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By Evan Reif

Why was Nazi Butcher Botsun at Bucha?

6 Apr 2022 – This story raises an important challenge to the official storyline of the Bucha massacre promoted in the mainstream media. The U.S. military has admitted that it cannot independently verify Ukrainian accounts of the atrocity alleging that Russian troops were behind it. The Russian Defense Ministry reported that Russian troops had left Bucha on March 30, while “the evidence of crimes” emerged only four days later, after Ukrainian Security Service officers had arrived in the town outside Kyiv. The Ministry stressed that on March 31, the town’s Mayor Anatoly Fedoruk had confirmed in a video address that there were no Russian troops in Bucha. However, he did not say a word about civilians shot dead on the street with their hands tied behind their backs. Reif’s article points to the presence of a notorious neo-Nazi commander in Bucha at the time of the massacre, suggesting that he was a key figure implicated in it. — Editors

Sergey Korotkikh is a man with many names. Botsun, Malyuta. Bandit. Terrorist. Nazi. All of them are fitting.

Born in 1974 in Tolyatti, USSR, his early life is not well documented. It is known that, as a child, his family moved to Belarus, where he would live for several decades. He served in the Soviet Marines as a young man, and allegedly attended the KGB Academy in 1994 (Belarus retained the name KGB for its secret police but there is no relation other than the name to the Soviet-era KGB) and was expelled in 1996 for his involvement with center-right anti-Lukashenko groups. [Alexander Luakashenko is the socialist leader of Belarus since 1994 who is allied with Vladimir Putin].

In 1999, Korotkikh joined the Belarussian chapter of Russian National Unity (RNU), his first neo-Nazi organization. The gang mostly sustained itself through petty gangsterism and racketeering, at which Korotkikh excelled. His training and skills meant that he rose quickly up the ranks, becoming one of its most feared muscle men.

Later that year he was involved in a fight with two of his former comrades in the Belarussian Popular Front. While much has been made of this encounter that made him appear as a stooge of Lukashenko, this was his only altercation with BPF activists as far as anyone knows. It was brutal, however, with some accounts saying Sergey beat one of the BPF men to death, which Sergey denies.

In 2001 the leader and founder of the RNU, Gleb Samoilov, was murdered while standing at the entrance of his home. Sergey was a prime suspect, but he and all other RNU members refused to co-operate with the police so the case was dropped. The RNU fell apart soon after that and Sergey moved to Russia in 2001. In 2004, he founded the National Socialist Society (NSO), which quickly became one of the wealthiest and most dangerous neo-Nazi organizations in Russia.

Unlike most other groups at the time, the NSO had a rigid hierarchy and offered military-style training to its members. It was able to pay its members a generous salary thanks to the backing of gangster Maxim Gritsay, which made it far more attractive than other Nazi groups.

The group itself could be the subject of many articles, but under the leadership of Korotkikh it carried out countless murders, robberies, extortion schemes and even bombings. It would become so successful and wealthy that, when finally shut down in 2010, the Russian authorities would find over 200 million rubles in its accounts.

In 2007, Korotkikh had himself filmed murdering two innocent Caucasian immigrants against the backdrop of a swastika flag in a video entitled “The Execution of a Dag [Dagestani] and a Tajik.” This video was so vile that it was initially believed to be a fake, but was quickly found by Russian prosecutors to be legitimate. The footage spread like wildfire throughout the internet and caused an outrage, possibly provoking the previously reluctant Russian authorities to action.

Only a few months thereafter, Korotkikh was expelled from the NSO. The reasons for this are not entirely clear, with the official NSO statement accusing him of theft and “financial mismanagement” which were likely true, however, almost certainly not the whole story. Over the next few years, Russian authorities launched a comprehensive attack on the remainder of the organization, arresting nearly all its members for a combined 28 counts of murder.

Sergey, however was untouched by this crackdown. At this point, rumors of police and/or intelligence collaboration also began to emerge. While I do believe he collaborated with the police to save his own skin, his ties to the FSB are much less clear. Ukrainian hackers have released what they say are chats between Sergey and his FSB handlers (now scrubbed from the site, for reasons unknown); however, while Sergey’s participation is clear, we have only their word that the other party is FSB.

While the content is suspicious—discussing smuggling, payment for illicit activities and so on—it is not out of the ordinary for a gangster, which Sergey very much still is. At one point, Sergey says he does not trust FSB, and it is specifically denied that he will be working for them.

I should point out here that there are very few trustworthy sources regarding Botsun, his life and his activities until about 2014. He is a loudmouth who loves publicity, with active YouTube, Instagram, and Telegram channels. I will not link to them to avoid giving this thug any more fame or fortune.

He loves to sit down for long interviews with anyone who will have him. His stories seem to grow ever more fantastical with each telling, claiming to have been a mercenary in the Middle East, in South America, and the founder of a Private Military Contractor (there is a company registered in his name called X-Trident, but I have found no evidence of its activities and it is registered out of an MMA gym).

The only evidence ever provided is the word of a scumbag Nazi thug or his equally repugnant Nazi friends, and these are not exactly trustworthy people.

I do not believe that he is an FSB agent or informer currently. He probably was one previously, but there are a variety of reasons I believe he went rogue, or perhaps defected to the other side.

Chief among them is that, upon arriving in Ukraine in 2014, he quickly became one of Azov’s top soldiers and has spent his entire time in Ukraine brutally slaughtering the separatists the FSB is backing.

It seems rather counterintuitive for the FSB to hire someone to kill its other employees, and while many liberals claim he is a provocateur, Ukraine had plenty of home-grown provocateurs long before Botsun arrived. It would not have been necessary to import terrorists into post-Maidan Ukraine. As for the second reason, I will elaborate below.

Living in a Nazi’s Paradise

After the destruction of the NSO, Sergey kept a low profile for several years. Very little is known about his activities during 2010-2014. Uncharacteristically of him, he does not seem to want to talk about it.

It is likely that his betrayal of his former comrades ruined his reputation and earning potential among Russian Nazis, and his extensive criminal background meant legitimate work was not possible. If he became a mercenary as he claims, this would most likely have been when he did so.

When the Maidan coup occurred in 2014, however, Sergey saw an opportunity. The ground has rarely been more fertile for a bloodthirsty fascist thug to ply his trade than 2014 Ukraine.

In 2014, Sergey moved to Ukraine. He did not just join Azov: By his own admission he was one of its original members and has been a military leader since day one. While this should be taken with a grain of salt, I have yet to find any information to refute it. His skills and experience meant that he climbed the ranks very rapidly in the early days of Azov.

He would become its first intelligence leader, a leader of the civic corps and eventually leader of Azov special forces. Once Poroshenko legitimized Azov as part of Ukraine’s security apparatus, Sergey was given command of a Ukrainian federal police force.

Sergey was a busy boy in his new home. Beyond playing an important role in the daily atrocities carried out by Azov and Ukrainian forces, he was also incredibly active in Azov’s “business ventures,” including racketeering and extortion. Kharkov became his fiefdom, one which he ruled with an iron fist. Between this and generous funding from Ukrainian gangster Ihor Kholomoisky, Botsun became very wealthy, amassing a fortune of more than a million euros by 2015. He would even acquire a private jet, an L-39 Albatross. This advanced jet trainer can be configured for a variety of combat roles.

He would ruthlessly consolidate power, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake, while also gaining friends in high places, including former Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, whose son Oleksandr trained at Botsun’s MMA gym, and even Petro Poroshenko himself.

Despite his incredibly sordid background, he was the first foreign fighter to receive Ukrainian citizenship, as a reward for his service (torturing, murdering and robbing) in the anti-terrorist operation zone (ATO). In response to widespread condemnation, the SBU carried out exhaustive background checks.

While I know the Ukrainian government of Poroshenko was incredibly corrupt and incompetent, it beggars belief that it would allow a man with so many red flags to walk in the door unless it was very sure he was not working for the enemy. Even Poroshenko is not THAT stupid. This also would have given Sergey a huge incentive to come into the Ukrainian camp and stay there.

All of this leads us to Bucha, Ukraine. What has been widely publicized is the massacre of civilians that took place there on the outskirts of Kyiv some time between March 31 and April 2, 2022.

What has not been so widely publicized is that the Nazi murderer and terrorist, a well-paid agent of the Ukrainian state, Sergey “Botsun” Korotkikh was not only among the first Ukrainian forces in the town along with his squad of terrorists, he was making jokes about shooting civilians as he entered. He would later happily post these videos on his official telegram channel.

