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By Philip Giraldi

There are many backstories surfacing from what is going on in Ukraine and Washington that have been largely ignored amid the drumbeat of casualty counts combined with claims and counter-claims from the two sides. Two stories that I believe have received insufficient attention are the US government’s three decades long obsession with weakening and de facto destroying the Russian state and the dominant neocon plus associate liberal democracy promoter role in what has become American foreign policy.

To be sure, anyone who doubts that the US is currently on a course to not only replace President Vladimir Putin but also to crash the Russian economy is delusional. Washington has been trying to deconstruct the former Soviet Union ever since 1991, beginning with President Bill Clinton’s expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe in spite of a pledge not to do so and his unleashing the oligarchs who looted the country’s natural resources under President Boris Yeltsin. The pressure continued under the beatified President Barack Obama, who appointed as Ambassador Michael McFaul, who saw his mission as connecting with dissidents and opposition forces inside Russia, a role incompatible with his promotion of US interests and protecting US persons.

And then we had the redoubtable President Donald Trump undoing confidence building agreements with Russia followed by the current disaster that is unfolding before our very eyes. One should not ignore the fact that the fighting in Ukraine came about largely because the Biden Administration refused to negotiate seriously regarding the mostly reasonable demands that the Kremlin was making to enhance its own security. Former US arms inspector Scott Ritter cites a reported comment by a senior Biden Administration official which sums up the current policy, such as it is:

“The only end game now is the end of Putin regime. Until then, all the time Putin stays, [Russia] will be a pariah state that will never be welcomed back into the community of nations.”

Indeed, President Joe Biden’s recent disastrous trip to Europe can likely be characterized as one wishes to see it and the media has certainly done considerable spinning, but Biden left behind a legacy of various gaffes and lapsus linguae that made clear that the US is in the game to defeat Russia however long it will take to play out. And Biden has considerable support from brain dead congressmen like Republican Senator Lindsey Graham who has called for someone to murder Putin, lamenting “Is there a Brutus in Russia?”

On his trip, Biden revealed that he expects US combat troops to go to Ukraine’s assistance and he has also taken delight in denouncing Putin as a “killer,” a “thug,” a “murderous dictator” and a “man who cannot remain in power.” In so doing, he has openly called for Putin’s removal from office, i.e. regime change, while also opening the door to an obvious false flag operation in his unwillingness to reveal when questioned by a reporter how the US might respond if Russia were to use chemical weapons in Ukraine. That he has taken those positions means that it will be impossible to restore manageable relations with Moscow post Ukraine. It is a heavy price to pay for something that is little more than posturing.

The chemical weapon issue is particularly important as President Donald Trump bombed Syria with cruise missiles in the wake of a fabricated report that Bashar al-Assad had used such weapons in an attack on Khan Shaykhun in 2017. It turned out that the anti-regime terrorists who were occupying the city at the time had themselves staged the attack and deliberately blamed it on the Syrian government to produce an expected US response.

Based on what I am seeing and hearing, I would conclude that the neoconservatives and their liberal democracy promoting friends are working hard from the inside to make something like a war with Russia happen. Note in particular that we are talking about war with shooting and deaths, not just a reincarnation or extension of the Cold War of yore. News on April 1st, admittedly April Fools’ Day, suggests that Ukraine has staged helicopter launched missile attacks on a fuel storage depot inside Russia, which, if true, could produce a massive escalation from the Kremlin. It would be a typical neocon maneuver to dramatically increase the level of the fighting and draw the United States into the conflict.

In addition to that, I know I am not the only one who has noticed the pace and focus of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskys’ widely promoted appeals to groups and world governments to come to his country’s aid, to include establishment of a no-fly zone. The appeals are slick, convincing and carefully focused, with Zelensky being framed as a “hero” fighting valiantly against savage invaders. To put it mildly they are way beyond the capabilities and experience level of a former comedian, whose performances featured erotic dancing and playing a piano with his penis, corruptly placed on the presidential hotseat by a billionaire oligarch Israeli citizen.

The US media is, of course, lavishly praising Zelensky, but I would bet that he has a cadre of American and possibly Israeli neoconservatives working diligently behind him to get it right, coaching him on what to say and do. There might be US government players also in on the act, to include NED (National Endowment for Democracy), CIA information specialists, State Department media consultants and observers from the National Security Council. Indeed, there is as much a war going on over the airwaves and internet to influence thinking internationally as there is fighting taking place on the ground.

One should conclude that the CIA is playing the central role in the “Russia Project” because of its ability to shield what it is doing from scrutiny. Based on previous operations to overthrow governments in various places, one might assume that the so-called covert action approach is multi-level. It consists of media placements that are intended to sway opinion both inside and outside Russia and produce unrest, the identification and recruitment of Russian government officials when they travel overseas, and the support of dissidents both internally and externally who share a negative view of Moscow and its policies. A major component in the approach is to obtain Western liberal support for harsh sanctions and other repressive measures against the Kremlin based on the fraudulent proposition that Putin and his associates are out to destroy “democracy” and “freedom.” Ironically, Americans are less “free” and also poorer because of the actions of their own government since 2001, not because of Vladimir Putin.

As was the case with Iraq, Afghanistan and the long list of American interventions, it is the neocons who are in front demanding a powerful military response, both to Russia and, inevitably, to Iran. What is particularly noticeable is how the neocons and their liberal democracy promoting counterparts have in several areas dominated the foreign policies of both parties. Leading neocon Bill Kristol, who called the Biden speech “a historic call to action on par with Ronald Reagan[‘s] ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall speech,’” recently also contributed “There would be no real prospect of an awakening in the United States and Europe were it not for the stand the Ukrainians have made. We would still be denying the threats we face. We would still be turning away from the urgency of the task we face. We would even, I daresay, still fail to appreciate the preciousness of the freedom and decency we have the obligation—and the honor—to defend. It is the Ukrainians who have shown us what free men and women can do, and what they are sometimes required to do, in defense of that freedom. It is the Ukrainians who have shown the world that we are in a new period of consequences. It is the Ukrainians who have given us the example of what it means today to fight back against brutality, and to fight for freedom.”

Kristol is, as so often, full of flag waving, chest puffing nonsense, peddling the notion that the United States has an obligation to police the world. Another leading neocon and regular Washington Post and The Atlantic contributor Anne Applebaum puts it this way and in so doing expands the playing field to include much of the world: “Unless democracies defend themselves together, the forces of autocracy will destroy them. I am using the word forces, in the plural, deliberately. Many American politicians would understandably prefer to focus on the long-term competition with China. But as long as Russia is ruled by Putin, then Russia is at war with us too. So are Belarus, North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, Nicaragua, Hungary, and potentially many others.”

It would be nice, for a change, to end an article on a high note, but high notes are hard to find these days. If there is anything beyond Ukraine to demonstrate the insanity of US foreign policy it would have to be, inevitably, recent news out of Israel. US Secretary of State Tony Blinken was recently in Israel trying in part to sell the possibility that the Biden Administration might actually come to a non-proliferation agreement with Iran over its nuclear program. Israel strongly opposes any such move and its lobby in the US led by various neocon think tanks has been working hard to kill any deal. So, what did Blinken do? He asked Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett for suggestions of what might be done in lieu of an actual agreement. Naftali reportedly suggested harsher sanctions on Iran. Cut it any way you want, but the renewal of 2015’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is beneficial for both the United States and all of Iran’s neighbors, and here the US senior-most representative involved in the negotiations is asking the head of a foreign government to tell him what to do. Something is very wrong in Washington.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

6 April 2022

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

By Jens Bernert

According to CNN:

“Lviv, Ukraine (CNN) The lifeless bodies of at least 20 civilian men line a single street in the town of Bucha near the Ukrainian capital. Some lie face down on the pavement while others are collapsed on their backs, mouths open in a tragic testament to the horrors of Russian occupation.

.
The hands of one man are tied behind his back with a piece of white cloth. Another man lies alone, tangled up in a bicycle by a grassy bank. A third man lies in the middle of the road, near the charred remains of a burned-out car.
The shocking images of the carnage in Bucha were captured by Agence France-Presse on Saturday, the same day Ukraine declared the town liberated from Russian troops. Accounts of alleged Russian atrocities are emerging as its forces retreat from areas near Kyiv following a failed bid to encircle the capital.
.

***

In contrast, the following report points to a false flag, which is yet to be verified.

At this stage the matter requires further investigation as to what actually happened.

***

Civilians were shot in Bucha, Ukraine, as reported by the Kiev government on April 3, 2022. The Russian army had withdrawn from the village on March 30. On March 31, the mayor of Bucha had reported joyfully and good-humoredly about the Russians‘ withdrawal in a video. There was no talk of deaths yet. They came later.

Video, Youtube (Upload 1. April 2022): „The mayor of Bucha, Anatoliy Fedoruk, confirmed the city’s liberation from Russian troops on March 31.“

Many of those killed wore white armbands, like those apparently worn by the Russian soldiers who occupied the site as a distinguishing mark.

It is speculated that many of those killed were people who had put on a white armband in solidarity with these Russian soldiers. Some of the people may also have been specifically branded as “traitors“ with an armband during the massacre, which was apparently perpetrated by Ukrainian units.

The murdered people were then abused on April 3 as part of a false flag operation by attributing their deaths to the Russians who had previously occupied this place. That the massacre was carried out only after the Russians had left, by Kiev-Ukrainian units, is shown by the already mentioned video with the mayor, who was in a good mood one day after the Russian withdrawal and had no dead to mourn in his place.

The fact that “traitors“ in Ukraine are going down the tubes, unfortunately, was already known a month ago by the BILD journalist Julian Röpcke, a great supporter of the Kiev government as well as a friend of the Azov battalion, from Ukraine. The propaganda with the dead themselves is reminiscent of the approach in the Syrian war.

Translation of Bild’s Journalist’s Statement:

“Phew … what can I say … Ukrainians do gruesome things with captured Russian soldiers & traitors. But I won’t post that here. It’s fundamentally wrong, but it happens and anyone who criticizes it should ask themselves what they would do in such a situation.“

Addendum:

A video released by the Ukrainian National Police (April 2, 6:52 p.m.) purported to show the “cleansing of the city from the occupiers.“

Russian troops had already left by that time (compare also the March 31 video of the mayor mentioned above).

