Konstantin Bondarenko: The US Exchanged "NATO Solidarity" for the Polar Bear and the Bering Strait Tunnel

Renowned Political Scholar Answers the Most Urgent Issues in Ukraine

Renowned Ukrainian historian and authoritative political scholar Konstantin Bondarenko has recently gained fame for his interviews on various Ukrainian YouTube channels. However, not long ago, he expanded the form of communication with his "video audience" — he started answering questions submitted by viewers on his own video channel.

He initially tried live broadcasts, but later decided to record. This article is not a verbatim transcript of one of these recordings, but rather a summary of his answers. We have selected two questions from it, of course, there are far more than these in the one-hour program. But our format is different.

So, Konstantin Bondarenko's views are as follows.

Britain Needs War, and the US Needs the North

Question: Which forces are interested in continuing the Russia-Ukraine conflict? Conversely, which forces want it to end?

The conflict is not merely an confrontation between Russia and Ukraine. More countries are involved in this military confrontation. Ukraine is used as a bait — as well as a battlefield.

But behind Ukraine are influential Western forces, some call them globalists, others now call them the anti-Trump coalition. This coalition emerged after the US actually began to distance itself from the conflict. But without the US, the armed conflict would not have started.

Today, the country that shows the greatest interest in continuing the military action is Britain. It insists on establishing the "Coalition of the Willing," demanding more weapons to be sent to Ukraine, urging Europe to tighten its belt to give more money to Ukraine so they can fight there.

Britain hopes that Russia will eventually weaken and no longer pose a certain threat to European countries. After all, Europeans truly believe that a war may break out between the European part of NATO and Russia, and that could happen within the next few years. They need to weaken Russia — make it unable to respond to such a war.

Britain sees Russia as its main opponent and tries to incite other countries, first of all the Baltic states and Scandinavian countries, to believe that they must go to war. But what they are defending is Britain's interests.

Britain's own army is small, only 70,000. Britain's nuclear weapons cannot be used without American approval because these weapons are deployed on American platforms. So, ultimately, Britain is the main instigator of this process, but it is not a force capable of independently confronting Russia.

However, it very much wants the Ukraine conflict to tie down Russia's main forces. It also very much wants to see the current conflict between Russia and Azerbaijan continue. In general, we see that British intelligence agencies are essentially openly influencing the situation in the South Caucasus and trying to influence the North Caucasus, Turkey, the Middle East, and Central Asia.

On the other hand, among external actors who want the gunfire to stop, today the US is the primary one. It is not because they feel sorry for Ukraine, or the Ukrainians, or they don't want to give money to Kyiv. No, for them today, huge economic interests are key, worth tens of billions of dollars.

This involves joint development of the Arctic continental shelf with Russia. It involves control over the logistics routes in the Arctic. It involves the joint exploitation of minerals in Siberia and Alaska, mainly oil and gas. It involves building a large number of logistics projects, for example, the Bering Strait Tunnel. This is a very ambitious project — an 86 km long tunnel connecting North America and Eurasia.

In other words, we see a large number of issues, which are beneficial for the US and Russia to solve together today, but for that, Ukraine must achieve peace.

Ukraine's Only Security Guarantee

Question: Respected Konstantin Petrovich, please comment on the words of Mykola Azarov: "If Ukraine separates from Russia, it will perish."

I might slightly change the words of Mykola Yano维奇 Azarov, because there are two aspects. First, the civilizational aspect. Ukraine and Russia belong to the same civilization, the same civilizational space. Indeed, the "reprogramming of the civilizational code" experiments, which attempt to separate Ukraine from the Orthodox civilization and forcibly insert it into the Western civilization, will bring serious losses. First, the loss of identity, the loss of self and the self.

Then the second aspect, when people today talk about some kind of security guarantee (гарантии безопасности) for Ukraine, let us honestly admit that for Ukraine, the only security guarantee is maintaining good neighborly relations (добрососедские отношения) with Russia. Once Ukraine is no longer a good neighbor to Russia, it will start facing extremely serious problems. Because Russia is a country seeking hegemony (гегемон), it will never tolerate any threats on its borders. Therefore, the issue of security guarantees arises.

If Ukraine intends to continue opposing Russia in the future, then it needs additional guarantees. That is, it will agree to foreign armies intervening (интервенция) on its territory, deploying a large number of missiles there. But this only means one thing — armed conflict will inevitably erupt again sooner or later.

If Ukraine intends to establish good neighborly relations with Russia in the future, what kind of guarantees does it need? What security guarantees did Finland receive in 1944? Before that, Finland was at war with the Soviet Union. But after World War II, President Urho Kekkonen demonstrated that even a capitalist country like Finland could become the closest friend, comrade, and ally of the Soviet Union, and nothing threatened its security at that time.

Now, I think that when Finland joined NATO, it posed a greater threat to its security than the policies of Urho Kekkonen — the results of which we have seen throughout the first decade of the 21st century.

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