At 6 seconds, you can hear the dialogue, a rough translation of which is:

“There are guys without blue armbands, can I shoot them?”

“Fuck yeah.”

The Ukrainian government clearly has a lot of explaining to do. Not just for allowing this bloodthirsty Nazi terrorist free reign in Donbas, not just for making him rich, not just for arming and supporting his death squads, not just for granting him citizenship, status, and power within its society, but for allowing this right-wing fanatic to breathe the same air as decent people.

I doubt we will ever receive satisfactory explanations.

Evan Reif was born in a small mining town in South Dakota as the son of a miner and a librarian.

11 April 2022

Source: www.transcend.org

By George Eaton

The US professor, now 93, on the climate catastrophe and the threat of nuclear war.

6 Apr 2022 – It was as a ten-year-old that Noam Chomsky first confronted the perils of foreign aggression. “The first article that I wrote for the elementary school newspaper was on the fall of Barcelona [in 1939],” Chomsky recalled when we spoke recently via video call. It charted the advance of the “grim cloud of fascism” across the world. “I haven’t changed my opinion since, it’s just gotten worse,” he sardonically remarked. Due to the climate crisis and the threat of nuclear war, Chomsky told me, “we’re approaching the most dangerous point in human history… We are now facing the prospect of destruction of organised human life on Earth.”

At the age of 93, as perhaps the world’s most cited living scholar, Chomsky could be forgiven for retreating from the public sphere. But in an era of permanent crisis, he retains the moral fervour of a young radical – more preoccupied with the world’s mortality than his own. He is a walking advertisement for Dylan Thomas’s injunction – “Do not go gentle into that good night” – or for what Chomsky calls “the bicycle theory: if you keep going fast, you don’t fall off”.

The occasion for our conversation is the publication of Chronicles of Dissent, a collection of interviews between Chomsky and the radical journalist David Barsamian from 1984 to 1996. But the backdrop is the war in Ukraine – a subject about which Chomsky is unsurprisingly voluble.

“It’s monstrous for Ukraine,” he said. In common with many Jews, Chomsky has a family connection to the region: his father was born in present-day Ukraine and emigrated to the US in 1913 to avoid serving in the tsarist army; his mother was born in Belarus. Chomsky, who is often accused by critics of refusing to condemn any anti-Western government, unhesitatingly denounced Vladimir Putin’s “criminal aggression”.

But he added: “Why did he do it? There are two ways of looking at this question. One way, the fashionable way in the West, is to plumb the recesses of Putin’s twisted mind and try to determine what’s happening in his deep psyche.

“The other way would be to look at the facts: for example, that in September 2021 the United States came out with a strong policy statement, calling for enhanced military cooperation with Ukraine, further sending of advanced military weapons, all part of the enhancement programme of Ukraine joining Nato. You can take your choice, we don’t know which is right. What we do know is that Ukraine will be further devastated. And we may move on to terminal nuclear war if we do not pursue the opportunities that exist for a negotiated settlement.”

How does he respond to the argument that Putin’s greatest fear is not encirclement by Nato but the spread of liberal democracy in Ukraine and Russia’s “near abroad”?

“Putin is as concerned with democracy as we are. If it’s possible to break out of the propaganda bubble for a few minutes, the US has a long record of undermining and destroying democracy. Do I have to run through it? Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973, on and on… But we are supposed to now honour and admire Washington’s enormous commitment to sovereignty and democracy. What happened in history doesn’t matter. That’s for other people.

“What about Nato expansion? There was an explicit, unambiguous promise by [US secretary of state] James Baker and president George HW Bush to Gorbachev that if he agreed to allow a unified Germany to rejoin Nato, the US would ensure that there would be no move one inch to the east. There’s a good deal of lying going on about this now.”

Chomsky, who observed in 1990 that “if the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every postwar American president would have been hanged”, spoke witheringly of Joe Biden.

“It’s certainly right to have moral outrage about Putin’s actions in Ukraine,” he said of Biden’s recent declaration that the Russian president “cannot remain in power”. “But it would be even more progress to have moral outrage about other horrible atrocities… In Afghanistan, literally millions of people are facing imminent starvation. Why? There’s food in the markets. But people who have little money have to watch their children starve because they can’t go to the market to buy food. Why? Because the United States, with the backing of Britain, has kept Afghanistan’s funds in New York banks and will not release them.”

Chomsky’s contempt for the hypocrisies and contradictions of US foreign policy will be familiar to anyone who has read one of his many books and pamphlets (his first political work, American Power and the New Mandarins, published in 1969, foretold the US’s defeat in Vietnam). But he is now perhaps most animated when discussing Donald Trump’s possible return and the climate crisis.

“I’m old enough to remember the early 1930s. And memories come to mind,” he said in a haunting recollection. “I can remember listening to Hitler’s speeches on the radio. I didn’t understand the words, I was six years old. But I understood the mood. And it was frightening and terrifying. And when you watch one of Trump’s rallies that can’t fail to come to mind. That’s what we’re facing.”

Though he self-identifies as an anarcho-syndicalist or a libertarian socialist, Chomsky revealed to me that he had voted for Republicans in the past (“like them or not, they were an authentic party”). But now he said, they were a truly dangerous insurgency.

“Because of Trump’s fanaticism, the worshipful base of the Republican Party barely regards climate change as a serious problem. That’s a death warrant to the species.”

Faced with such existential threats, it is perhaps unsurprising that Chomsky remains a dissident intellectual – in the manner of one of his heroes, Bertrand Russell (who lived to 97 and similarly straddled politics and philosophy). But he also still spends hours a day answering emails from admirers and critics, and teaches linguistics at the University of Arizona, the state where he lives with his second wife, Valeria Wasserman, a Brazilian translator.

Chomsky is also still engaged by British politics. “Brexit was a very serious error, it means that Britain will be compelled to drift even further into subordination to the US,” he told me. “I think it’s a disaster. What does it mean for the Conservative Party? I imagine they can lie their way out of it, they’re doing a good job of lying about a lot of things and getting away with it.”

Of Keir Starmer, he scornfully remarked: “He’s returning the Labour Party to a party that’s reliably obedient to power, that will be Thatcher-lite in the style of Tony Blair and that won’t ruffle the feathers of either the US or anyone who’s important in Britain.”

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci advised radicals to maintain “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will”. What, I asked Chomsky at the close of our conversation, gives him hope?

“A lot of young people; Extinction Rebellion in England, young people dedicated to trying to put an end to the catastrophe. Civil disobedience – it’s not a joke, I’ve been involved with it for much of my life. I’m too old for it now [Chomsky was first arrested in 1967 for protesting against the Vietnam War and shared a cell with Norman Mailer]… It’s not pleasant to be thrown in jail and beaten, but they’re willing to undertake it.

“There are plenty of young people who are appalled by the behaviour of the older generation, rightly, and are dedicated to trying to stop this madness before it consumes us all. Well, that’s the hope for the future.”

George Eaton is senior editor of the New Statesman.

11 April 2022

Source: www.transcend.org

By William J Astore

What Would It Take for Military Spending in America to Go Down? A Thought Experiment on the Military-Industrial Complex

I have a question for you: What would it take in today’s world for America’s military spending to go down? Here’s one admittedly farfetched scenario: Vladimir Putin loses his grip on power and Russia retrenches militarily while reaching out to normalize relations with the West. At the same time, China prudently decides to spend less on its military, pursuing economic power while abandoning any pretense to a militarized superpower status. Assuming such an unlikely scenario, with a “new cold war” nipped in the bud and the U.S. as the world’s unchallenged global hegemon, Pentagon spending would surely shrink, right?

Well, I wouldn’t count on it. Based on developments after the Soviet Union’s collapse three decades ago, here’s what I suspect would be far more likely to happen. The U.S. military, aided by various strap-hanging think tanks, intelligence agencies, and weapons manufacturers, would simply shift into overdrive. As its spokespeople would explain to anyone who’d listen (especially in Congress), the disappearance of the Russian and Chinese threats would carry its own awesome dangers, leaving this country prospectively even less safe than before.