There are no civilian corpses in this video.

One would expect the (alleged) Russian atrocities announced on April 3 to be shown or addressed there.

5 April 2022

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

By Ziaul Hoque

An unprecedented economic crisis is disrupting life across Sri Lanka. The government is running out of dollars to buy essentials. Mass protests are building against acute shortages of food and fuel. Multiple power plants are down, causing rolling power cuts disrupting life and production of key industries. Exams in schools are being suspended due to shortages of paper. Newspapers are either being forced to shut down, or cut their pages to stay afloat. Cooking gas shortages are forcing most bakeries and restaurants to close businesses. People even reportedly died while waiting in line for essentials.

The government has closed embassies abroad. The central bank is printing rupees and hoarding dollars, sending inflation to a record high of 17.5 percent in February. The finance minister is begging neighbours for credit lines to buy fuel and essentials.

The situation is alarming to say the least.

The crisis in the country, which has been in economic emergency since 2021, this year reached an extent where President Gotabaya Rajapaksa called in the army to manage the crisis.

This is in complete contrast with projections made only a few years back. Despite a 30-year-old civil war that ended in 2009, the country was heading towards the status of an upper-middle-income nation. The tourism-based economy was thriving, bringing in more jobs and billions of dollars, and middle class comforts: high-end eateries and cafes, imported cars, and upscale malls.

But how did the situation in the country, outperforming its neighbours not so long ago, sink so low and so fast?

Experts blame the crisis on a number of economic missteps by successive governments and also on misfortunes. The country’s enormous debt load, badly-timed tax cuts, the Covid-19 pandemic, which pummelled the tourism industry and foreign remittances, and, most recently, the war in Europe have wreaked havoc on the economy.

A 70 percent drop in foreign exchange reserves since January 2020 has left Sri Lanka struggling to pay for essential imports. The country is left with foreign reserves of only around $2.31 billion as of February, even as it faces debt payments of about $6.9 billion through the rest of the year.

In comparison, Bangladesh’s foreign reserves, as of March 2022, stand at $44.2 billion, which has increased despite the pandemic.

Sri Lanka’s foreign debt is at a staggering $51 billion.

After winning the election in 2019, Gotabaya Rajapaksa made good on a campaign promise to slash taxes. The move, which included a near-halving of value added tax, blindsided some top central bank executives.

The case against the move was that reducing potential revenues when obligations were high was risky and it undermined a 2019 debt management plan that hinged on a narrowing fiscal deficit.

The economic argument for the cuts was simple — to free up spending and boost Sri Lanka’s ailing finances. A similar move in 2009 by an administration led by Gotabaya’s elder brother Mahinda Rajapaksa had helped drive the country’s economic recovery after the civil war.

That time the bet paid off as Sri Lankan economy grew around 12 percent in 2012. But this time, the country was unprepared for what came next.

Not long after the move, the pandemic struck, inflicting deadly blows to the two main sources of foreign revenue for the island nation – tourism and remittance. According to World Bank estimates, half a million out of 22 million people in Sri Lanka fell below the poverty line since the pandemic struck.

The pandemic has sapped the flow of dollars from the island’s tourism sector, which in 2018, its best year on record, generated more than $4 billion. Foreign workers’ remittances slumped 22.7 percent to $5.5 billion in 2021, according to Reuters.

Economists say Sri Lanka’s debt spiral was already on an unsustainable path even before the pandemic dried up the tourism fund, which accounts for 10 percent of the country’s GDP.

And the misfortunes continued. The ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict has contributed to the downfall as Russia is one of the top buyers for the Sri Lankan tea industry. The conflict has also hiked fuel prices.

Apart from the debt crisis, the government’s decision to ban chemical fertilisers to make agriculture 100 percent organic had a negative impact on the economy too. Experts say organic farming reduces production by half.

Sri Lanka’s high dependency on imports for its essential items such as sugar, pulses, cereals and pharmaceuticals has only added to the troubles.

Experts said that successive Sri Lankan governments have been issuing sovereign bonds since 2007 without any plan to repay the loans. Further, reserves were built by borrowing foreign funds rather than a high earning through export services. This only exacerbated the foreign debts of the country.

During his 2005 to 2015 rule, Mahinda Rajapaksa, now the prime minister, opened the door to Chinese lenders. He borrowed heavily from China, eying to turn the country into another Singapore by building ambitious infrastructure projects, some of which ended up as white elephants.

From 2010 till 2015, Rajapaksa’s final years in office, China poured $4.8 billion worth of loans into building the Hambantota port, a new airport, a coal-fired power plant and highways. By 2016, Chinese had loaned Sri Lanka $6 billion, fueling an infrastructure-building spree.

As a bitter lesson of this ill-planned drive, Sri Lanka, unable to repay a $1.4b loan, had to lease the Hambantota port to a Chinese company for 99 years in 2017.

The debt crisis has also dogged the coalition government of president Maithripala Sirisena, who ruled from 2015-2018. Political instability during this period didn’t help the country either. After the highs of 12 percent economic growth in 2012, the country’s growth hovered around 3-5 percent in subsequent years, only to take a plunge since 2019.

But it’s not only the Chinese loan that Sri Lanka has to pay. The largest slice of debt that will mature in the next couple of years predates the Chinese lending boom. Those are from multilateral institutions like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.

Chinese lenders hold 10 percent of this $51 billion debt total, Japan accounts for 12 percent, the Asian Development Bank 14 percent and the World Bank 11 percent.

At a time when Sri Lanka badly needed access to international capital markets to keep its debt management programme on track, a series of downgrades by rating agencies in the wake of the pandemic in 2020 effectively locked it out.

The government has responded to the ratings agency downgrades with a mix of indignation, disbelief and denial.

Government officials believe the country can still manage to come out of this crisis betting on a huge upturn in tourism. In fact, the country’s Department of Census and Statistics announced on Tuesday (March 29) that Sri Lanka’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 3.7 percent in 2021 after contracting 3.6 percent in 2020.

In a sign of recovery, the main economic activities of the economy — agriculture, industry and services — grew by 2 percent, 5.3 percent and 3 percent respectively, the department said.

But are those figures enough to rescue the country?

After initially refusing to budge, Sri Lanka last week said it will seek World Bank assistance to stave off the crisis in addition to an International Monetary Fund (IMF) rescue plan.

It has sought help from its neighbours too. The government has raised swaps and credit lines worth $1.9 billion from India, and two more are under negotiation with Pakistan and Australia. Bangladesh has also provided $250 million loan assistance in August 2021 through currency swap.

Sri Lanka also received a $1.5 billion Yuan swap in December and the last tranche of a $1.3 billion syndicated loan from China arrived in September 2021. It has also asked for another $2.5 billion loan package from Beijing.

The Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL) this month said in a statement that the economy was in a better shape than some reports suggested. The CBSL said that it was committed to meeting all debt obligations and that suggestions Sri Lanka was close to default were wrong.

“The Sri Lankan authorities are pursuing a carefully thought-out plan which will ensure Sri Lanka’s debt sustainability and economic revival,” the Bank said.

Some analysts and opposition politicians, however, fear Sri Lanka may default this year.

“Sri Lanka’s economy is experiencing multiple organ failures, and sepsis has set in,” said Murtaza Jafferjee, chairman of the Advocata Institute, a think tank in Colombo, to The New York Times.

2 April 2022

Source: www.thedailystar.net

Press Release: ‘A NEW SECURITY AND DEVELOPMENT ARCHITECTURE FOR ALL NATIONS’

The international Schiller Institute is releasing this program outline for the April 9 conference, with leading speakers from around the world, to establish “A New Security and Development Architecture for all Nations. Click here for more information and to register.

I. PLENARY SESSION

1) Helga Zepp-LaRouche; Founder, Schiller Institute: Welcome and Keynote, “The Need for a New Paradigm”
2) Amb. Anatoly Antonov, H.E. Ambassador Anatoly Antonov, Ambassador of The Russian Federation to the United States: “Prospects for Building a New International Security Architecture”
3) Sam Pitroda; Innovator, Entrepreneur and Policy-Maker; U.S./India: “The Need to Redesign the World”
4) Jay Naidoo; Cabinet Minister under President Nelson Mandela, South Africa: “The African Perspective”
5) Chen Xiaohan, Chinese People’s Association for Peace and Disarmament: “Shared Future of Mankind”
6) Alessia Ruggeri; Spokeswoman of the Comitato per la Repubblica, trade unionist (Italy): “For a Europe of the Fatherlands with the Peace of Westphalia”
7) P.S. Raghavan, Former Indian Ambassador to Russia: “The Indian Perspective”

Discussion among the panelists

II. ECONOMY

1) Dennis Small; Ibero-American Editor, EIR: “The New Architecture: A Program to Prevent the Starvation of One Billion People Due to the Sanctions”
2) Prof. Justin Yifu Lin; Dean, Institute of New Structural Economics; Dean, Institute of South-South Cooperation and Development; Honorary Dean, School of National Development, Peking University: “China’s BRI: The Rationale and Likely Impacts”
3) Diogène Senny; President of the Pan African League UMOJA Congo, Republic of Congo: “What Africa Expects from the World”
4) Fraydique Alexander Gaitán, President of USCTRAB trade union confederation of Colombia; and Pedro Rubio, Colombian trade union leader: “South America and the New Development Architecture”

Public discussion

BREAK: 45 Minutes

III. SECURITY

1) Jacques Cheminade; President, S&P, France: “The Peace of Westphalia to Escape the Thucydides Trap”
2) Dr. George Koo; retired Business Consultant; Chairman, Burlingame Foundation: “U.S. Sanctions on Russia and China Are Suicide for the Dollar”
3) Mike Callicrate; Kansas cattleman, policy advocate and the founder and owner of Ranch Foods Direct: “The Cartel Era Is Over – More Sovereign Farmers, Food for All – Double World Food Production”

Public discussion

IV. DEVELOPMENT

1) Dennis Speed; Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites, author and long-time leader of the LaRouche movement; “The Urgent Need for a World Health System”
2) Helga Zepp-LaRouche: “Operation Ibn Sina”, Dipl. Ing. Daud Azimi – Board Member Peace National Front of Afghanistan: “Afghanistan: Today’s Urgent Economic and Political Imperatives”
3) Princy Mthombeni; Communication Specialist, Africa4Nuclear Founder, South Africa: “Energy Security for Africa”
4) Saeed Naqvi; senior Indian journalist, television commentator and interviewer: “Media Role and Responsibility”

Public discussion

Concluding Remarks: Helga Zepp-LaRouche and Sam Pitroda

3 April 2022

By Manlio Dinucci

Prime Minister Draghi pulls straight on increasing military spending, with the full support of the President of the Republic. For Italy, this means going from the current 26 billion euros a year to at least 38 billion a year, or from 70 to over 100 million euros a day spent on public money.

