war and established proper protections for the Russian culture of the region. He wished to minimise Russian involvement in Ukraine, if at all possible.

When Paré visited the Donbass, he found all the cities, towns and villages frozen in time, in 1991. The buildings, factories and infrastructure were entirely from the Soviet era. Kyiv, and independent Ukraine, had done nothing for the people there. They had been left to rot while all investment had been directed West of the Dnieper, or taken by oligarchs. The Russian population was being punished; with the hope they would leave for Russia.

But after the Maidan a price would be paid for this deliberate neglect that resulted in these Ukrainian citizens feeling not part of the new, independent nation and threatened by its actions.

Early in his mission Paré read a report from the Kramatorsk Human Dimension office of the OSCE. It was about the large number of abductions, by hooded men, of people, many of them teenagers who were suspected of having sympathies with separatists. The people who were abducted were tortured and often disappeared without trace.

The report stated that the hooded men were invariably hard-line Ukrainian nationalists, acting outside the law. The OSCE, which wanted to preserve a pro-Kyiv narrative, buried the report because it conflicted with what they wanted to publicise.

This was the first incident that made Paré aware that the conflict was not how it was being projected publicly in the West. He noted how shelling by Kyiv’s forces also went unreported by the OSCE in the areas he served, while every incident of aggression was blamed on the separatists. When he reported, as part of his impact site analysis duties, Paré found villagers’ testimonies removed in OSCE reports. This was explained on the basis that anything said against Kyiv’s attacks were by people “brainwashed by propaganda.” (p.197) Paré began to conclude that the OSCE was not neutral but was on the side of Ukraine in the conflict.

He witnessed Ukrainian show trials of those accused of “terrorism.” Paré noted that the definition of “terrorism” under the Ukrainian Criminal Code article 258.3 was so broad that virtually anyone who was in any way critical about Kyiv or refused to be pushed around was put on trial and given harsh sentences. He gives a large number of examples of these trials in the book and they resembled the kind of judicial system that the Nazis operated.

Paré concludes that after attending these trials

“we had the impression of facing a totalitarian state, without moral principles, without pity, without humanity, which terrorized its own citizens, hunting down wrong thinkers and monitoring all communications. No one was safe. The system only maintained the appearance of legal proceedings… there was no justice, only a parody of justice. Every trial was like a play, with the end, whatever the twists and turns, already written.” (p.72)

Paré notes that Kyiv never implemented the amnesty agreement agreed at Minsk.

Between 2017 and the beginning of 2018, Poroshenko’s government prepared law to plan the re-integration of the so-called “temporarily occupied” areas of the Donbass. The law in 2018 contained a clause which enabled the suing and financial ruin of all people involved in “occupation governments” even those who were paid by them. This was in direct contradiction with Article 5 of the Package of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements, which provided for general amnesty. This ensured that people in the Donbass fought even harder against Kyiv, knowing there was no way back for them with the Ukrainian authorities.

It became clear to Paré by August 31^st 2015 that the Minsk Agreements were failing. Under the last of the Minsk agreements Donbass was to be given a status within one year of the agreement in February 2015.

Paré recalls:

“On August 31, the Ukrainian Parliament was due to adopt two pieces of legislation that were key to the implementation of the Minsk agreements: A first text creating the status of autonomy for the Donbass (details to be defined later), and the second one changing the Constitution to enable the implementation of the first. The problem was that, while adoption of the first text only required a 50% majority, the second required a two-thirds majority. That day, a crowd of tens of thousands of nationalists gathered in front of the Rada to protest against what they saw as a betrayal. On hearing the news that the first text had been adopted, one of the demonstrators threw a grenade at the police that was forming a security cordon around the Parliament building. Four people died, including three police officers, and dozens were injured. The Rada interrupted its session following these dramatic events, and three parties, including Yulia Timoshenko’s, announced that they would never vote to change the Constitution. This news made it mathematically impossible to amend the latter, and to implement the political part of the Minsk agreements.

I then understood that these agreements were dead…

August 31 demonstrated that the Ukrainian nationalists, despite being in the minority in terms of votes, were capable of imposing their views on Parliament, and therefore on the entire nation. And this phenomenon which began with the Maidan, was only set to become more pronounced.” (p.58)

This, the most crucial event, in the failure of the Minsk agreements, is omitted in most Western accounts (including Wikipedia), which go to great lengths to blame the separatists, or Russia, for their demise. But it is this which was the crucial failure, no doubt, and a major step toward full-scale war.