You’d hear things like: we’ve suddenly been plunged into a more complex multipolar world, significantly more chaotic now that our “near-peer” rivals are no longer challenging us, with even more asymmetrical threats to U.S. military dominance. The key word, of course, would be “more” — linked, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, to omnipresent Pentagon demands for yet more military spending. When it comes to weapons, budgets, and war, the military-industrial complex’s philosophy is captured by an arch comment of the legendary actress Mae West: “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.”

Even without Russia and China as serious threats to American hegemony, you’d hear again about an “unbalanced” Kim Jong-un in North Korea and his deeply alarming ballistic missiles; you’d hear about Iran and its alleged urge to build nuclear weapons; and, if those two countries proved too little, perhaps the war on terror would be resuscitated. (Indeed, during the ongoing wall-to-wall coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, North Korea did test a ballistic missile, an event a distracted media greeted with a collective shrug.) My point is this: when you define the entire globe as your sphere of influence, as the U.S. government does, there will always be threats somewhere. It matters little, in budgetary terms, whether it’s terror, most often linked to radical Islam, or the struggle over resources linked to climate change, which the Pentagon has long recognized as a danger, even if it still burns carbon as if there were no tomorrow. And don’t discount a whole new set of dangers in space and cyberspace, the latest realms of combat.

Of course, this country is always allegedly falling behind in some vital realm of weapons research. Right now, it’s hypersonic missiles, just as in the early days of the Cold War bomber and missile “gaps” were falsely said to be endangering our security. Again, when national security is defined as full-spectrum dominance and America must reign supreme in all areas, you can always come up with realms where we’re allegedly lagging and where there’s a critical need for billions more of your taxpayer dollars. Consider the ongoing “modernization” of our nuclear arsenal, at a projected cost approaching $2 trillion over the coming decades. As a jobs program, as well as an advertisement of naked power, it may yet rival the Egyptian pyramids. (Of course, the pyramids became wonders of the world rather than threatening to end it.)

No Peace Dividends for You

While a young captain in the Air Force, I lived through the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a romping, stomping performance by our military in the first Gulf War against Iraq in 1991. It felt great! I was teaching history at the Air Force Academy when President George H.W. Bush talked of a “new world order.” On a planet with no Soviet Union and no Cold War, we even briefly heard talk of “peace dividends” to come that echoed the historical response of Americans after prevailing in past wars. In the aftermath of the Civil War, as well as World Wars I and II, rapid demobilization and a dramatic downsizing of the military establishment had occurred.

And indeed, there was initially at least some modest shrinkage of our military after the Soviet collapse, though nothing like what most experts had expected. Personnel cuts came first. As a young officer, I well remember the Voluntary Separation Incentive Payments (VSIP) and the Selective Early Retirement Board (SERB). VSIP offered money to entice officers like me to get out early, while SERB represented involuntary retirement for those judged to have overstayed their welcome. Then there was the dreaded RIF, or Reduction in Force, program, which involved involuntary separation without benefits.

Yet even as personnel were pruned from our military, the ambitions of the national security state only grew. As I wrote long ago, the U.S. didn’t just “contain” the Soviet empire during the Cold War; that empire also contained us. With its main enemy in tatters and facing virtually no restraint to its global ambitions, the military-industrial complex promptly began to search for new realms to dominate and new enemies to contain and defeat. Expansion, not shrinkage, soon became the byword, whether in Asia, Africa, or Europe, where, despite promises made to the last of the Soviet Union’s leaders, NATO’s growth took the lead.

So, let’s jump to 1998, just before the initial round of NATO expansion occurred. I’m a major in the Air Force now, on my second tour of teaching history to cadets and I’m attending a seminar on coalition warfare. Its concluding panel focused on the future of NATO and featured four generals who had served at the highest levels of that alliance. I was feverishly taking notes as one of them argued forcefully for NATO’s expansion despite Russian concerns. “Russia has nothing to fear,” he assured us and, far more important, could no longer prevent it. “If the Soviet Union was an anemic tiger, Russia is more like a circus tiger that may growl but won’t bite,” he concluded. Tell that to the people of Ukraine in 2022.

Retired Army General Andrew Goodpaster had a different view. He suggested that the U.S. could have fostered a peaceful “overarching relationship” with Russia after 1991 but chose antagonism and expansion instead. For him, NATO’s growth was only likely to antagonize a post-Soviet Russia further. Air Force General John Shaud largely agreed, suggesting that the U.S. should work to ensure that Russia didn’t become yet more isolated thanks to such a program of expansion.

In the end, three of those four retired generals urged varying degrees of caution. In an addendum to my notes, I scribbled this: “NATO expansion, from the perspective of many in the West, gathers the flock and unites them against an impending storm. From the Russian perspective, NATO expansion, beyond a certain point, is intolerable; it is the storm.” If three of four former senior NATO commanders and a young Air Force major could see that clearly almost 25 years ago, surely senior government officials of the day could, too.

Unfortunately, it turned out that they simply didn’t care. For the military-industrial complex, as journalist Andrew Cockburn noted in 2015, such expansion was simply too lucrative to pass up. It meant more money, profits, and jobs, as Eastern European militaries retooled with weaponry from the West, much of it made in the USA. It didn’t matter that Russia was prostrate and posed no threat; it didn’t matter that NATO’s main reason for being had disappeared. What mattered was more: more countries in NATO, meaning more weapons sold, more money made, more influence peddled. Who cared if expansion pissed off the Russians? What was a toothless “circus tiger” going to do about it anyway, gum us to death?

If there ever was a time for peace dividends and military demobilization, the 1990s were it. This country even had a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who was focused far more on domestic concerns than foreign policy. And there’s the rub. He simply had no desire to challenge the military-industrial complex. Few presidents do.

Early in his first term, he’d already lost big-time in arguing for gays to serve openly in the ranks, leading to his ignominious surrender and the institutionalization of “don’t ask, don’t tell” as military policy. As that complex then frog-marched Clinton through what remained of the twentieth century, hardheaded hawks like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz were already hatching their plans for America’s triumphant return to a policy of complete unipolar dominance empowered by a kick-ass military. Their time came with George W. Bush’s less than legitimate election in 2000, accelerated by the September 11th tragedy the following year.

America’s New Normal Is War

Ever since 9/11, endless conflict has been this country’s new normal. If you’re an American 21 years of age or younger, you’ve never known a time when your country hasn’t been at war, even if, thanks to the end of the draft in the previous century, you stand no chance of being called to arms yourself. You’ve never known a time of “normal” defense budgets. You have no conception of what military demobilization, no less peacetime might actually be like. Your normal is only reflected in the Biden administration’s staggering $813 billion Pentagon budget proposal for the next fiscal year. Naturally, many congressional Republicans are already clamoring for even higher military spending. Remember that Mae West quip? What a “wonderful” world!

And you’re supposed to take pride in this. As President Biden recently told soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division now stationed in Poland, this country has the “finest fighting force in the history of the world.” Even with the mountains of cash we give to that military, the nation still “owes you big,” he assured them.

Well, I’m gobsmacked. During my 20-year career in the military, I never thought my nation owed me a thing, let alone owed me big. Now that I think of it, however, I can say that this nation owed me (and today’s troops as well) one very big thing: not to waste my life; not to send me to fight undeclared, arguably unconstitutional, wars; not to treat me like a foreign legionnaire or an imperial errand-boy. That’s what we, the people, really owe “our” troops. It should be our duty to treat their service, and potentially their deaths, with the utmost care, meaning that our leaders should wage war only as a last, not a first, resort and only in defense of our most cherished ideals.

This was anything but the case of the interminable Afghan and Iraq wars, reckless conflicts of choice that burned through trillions of dollars, with tens of thousands of U.S. troops killed and wounded, and millions of foreigners either dead or transformed into refugees, all for what turned out to be absolutely nothing. Small wonder today that a growing number of Americans want to see less military spending, not more. Citizen.org, representing 86 national and state organizations, has called on President Biden to decrease military spending. Joining that call was POGO, the Project on Government Oversight, as well as William Hartung at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. And they couldn’t be more on target, though they’re certain to be ignored in Washington.

Consider the recent disastrous end to the Afghan War. Viewing that conflict in the aggregate, what you see is widespread corruption and untold waste, all facilitated by generals who lied openly and consistently to the rest of us about “progress,” even as they spoke frankly in private about a lost war, a reality the Afghan War Papers all too tellingly revealed. That harsh story of abysmal failure, however, highlights something far worse: a devastating record of lying on a massive scale within the highest ranks of the military and government. And are those liars and deceivers being called to account? Perish the thought! Instead, they’ve generally been rewarded with yet more money, promotions, and praise.