The decision was actually taken not in Rome but in Brussels, at the NATO Summit of Heads of State and Government. The increase in NATO military expenditure is driven by the United States: the Pentagon budget is increased by 10% to 773 billion dollars, to which other military expenditures are added, bringing the total to over 1.000 billion dollars annually.

NATO under US command is intensifying its military escalation in Europe, following the same strategy that provoked the Russian response with the military operation in Ukraine. To the four battle groups already deployed in Poland and the three Baltic republics, NATO is adding four more in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. Their function is not only against Russia, however.

In Bulgaria, the defense minister, deemed untrustworthy, was deposed by NATO order and replaced by Bulgaria’s ambassador to NATO. In Hungary, where general elections are held on April 3rd, Prime Minister Orbán opposes the country’s involvement in the escalation of war against Russia, refusing to supply arms to Ukraine, and declares that Hungary wants to increase imports of Russian gas. Conversely, the left declares that, if it goes to government, it will adopt sanctions on Russian gas supplies and send arms to Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the U.S. and the European Union have formed a joint task force to reduce Russian gas supplies to Europe and replace it with U.S.-supplied liquefied natural gas. However, this is much more expensive than Russian gas and has very volatile prices. Hence the colossal increase in energy expenditure in Italy and Europe, which prepares for a disastrous economic crisis.

Manlio Dinucci, award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

3 April 2022

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

By Richard Falk

31 Mar 2022 – This is a modified version of an opinion piece published in CounterPunch on March 30, 2022.

Russia launched its massive invasion of Ukraine on February 24 flagrantly violating the most fundamental norm of international law—the prohibition of recourse to international force encroaching upon the territory of a sovereign state except in exercising the right of self-defense against a prior armed attack. Yes, there were a series of irresponsible provocations by NATO that aroused understandable security concerns in Moscow, including the relentless expansion of the Cold War NATO alliance after the Cold War was over, the threat from the Soviet Union had disappeared, and promises were made by Western leaders to Gorbachev of no further NATO expansion. Such geopolitical behavior amounted to imprudent statecraft by the West, especially given Russian historical anxieties about being surrounded and attacked by hostile forces. Such eminent public figures as George Kennan, Jack Matlock (respected former U.S. ambassador to Russia), and even Henry Kissinger issued warnings to this effect, but they went unheeded in Washington.

The Ukraine War is best understood and interpreted as a two-level war. In the active combat zones of Ukraine, it is a devastating traditional war between Russia and Ukraine producing an increasingly severe humanitarian crisis that includes massive civilian displacement taking the dual form of refugee flows over Ukraine’s borders and internal movements away from embattled cities and throughout the country.

This primary war phenomenon interacts with, and in some respects contradicts, an ongoing secondary proxy war pitting Russia against the United States, with Russia trying to impose its will on Ukraine and the U.S. pursuing several geopolitical objectives additional to the support of Ukrainian territorial sovereignty. These include revitalizing and strengthening NATO and mobilizing unity in Europe by inflaming anti-Russian sentiments, which as during the Cold War rested on fear and loathing of Russia, then the Soviet Union. There is no military engagement at this point in the proxy war, although its ideological confrontations, while avoiding direct violence at present, run the risk of escalating dangerously in various directions, including putting inhibitions on nuclear threats and risks to their greatest test since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. It should be appreciated that the fog of war is denser in the secret sessions of proxy war advisors and leaders than even what is hovering over the Ukrainian battlefields. Strategic objectives in this two-level war are confusing, being neither coherent nor consistent, and because there are no current images of death and destruction, the very real negative effects of the proxy war tend to be ignored, such as prolonging the killing, delaying a ceasefire.

In this proxy war, Russia is seeking to reestablish its traditional sphere of influence over the Russian ‘near abroad’ in Ukraine and the U.S. is determined to frustrate this Russian mission, although at a high cost to Ukrainians. The U.S., along with other NATO members, is doing this by sending weapons and other forms of assistance to help the Ukrainians resist more effectively. In addition, strong sanctions are being imposed on Russia with the announced intention of exerting enough economic and political pain on Moscow and Putin to make Russia reverse course. To augment coercive policies Biden, in particular has used language of incitement to attack Putin, climaxing with this outburst a few days ago while in Poland: “For God’s sake, this man cannot stay in power.” Previously, he had called Putin a war criminal, supportive of indictment of the Russian leader by the International Criminal Court, surely viewed by most of the world as hypocritical given the denunciation of the ICC for daring to investigate charges of war crimes against the U.S. in Afghanistan, reinforced by retaliatory personal sanctions imposed on the Prosecutor in the Hague and other officials of the Tribunal.

I find both of these war strategies dysfunctional and dangerous. For Russia to impose its will on Ukraine by military force is both unlawful, and unlikely to succeed, while inflicting great harm on Ukraine and Ukrainians, as well as on itself as a result of the sanctions and diplomatic pushback. One symbolic result has been the activation of the International Criminal Court in pursuit of an indictment of Putin. Some critics are urging. the UN to establish the type of tribunal used to prosecute surviving Nazi leaders at Nuremberg after World War II. Although these gestures towards accountability for international crimes are plausibly associated with the Russian leader’s behavior, their wider credibility is gravely compromised as mentioned above by moral, legal, and political hypocrisy given past U.S. comparable behavior that was carefully spared similar scrutiny.

Looked at differently, for the U.S. to pursue a militarist strategy toward Russia in this manner is to choose a path leading toward frustration and danger, drawn out humanitarian suffering in Ukraine, disastrous economic spillover effects already leading to food insecurity throughout the Middle East and North Africa by way of spikes in prices and shortages, renewed pressures to turn to nuclear power and fossil fuels in the vain search for energy independence, and the likelihood of inducing a severe global recession coupled with an escalation of geopolitical tensions of the West with Russia and possibly China. In other words, these antagonists on the geopolitical level of conflict are on a treacherous collision course, with only China so far acting prudently throughout the crisis, remaining on the sidelines, unwilling to give either Russia assistance or to endorse its flagrant violations of Ukrainian sovereignty while opposing sanctions and punitive action directed at Russia.

There is another, better way to proceed to resolve the Ukraine crisis. Russia should have learned from its earlier Afghanistan invasion that military superiority cannot overcome determined national resistance, particularly if externally supported. This is the unlearned lesson for the U.S. of the Vietnam War and all subsequent regime-changing wars of the Ukraine variant. The political outcomes of the Iraq War of 2003 and the costly failure of the prolonged effort to keep the Taliban from power in Afghanistan were reminders that military superiority had lost its historical agency in the post-colonial world. Such a recognition by Washington while long overdue, yet not forthcoming, which means the likelihood of future failures of a similar kind.

At the same time, the U.S. has been losing out globally, overplaying its geopolitical hand ever since the end of the Cold War. Instead of dissolving NATO when Moscow ended the Warsaw Pact, it sponsored anti-Russian political forces all along the Russian border as well as taking the lead in converting NATO into an expanding offensive alliance to be used anywhere in the world, defying its European founding mission as specified in the underlying treaty arrangement. Since the Soviet collapse the alliance was being illegitimately used by Washington as a global policy tool to provide a collective cover somewhat obscuring the unilateral lawlessness of controversial U.S. foreign policy undertakings that involve uses of military force.

The U.S. would have much to gain by shifting the emphasis from a pro-active level 2 strategy to a level 1 diplomatic approach. By this is meant that instead of inflicting pain on Russia and demonizing Putin and Russia, the U.S. should be seeking to solve the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine by opting for diplomacy and political compromise, stopping the killing as the highest policy priority, and also moving to ease the nuclear dangers associated with escalation and prolonging the Ukrainian ordeal of this Level1 war. Such a behavioral abandonment by the U.S. of its Level 2 irresponsible geopolitical tactics of confrontation and incitement would also have the great national advantage of minimizing the adverse spillover effects outside of Ukraine on food, energy, trade, and political stability.

This seems an opportune moment to renounce the triumphalist unipolar pretensions that took over in Washington at the end of the Cold War. It is time to take account of the self-inflicted wounds of a disastrous record of U.S. over-investment in the military (currently more than the combined expenditures of the next eleven countries) and under-investment in humane state-building at home. Those who seek peace, justice, and economic stability in the political sphere should explore further the restorative potentialities of a UN/international law centered geopolitics of multipolarity.

At present, neither side seems ready to move in such constructive directions. Biden articulates the Level 2 strategy of the U.S. as based on bolstering Ukraine’s military capabilities to carry on a successful war of resistance, while seeking to pressure Russia to the point of acknowledging that their leader should be replaced and Moscow renounce all security claims justifying action beyond its borders. Backing Putin into such a corner is a recipe for geopolitical retaliation, likely giving rise to an escalation spiral that comes ever closer to the nuclear threshold, which as it unfolds would lead to a Western response that was more prone to engage in the active defense of the Ukraine. Escalation along these lines would heighten the nuclear danger, amounts to starting a menacing second cold war, and seems oblivious to the risks of World War III. In the interim, climate change challenges, despite their urgency are placed once more on the back burner of international attention where they were temporarily relocated during the COVID pandemic since 2020. Put simply the opposed geopolitical postures draw on competing visions of world order: the U.S. seeks to police a unipolar world without opposition, while Russia and China in different ways are insisting on establishing geopolitical norms of multipolarity, which include the restoration of geographically proximate spheres of influence for geopolitical actors.