Paré recalls that, despite the impression given in Western media, the vast majority of ceasefire violations were committed by Kyiv’s forces. The Ukrainian nationalists,

“… were behind most of the firefights, as many of them only dreamed of retaking the field by force. And provoking their opponents to retaliate enabled them to justify counterattacks, but also to blame the other side for not respecting the Minsk agreements. This kind of manoeuvre allowed them to make people forget that Kiev was doing nothing to implement the political aspects of these agreements, which were the most important, since they were about fundamental problems.” (p.206)

Statistics of the OSCE from 2017 to 2020 showed that two-thirds of the civilian deaths in the Ukraine civil war were caused by Kyiv’s forces. Small scale offences were continually launched by Kyiv’s forces. The vast majority of casualties, civilian and military, in the conflict were inflected on the separatists during this period, around double those on Kyiv’s side. The OSCE report provoked an outcry from the Ukrainian authorities who blamed Russian observers for the false figures, even though the reports did everything to minimise Kyiv’s responsibility for aggression.

In September 2018, angry at the suppression of truth by his superiors, Paré penned a letter to them, detailing their failure to publish the facts of the conflict he was observing, quantifying and reporting – but to no avail.

At this point the Ukrainian people were growing tired of the mess created by the events of 2014 and the civil war and wanted Poroshenko out. So, the President decided to speed up the nationalist agenda through the “One Army, One Language, One Faith” campaign.

In one of his last acts, the increasingly unpopular Poroshenko pushed through legislation on the Protection of the Ukrainian Language as an Official Language. The aim was to gradually impose the Ukrainian language in all parts of the state. This covered all areas of life: administration, education, media, science, economics, sports and health. Everything was to be done in Ukrainian. To appease the West, European languages were exempt from the law – only Russian was prohibited.

This was in contravention to the Constitution, which officially protected the Russian language.

The Law was adopted on April 25, 2018, 5 days after President Poroshenko’s heavy defeat in the Presidential election to Zelensky and was pushed through by the Speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament, a founder of the Ukraine National Social Party. It was signed by the ex-President on May 14, before the Russian-speaking Zelensky took office.

Paré had great hopes for Zelensky after he won a landslide 73% of the vote to become President of Ukraine in May 2018. He promised change in the dynamics of the conflict and an end to the war in the Donbass, making a settlement possible in the civil war on the terms of the Minsk agreements.

Zelensky, a popular comedian, came to prominence as the TV “Servant of the People” fictional character, who had risen to power and cleansed his country of corruption. He named his newly-established party “Servant of the People” and it won a majority in the Rada with 254 out of 450 seats. Nationalist parties were nearly wiped out and the pro-Minsk parties, along with “Servant of the People”  gained the two-thirds majority needed to change the Constitution. Fiction seemed to be coming reality. Now, all that was required was the will to stop the conflict.

This situation in which the Ukrainian people had asserted their will to end the civil war and come to a settlement to preserve the state caused deep concern within 2 minority groups in Ukraine.

Firstly, with the hard-line, semi-fascist, nationalists who had made Maidan possible on the ground and who were the most ardent advocates of violent action against the Russian Ukrainians of the Donbass. Secondly, with the Western-sponsored NGOs, which had spread like a cancer through the Ukrainian body politic, and which worried that the take-over of Ukraine was endangered by the democracy and its new conciliatory president and parliament.

These 2 groups – fascists and agents of a foreign power – set to overturn the democratic will in Ukraine and maintain the course of the country toward conflict with Russia set in 2014.

On May 23, 2019 the Ukraine Crisis Media Centre, an organisation funded by the US State Department, USAID, the NED, and NATO, published a radical public letter, signed by over 70 Western sponsored NGOs in which “red lines” were set for the new President Zelensky in all areas including security, political, diplomatic, economic and cultural spheres.

Among other things the statement forbade the new President to attempt to modify the anti-Russian laws passed during President Poroshenko’s term, including the legislation on language, education, the media, and the new Ukrainian Orthodox Church, on pain of “political instability” and “deterioration in international relations”. This was a warning that Washington would take a dim view of Ukraine and stop all its support if the new government and Parliament persisted with Minsk and a settlement of the conflict in Donbass.

Paré recalls:

“In December 2024, on the Joe Rogan show, Mike Benz commented on this letter whose existence had been largely forgotten. He called it “the red lines memo” describing it as a direct warning from the US State Department to Zelensky. Getting the message across publicly via a consortium of NGOs was a way, as in 2013-2014 with the Maidan protests, of giving an appearance of Ukrainian popular legitimacy to an operation teleguided by Washington. The message was that Zelensky was not immune from another coup d’état if he dared to deviate from the priorities drawn up by his country’s true masters. With hindsight it is enough to reread the text today to be convinced that it was a near exhaustive summary of all the objectives of American policy in Ukraine. That is why Zelensky changed little or nothing from his predecessors’ policy.