So, what would it take for the Pentagon budget to shrink? Blowing the whistle on wasteful and underperforming weaponry hasn’t been enough. Witnessing murderous and disastrous wars hasn’t been enough. To my mind, at this point, only a full-scale collapse of the U.S. economy might truly shrink that budget and that would be a Pyrrhic victory for the American people.

In closing, let me return to President Biden’s remark that the nation owes our troops big. There’s an element of truth there, perhaps, if you’re referring to the soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen, many of whom have served selflessly within its ranks. It sure as hell isn’t true, though, of the self-serving strivers and liars at or near the top, or the weapons-making corporations who profited off it all, or the politicians in Washington who kept crying out for more. They owe the rest of us and America big.

My fellow Americans, we have now reached the point in our collective history where we face three certainties: death, taxes, and ever-soaring spending on weaponry and war. In that sense, we have become George Orwell’s Oceania, where war is peace, surveillance is privacy, and censorship is free speech.

Such is the fate of a people who make war and empire their way of life.

William Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, is a TomDispatch regular and a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), an organization of critical veteran military and national security professionals.

4 April 2022

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Ramzy Baroud

When a gruesome six-minute video of Ukrainian soldiers shooting and torturing handcuffed and tied up Russian soldiers circulated online, outraged people on social media and elsewhere compared this barbaric behavior to that of Daesh.

In a rare admission of moral responsibility, Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to the Ukrainian President, quickly reminded Ukrainian fighters of their responsibility under international law. “I would like to remind all our military, civilian and defense forces, once again, that the abuse of prisoners is a war crime that has no amnesty under military law and has no statute of limitations,” he said, asserting that “We are a European army”, as if the latter is synonymous with civilized behavior.

Even that supposed claim of responsibility conveyed subtle racism, as if to suggest that non-westerners, non-Europeans, may carry out such grisly and cowardly violence, but certainly not the more rational, humane and intellectually superior Europeans.

The comment, though less obvious, reminds one of the racist remarks by CBS’ foreign correspondent, Charlie D’Agata, on February 26, when he shamelessly compared Middle Eastern cities with the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, stating that “Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, (…) this is a relatively civilized, relatively European city”.

The Russia-Ukraine war has been a stage of racist comments and behavior, some explicit and obvious, others implicit and indirect. Far from being implicit, however, Bulgarian Prime Minister, Kiril Petkov, did not mince words when, last February, he addressed the issue of Ukrainian refugees. Europe can benefit from Ukrainian refugees, he said, because “these people are Europeans. (…) These people are intelligent, they are educated people. This is not the refugee wave we have been used to, people we were not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists.”

One of many other telling episodes that highlight western racism, but also continued denial of its grim reality, was an interview conducted by the Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, with the Ukrainian Azov Battalion Commander, Dmytro Kuharchuck. The latter’s militia is known for its far-right politics, outright racism and horrific acts of violence. Yet, the newspaper described Kuharchuck as “the kind of fighter you don’t expect. He reads Kant and he doesn’t only use his bazooka.” If this is not the very definition of denial, what is?

That said, our proud European friends must be careful before supplanting the word ‘European’ with ‘civilization’ and respect for human rights. They ought not to forget their past or rewrite their history because, after all, racially-based slavery is a European and western brand. The slave trade, as a result of which millions of slaves were shipped from Africa during the course of four centuries, was very much European. According to Encyclopedia Virginia, 1.8 million people “died on the Middle Passage of the transatlantic slave trade”. Other estimations put the number much higher.

Colonialism is another European quality. Starting in the 15th century, and lasting for centuries afterward, colonialism ravaged the entire Global South. Unlike the slave trade, colonialism enslaved entire peoples and divided whole continents, like Africa, among European spheres of influence.

The nation of Congo was literally owned by one person, Belgian King Leopold II. India was effectively controlled and colonized by the British East India Company and, later, by the British government. The fate of South America was largely determined by the US-imposed Monroe Doctrines of 1823. For nearly 200 years, this continent has paid – and continues to pay – an extremely heavy price of US colonialism and neocolonialism. No numbers or figures can possibly express the destruction and death toll inflicted by Western-European colonialism on the rest of the world, simply because the victims are still being counted. But for the sake of illustration, according to American historian, Adam Hochschild, ten million people have died in Congo alone from 1885 to 1908.

And how can we forget that World War I and II are also entirely European, leaving behind around 40 million and 75 million dead, respectively. (Other estimations are significantly higher). The gruesomeness of these European wars can only be compared to the atrocities committed, also by Europeans, throughout the South, for hundreds of years prior.

Mere months after The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed in 1949, the eager western partners were quick to flex their muscles in Korea in 1950, instigating a war that lasted for three years, resulting in the death of nearly 5 million people. The Korean war, like many other NATO-instigated conflicts, remains an unhealed wound to this day.

The list goes on and on, from the disgraceful Opium Wars on China, starting in 1839, to the nuclear bombings of Japan in 1945, to the destruction of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, in 1954, 1959 and 1970 respectively, to the political meddling, military interventions and regime change in numerous countries around the world. They are all the work of the West, of the US and its ever-willing ‘European partners’, all done in the name of spreading democracy, freedom and human rights.

If it were not for the Europeans, Palestine would have gained its independence decades ago, and its people, this writer included, would have not been made refugees, suffering under the yoke of Zionist Israel. If it were not for the US and the Europeans, Iraq would have remained a sovereign country and millions of lives would have been spared in one of the world’s oldest civilizations; and Afghanistan would have not endured this untold hardship. Even when the US and its European friends finally relented and left Afghanistan last year, they continue to hold the country hostage, by blocking the release of its funds, leading to actual starvation among the people of that war-torn country.

So before bragging about the virtues of Europe, and the demeaning of everyone else, the likes of Arestovych, D’Agata, and Petkov should take a look at themselves in the mirror and reconsider their unsubstantiated ethnocentric view of the world and of history. In fact, if anyone deserves bragging rights it is those colonized nations that resisted colonialism, the slaves that fought for their freedom, and the oppressed nations that resisted their European oppressors, despite the pain and suffering that such struggles entailed.

Sadly, for Europe, however, instead of using the Russia-Ukraine war as an opportunity to reflect on the future of the European project, whatever that is, it is being used as an opportunity to score cheap points against the very victims of Europe everywhere. Once more, valuable lessons remain unlearned.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

4 April 2022

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Salim Nazzal

(The Corona war) revealed many things, first and foremost of the greed of Western countries, especially with regard to providing vaccines for poor countries in the third world.

It also revealed that globalization which said to have made the world a small village has become questionable issue. The borders of countries were closed and each country had to rely on itself, which strengthened the idea of self-reliance, especially in basic foodstuffs.

The Corona war has provided an important lesson for the countries outside the Western world that they must rise as a cooperating force, especially in crises such as the Corona crisis, where countries closed their borders.

And the Ukrainian crisis revealed in an unequivocal way the ugly face of the West, which we thought was from the past. We watched on TV screens how racist dealt with Arab, Indian and African students in Kyiv when they were not allowed to board the trains to escape the war.

We also saw how the racist episodes with the colored persons on the Polish border. Though this thing may vary from a western country to another, yet this confirms that the superiority view over the people of the countries with brown and black skin is still there.

The Moroccan thinker Al jabre explained this phenomenon from a historical perspective. In his view the slogans of the French Revolution about brotherhood, justice and equality were only for the French, because the state of the French Revolution was itself the one which colonized the Third World and deprived its people of their basic rights.

In crises, real positions are revealed. It appears that the rhetoric in the West about human rights in the nonwestern countries has been a tool often used against any regime that challenge the west domination.

Therefore, the west must not be surprised that most of the third world countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America did not stand with America and the West in the Ukrainian-Russian war. The reason in my view is that nonwestern counties do not support occupying any country but rather they are more aware than ever of the hypocrisy and duplicity of the West

These countries saw that it is in the interest of their countries to take a position of the center. The Pakistani Prime Minister expressed this position by saying that we are not slaves to the West. This blunt position expresses the essence of the position of many countries outside the west that do not see that America’s enemies are necessarily its enemies.