I find it extremely disturbing that the venerable Economist articulates support for Biden’s geopolitical approach, framed as Western support for a Ukrainian victory in a form that inflicts a humiliating defeat upon Russia: “Unfortunately, Ukraine’s Western backers are dragging their feet–reluctant, it seems, to provoke Russia or bear the cost of sanctions. That is reprehensibly short-sighted. A decisive Ukrainian victory is more likely to lead to a stable peace. And by dealing what may be a terminal blow to three centuries of Russian imperialism, it could also transform the security of Europe.” [March 31, 2022] Such a logic is oblivious to Ukrainian suffering arising from a prolonged war, the severity of severe spillover costs to Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and the world economy, as well as dangerously stressing geopolitics with high probabilities of escalation in the short-run including heightened risks of breaching nuclear red lines and in the longer run of stimulating a resurgent militarism experienced as a new cold war that diverts the world from climate change and other global challenges. Never has it seemed more beneficial ‘to give peace a chance’ not by such militarist thinking, but by a turn to imaginatively flexible diplomacy. If the The Economist editorial is a reflection of a consensus prevailing in Western political elite circles, we are all in for a dismal future.

I find it extremely disturbing that the venerable Economist articulates support for Biden’s geopolitical approach, framed as Western support for a Ukrainian victory in a form that inflicts a humiliating defeat upon Russia: “Unfortunately, Ukraine’s Western backers are dragging their feet–reluctant, it seems, to provoke Russia or bear the cost of sanctions. That is reprehensibly short-sighted. A decisive Ukrainian victory is more likely to lead to a stable peace. And by dealing what may be a terminal blow to three centuries of Russian imperialism, it could also transform the security of Europe.” [March 31, 2022] Such a logic is oblivious to Ukrainian suffering arising from a prolonged war, the severity of severe spillover costs to Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and the world economy, as well as dangerously stressing geopolitics with high probabilities of escalation in the short-run including heightened risks of breaching nuclear red lines and in the longer run of stimulating a resurgent militarism experienced as a new cold war that diverts the world from climate change and other global challenges. Never has it seemed more beneficial ‘to give peace a chance’ not by such militarist thinking, but by a turn to imaginatively flexible diplomacy. If the The Economist editorial is a reflection of a consensus prevailing in Western political elite circles, we are all in for a dismal future.

These concerns are aggravated by other factors in the broader international context. The UN has been sidelined, international law is flaunted, and the killing goes on. Only transnational civil society in the form of public pressure from within the main geopolitical antagonists can bring these two governments to their senses and end this terrible two-level struggle. A few countries, among them Turkey, could offer to mediate peace negotiations to end the Level 1 Ukrainian War but the Level 2 antagonists seem stubbornly entrapped in their lose/lose war paradigm. As long as this is so, Ukrainians will continue to die and the peoples of the world suffer from the immediate and more deferred consequence of dysfunctional geopolitics.

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Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, at Queen Mary University London, Research Associate the Orfalea Center of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Fellow of the Tellus Institute.

4 April 2022

Source: www.transcend.org

By Joe Lauria

27 Mar 2022 – The U.S. got its war in Ukraine. Without it, Washington could not attempt to destroy Russia’s economy, orchestrate worldwide condemnation and lead an insurgency to bleed Russia, all part of an attempt to bring down its government. Joe Biden has now left no doubt that it’s true.

The president of the United States has confirmed what Consortium News and others have been reporting since the beginnings of Russsiagate in 2016, that the ultimate U.S. aim is to overthrow the government of Vladimir Putin.

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden said on Saturday at the Royal Castle in Warsaw. The White House and the State Dept. have been scrambling to explain away Biden’s remark.

But it is too late.

“The President’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region,” a White House official said. “He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.”

On Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “As you know, and as you have heard us say repeatedly, we do not have a strategy of regime change in Russia, or anywhere else, for that matter,” the last words inserted for comic relief.

Biden first gave the game away at his Feb. 24 White House press conference — the first day of the invasion. He was asked why he thought new sanctions would work when the earlier sanctions had not prevented Russia’s invasion. Biden said the sanctions were never designed to prevent Russia’s intervention but to punish it afterward. Therefore the U.S. needed Russia to invade.

“No one expected the sanctions to prevent anything from happening,” Biden said. “That has to sh- — this is going to take time. And we have to show resolve so he knows what’s coming and so the people of Russia know what he’s brought on them. That’s what this is all about.” It is all about the Russian people turning on Putin to overthrow him, which would explain Russia’s crackdown on anti-war protestors and the media.

It was no slip of the tongue. Biden repeated himself in Brussels on Thursday: “Let’s get something straight … I did not say that in fact the sanctions would deter him. Sanctions never deter. You keep talking about that. Sanctions never deter. The maintenance of sanctions — the maintenance of sanctions, the increasing the pain … we will sustain what we’re doing not just next month, the following month, but for the remainder of this entire year. That’s what will stop him.”

It was the second time that Biden confirmed that the purpose of the draconian U.S. sanctions on Russia was never to prevent the invasion of Ukraine, which the U.S. desperately needed to activate its plans, but to punish Russia and get its people to rise up against Putin and ultimately restore a Yeltsin-like puppet to Moscow. Without a cause those sanctions could never have been imposed. The cause was Russia’s invasion.

Regime Change in Moscow

Once hidden in studies such as this 2019 RAND study, the desire to overthrow the government in Moscow is now out in the open.

One of the earliest threats came from Carl Gersham, the long-time director of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Gershman, wrote in 2013, before the Kiev coup: “Ukraine is the biggest prize.” If it could be pulled away from Russia and into the West, then “Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

David Ignatius wrote in The Washington Post in 1999 that the NED could now practice regime change out in the open, rather than covertly as the C.I.A. had done.

The RAND Corporation on March 18 then published an article titled, “If Regime Change Should Come to Moscow,” the U.S. should be ready for it. Michael McFaul, the hawkish former U.S. ambassador to Russia, has been calling for regime change in Russia for some time. He tried to finesse Biden’s words by tweeting:

On March 1, Boris Johnson’s spokesperson said the sanctions on Russia “we are introducing, that large parts of the world are introducing, are to bring down the Putin regime.” No. 10 tried to walk that back but two days earlier James Heappey, minister for the armed forces, wrote in The Daily Telegraph:

“His failure must be complete; Ukrainian sovereignty must be restored, and the Russian people empowered to see how little he cares for them. In showing them that, Putin’s days as President will surely be numbered and so too will those of the kleptocratic elite that surround him. He’ll lose power and he won’t get to choose his successor.”

After the fall of the Soviet Union and throughout the 1990s Wall Street and the U.S. government dominated Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, asset-stripping former state-owned industries and impoverishing the Russian people. Putin came to power on New Year’s Eve 1999 and starting restoring Russia’s sovereignty. His 2007 Munich Security Conference speech, in which he blasted Washington’s aggressive unilateralism, alarmed the U.S., which clearly wants a Yeltsin-like figure to return. The 2014 U.S.-backed coup in Kiev was a first step. Russiagate was another.

Back in 2017, Consortium News saw Russiagate as a prelude to regime change in Moscow. That year I wrote:

“The Russia-gate story fits neatly into a geopolitical strategy that long predates the 2016 election. Since Wall Street and the U.S. government lost the dominant position in Russia that existed under the pliable President Boris Yeltsin, the strategy has been to put pressure on getting rid of Putin to restore a U.S. friendly leader in Moscow. There is substance to Russia’s concerns about American designs for ‘regime change’ in the Kremlin.

Moscow sees an aggressive America expanding NATO and putting 30,000 NATO troops on its borders; trying to overthrow a secular ally in Syria with terrorists who threaten Russia itself; backing a coup in Ukraine as a possible prelude to moves against Russia; and using American NGOs to foment unrest inside Russia before they were forced to register as foreign agents.”

The Invasion Was Necessary

The United States could have easily prevented Russia’s military action. It could have stopped Russia’s intervention in Ukraine’s civil war from happening by doing three things: forcing implementation of the 8-year old Minsk peace accords, dissolving extreme right Ukrainian militias and engaging Russia in serious negotiations about a new security architecture in Europe.

But it didn’t.

The U.S. can still end this war through serious diplomacy with Russia. But it won’t. Blinken has refused to speak with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Instead, Biden announced on March 16 another $800 million in military aid for Ukraine on the same day it was revealed Russia and Ukraine have been working on a 15-point peace plan. It has never been clearer that the U.S. wanted this war and wants it to continue.

NATO troops and missiles in Eastern Europe were evidently so vital to U.S. plans that it would not discuss removing them to stop Russia’s troops from crossing into Ukraine. Russia had threatened a “technical/military” response if NATO and the U.S. did not take seriously Russia’s security interests, presented in December in the form of treaty proposals.

The U.S. knew what would happen if it rejected those proposals calling for Ukraine not to join NATO, for missiles in Poland and Romania to be removed and NATO troops in Eastern Europe withdrawn. That’s why it started screaming about an invasion in December. The U.S. refused to move the missiles and provocatively sent even more NATO forces to Eastern Europe.

MSNBC ran an article on March 4, titled, “Russia’s Ukraine invasion may have been preventable: The U.S. refused to reconsider Ukraine’s NATO status as Putin threatened war. Experts say that was a huge mistake.” The article said:

“The abundance of evidence that NATO was a sustained source of anxiety for Moscow raises the question of whether the United States’ strategic posture was not just imprudent but negligent.”

Senator Joe Biden knew as far back as 1997 that NATO expansion, which he supported, could eventually lead to a hostile Russian reaction.

The Excised Background to the Invasion

It is vital to recall the events of 2014 in Ukraine and what has followed until now because it is routinely whitewashed from Western media coverage. Without that context, it is impossible to understand what is happening in Ukraine.

Both Donetsk and Lugansk had voted for independence from Ukraine in 2014 after a U.S.-backed coup overthrew the democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovych. The new, U.S.-installed Ukrainian government then launched a war against the provinces to crush their resistance to the coup and their bid for independence, a war that is still going on eight years later at the cost of thousands of lives with U.S. support. It is this war that Russia has entered.

