By David Stockman - March 11, 2025

It goes without saying that the Donald can never get enough of the limelight. But recently in a live Oval Office broadcast seen around the world that thirst for public attention may have actually changed the course of history. And very much for the good—even if the trigger was pulled by a third rate actor who couldn’t even figure out how to properly brown-nose one of the most capacious egos on the planet.

For all practical purposes, therefore, Washington’s sick adventure in the destruction of a fake nation—along with the hideously unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of real people who inhabit the Ukrainian territory—is now over.

Zelensky will soon be gone to a hideaway in such as Costa Rica or an unmarked grave, as the case may be. Thereafter a caretaker regent for the rump of what is now the Potemkin State that Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev built with Bolshevik blood and guns will sign-up to a Trump/Putin ceasefire and partition deal—the latter having been in the making ever since the yoke of communism was lifted in 1991.

Indeed, the final splintering of “Ukraine” in the Oval Office itself will surely soon unmask the rationality-defying farce that has been the Washington/NATO proxy war against Russia in its own “borderlands”. The latter term, of course, being the meaning of the word “ukraine” in Russian.

And we do mean monumental farce. As the most recent desultory chapter has unfolded since February 2022, in fact, the US and EU combined have spent the staggering sum of nearly $400 billion to conduct a Demolition Derby on Russia’s doorstep in order for what?

Apparently, to pleasure the arms merchants of the US and Europe with a grand occasion for the sale of beaucoup new weapons to replenish depleted NATO arsenals. And all in the name of more of the same old baloney about collective security and a “rules based international order”.

But that’s all just beltway bullshit. There has not been an iota of America’s homeland security implicated in the fate of the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic after it split off from the expired corpse of the Soviet Union in 1991. And since “Ukraine” was a communist-built simulacrum of a nation, it was not destined to last, anyway—nor would its demise have been even a little bit noted or briefly remembered by the world at large.

That is to say, the wholly artificial state of “Ukraine” embodies the very historical metaphor associated with the borderland territories that Russia had acquired, conquered, populated and developed in the late 18th century under the stewardship of Grigory Potemkin. The latter was the nation’s chief minister, who literally had an intimate relationship with the Russian Empress, Catherine the Great.

After the Catherine’s 1783 acquisition of Crimea from the Ottoman Empire and the liquidation of a small Cossack principality on the lower Dnieper River called the Zaporozhian Sich, which had governed the adjacent territories for upwards of 200 years, Potemkin became governor of the region. He promptly named these new territories Novorossiya or “New Russia” in honor of his paramour/ruler. At length, Russian people, capital and commerce poured into the theretofore largely empty steppes.

Potemkin’s major tasks were to pacify and rebuild what had been a war-torn region by bringing in Russian settlers and laying the ground work for a new flourishing of farms, industry, towns and trade. In 1787, as renewed war was about to break out between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, Catherine II, with her court and several ambassadors, made an unprecedented six month tour of New Russia, navigating down the Dnieper River (blue thread on the map) to inspect her new colonies.

One purpose of this trip was to impress Russia’s allies prior to the war. To help accomplish this, Potemkin was said to have set up “mobile villages” on the banks of the Dnieper River. As soon as the barge carrying the Empress and ambassadors arrived, Potemkin’s men, dressed as peasants, would populate the village. Once the barge left, the village was disassembled, then rebuilt downstream overnight.

Whatever the degree to which the story is apocryphal, the underlying metaphor could not be more apt. To wit, the entire territory from Lugansk and Donetsk (i.e. the Donbass) down through Mariupol on the Sea of Azov and on both banks of he Dnieper, to Odessa on the Black Sea coast, was henceforth known as New Russia and was labeled as such per the 1897 map depicted below.

Moreover, search other maps of the pre-1917 era as you may, but you will find no country called Ukraine because . . .

[SNIP]