We may still remember that Nelson Mandela took a similar position when he was told in America that has friends like Castro and Gaddafi, and his response was that America’s enemies are not necessarily his enemies

It seems that the time for America to drag the nonwestern world into its wars, choosing friends for them and choosing enemies for them, is over. It is true that many non-Western countries are still in conflict with each other. And it is true that its abilities to stand up to America are still limited, but it is also true that the world outside the west is no longer ready to accept that America determines its options for it, including who are its friends and who are its enemies.

Salim Nazzal is a Palestinian Norwegian researcher, lecturer playwright and poet, wrote more than 17 books such as Perspectives on thought, culture and political sociology.

6 April 2022

Source: countercurrents.org

By Ellen Brown

Foreign critics have long chafed at the “exorbitant privilege” of the U.S. dollar as global reserve currency. The U.S. can issue this currency backed by nothing but the “full faith and credit of the United States.” Foreign governments, needing dollars, not only accept them in trade but buy U.S. securities with them, effectively funding the U.S. government and its foreign wars. But no government has been powerful enough to break that arrangement – until now. How did that happen and what will it mean for the U.S. and global economies?

The Rise and Fall of the PetroDollar

First, some history: The U.S. dollar was adopted as the global reserve currency at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, when the dollar was still backed by gold on global markets. The agreement was that gold and the dollar would be accepted interchangeably as global reserves, the dollars to be redeemable in gold on demand at $35 an ounce. Exchange rates of other currencies were fixed against the dollar.

But that deal was broken after President Lyndon Johnson’s “guns and butter” policy exhausted the U.S. kitty by funding war in Vietnam along with his “Great Society” social programs at home. French President Charles de Gaulle, suspecting the U.S. was running out of money, cashed in a major portion of France’s dollars for gold and threatened to cash in the rest; and other countries followed suit or threatened to.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon ended the convertibility of the dollar to gold internationally (known as “closing the gold window”), in order to avoid draining U.S. gold reserves. The value of the dollar then plummeted relative to other currencies on global exchanges. To prop it up, Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made a deal with Saudi Arabia and the OPEC countries that OPEC would sell oil only in dollars, and that the dollars would be deposited in Wall Street and City of London banks. In return, the U.S. would defend the OPEC countries militarily. Economic researcher William Engdahl also presents evidence of a promise that the price of oil would be quadrupled. An oil crisis triggered by a brief Middle Eastern war did cause the price of oil to quadruple, and the OPEC agreement was finalized in 1974.

The deal held firm until 2000, when Saddam Hussein broke it by selling Iraqi oil in euros. Libyan president Omar Qaddafi followed suit. Both presidents wound up assassinated, and their countries were decimated in war with the United States. Canadian researcher Matthew Ehret observes:

We should not forget that the Sudan-Libya-Egypt alliance under the combined leadership of Mubarak, Qadhafi and Bashir, had moved to establish a new gold-backed financial system outside of the IMF/World Bank to fund large scale development in Africa. Had this program not been undermined by a NATO-led destruction of Libya, the carving up of Sudan and regime change in Egypt, then the world would have seen the emergence of a major regional block of African states shaping their own destinies outside of the rigged game of Anglo-American controlled finance for the first time in history.

The Rise of the PetroRuble

The first challenge by a major power to what became known as the petrodollar has come in 2022. In the month after the Ukraine conflict began, the U.S. and its European allies imposed heavy financial sanctions on Russia in response to the illegal military invasion. The Western measures included freezing nearly half of the Russian central bank’s 640 billion U.S. dollars in financial reserves, expelling several of Russia’s largest banks from the SWIFT global payment system, imposing export controls aimed at limiting Russia’s access to advanced technologies, closing down their airspace and ports to Russian planes and ships, and instituting personal sanctions against senior Russian officials and high-profile tycoons. Worried Russians rushed to withdraw rubles from their banks, and the value of the ruble plunged on global markets just as the U.S. dollar had in the early 1970s.

The trust placed in the U.S. dollar as global reserve currency, backed by “the full faith and credit of the United States,” had finally been fully broken. Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a speech on March 16 that the U.S. and EU had defaulted on their obligations, and that freezing Russia’s reserves marks the end of the reliability of so-called first class assets. On March 23, Putin announced that Russia’s natural gas would be sold to “unfriendly countries” only in Russian rubles, rather than the euros or dollars currently used. Forty-eight nations are counted by Russia as “unfriendly,” including the United States, Britain, Ukraine, Switzerland, South Korea, Singapore, Norway, Canada and Japan.

Putin noted that more than half the global population remains “friendly” to Russia. Countries not voting to support the sanctions include two major powers – China and India – along with major oil producer Venezuela, Turkey, and other countries in the “Global South.” “Friendly” countries, said Putin, could now buy from Russia in various currencies.

On March 24, Russian lawmaker Pavel Zavalny said at a news conference that gas could be sold to the West for rubles or gold, and to “friendly” countries for either national currency or bitcoin.

Energy ministers from the G7 nations rejected Putin’s demand, claiming it violated gas contract terms requiring sale in euros or dollars. But on March 28, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia was “not engaged in charity” and won’t supply gas to Europe for free (which it would be doing if sales were in euros or dollars it cannot currently use in trade). Sanctions themselves are a breach of the agreement to honor the currencies on global markets.

Bloomberg reports that on March 30, Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the lower Russian house of parliament, suggested in a Telegram post that Russia may expand the list of commodities for which it demands payment from the West in rubles (or gold) to include grain, oil, metals and more. Russia’s economy is much smaller than that of the U.S. and the European Union, but Russia is a major global supplier of key commodities – including not just oil, natural gas and grains, but timber, fertilizers, nickel, titanium, palladium, coal, nitrogen, and rare earth metals used in the production of computer chips, electric vehicles and airplanes.

On April 2, Russian gas giant Gazprom officially halted all deliveries to Europe via the Yamal-Europe pipeline, a critical artery for European energy supplies.

U.K. professor of economics Richard Werner calls the Russian move a clever one – a replay of what the U.S. did in the 1970s. To get Russian commodities, “unfriendly” countries will have to buy rubles, driving up the value of the ruble on global exchanges just as the need for petrodollars propped up the U.S. dollar after 1974. Indeed, by March 30, the ruble had already risen to where it was a month earlier.

A Page Out of the “American System” Playbook

Russia is following the U.S. not just in hitching its national currency to sales of a critical commodity but in an earlier protocol – what 19th century American leaders called the “American System” of sovereign money and credit. Its three pillars were (a) federal subsidies for internal improvements and to nurture the nation’s fledgling industries, (b) tariffs to protect those industries, and (c) easy credit issued by a national bank.

Michael Hudson, a research professor of economics and author of “Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire” among many other books, notes that the sanctions are forcing Russia to do what it has been reluctant to do itself – cut reliance on imports and develop its own industries and infrastructure. The effect, he says, is equivalent to that of protective tariffs. In an article titled “The American Empire Self-destructs,” Hudson writes of the Russian sanctions (which actually date back to 2014):

Russia had remained too enthralled by free-market ideology to take steps to protect its own agriculture or industry. The United States provided the help that was needed by imposing domestic self-reliance on Russia (via sanctions). When the Baltic states lost the Russian market for cheese and other farm products, Russia quickly created its own cheese and dairy sector – while becoming the world’s leading grain exporter.

Russia is discovering (or is on the verge of discovering) that it does not need U.S. dollars as backing for the ruble’s exchange rate. Its central bank can create the rubles needed to pay domestic wages and finance capital formation. The U.S. confiscations thus may finally lead Russia to end neoliberal monetary philosophy, as Sergei Glaziev has long been advocating in favor of MMT [Modern Monetary Theory]. …

What foreign countries have not done for themselves – replacing the IMF, World Bank and other arms of U.S. diplomacy – American politicians are forcing them to do. Instead of European, Near Eastern and Global South countries breaking away out of their own calculation of their long-term economic interests, America is driving them away, as it has done with Russia and China.

Glazyev and the Eurasian Reset

Sergei Glazyev, mentioned by Hudson above, is a former adviser to President Vladimir Putin and the Minister for Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Commission, the regulatory body of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). He has proposed using tools similar to those of the “American System,” including converting the Central Bank of Russia to a “national bank” issuing Russia’s own currency and credit for internal development. On February 25, Glazyev published an analysis of U.S. sanctions titled “Sanctions and Sovereignty,” in which he stated:

[T]he damage caused by US financial sanctions is inextricably linked to the monetary policy of the Bank of Russia …. Its essence boils down to a tight binding of the ruble issue to export earnings, and the ruble exchange rate to the dollar. In fact, an artificial shortage of money is being created in the economy, and the strict policy of the Central Bank leads to an increase in the cost of lending, which kills business activity and hinders the development of infrastructure in the country.