Neo-Nazi groups, such as Right Sector and the Azov Battalion, who revere the World War II Ukrainian fascist leader Stepan Bandera, took part in the coup as well as in the ongoing violence against Lugansk and Donetsk.

Despite reporting in the BBC, the NYT, the Daily Telegraph and CNN on the neo-Nazis at the time, their role in the story is now excised by Western media, reducing Putin to a madman hellbent on conquest without reason. As though he woke up one morning and looked at a map to decide what country he would invade next.

The public has been induced to embrace the Western narrative, while being kept in the dark about Washington’s ulterior motives.

The Traps Set for Russia

Six weeks ago, on Feb. 4, I wrote an article, “What a US Trap for Russia in Ukraine Might Look Like,” in which I laid out a scenario in which Ukraine would begin an offensive against ethnic Russian civilians in Donbass, forcing Russia to decide whether to abandon them or to intervene to save them.

If Russia intervened with regular army units, I argued, this would be the “Invasion!” the U.S. needed to attack Russia’s economy, turn the world against Moscow and end Putin’s rule.

In the third week of February, Ukrainian government shelling of Donbass dramatically increased, according to the OSCE, with what appeared to be the new offensive. Russia was forced to make its decision.

It first recognized the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, a move it put off for eight years. And then on Feb. 24 President Vladimir Putin announced a military operation in Ukraine to “demilitarize” and “denazify” the country.

Russia stepped into a trap, which grows more perilous by the day as Russia’s military intervention continues with a second trap in sight. From Moscow’s perspective, the stakes were too high not to intervene. And if it can induce Kiev to accept a settlement, it might escape the clutches of the United States.

A Planned Insurgency

The examples of previous U.S. traps that I gave in the Feb. 4 piece were the U.S. telling Saddam Hussein in 1990 that it would not interfere in its dispute with Kuwait, opening the trap to Iraq’s invasion, allowing the U.S. to destroy Baghdad’s military. The second example is most relevant.

In a 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, Jimmy Carter’s former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted that the C.I.A. set a trap four decades ago for Moscow by arming mujahiddin to fight the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan and bring down the Soviet government, much as the U.S. wants today to bring down Putin. He said:

“According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

He then explained that the reason for the trap was to bring down the Soviet Union. Brzezinski said:

“That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.’ Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime, a conflict that bought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.”

Brzezinski said he had no regrets that financing the mujahideen spawned terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. “What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?,” he asked. The U.S. today is likewise gambling with the world economy and further instability in Europe with its tolerance of neo-Nazism in Ukraine.

In his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, Brzezinski wrote:

“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state.”

Thus U.S. “primacy,” or world dominance, which still drives Washington, is not possible without control of Eurasia, as Brzezinski argued, and that’s not possible without control of Ukraine by pushing Russia out (U.S. takeover of Ukraine in the 2014 coup) and controlling the governments in Moscow and Beijing. What Brzezinski and U.S. leaders still view as Russia’s “imperial ambitions” are in Moscow seen as imperative defensive measures against an aggressive West.

Without the Russian invasion the second trap the U.S. is planning would not be possible: an insurgency meant to bog Russia down and give it its “Vietnam.” Europe and the U.S. are flooding more arms into Ukraine, and Kiev has called for volunteer fighters. The way jihadists flocked to Afghanistan, white supremacists from around Europe are traveling to Ukraine to become insurgents.

Just as the Afghanistan insurgency helped bring down the Soviet Union, the insurgency is meant to topple Putin’s Russia.

An article in Foreign Affairs entitled “The Coming Ukrainian Insurgency” was published Feb. 25, just one day after Russia’s intervention, indicating advanced planning that was dependent on an invasion. The article had to be written and edited before Russia crossed into Ukraine and was published as soon as it did. It said:

“If Russia limits its offensive to the east and south of Ukraine, a sovereign Ukrainian government will not stop fighting. It will enjoy reliable military and economic support from abroad and the backing of a united population. But if Russia pushes on to occupy much of the country and install a Kremlin-appointed puppet regime in Kyiv, a more protracted and thorny conflagration will begin. Putin will face a long, bloody insurgency that could spread across multiple borders, perhaps even reaching into Belarus to challenge Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Putin’s stalwart ally. Widening unrest could destabilize other countries in Russia’s orbit, such as Kazakhstan, and even spill into Russia itself. When conflicts begin, unpredictable and unimaginable outcomes can become all too real. Putin may not be prepared for the insurgency—or insurgencies—to come.

WINNER’S REMORSE

Many a great power has waged war against a weaker one, only to get bogged down as a result of its failure to have a well-considered end game. This lack of foresight has been especially palpable in troubled occupations. It was one thing for the United States to invade Vietnam in 1965, Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq in 2003; likewise for the Soviet Union to enter Afghanistan in 1979. It was an altogether more difficult task to persevere in those countries in the face of stubborn insurgencies. … As the United States learned in Vietnam and Afghanistan, an insurgency that has reliable supply lines, ample reserves of fighters, and sanctuary over the border can sustain itself indefinitely, sap an occupying army’s will to fight, and exhaust political support for the occupation at home.’”

As far back as Jan. 14, Yahoo! News reported:

“The CIA is overseeing a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel, according to five former intelligence and national security officials familiar with the initiative. The program, which started in 2015, is based at an undisclosed facility in the Southern U.S., according to some of those officials.

The CIA-trained forces could soon play a critical role on Ukraine’s eastern border, where Russian troops have massed in what many fear is preparation for an invasion. …

The program has involved ‘very specific training on skills that would enhance’ the Ukrainians’ ‘ability to push back against the Russians,’ said the former senior intelligence official.

The training, which has included ‘tactical stuff,’ is “going to start looking pretty offensive if Russians invade Ukraine,’ said the former official.

One person familiar with the program put it more bluntly. ‘The United States is training an insurgency,’ said a former CIA official, adding that the program has taught the Ukrainians how ‘to kill Russians.’”

In his Warsaw speech, Biden tipped his hand about an insurgency to come. He said nothing about peace talks. Instead he said: “In this battle, we need to be clear-eyed. This battle will not be won in days or months either. We need to steel ourselves of a long fight ahead.”

Hillary Clinton laid it all out on Feb. 28, just four days into Russia’s operation. She brought up the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, saying “it didn’t end well for Russia” and that in Ukraine “this is the model that people are looking at … that can stymie Russia.”

What neither Maddow nor Clinton mentioned when discussing volunteers going to fight for Ukraine is what The New York Times reported on Feb. 25, a day after the invasion, and before their interview: “Far-right militias in Europe plan to confront Russian forces.”

The Economic War

Along with the quagmire, are the raft of profound economic sanctions on Russia designed to collapse its economy and drive Putin from power.

These are the harshest sanctions the U.S. and Europe have ever imposed on any nation. Sanctions against Russia’s Central Bank sanctions are the most serious, as they were intended to destroy the value of the ruble. One U.S. dollar was worth 85 rubles on Feb. 24, the day of the invasion and soared to 154 per dollar on March 7. However the Russian currency strengthened to 101 on Friday.

Putin and other Russian leaders were personally sanctioned, as were Russia’s largest banks. Most Russian transactions are no longer allowed to be settled through the SWIFT international payment system. The German-Russia Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline was closed down and become bankrupt.

The U.S. blocked imports of Russian oil, which was about 5 percent of U.S. supply. BP and Shell pulled out of Russian partnerships. European and U.S. airspace for Russian commercial liners was closed. Europe, which depends on Russia gas, is still importing it, and is so far rebuffing U.S. pressure to stop buying Russian oil.

A raft of voluntary sanctions followed: PayPal, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix and McDonalds have been shut down in Russia. Coca-cola will stop sales to the country. U.S. news organizations have left, Russian artists in the West have been fired and even Russian cats are banned.

It also gave an opportunity for U.S. cable providers to get RT America shut down. Other Russia media has been de-platformed and Russian government websites hacked. A Yale University professor has drawn up a list to shame U.S. companies that are still operating in Russia.

Russian exports of wheat and fertilizer have been banned, driving the price of food in the West. Biden admitted as much on Thursday:

“With regard to food shortage … it’s going to be real. The price of these sanctions is not just imposed upon Russia, it’s imposed upon an awful lot of countries as well, including European countries and our country as well. And — because both Russia and Ukraine have been the breadbasket of Europe in terms of wheat, for example — just to give you one example.”

The aim is clear: “asphyxiating Russia’s economy”, as French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian put it, even if it damages the West.

The question is whether Russia can extricate itself from the U.S. strategy of insurgency and economic war.
______________________________________

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Sunday Times of London and numerous other newspapers.

4 April 2022

Source: www.transcend.org

By Jan Oberg, Ph.D.

Since Russia’s foolish and totally unacceptable war on Ukraine started, there no longer seems to be any limit to what can be said about Russians and Russia and what can be done to isolate the country and its people economically, culturally, socially, financially and in the media. The word ‘Putin’ explains everything as if by magic.

The contempt and hatred must have been latent deep in the collective unconscious for a very long time. It is probably largely a consequence of the so-called free media’s systematic, one-sided “threat assessments” over decades – without comparative analysis with NATO’s behaviour and military overspending – and the omission of any perspective on Russia’s history, security needs or its perception of us.

To explain something has been distorted – by whom? – to be identical with defending. The conversation is dumbing down. The case – the ball – disappears, and all that remains is the persona, categorisation and positioning: “Putin Versteher,” “pro-Russian,” “anti-NATO,” “Putinist,” or “paid by the Kremlin.”

The Unbearable Folly of Irreversible, Hasty Decisions

With the classic reservation of a few exceptions, governments, politicians, scientists, and the media are today entirely at the mercy of emotion. Laws can be broken, special regulations imposed, money taken from the world’s poor for Ukrainian refugees; the business world has suddenly become PR-politically correct with Ukraine flags and blue/yellow lights and immediate cessation of all activities in Russia.

The EU overnight has no resource problems with 2-3 million refugees from Ukraine, while in 2015 it could not cope with 1.5 million – mostly Muslims, and this is important – from the war zones the US and other NATO countries have ravaged for decades and many times worse than Russia has done at least until today in Ukraine. Germany decides – again without analysis – to immediately rearm up to US$ 112 billion per year. Russia’s is US$ 66 billion!

