Over the past two weeks, media headlines worldwide have been dominated by the Russian military intervention in Ukraine – launched in response to almost nine years of Western provocations, beginning with the CIA and MI6 orchestrated Euromaidan color revolution in November 2013, following then-President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to suspend an EU trade deal in favor of closer ties with Russia, which in turn would lead the predominantly ethnic Russian Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics in the eastern Donbass region breaking away from Kiev’s control in April 2014, the catalyst for this secession being the anti-Russian far-right sympathizers that would make up the Western-backed post-Maidan government of Petro Poroshenko.

A near eight-year-long war on both Republics would follow, involving Kiev-supported neo-Nazi factions such as Azov Battalion and Right Sector. The war would eventually lead to an estimated 14,000 deaths, a conflict that Moscow would seek to resolve through diplomatic means via the Minsk Agreements – a federalization solution in which Donetsk and Lugansk would be granted a degree of autonomy whilst still remaining under Ukrainian rule. However, the failure of Kiev to implement its side of the agreements, as well as the ongoing attacks on the ethnic Russians in the Donbass and the inevitability that Ukraine would ultimately go on to become a NATO member and host weapons and troops intended to attack Russia, would ultimately force Moscow into launching a military intervention into its Western neighbor in order to demilitarise and de-Nazify the country.

Two weeks into the conflict, it has become apparent from the corporate media narrative of the ‘Ukrainian resistance’ that the goal of the US and its allies, with little regard for the Ukrainian civilians they claim to care about, is to drag Moscow into a military quagmire in the second-largest country in Europe. This tactic is one with historical usage against the Kremlin: In 1979, at the height of the Cold War, the CIA and MI6 would begin a covert operation of arming and training Islamist fundamentalists, including Osama Bin Laden, known as the Mujahideen, who would go on to wage war on the then-Socialist government of Afghanistan – leading to a ten-year-long Soviet military intervention, something which many commentators have seen as a contributing factor to the subsequent break-up of the bloc in 1991. Indeed, Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to US President Jimmy Carter when Operation Cyclone was launched in 1979, would later recount in a 1998 interview how drawing the USSR into a costly military intervention was a motivating factor in its inception.

Despite the intention of the Neocons and the war lobby to seemingly draw the Russian Federation into an Iraq war-style quagmire, there also appears to be an element who favors an approach that would lead to far more grave consequences – a Libya-style no-fly zone over Ukraine, involving the shooting down of Russian aircraft by NATO, which would undoubtedly trigger a catastrophic third world war involving the use of nuclear weapons.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a newfound darling of the Western media since their coverage of the Russian intervention began, has repeatedly called for the implementation of a no-fly zone over his countries’ skies. World Economic Forum-linked Ukrainian activist Daria Kaleniuk went viral with her plea for British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to intervene militarily against Russian forces, and a recent poll by corporate media outlet Reuters found that 74% of Americans supported a no-fly zone over Ukraine – with it remaining unclear on whether those polled were aware of the nuclear apocalypse that such a measure would entail.

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Despite this push for Western military intervention in Ukraine, US President Joe Biden, Boris Johnson and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg have made it clear that such a measure is off the table, each citing the global nuclear conflict that would undoubtedly follow as the reason. Though this may seem a reason to be optimistic that the current Ukraine crisis won’t develop into World War III, it does not however rule out the far more hawkish members of the regime-change lobby seeking to carry out a false flag operation in Ukraine, one with the intention of implicating Moscow, and to push public and political opinion even more towards support for a NATO intervention, a tactic with very recent usage.

In 2017, the Syrian Arab Republic had been in the six-year-long grip of a Western-backed regime change operation launched in response to Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s 2009 refusal to allow US-allied Qatar to build a pipeline through his country, one that would have undermined his relationship with key-ally Russia. Like the aforementioned Operation Cyclone, Timber Sycamore would see the arming, funding and training of Wahhabi terrorist groups by the West and its allies, with the intention of removing Assad’s secular government and replacing it with a Western-friendly leadership.

In June 2013, Iran and Hezbollah would intervene in the ensuing proxy war at the request of the Syrian government, providing a key role in assisting Damascus in repelling the Western-backed terrorist campaign. What would perhaps be the most decisive factor in turning the tide of the conflict in the Arab Republic’s favor, however, would come in September 2015 - a Russian air campaign, again at the request of the Syrian government, targeting the terrorist groups, allowing Damascus to retake the vast swathes of Syrian territory which had come under their control, such as the key city of Aleppo.

With the Syrian regime-change operation not going as planned, Washington’s Neocons would soon resort to desperate – and reckless – measures.

On the 4th of April 2017, a false flag chemical attack took place in the Syrian town of Khan Shaykhun, the blame immediately being placed on Damascus and resulting in the then-US administration of Donald Trump launching cruise missile strikes on a Syrian government airbase three days later. Washington's action was a highly provocative action, though one that just stopped short of the full-scale military intervention that the regime-change lobby had clamored for. Undeterred, the same tactic would be carried out a year later in the city of Douma, which again would result in the US, Britain and France launching airstrikes against Syrian government targets, also just stopping short of a full-scale intervention.

This is not to discount the grave seriousness of NATO launching a military strike against a Russian ally and the potential consequences that that action could have entailed. Nevertheless, should a similar false flag operation take place in Ukraine, perhaps also involving chemical weapons or a nuclear reactor as Moscow itself has warned of in recent days, even a ‘limited’ strike against Russian military infrastructure would immediately place the world on an irreversible path to the gravest consequence of all - nuclear war.