Glazyev said that if the central bank replaced the loans withdrawn by its Western partners with its own loans, Russian credit capacity would greatly increase, preventing a decline in economic activity without creating inflation.

Russia has agreed to sell oil to India in India’s own sovereign currency, the rupee; to China in yuan; and to Turkey in lira. These national currencies can then be spent on the goods and services sold by those countries. Arguably, every country should be able to trade in global markets in its own sovereign currency; that is what a fiat currency is – a medium of exchange backed by the agreement of the people to accept it at value for their goods and services, backed by the “full faith and credit” of the nation.

But that sort of global barter system would break down just as local barter systems do, if one party to the trade did not want the goods or services of the other party. In that case, some intermediate reserve currency would be necessary to serve as a medium of exchange.

Glazyev and his counterparts are working on that. In a translated interview posted on The Saker, Glazyev stated:

We are currently working on a draft international agreement on the introduction of a new world settlement currency, pegged to the national currencies of the participating countries and to exchange-traded goods that determine real values. We won’t need American and European banks. A new payment system based on modern digital technologies with a blockchain is developing in the world, where banks are losing their importance.

Russia and China have both developed alternatives to the SWIFT messaging system from which certain Russian banks have been blocked. London-based commentator Alexander Mercouris makes the interesting observation that going outside SWIFT means Western banks cannot track Russian and Chinese trades.

Geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar sums up the plans for a Eurasian/China financial reset in an article titled “Say Hello to Russian Gold and Chinese Petroyuan.” He writes:

It was a long time coming, but finally some key lineaments of the multipolar world’s new foundations are being revealed.

On Friday [March 11], after a videoconference meeting, the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and China agreed to design the mechanism for an independent international monetary and financial system. The EAEU consists of Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus and Armenia, is establishing free trade deals with other Eurasian nations, and is progressively interconnecting with the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

For all practical purposes, the idea comes from Sergei Glazyev, Russia’s foremost independent economist ….

Quite diplomatically, Glazyev attributed the fruition of the idea to “the common challenges and risks associated with the global economic slowdown and restrictive measures against the EAEU states and China.”

Translation: as China is as much a Eurasian power as Russia, they need to coordinate their strategies to bypass the US unipolar system.

The Eurasian system will be based on “a new international currency,” most probably with the yuan as reference, calculated as an index of the national currencies of the participating countries, as well as commodity prices. …

The Eurasian system is bound to become a serious alternative to the US dollar, as the EAEU may attract not only nations that have joined BRI … but also the leading players in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as well as ASEAN. West Asian actors – Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon – will be inevitably interested.

Exorbitant Privilege or Exorbitant Burden?

If that system succeeds, what will the effect be on the U.S. economy? Investment strategist Lynn Alden writes in a detailed analysis titled “The Fraying of the US Global Currency Reserve System” that there will be short-term pain, but, in the long run, it will benefit the U.S. economy. The subject is complicated, but the bottom line is that reserve currency dominance has resulted in the destruction of our manufacturing base and the buildup of a massive federal debt. Sharing the reserve currency load would have the effect that sanctions are having on the Russian economy – nurturing domestic industries as a tariff would, allowing the American manufacturing base to be rebuilt.

Other commentators also say that being the sole global reserve currency is less an exorbitant privilege than an exorbitant burden. Losing that status would not end the importance of the U.S. dollar, which is too heavily embedded in global finance to be dislodged. But it could well mean the end of the petrodollar as sole global reserve currency, and the end of the devastating petroleum wars it has funded to maintain its dominance.

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This article was first posted on ScheerPost.

Ellen Brown is an attorney, chair of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution, and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age.

6 April 2022

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

By Eric Zuesse

An update to

How Both Putin and Biden Bungled in Ukraine

By Eric Zuesse, April 04, 2022

***

On April 4th, Russia’s RT headlined “Russia and Ukraine trade accusations over Bucha civilian deaths (TIMELINE): After footage of dead civilians in the Ukrainian city of Bucha emerged, the West immediately pointed the finger at Moscow”, and included such items as, on April 2nd,

One clip published and later deleted by Ukrainian military commander Sergey Korotkih showed Ukrainian troops in Bucha discussing engagement rules. Korotkih, formerly a citizen of Belarus, is an open neo-Nazi who went to Ukraine back in 2014 to fight in the ranks of the notorious Azov Battalion. In Russia, Korotkih is wanted on multiple murder charges. One of the fighters can be heard asking if it was OK to shoot at “guys not wearing blue armbands” identifying Ukrainian soldiers. The response was an affirmative “you bet”.

This links through to this uploaded cellphone video evidence recording that conversation, physically onsite at Bucha, as Ukraine’s forces were coming into the area to inspect and evaluate the situation and to record and display the extent of their victory there.

Furthermore, on April 4th, Russia’s Ministry of Defense alleged that:

“All units of Russian troops completely withdrew from Bucha on March 30, and these shots [videos about Bucha that were distributed to the press] appeared on the 4th day after that, when SBU officers and representatives of Ukrainian TV arrived in the area”

If this statement is true, this would prove (even without there having been the necessary independent international investigation into Ukraine’s allegations on the matter) that Ukraine’s accusations were, in fact, bald-faced lies.

If Russia’s allegations in that Bucha matter are true, then, of course, the propaganda-value of the ‘news’-reports by CNN and others regarding it will reduce with time, and perhaps even become the enduring scandal here — yet another scandal of U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media being actually instead propaganda-media. Trusting Western reports regarding Russia might then turn out to be even stupider than it was before.

Putin’s reputation in the U.S.-and-allied countries might then not suffer long-term harm from the Bucha matter. Putin’s approval-rating within Russia, itself, has risen from his low of around 60% in August 2021 to above 80% now, mainly as a result of soaring from 71% just before the February 24th invasion.

However, what’s far more important going forward will be the public opinion of him outside Russia, in the countries that never really stopped their Cold War against Russia after the Soviet Union’s 1991 end. America’s regime-change-in-Russia campaign will almost certainly not succeed by driving Putin’s approval-rating inside Russia down to where, say, Joe Biden’s in America is. But if America takes an alternative approach, such as a military coup, or a blitz invasion of Russia, perhaps the people who rule in America might ultimately succeed (in which case what happened to Ukraine after Obama conquered it in 2014 might happen, some day, to Russia itself).

The South Front Report

Then, later on April 4th, the best news-site on the war, South Front, bannered “NEW EVIDENCES SHED LIGHT ON ALLEGED MASSACRE IN BUCHA, KIEV REGION (VIDEO, PHOTO)”, and reported that,

Today, there are more interesting videos from Bucha shared by the Ukrainian military which may help to shed light on what did really happen in the town left by the Russian troops on March 30.

On April 2, a day before Ukrainian “journalists” came to Bucha to stage the horrific scenes on the streets, the National Police of Ukraine published a video of the mop up operation in Bucha.

Video Player

00:00

07:48

The footage confirmed that:

• there were no corpses laying on the streets. Not a single civilian confirmed that any mass shootings [had occurred] in the city.
• Ukrainian demining teams who entered the town right after the Russian withdrawal had no work to do. They are seen walking on the streets along with civilians. Not a single mine left by the Russians was shown on the video.
• Servicemen of the National Guard asked some civilians if they needed help, none of them replied asking for any immediate assistance, confirming that they are fine.

Only one man is seen killed in his car. It is not clear how did his death happen. Another victim was obviously a servicemen of one of the warring sides killed in clashes, whose corps[e] is laying [lying] near a destroyed military equipment.

One of [the] Ukrainian “patriots” made a comment on behaviour of the “Russian invaders”. After his own compatriots told Russian servicemen about his acute social awareness, Russian military checked his apartment but found only flags and a bunch of Ukrainian symbols. To add some drama to his case, the man claimed that [a] Russian soldier took him out “to kill him”, but suddenly changed his mind and brought the man to the military commander. The brave patriot only had a short peaceful conversation with Russian servicemen, with no tortures. …

This video of the National Police of Ukraine, shot presumably on April 1 or earlier, does not really correspond to what the Ukrainian media published on April 3, trumpeting to the whole world that the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation allegedly carried out a “mass massacre” of civilians.