In the frenzy of the dog pack, no one will risk appearing cautious, moderate or understanding when it comes to the underlying Russia-NATO conflicts. They denounce the violence – Russia’s but not that of others to nearly the same extent – and overlook entirely the underlying conflicts, which are Russia and NATO and certainly not Russia and Ukraine. Ukraine is only the unfortunate war theatre of war.

More weapons and more rearmament – whatever the cost to our society in the slightly longer term, which no one is analysing – is the only answer needed. We must stand together now, and we do.

But what do we do if it turns out the day after tomorrow to be fundamentally wrong and self-destructive policies?

Cultural events involving Russians are shut down in a row – exhibitions and concerts. The grotesque thing is that these measures also affect Russian artists who have explicitly denounced Russia’s invasion. In other words, they are being punished because they are Russian.

Ministers are urging scientists to stop ongoing research collaborations and not start new ones. Russian goods are removed from shops. Peace and other demonstrations go only to the Russian embassies, not to those of the NATO countries, which – extremely provocatively – have just expanded NATO and let all the wise warnings go to waste. And, as mentioned, waged wars on a scale that dwarfs Russia in comparison.

Facebook sees fit to allow hate speech against Russians – and only them, of course – as long as it’s within the context of the war in Ukraine.

I wonder how far Russians and the rest of us will be forced to suffer under this modern-day parallel to anti-Semitism: Russophobia?

I wonder when this collective psychosis, this mass hysteria with a single focus, will end generations from now?

I wonder if anyone in the Christian West will one day think of Luke: “Why do you see the speck in your brother’s eye but do not notice the beam in your own eye? Hypocrite, first take the beam out of your own eye; then you will see clearly enough to take out the mote that is in your brother’s eye.” (Luke 6:41-42).

The Slippery Slope of Lawlessness

There now seems to be an orgiastic heat of self-righteousness. The entire response – every single action in response to Russia’s war on Ukraine – has been decided in such a short time that there has been no time for any kind of impact assessment even 6 months ahead, let alone on a 6 year or 30-year horizon. Not within a national, European or global framework.

The G7 countries are freezing Russia’s US$ 400 billion debt. This is pure theft. They are closing airspaces so that, for example, the Russian foreign minister cannot fly to meetings at the UN in Geneva. The EU/NATO world cuts off oil and gas imports from Russia and imposes countless sanctions on anything and anyone that can move in Russia: “We are coming to get you!” – President Biden said in his State of the Union address.

That’s not how you behave if you feel inferior or fearful of your opponent – the way you argue when you need to raise military spending. And former NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen tells Danish TV2 that – “Putin will be beaten to a pulp by NATO. Once NATO moves, it will be with enormous force. You have to remember that the investments we make in defence are ten times as big as Putin’s.”

And now the heavily over-armed must over-arm even more?

Thousands of Western companies operating in Russia are now facing possible nationalisation. Will Western governments and/or insurance companies compensate them after leaving? Just think of the cost to German business of this on a 10-20 year horizon – that is, at best, the time it will take until we can hope for a rapprochement with Russia after this.

The boomerangs will come back to us. Be sure of that. And when it happens so severely, the only response from any decision-maker will be: Well, it was and is all Putin’s fault!

But that doesn’t hold water by the West’s own standards.

NATO has provoked Russia with its expansion for 30 years and ignored dozens of warnings about where it was going. When solid, highly experienced American statesmen and intellectuals of a very different calibre than those in the West today – like George F. Kennan, Henry Kissinger, John Mearsheimer, Jack Matlock and William Perry – warned against NATO expansion and attempts to bring Ukraine into NATO, they were simply ignored.

It has broken the promises not to expand NATO an inch, made to Gorbachev in 1989-90. It has set up The Ballistic Missile Defence that deliberately undermines Russia’s ability to respond to a nuclear attack. It has waged war in Yugoslavia, treating both Russia and the UN and international law as inferior.

I am not the only one who predicted years ago that there would be a reaction. Nobody listened. Now Russia has reacted – over-reacted. I agree it is an over-reaction and have argued that Putin could have done other things than this invasion.

Proportionality, Collective Punishment and Violation of Freedom of Expression

Here we are faced with a classic dilemma and responsibility: A may provoke B, but it is still B who chooses his way of reacting and must be held responsible for it.

It is precisely this reasoning about the responsibility of the provoked side for its reaction that must also apply to the response of the NATO/EU countries to Russia’s invasion.

While the West’s response to the invasion is a complete knee-jerk hate policy, it also borders on systematic violation of international law. It is not proportional. It is a deliberate use of collective punishment that the Geneva Conventions and their protocols prohibit. It is all the more so when those who carry it out believe that they are facing a dictator. In a democracy, it might be argued that the people share responsibility for the actions of leaders because they have become leaders through free elections. The situation is quite different in what the same people call dictatorships, where the people cannot be held jointly responsible (I am not saying that Russia is a dictatorship; I am challenging the reasoning of those who think it is).

The closing down of access to Russian media such as RT and Sputnik is a clear violation of The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966, Article 19 about the right to seek information freely. And of Article 20 that ”Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law” and

”Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.”

One must also raise the issue: What kind of suffocating, very hard, broad, unconditional and unlimited sanctions like those the US and EU – not the UN – have decided can possibly be compatible with international law?

Although it is difficult to judge when such things actually happen and should be condemned, the whole public discussion tends to violate at least the spirit of these international law provisions. And it cannot and should not be swept off the table by reference to Russians or others doing the same. We are responsible for our actions.

The West itself tramples on international human rights 24/7 at the moment.

Such fairly obvious ethical-legal dimensions are, of course, completely sidelined. The inner swine dog has frothing at its mouth, and in all its lying self-righteousness can’t get enough. Regardless of decency, the spirit and the letter of international law.

The Boomerangs of Hate – The Self-Destruction of the West

We, our children and grandchildren, will pay dearly for this – the self-isolation and accelerated decline and fall of the West. And perhaps nuclear war – deliberate or by technical and human error.

And it is, one wants us to remember forever, all one person’s fault, Vladimir Putin. And him “we” need neither understand nor take into account. The amateur psychologists and editors are now queuing up in our media to have him diagnosed as almost insane. He went insane on 23 February 2022.

That way this hellishly complex conflict over decades with at least 50 parties can be reduced to issues of one person’s mental health. And it also follows that “we” bear no responsibility whatsoever for the fact that the world is now in the most existentially threatening situation since 1945. We are up against a Russian Hitler – ”Putler” – and now no trick is too small, no lie too big.

So where could this re-action to Russia’s invasion take us? Her a few heuristically chosen possible scenarios, which Western decision-makers have hardly given a thought:

• The longer the war lasts in Ukraine – and it lasts longer than it otherwise would because vast amounts of arms and ammunition are pumped in from the West – the greater the humanitarian disaster and the reconstruction of a country that was already the poorest in Europe heavily marked by corruption. Internal hatred in Ukraine is also likely to be more intense than before the invasion.
• The probably extensive infiltration of neo-Nazism into Ukraine’s politics and military security sector – arguably the largest anywhere – will not diminish once the war is over. These circles will demand a special status in future Ukraine because of their efforts in the resistance struggle. What role might they seek to play internationally – in, say, US-like movements and in European countries with, so far, less far-right extremism? Over the years, Nazism could spread precisely because its supporters were seen as heroes in the fight against Russia.
• In the long run, Russia’s people will suffer so much because of our sanctions that the world may face a massive humanitarian disaster that it cannot bear on top of all the other problems of poverty, refugees and climate change, etc. And someone will begin to realise and say: These poor, innocent people are victims of Western sanctions that were imposed without a time limit.
• While many are talking about which countries Putin will now try to conquer, I think this is a reasonably likely scenario. In the US view, there is now an excellent chance to tie Russia to the war in Ukraine and make it as long as possible by pumping weapons and everything else into Ukraine – but not participating in it At the same time, the focus is now 100% on strangling the Russian economy and effectively collapsing the country like the old Soviet Union. I know too little about the Russian economy to say whether this is a possibility – but in Washington’s perspective, this is where the stakes are: drain Russia’s military strength in Ukraine and undermine its economic base at home.
  By contrast, I’m pretty sure China and others won’t let that happen. Regardless, the US can then calculate that millions of Russians will have to flee – including to Europe. And there the Atlantic consensus will end: the EU will blame the US for demanding that the EU impose these suffocating sanctions whose human consequences will only affect Europe, not the US.
• Far more nationalistic and militaristic people in the Kremlin depose Putin and re-arm, like Germany, to the double and bomb the NATO installations NATO will not discuss as provocative. In that case, there is a far more significant than 50% risk of a nuclear war in Central Europe.
• This conflict will legitimise any increase in the US presence with heavy equipment as close to Russia’s border as possible. This is already being planned in US military circles. The US will impose itself militarily and politically on Europe to a perhaps unprecedented extent. Until that day, the United States will have militarised itself to death by seeking to wage two cold wars simultaneously – against Russia and China – with significant elements of rearmament and militaristic policy. It is called over-extension, and the economy, as in the old Soviet Union, will collapse under this burden. Why are the Americans betting so much on Europe? Because NATO’s primary purpose – when you peel back all the rhetoric – is to ensure that a war with Russia is fought on European soil, not US soil.
• With the weapons and ammunition that NATO and EU countries are now pumping into and around Ukraine, there is already a de facto war between NATO/EU and Russia. Moreover, with the borders open to all manner of mercenaries and adventurers from around the world, one can safely expect more suffering than would otherwise be necessary. Terrorist groups of various kinds will undoubtedly feel drawn; I imagine that the terrorist groups that Russia has helped to defeat in Syria will see Ukraine as a golden territory for revenge against Russians.
• Another scenario might be that Russia does reasonably well economically with a prolonged military presence in Ukraine, converts to a kind of war economy and expands cooperation with Iran, China and perhaps India. Others outside the West will see the same writing on the wall: it is futile to try to have a reasonably trusting relationship with the US, NATO and the EU after this. If they can do that to the Russians, what can they do to us? The US-led system with allies who have lost the ability to think and act independently of the US/NATO will become a periphery of the future world order as the years go by.
• The Western world’s response to Russia’s invasion has shown that the only thing that can unite it is confrontation and hate – it has not been able to connect around the financial crisis, NATO’s future and burden-sharing, the 2015 refugees or the Corona, all of which could have brought us closer together and working together for our own good and the good of humanity. More hatred brings satisfaction, inward solidarity and strengthen the sense of shared values. And so who will be the next object of hate?
• Very simply: China – even more so than hitherto. We have just seen the beginning of the US-led and -funded Cold War against China so far. The West will accuse China of not siding closely enough with the West against Russia (and China won’t, though it is undoubtedly very unhappy with Russia over the invasion). So the future ice-cold war in the world could be between the declining Occident and the rising Orient, to simplify. The West’s gigantic rearmament in “response” to Russia’s invasion will of course drain its civilian economy – all militarisation is harmful to everyone but the arms industries – and cause the West’s economic strength to be eroded over time even more and faster by the rearmament’s mad waste of resources.