As a result, the new majority never went back on the language law and even seemed to apply it without a second thought. It was as if the accelerated de-Russification of the country – since everyone could understand that this was what was at stake – was unstoppable.” (pp.466-7)

The ultra-nationalists told Zelensky that he would be hanged if he implemented Minsk. His family was also threatened.

Zelensky was, therefore, caught between the US deep state and violent Ukrainian nationalists. They operated as a double act, with the CIA running the Ukrainian nationalists and directing their fury toward Zelensky and the new members of the Rada. This was during the latter part of the Trump Presidency, when he had been disabled by Russiagate.

The new President and parliament subsequently caved in to the US and ultra-nationalist pressure and the Ukrainian civil war intensified toward a national war.

Paré resigned from the OSCE on March 12, 2020 but joined the election observation mission in Ukraine at the end of September 2020 and then returned to the Monitoring Mission in December 2021, when he was sent to Odessa. At that point Trump was out of the Whitehouse and Biden was President.

Paré recalls “the march toward confrontation,” during this period:

“When we look in detail at what happened in 2021, we see that it was in the wake of the Democrats taking office in the United States, on January 20, that there was a major acceleration in the radicalisation of Ukraine.

In addition to the closure of opposition channels, just 13 days after Biden’s inauguration… Zelensky signed Decree 117/2021, which ruled on the measures Ukraine would take in Crimea, when the territory would be retaken, in one way or another, including by force. The reading of this decree was reminiscent of the famous 2018 law on the reintegration of the Donbass.

A few months later, on August 31, 2021, the USA and Ukraine signed a Strategic Defence Framework, in which the USA pledged “to work together to advance Ukraine’s military capabilities,” including its “interoperability with NATO.” The White House publicized a joint declaration with Ukraine, aimed at relaunching the strategic partnership between the two countries, emphasizing security and defense issues, and in particular resistance to “Russian aggression” in the Donbass and Crimea. The text renewed the United States support for Ukraine’s aspirations to join NATO, already expressed at the organizations summit in June of the same year.

On November 10, 2021, new Ukrainian-American Charter was adopted, using the same language as the September Declaration, with even greater emphasis on “Russian aggression” and cooperation in all areas, first and foremost, security.

In fact, throughout the year, the United States talked incessantly about Ukraine’s integration into NATO, but the NATOisation of Ukraine, while not formal, was already well underway. And so was its Americanisation. When the Russians read the agreements signed between the two countries, they could guess the next step would be the deployment of American missiles in Ukraine, Moscow’s absolute fear.

At the same time, the Minsk Agreements were at a complete standstill, due to a lack of Ukrainian and Western determination to see them implemented…

In November, the Russians published exchanges of diplomatic telegrams with the French and Germans, in which Moscow asked the sponsors of the Minsk Agreements to try to convince Kiev to finally negotiate directly with the separatists. But Berlin and Paris replied that they could not force the Ukrainian’s hand. The publication of these exchanges seemed to be a message to the world that the Minsk Agreements were dead.

At the same time, Ukraine’s most nationalist movements were honoured and promoted. On November 3 Dmytro Yaroch ex-founder of the Right Sektor was appointed advisor to the Ukrainian armed forces Chief of Staff… Yaroch was claiming that war with Russia was “inevitable”…

To complete the picture, we can also mention that the eradication of the Russian language and culture in Ukraine was going crescendo and seemed irreversible, with the entry into force of several measures decided in the 2019 laws.

Finally, on December 15, Russia proposed to the United States and NATO a treaty to put an end to the enlargement of NATO towards the countries of the former USSR, which so worried Russia. But the response was negative.

You would think that if the US and Ukraine had made a list of everything they could do to provoke Russia, they had ticked all the boxes.

So from Russia’s point of view, all the political, diplomatic, cultural and military indicators had turned red by 2021. Nothing seemed able to reverse Ukraine’s march towards confrontation.

It is hard not to think back to Arestovych’s (Oleksiy Arestovych, former advisor to the Ukrainian President’s Office) statements in 2019 calling for “a major war with Russia by 2022.” From their point of view, it could even be considered ideal to push Russia to attack first, which would then give Ukraine the status of innocent victim of Russian aggression, allowing it to enjoy at least the moral support of the entire world.” (pp.546-9)

As Paré notes, parallel with the deteriorating political situation, from February 16 2022, the OSCE Monitoring Mission recorded a sharp increase in ceasefire violations on the part of Kyiv’s forces on the Donbass front. Shelling of civilian areas increased drastically with 519 explosions in Luhansk and 122 in Donetsk Oblasts.