As more photos are shared from the spot, more proves [proofs], that the scene was staged, appear.

As the main video proof from Bucha raised a lot of suspicions and was quickly disclaimed, it was accompanied by more fake photos allegedly made in the town.

Unfortunately, these attempts are even less effective and are evident lies. For example, notorious Advisor to the Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Arestovich published the photo of a woman tortured in Mariupol last week by Ukrainian Azov militants, claiming that she was a victim tortured by the Russians. The photo was later deleted but was widely spread by the Ukrainian MSM, who even did not come together if it was in Gostomel or in Bucha. The Ukrainian media are trying their best to gain as much hype as possible, lying on any matter. …

The Al Jazeera Report

However, at around the same time, Al Jazeera, which is owned by the Thani family of U.S.-allied Qatar, headlined “Bucha killings: ‘The world cannot be tricked anymore’,” and showed Ukraine-government-supporting alleged “witnesses” who alleged that Russian soldiers had perpetrated a “massacre” there, and urged international war-crimes trials against Russia’s leaders (and nothing against America’s leaders).

No one has — at least in any prominent ‘news’-medium — urged any war-crimes trial against any American leader: not against George W. Bush, nor against Obama, nor against Biden: no American leader at all.

Washington Post and AP Reports

Yet later in the day, America’s AP bannered “Biden: Putin should face war crimes trial for Bucha killings”, and an editorial in Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post headlined “The Bucha massacre should prompt a forceful response” and said that “Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the civilian executions ‘genocide,’ and President Biden declared that Mr. Putin is ‘a war criminal.’ Those words will find meaning only with a determined prosecution.”

As-of day’s-end on the 4th, it seemed that there were corpses in Bucha, but there was no public information yet on the identities of the dead, nor on how many were civilians, how many were Ukrainian soldiers, and how many were Russian soldiers, and the ways in which each of those individuals had become killed — much less on whether any legal grounds yet existed for asserting that any “war crimes” had been perpetrated by anyone there.

And the Ukrainian account of the Bucha matter was full of faked ‘interpretations’ of the ‘evidence’ they were providing.

Nonetheless, on the morning of April 4th, Washington’s The Hill had bannered “Macron, EU official join calls for further sanctions over ‘clear’ indications of war crimes in Bucha”.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s next book (soon to be published) will be AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change.

6 April 2022

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

By South Front

On April 3, the Ukrainian propaganda machine attempted another attack against Moscow. A few videos showing dozens of civilians who were allegedly killed by the Russian servicemen were widely spread by all the Ukrainian MSM.

The main thesis of the Ukrainian and Western media is that the Russian military left Bucha, causing huge civilian casualties. One of the main pieces of evidence was a video of the AFU driving along the city. Corpses of civilians were shown laying along the road.

The slightest analysis of the footage rose a lot of suspicions on its credibility. You can read more information HERE.

Today, there are more interesting videos from Bucha shared by the Ukrainian military which may help to shed light on what did really happen in the town left by the Russian troops on March 30.

On April 2, a day before Ukrainian “journalists” came to Bucha to stage the horrific scenes on the streets, the National Police of Ukraine published a video of the mop up operation in Bucha.

The footage confirmed that:

• there were no corpses laying on the streets. Not a single civilian confirmed that any mass shootings in the city.
• Ukrainian demining teams who entered the town right after the Russian withdrawal had no work to do. They are seen walking on the streets along with civilians. Not a single mine left by the Russians was shown on the video.
• Servicemen of the National Guard asked some of civilians if they need help, no of them replied asking for any immediate assistance, confirming that they are fine.

Only one man is seen killed in his car. It is not clear how did his death happen. Another victim was obviously a servicemen of one of the warring sides killed in clashes, whose corps is laying near a destroyed military equipment.

One of Ukrainian “patriots” made a comment on behaviour of the “Russian invaders”. After his own compatriots told Russian servicemen about his acute social awareness, Russian military checked his apartment but found only flags and a bunch of Ukrainian symbols. To add some drama to his case, the man claimed that the Russian soldier took him out “to kill him”, but suddenly changed his mind and brought the man to the military commander. The brave patriot only had a short peaceful conversation with Russian servicemen, with no tortures.

This video of the National Police of Ukraine, shot presumably on April 1 or earlier, does not really correspond to what the Ukrainian media published on April 3, trumpeting to the whole world that the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation allegedly carried out a “mass massacre” of civilians.

As more photos are shared from the spot, more proves that the scene was staged appear.

As the main video proof from Bucha raised a lot of suspicions and was quickly disclaimed, it was accompanied by more fake photos allegedly made in the town.

Unfortunately, these attempts are even less effective and are evident lies. For example, notorious Advisor to the Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Arestovich published the photo of a woman tortured in Mariupol last week by Ukrainian Azov militants, claiming that she was a victim tortured by the Russians.

The photo was later deleted but was widely spread by the Ukrainian MSM, who even did not come together if it was in Gostomel or in Bucha. The Ukrainian media are trying their best to gain as much hype as possible, lying on any matter.

In fact, Ukrainian media used a random photo of Yakut conscript soldiers, which was found in social networks.

These soldiers were demobilized a year ago. Now they were advised to hide their army photos so as not to be exposed in Ukrainian fakes.

Some of the victims in Bucha are people who were killed by the so-called Ukrainian territorial defense. This is confirmed by the Ukrainians themselves. The rest of the victims were killed in the shelling conducted by the AFU after the departure of Russian troops — this is indicated by a large number of craters from artillery strikes on the video.

On April 3, the Russian Defense Ministry confirmed that Kiev’s information about the mass killings in the Ukrainian Butcha was not true, and the footage was staged.

The Russian Defense Ministry stated that all the facts irrefutably confirm that the photos and video frames from Bucha are another staging of the Kiev regime for the Western media, as it was a case in Mariupol with the maternity hospital, as well as in other cities.

It was added that:

• All units of the Russian troops completely withdrew from Bucha on March 30, and these shots appeared on the 4th day after that, when SBU officers and representatives of Ukrainian TV arrived there;
• During the stay of Russian soldiers in Bucha, not a single civilian was injured;
• 452 tons of humanitarian aid were delivered and issued to civilians by Russian servicemen in the settlements of the Kiev region.

On April 4, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claimed that Russia sees a direct threat to international security in such provocations as in the Butchs. In turn, spokesperson of the Russian President Peskov claimed that Russia categorically rejects any accusations of involvement in the deaths of people in the Ukrainian Butcha, the topic should be discussed at the international level.

Peskov added that the videos distributed by Ukraine cannot be trusted, experts of the Russian Ministry of Defense have revealed signs of video forgery and fakes, facts and time lane also undermine the reliability of the statements of the Ukrainian side.

“We would demand that international leaders not rush into sweeping accusations and listen to Russia’s arguments.” -Peskov said.

In turn, the European Union has already claimed that its readiness to tighten sanctions against Russia and strengthen Kiev’s support in defense issues, according to German Foreign Minister Anna Lena Berbock on Twitter. European officials attribute this decision to the reports of the Ukrainian authorities about the events in Bucha. London followed their example.

Surprisingly, on April 4, London has not agreed to hold a meeting of the UN Security Council on the events in Bucha in Ukraine. This was stated by the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova in Telegram.

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6 April 2022

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

By Rodney Atkinson

Russian troops evacuated Bucha on March 30. Ukrainian National Police began entering Bucha on March 31, and that same day the mayor of Bucha announced that the town was fully under the control of Ukrainian officials.

At no time was there any suggestion by the mayor (watch video below) or any other Ukrainian official of mass killings undertaken by Russia. Given that they are claiming bodies litter the streets they could hardly have escaped the attention of the Mayor!

Mayor of Bucha confirms liberation from Russian occupants

It took four day for claims of a “war crime” to emerge (3rd April).

Film of alleged victims on the roads in Bucha look suspicious, with “bodies” moving. (we know this has happened in other staged and acted films provided by Ukraine’s propaganda) It is claimed that civilians had been shot and buried in shallow graves. We know from the behaviour of NATO allies in the Yugoslav war that in Racak dead soldiers were dressed up as civilians and then paraded as the victims of “a massacre” which was later debunked.