Humanity, as we know, desperately needs constructive cooperation if we shall succeed in solving the problems of inequality, climate and the environment here in the 11th hour, create technological progress and new infrastructure for the good of all, create a new green global economy, reduce militarism and abolish nuclear weapons…etc. All this – all this – will be made impossible by the West’s destructive energy, cold war philosophy, conversion to a kind of war economy, and total lack of positive Realpolitik vision in even a 20-year horizon.

The intellectual laziness, the contempt for ‘the others’ as a kind of Untermenschen, the spine-hatred and the cocktail of self-righteousness are bound to harm the Russian people. But the longer this ‘policy’ is pursued, the more damaging it will become for the West itself. China and the others need not lift a finger, one by one the fruits of history will fall into its basket, and the US system will crumble.

But I know that such reasoning has not one chance in a thousand of being heard in these – fateful – hours and days. Unbearable as it is, I have felt that it should be said as I have done here.

__________________________________________

Prof. Jan Oberg, Ph.D. is director of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, TFF and a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment.

21 March 2022

Source: www.transcend.org

By Michael Welch, Yves Engler, Glenn Michalchuk, and Max Blumenthal

“The propaganda war that we’ve seen waged by the Ukrainian government is a U.S. propaganda war. It is a British propaganda war. And in Kiev and across the country there are just highly educated young tech-savvy people ready to wage that war. And they have invented so many false stories.” – Max Blumenthal, from this week’s interview

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Ukraine: Countering the Spin on “Russian aggression”

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

Right now, in Ukraine it is said by multiple media sources in the West that Russia is behind a campaign to fabricate illusions about what President Vladimir Putin’s troops are and are not doing in the battlefield in order to bend sympathies of the public inside and outside of Russia. [1][2][3]

The Communications Security Establishment (CSE), a Canadian signals intelligence agency, has observed the Russian war messaging online and says via twitter:

“We are sharing this information as part of the government of Canada’s efforts to help inform Canadians so they can protect themselves from disinformation.” [4]

Fair enough, in principle. But the point MUST be emphasized that the United States is DEFINITELY shaping coverage of war to their strategic advantage.

In 1964, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which North Vietnamese boats attacked two US destroyers resulting in the Vietnam War, never actually happened.

In 1990, news of Iraqis taking babies out of incubators and throwing them on the floor sparking a surge in support for the Persian Gulf War the following year never actually happened. Same scenario with the claim of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq which served the purpose of instigating massive bloodshed during the lengthy Iraq War.

And more recently: In Venezuela, after widespread accusations of President Nicolás Maduro’s troops torching a humanitarian convoy coming over the border from Colombia, it was established first by independent media that hooligans from Columbia threw molotov cocktails on the truck and then looting the trucks!

And as we have covered elsewhere on this site, including this program, accusations of chemical weapons attacks waged by the president of Syria in recent years were more likely waged by the opposition. Humanitarian corridors for civilians subjected to attacks by Syrian and Russian forces were actually struck by the opposition forces.

Given their record of distorting the truth, it would seem extremely out of character for the U.S. – NATO corporate media press to suddenly be addicted to the TRUTH!

On this week’s Global Research News Hour, we will feature major instances of the holes in journalistic coverage not addressed by those who want “to help inform Canadians so they can protect themselves from disinformation.”

Our first guest, journalist Max Blumenthal of The Gray Zone, takes us through his site’s multiple examples of how the stories pointing to Russian nastiness is not verified and even corrupted by the make-up of their press corps.

My next guest, author and activist Yves Engler explains the unacknowledged work of Canadians in the set-up for the war, and the building up of NATO to the outrage of Russia. Finally, Glenn Michalchuk finishes expressing his continued opposition to this war since February 24, and what listeners can do who wish to stop increased military funding in the upcoming Federal Budget of 2022.

Max Blumenthal is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Gray Zone. He is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery.

Yves Engler is a Montreal based activist and author of twelve books including House of mirrors: Justin Trudeau’s Foreign Policy and his latest Stand on Guard for Whom? A People’s History of the Canadian Military.

Glenn Michalchuk is chair of Peace Alliance Winnipeg and president of the Winnipeg branch of the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 350)

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Ukraine: Countering the Spin on “Russian aggression”

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

Transcript – Interview with Max Blumenthal, March 28, 2022

Global Research: We’re going to touch base on the topic of disinformation, but not from the Russian side, from the US-NATO side. For this, I got hold of Max Blumenthal. He’s an award-winning journalist, author of several books, and editor-in-chief of thegrayzone.com, which he describes as shining a spotlight on America’s state of perpetual wars and its dangerous domestic repercussions. I started our conversation by asking Max to provide some examples of fake news manufactured in opposition to the Russians.

Max Blumenthal: It’s really obvious that there are so many fake stories that you can’t even count them. And it’s hard to understand why they’re so necessary when there is real civilian suffering in a city like Mariupol which Russia is taking street by street back from the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which has been incorporated into the Ukrainian military. There are civilians being killed in the fire or suffering enormously, but what the Ukrainian side has done, they’ve been, I mean, if you look at Syria or Venezuela, and how much the US intelligence cut-outs have invested there in training and cultivating their, not just their armed proxies but their information warriors. So much more has gone into Ukraine, and Ukraine has been controlled by this pro-US pro-NATO regime since 2014.

So it’s just open season for funding PR operatives and tech startups to do the kind of information warfare that is the dream of the US. The propaganda war that we’ve seen waged by the Ukrainian government, it is a US propaganda war, it is a British propaganda war. And in Kiev and across the country there are just highly educated young tech-savvy people ready to wage that war and they have invented so many false stories, for instance the ghost of Kiev, or ​Keev as we’re supposed to call it [laughter], a fighter pilot who has taken down 40 Russian jets like representative Adam Kinzinger, this wannabe n McCain tweeted about, the ghost of Kiev. And it turns out it’s a completely fake story, no such fighter pilot exists. The Ukrainian Air Force doesn’t even exist.

Then you got the Snake Island story of 13 soldiers, Ukrainian border guards, who stood up to a Russian battleship and said, you know, to screw off, I mean, they used harsher language than that, and then they all died fighting. It turned out there were way more than 13 border guards. All of them were captured, none of them defied the Russian warship at all, and they were then safe and sound as POWs. There was no brave standoff, but this incident, you know, was reported in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Military Times as something real.

Then you’ve got something I’ve been looking at, using kind of open-source intelligence, otherwise known as reporting [laughter], and it’s the bombing of the Mariupol theatre, which is said to be the deadliest incident of the war. CNN and BBC are reporting that 300 were killed in this theatre that women and children sheltered in, and that the theatre was marked with signs reading “children,” to ward off Russian bombers, but they bombed it anyway. And it appears pretty clear that no one was inside the theatre when it was bombed, there are no images of rescuers of dead of survivors that can be found, and that the only source of this claim is an assistant to the exiled mayor of Mariupol, who has run away days ago, and who was working hand-in-glove with the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, who is pro-Azov.

This is the only source for the BBC and CNN. It’s just pure hearsay. They have not been able to independently verify anything, and just looking at the, you know, the photographic evidence, I found that there were cars parked all around this theatre the day before the bombing, and that the day of the bombing there were no vehicles. No vehicles damage, no vehicles present, and no people present.

GR: Wait a second, I mean, the press, aren’t they supposed to verify before they go to print? I mean they’re just taking the message from this one mayor as the basis for everything that’s going on?

MB: Exactly. And so this is one of the worst performances, or maybe you could call it one of the best performances by US corporate media, because essentially, what we’re seeing, is that they are an arm of the information war being waged by US intelligence through its Ukrainian proxies. And the assistant to the Ukrainian mayor, I was reading in Ukrainian media, just using translation tools, he said we had to abandon Mariupol in order to preserve our intelligence network. That was the language he used. So this is just an intelligence game.

And what is the agenda of the Azov Battalion in Mariupol–aside from establishing a fascist bastion, which they’ve sort of effectively done for years. They have been calling for a no-fly zone because they’re desperate, they’re losing the fight there against a much larger military force, just like the armed opposition in Syria was. So we’ve seen their commanders issued pleas in English on YouTube for NATO to intervene militarily. But NATO doesn’t want to do it. Biden doesn’t want to do it. They don’t want a direct confrontation with a nuclear power. And so they’re trying to generate emotionally potent incidents that will cause the Western public to demand that their leaders intervene.

And that was the point of the theatre story I think. Where Azov had controlled the theatre, they’ve controlled everything around it, and as they were retreating, it appears that an explosive charge was detonated with no one inside the theatre, or no one near the charge, that’s what it looks like to me, I could be completely wrong, it’s been 12 days since this tip took place and there’s still no footage of dead people or rescue crews or anything.

So maybe that will turn up, and I’ll be proven completely wrong, but it looks like they were trying to stage something to generate the emotional impact needed to get the West on board with getting in there, just like the Syrian rebels did, the so-called rebels in Douma, April 2018, when Jaish al-Islam, this extremist faction backed by Saudi Arabia was losing in a Damascus suburb, was retreating, had everyone, all the other battalions around it had been defeated by the Syrian Army, they were closing in. And suddenly they allege a chemical attack, a chlorine attack and produced video through all of these networks that have been set up through Turkish and US intelligence so they have like pretty powerful communication networks still even though their military capacity had collapsed. They produce, just video and a photograph of dead civilians in a basement. No evidence of any chlorine attack.