The Ukrainians launched a number of false-flag operations on the day, 16 February, Washington had predicted for a Russian attack. But the US intelligence was faulty, despite the provocations. For February 21 the Monitoring Mission counted 332 in Donetsk and 1,149 in Luhansk, marking a major UAF offensive using attack-drones, missiles, heavy artillery and rocket launchers. On the following day the figures were 345 and 1075 explosions respectively with 1600 incidents in total. It seems that the offensive was mainly designed, and encouraged by the US, to lure the Russians into Ukraine.

On February 21, the Russian President finally recognised the self-proclaimed Donbass People’s Republics, putting an end to his exhausted faith in the Minsk Agreements, which the Ukrainians showed no sign in honouring. Up to that point Putin had preferred that these regions remain within the Ukrainian state, with Russian rights protected through some form of autonomy. Now it was clear to him that the nearly 4 million people of the Donbass faced a potential genocide. He announced the imminent signing of a “Treaty of Friendship and Mutual Assistance” with Donetsk and Lugansk, to counteract the aggressive treaties concluded between Washington and Kyiv.

Putin gave Kyiv one last chance, warning it to “cease hostilities immediately” against the 4 million people of the Donbass. If Kyiv did not desist from its aggression “further bloodshed will rest entirely on the conscience of the Ukrainian regime in power.” (p.582)

On February 23 the Donbass Peoples Republics requested immediate assistance against “Ukrainian aggression” and the following day, the Russian Special military Operation was launched, intended as a limited military intervention, using a small expeditionary force, designed to force Kyiv into halting their war on the Donbass.

Putin insisted the intervention was legal under Article 51 of the UN Charter, that gave the right to collective self-defence against armed attack. It was a protective operation with no intention to occupy Ukrainian territory. It was a reluctant Russian intervention in the civil war in Ukraine between the Ukrainian nationalist forces of Kyiv wishing to impose a homogeneous character state on the Russian-Ukrainian population of the Donbass and Crimea.

Benoit Paré, at the end of his book, includes ‘Some thoughts on the Russian-Ukrainian War’ from his experiences about Putin’s decision to intervene in Ukraine in February 2022:

“If Ukraine became a member of NATO and decided to take Crimea back by force of arms, this could automatically trigger a war between Russia and NATO. And for the Russians, this was the worst-case scenario. So according to their logic, to avoid this risk, it was better not only to attack first as a preventative measure, but to do so as soon as possible. For they were perfectly aware that, as time went by, Ukraine was building up its military potential, even though it was not a member of NATO.

Realising this implacable logic frightened me. So afterwards I try to suppress this idea deep inside me, which I did not want to believe in…

Many people speculate as to when President Putin made the decision to massively commit Russian troops to Ukraine. Perhaps historians will find out one day.

In the light of the elements combined in this book it is reasonable to think that it was during the year 2021 that a hypothesis of an armed intervention could be germinated in the mind of the Russian president or his entourage. It is in this period of the Biden presidency that we find deep motivations for this.

But before deciding to intervene, Putin may have been hoping that the concentration of Russian forces on Ukraine’s borders could influence the situations somewhat, and spare him the need in order to intervene. It is conceivable that he was keeping the option of whether or not to launch the operation open until the very last moment.

It remains to be seen why the Americans took the risk of announcing the invasion date of February 16. Did the announcement dissuade the Russians from attacking on that day? If the Americans were convinced that the Russian attack was imminent, how certain were they? Had the Russian decision really been taken?

Originally, I suspected that the Russians had provoked the rising tension on the front from February 16 onwards to justify recognizing the Donbass republics, and then responding to their call for help… However, the events from February 16 to 23, 2022, tend to demonstrate a continuous Ukrainian/American provocation. It is not ridiculous to imagine that if the Biden administration had initially announced that the Russian attack would take place on February 16, it was because they knew that this was the day of the scheduled start of the Ukrainian actions, in a context where they also knew that the Russians, having ran out of patience, were on the verge of launching an Intervention. This date would not have been chosen at random, since it was just before the Munich Conference which would serve to rally the entire West behind the aggressed Ukraine… When the Anglo-Saxons announced on February 18 the withdrawal of their nationals by the 21st, they knew then that the Ukrainian provocation had begun, and that the Russian response was more than likely. With the CIA bases along the border, there was enough to anticipate Russian movements.” (pp.604-6)

Benoit Paré’s book, What I Saw in Ukraine, 2015-2022, Diary of an International Monitor, along withconfirming everything written here over the last 4 years or so, also reveals the misinformation and disinformation which has deluged the West about the causes of the conflict in Ukraine, and who was in actuality really responsible for that war.