There is also the possibility that those civilians in Bucha who were accused of cooperating with Russian forces could have been executed by Ukrainian forces following the Russian exit on 30th March.

It is also both unprecedented and suspicious that the U.K. Chair at the UN Security Council refused an emergency meeting called by Russia on 3rd April to discuss the Bucha claims.

A Ukrainian MP Ilya Kiva has accused the Ukrainian SBU [Security Service of Ukraine] of fabricating (with the help of MI6) the Bucha “crimes”. (see youtube unless it has been censored already!)

If only we could say that “time will tell” which side is telling the truth! But there is certainly no doubt about the self-filmed Ukrainian crimes in this post (see below).

The Cynical Sacrifice of Ukraine

In an interview with CNN ON 20th March, Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy said of Joe Biden and the NATO leadership (the interview)

“I requested them personally to say directly that we are going to accept you into NATO in a year or two or five, just say it directly and clearly, or just say no,” Zelensky said. “And the response was very clear, you’re not going to be a NATO member, but publicly, the doors will remain open,”

Nothing shows the cynical sacrifice of Ukrainians more than this duplicitous treatment of Zelensky by NATO. Privately NATO and the Biden administration were telling Zelenskyy Ukraine was never going to be in NATO, yet they told him they were going to act publicly as if the possibility existed. The latter position (together with Zelensky’s remarks about developing nuclear weapons) they knew would provoke Russia into war.

The German President has every reason to be angry at this given that he promised Zelensky before the war that if he rejected NATO membership the Russians wouldn’t attack.

The evident (at least 8 year long) intent of the USA and NATO to provoke Russia into an attack was confirmed by Biden’s intemperate admission (on his visit to Poland) that he wanted regime change in Moscow. As Madeleine Albright (recently deceased) said in 1998

“If we have to use force, it is because we are America! We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.”

According to recent polls, one-third of the American people were enthusiastic about the idea of nuclear war with Russia. Even though as one commentator pointed out most of them would be Democrat supporting inhabitants of major cities which would be nuclear bomb targets! After years of wall to wall Russophobic bigotry and lies about Ukraine blasted out by tech companies, politicians and the mainstream media this mad mass psychosis is no surprise.

David Sanger reported for the New York Times that the Biden administration

“seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire without inciting a broader conflict with a nuclear-armed adversary or cutting off potential paths to de-escalation … CIA officers are helping to ensure that crates of weapons are delivered into the hands of vetted (!!!) Ukrainian military units, according to American officials.”

In fact (as happened with US weapons provided to Syrian rebel forces) hundreds of tanks and anti tank weapons have found their way into the hands of the Russians as Ukrainian troops have defected, been killed or captured.

The Mindless Western and Ukrainian War Propaganda

Here are some examples of the blatantly distorted media and image war. A picture of an injured child from Damascus is used again as anti Russian propaganda in Ukraine:

Here a “heartbreaking” image of a Ukrainian soldier leaving his loved one to go to war turns out to be from fiction film “The War of Chimeras”.

The BBC broadcast on the World Service the news that somewhere called “Tarkov” was resisting the Russians. Pity it is a fictional city from a computer game!

A film of a rocket ostensibly shooting down a Russian aircraft also turned out to be a scene from a commercial film!

Russian Civilians Killed in East Ukraine Don’t Make News

This DONETSK bombing by Ukrainian troops which killed 20 civilians was not reported in the western media. The missile was one used only by Ukrainian forces. See this.

Indeed there is a report that a far greater crime had been intended with civilians drawn by false information to an Administration building with fake text messages.

The very next day, Monday March 14th, at about 12:20 in the afternoon, the ukrops (Ukrainian forces) launched a Tochka-U ballistic missile with a 1,000 pound anti-personnel cluster bomb warhead at the Administration building in the city center.

The Nazis sent text messages and posted on social media (under fake pro-DPR accounts) for mothers, wives and sisters of our soldiers to gather at the administration building at noon on Monday to get information about their men. THIS was the intended target of the missile.

As many civilian women as possible. And it is not a rumour, I can confirm I have seen the text message myself sent to the daughter of one of my comrades. Our air defence intercepted the missile and prevented it from reaching the target, but some of the cluster bomb cassettes fell on University Avenue in downtown Donetsk (where the 20 civilians were killed).

Ukrainian War Crimes and Propaganda

As befits a regime headed by a comedian and actor, never has one side in a war used so many actors to fake scenes for propaganda purposes. The most common has been the use of actors to fake dead bodies. The most recent being claims related to areas where Russian troops have withdrawn since 30th March. Here a “body” moves and after the car goes by, starts to get up.

A similar film was taken a couple of weeks ago ostensibly from a morgue where some 30 “bodies” were lined up. Unfortunately some of them moved while the filming was going on!

Ukrainian Psychopaths

But such fakes are nothing compared to the treatment by Ukrainian soldiers of captured Russians in an infamous video.

At the beginning of the video, we can see Ukrainian soldiers shooting newly arrived prisoners through their legs. Needless to say they are not treated. Shock could have killed them due to the pain. In the rest of the video Russian POWs lying on the ground with bullet wounds in their legs. Some of them have their legs broken. It takes psychopaths to film their own atrocities and then make it public. All of this was filmed by Ukrainian soldiers themselves.

Article 13 of the Third Geneva Convention states: “Prisoners of war must at all times be humanely treated.” Here Ukrainian soldiers call up the mothers and wives of soldiers they have killed, mocking them

Ukrainian Soldiers Film Themselves Calling Up Mothers of Russian Soldiers Killed in Action And Mocking Them

Crimes in the Donbass

“Tatyana accompanies me to the hospital. She has also lived in Volnovakha most of her life. “The Ukrainians deliberately destroyed us. They needed the land. And then, it seems, the land was no longer needed, so they just beat us out of anger,” she says, pointing to holes blown into the hospital by shells and shrapnel-scarred asphalt. Then she takes me to the morgue, a small building that has also been noticeably damaged by shooting. The door turns out to be unlocked, and I see the morgue is completely filled with dead bodies. They lie in the corridor stacked up in two or three layers.

According to Tatyana, the National Guard soldiers siphoned diesel fuel from the hospital’s generators, so all the old people who depended on artificial ventilation devices died. “

The Ukrainian military allegedly said they would “leave nothing” in Volnovakha if they were ousted by pro-Russian forces.

See this.

When Fox News’ Bret Baier asked President Zelensky on Friday about reports of Azov Battalion committing atrocities, Zelensky appeared to brush them off by saying, “They are what they are, they were defending our country.” Fox then censored their report!

See this.

The main reason why so many civilian buildings have been damaged and destroyed in Ukrainian towns is because Ukrainian soldiers have used those buildings and the civilians in and around them as human shields. Here is a report from Odessa which although not yet the centre of Russian operations its preparing for an attack. Ukrainian troops have apparently taken up positions in Schools and hospitals.

See this.

Odessa native (Lev Vershinin) living in exile in the EU wrote in this article in Russian:

• Nazi/Ukr-soldiers taking positions in schools, hospitals:
• school no.1 at Mikhailovskiy-Place 10
• school no. 57 at Yamchinkiy street 7
• school no. 59 at Maraslievskyy street 60
• medical centre/surgery at Sudostroitelnaya 1
• Odessa University clinic at Tenista st. 8
• maternity clinics no.1 and no.4
• evening school no.25 at Staroportofrankovskiy st 45a
• Marinskiy gymnasium at Lev-Tolstoy-st 9

Aidar-leader Maksim Marchenko in a document of 16/3/2022 ordered his troops to prevent civilians from leaving the city (apparently a document with his stamp & signature exists). This has been the norm which is why the humanitarian corridors offered by the Russians were for a long time a dangerous failure. Only the Ukrainians have the incentive to bottle up civilians as human shields in the cities to which they have retreated. They know the Russians don’t want to destroy such heritage but are forced to fire on buildings which protect Ukrainian gun positions. Would the British Government station guns in St Paul’s Cathedral?

Oles Yanchuk – former mayor of Odessa, now leader of Nazi-battalion “Bratstvo” – said about Odessa: the city will be destroyed (by us): “if they come to Odessa, they will receive it only burned down and destroyed.”

Other buildings used by Ukrainian troops have been a synagogue and the famous Pecherskaya Lavra monastery in Kiev. See this.

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6 April 2022

Source: www.globalresearch.ca