And then they gather a bunch of civilians together including children and start hosing them off through their auxiliary so-called rescue crews like the White Helmets and then, and then corporate media and the West broadcast all of it. “Allegations of a chemical attack,” and they show children being hosed off. And then the leaders have to respond, and so they do pinprick missile strikes on Damascus.

That’s the model that the Ukrainian forces are operating under.

GR: Well, they used to talk about the White Helmets was also providing a lot of disinformation and today they actually have Azov Battalion showing some of the theatre footage of the attacks in Mariupol. Is it the same tactic or there might be a little bit of a difference this time?

MB: What’s different is that they didn’t, what they could have done, which is what appears to have been done in Douma, was that these civilians had actually been killed. They may have been killed in a conventional, by a conventional weapon by the Syrian Army, or they could have been executed by these vicious forces. And I can tell you, like I’ve been in the ruins, in Ghouta, which is just west of Douma, and talked to civilians there about the conditions. They lived under just, a miniature Saudi Arabia but more tyrannical, for several years. They said that women were trafficked, people were used as slave labour, all the aid that came in was pillaged, and that people were used as human shields towards the end and held in a stable, and that the Syrian government was told that they will kill everyone in the stable if they enter the area.

So that was, and that’s what sort of been going on Mariupol these past days, except the Azov Battalion apparently didn’t kill anyone or take any dead bodies that had been killed by the Russian army and attempt to claim that they were killed inside the theatre. And that’s what makes this incident so strange. I mean, they haven’t really backed up any of their claims with the kind of photographic and video evidence that was so potent in Syria, and I’m waiting for that to come, but it just hasn’t come, so it really looks like the Azov people let everyone just go the day before. We do hear a lot of talk about people leaving the day before, around the theatre.

GR: Yeah. Well you mentioned just a few days ago, there was a press article about an incident involving how some press agencies had biased their reporting by setting up an individual as a reporter and fixer for press agency BBC. And this reporter was working formally as the head of the PR firm linked to boosterism for Ukraine in as late as October 2021. So she brings the stories of this theatre in Mariupol, completely consistent with what the architects wanted people to see. Orysia Khimiak is her name. Could you describe a little bit about what you could see as some of the holes running through their news narratives?

MB: Well, the most obvious hole is that they did not have any evidence, photographic or video evidence, of even a rescue taking place or being attempted. The descriptions, they have two eyewitnesses, and these reporters are in Lviv or Lvov. which is in the west of Ukraine, very far from Mariupol, and so they’re interviewing two people who said they were eyewitnesses delivering a very cinematic account, who themselves were not able to see who was responsible for the blast, they just said they felt a blast and that they had gone there to get lunch. I think what Azov appeared to be doing was just gathering people there with a field kitchen they said they had.

But beyond that, I mean, you have a co-author of these BBC articles, you look at who they are, they’re a public relations operative from Lviv, and who also worked in Kiev on a app produced by a start-up that the Washington Post called one of the top Ukrainian war information messaging apps. And it’s called Reface. It gives users the ability to put their face on celebrities’ bodies in like famous film scenes…what they do is they’ve gathered millions of people into this network, and now they’re pumping out messages urging them to stand with Ukraine, to send aid, to support the war effort, to support the Ukrainian military to everyone who participates in this app. And it seems like it was all done by design.

GR: Yeah. I mean, all my time in journalism, whenever you had any kind of potential conflict, you have to state it outright, you have to be transparent, and here it’s presented as if it’s totally fair, and I just don’t get it.

MB: Well, it just shows what the BBC is. It’s just another information weapon. And they just cast aside any pretense of objectivity.

Like, on their site, one of the first things you see is that they’re the most trusted network. And that you could trust them more than other outlets, and that they’re against disinformation. And then you have them, you know their correspondent in Ukraine sharing a byline with someone who is a nationalist Ukrainian PR operative. I went on her Twitter account, and she’s openly saying that she hates all Russians. She’s saying, like, I cannot, I can no longer suspend my impulse to hate all Russians because of what they’re doing.

So it’s just like, it’s right out there in the open. Her Twitter header is a meme referring to the phony incident of Snake Island, which she treats as real. This is the BBC. I mean, it’s everything they say about RT… It just shows what a projection all of the denunciations of RT are.

GR: Yeah, now I know that the press keeps insisting that the idea that neo-Nazis are in Ukraine, that’s Russian disinformation. I can’t even hear any news about the Nazi Azov faction on the show like Democracy Now, which is held up as a high beacon of independent news reporting. And I don’t think you can get a sense of what the war is unless you have acknowledgement of their existence. But it is only mentioned as Russian disinformation. And they say that there is a Jewish president, so how could the Nazis be taking over. That sort of thing. Give us a few short descriptions of how you, I guess, bulk up your insistence of the Nazis in Ukraine, and indeed how they are a major presence versus the Russian fairy tale.

MB: Well right now you could just look at who’s doing the fighting in the key theatre of battle. It is Mariupol. And it is the Azov Battalion. That’s their base. They captured it in 2014 and they maintained it on behalf of the Ukrainian State. The Azov Battalion emerged from the so-called black-shirts of the Maidan revolution of dignity which I would consider a US backed coup. They were the street muscle.

They themselves emerged out of the Patriot of Ukraine which was a gang of Fascist hooligans who assaulted migrants and Roma people, homosexuals, you know, the usual suspects, they were just literal, they were a literal neo-Nazi street gang that turned into one of the most ferocious and important battalions of the Ukrainian National Guard. The Azov Battalion which wears neo-Nazi insignia on its uniforms, has a civilian wing called a National Corps which operates openly intimidating citizens and political opponents in Kiev and cities across Ukraine under the auspices of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry.

They are sponsored officially by the Ukrainian Interior Ministry to keep order and they are armed by the state, their uniforms are provided by the state, and they go around intimidating city councils and mayors that will not do their bidding. And they’ve stolen elections by just going to the polls and telling people, we want.

They have another gang, C14, its name was inspired by the famous 14 words by the dead American Neo-Nazi leader David Lane, which has been funded and sponsored by the Ukrainian minister of culture. One of their leaders gave a talk at the America house in Kiev, which is an NGO sponsored by the US government, and the Kiev city council sponsored this group, C14, it’s a literal neo-Nazi terrorist organization, to attack Roma people who are sleeping near a train station. It was considered part of a public clean-up campaign.

They filmed themselves pepper spraying women and elderly Roma people and beating them with clubs. These are leaders that have participated in negotiations with Zelensky and held veto power over the Minsk agreement because they have their forces in the east. And when Zelensky attempted to get them to pull back they just told him to go to hell and he left.

And Zelensky himself, while Jewish, has not only downplayed his Jewish background, he has said that it is cool and normal for a part of the Ukrainian population to revere Stepan Bandera, who is the hero of all Ukrainian nationalists and was the leader of the organization of Ukrainian nationalists during World War II who collaborated with Nazi Germany and participated in the Holocaust of Bullets, in which hundreds of thousands of Jews, ethnic Poles, and other minorities were exterminated across Ukraine.

That is just a small slice of the kind of collaboration between the Ukrainian state and literal neo-Nazis that we’ve witnessed since the birth of the Maidan regime in 2014, and what sets Ukraine apart from a country like the United States or Russia, which both have neo-Nazis and white supremacists, is that their neo-Nazis and white supremacists are part of the military, and part of the state, and they’re officially recognized as such and celebrated.

GR: You know, your coverage has been quite refreshingly at odds with what we see in media. Have you been subjected to attacks of any origin? I mean, putting out Russian disinformation, or are they just, ignore you all together?

MB: Well, you can look at my Wikipedia page. It says that I’m like a regular free contributor to RT and Sputnik, and that is one of the first things you’ll read. And while I value RT and Sputnik as news sources that provide a different point of view for Americans, we need to follow all sorts of media, I’ve been on RT I think twice in the past two or three months, and I have been on Sputnik maybe once.

I’ve been on other networks much more, but it doesn’t list me that way, pretty much that you just follow, just look down through my Wikipedia page, and it basically makes me look like a psychotic holocaust-denying self-hating Jew who is an Assadist genocide denier, and it’s just pure propaganda. None of the facts are engaged, and in fact, The Grayzone, the site that I run, while we’ve never had to really issue a factual correction, we’ve never had anyone debunk any of our articles, we are listed as a deprecated source on The Grayzone, sorry on Wikipedia, so the denigrations start there.

And then you have mainstream journalists just drawing on that to create and cobble together a phony narrative about us in order to discredit our work. What they want to do is frighten people away from our factual journalism because it’s doing so much damage to their disinformation narrative. And I’m waiting for some mainstream…

I was attacked in the Times of London last week, which is like the MI5’s favorite paper in the UK, because an academic in the UK retweeted one of my articles. They want to get him fired. I was sort of peripherally attacked. But I got a Newsweek reporter reached out to me and I was just, like, it was a strange request, so I assume there’ll be some more attacks incoming.

No one in mainstream media can be treated as a good-faith operator or someone who will honestly quote you and present your side because if you just look at the whole spectrum of US media right now, there is only one side, and that is the Ukrainian nationalist narrative and the State Department side.

GR: I really congratulate you on your work, you and your colleagues out there at The Grayzone. Sounds like you’re doing the kind of work that you should be doing if you’re getting attacked to the extent you are. So I want to thank you for coming on the show, and maybe we can have you back at a later date.

MB: Thanks a lot Michael. Absolutely I would love to come back.
__________________________________________

The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .

3 April 2022

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

 

By Douglas Valentine and Regis Tremblay

A nine-minute segment from Part 2 of Doug Valentine’s The CIA As Organized Crime. For 70 years the CIA has been working to undermine and occupy Ukraine to bring down Russia using such things as paramilitaries, right wing Nazi groups, corrupt politicians and businessmen, coups, and warfare in the eastern Ukraine region of the Donbass.

The CIA – 70 years in Ukraine

Douglas Valentine is an investigator and author with a rare and tenacious approach toward research.

4 April 2022

Source: www.globalresearch.ca