Former CIA director William J. Casey once candidly told U.S. President Ronald Reagan and other aides during a meeting in the White House, “We’ll know when our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false”.

Some have viewed that observation to be a flippant aside not meant to signify actual consequence. Others, however, have contended it had far more deliberate sinister connotations whose scale of public thought-control is a conscious objective.

When one looks at how the conflict in Ukraine and Western relations with Russia are unfolding and the way Western news media are reporting on it, Casey’s words seem to be a grim forewarning.

This week saw lurid claims amplified across the U.S. and Western media of a massacre in the Ukrainian city of Bucha allegedly carried out by Russian troops. The source of those claims was the partisan Ukrainian military associated with the Nazi-infested Azov Battalion. The Azov Battalion whose members openly display Waffen-SS insignia has been trained and weaponized by the United States and other NATO military over the past decade.

There was no attempt by Western media to verify the sensational claims leveled against Russia. They were printed and broadcast with gusto leading to more Western sanctions and weapons supply to Ukraine in support of the Kiev regime. What’s all the more disturbing is that the information purporting to incriminate Russian troops is questionable. The alleged atrocities appear to have occurred several days after Russian forces withdrew from the area.

Moscow claimed that the killings were carried out by the Western-backed Azov regiments in a false-flag provocation to blame Russia. However, Western media have reflexively branded Russian claims as “Kremlin propaganda”. Even Western analysts and alternative media sources have been vilified or censored for daring to challenge the narrative of alleged Russian atrocities. One such independent voice is that of Scott Ritter, the former U.S. Marine Corps officer, who was temporarily banned from social media this week for doing so.

A bitter irony is that this week also saw reports in U.S. media openly admitting that American intelligence services have been knowingly sowing disinformation in the media. Far from feeling shame or contrition, the U.S. intelligence agencies and media are exulting in the practice of “getting ahead” of Russia in “information warfare”.

Some of the disinformation stories admitted include claims that Russia was planning to use chemical weapons in Ukraine; that Russian President Vladimir Putin was being misled by his military generals about the lack of progress in the war; and that Moscow was seeking to obtain weapons supply from China for the war in Ukraine. All the stories are now acknowledged as false. The U.S. media is lying to the public and openly admitting it. But, supposedly, that’s okay because it’s in the name of information warfare against Russia.

Another disinformation story was the claim made in February by the State Department that Russia was preparing to stage false-flag attacks to serve as a pretext for invading Ukraine. When State Department spokesman Ned Price was challenged by reporters at the time to provide hard evidence, he snidely implied they were pushing Russian propaganda. Turns out now though that the State Department was peddling lies planted by its intelligence services.

None of this shocking collusion between supposedly independent news services and the secret intelligence apparatus should be surprising. After all, former CIA director Mike Pompeo bragged in public about how the agency “lied and cheated all the time” like a badge of honor.

We know from decades ago how Operation Mockingbird was an ambitious CIA program to infiltrate all U.S. news media with dutiful editors and reporters as assets.

Frank Wisner, a leading CIA intelligence officer, once marveled at what he referred to as the agency’s influence over media as the “Mighty Wurlitzer”, an apt image of an organ-grinder calling the tune for public discourse and perception.

In a 1977 investigative study by the Washington Post’s Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, it was reported that hundreds of newspapers and broadcasters across the U.S. were recruited in the service of the CIA. The outlets included the supposedly august New York Times down to the provincial newspapers in dusty rural states. Amusingly enough given Bernstein’s earlier insights on public thought-control by the intel apparatus, he later became an advocate of the “Russiagate” hoax concocted by U.S. intel implicating former President Donald Trump as a Russian stooge.

Another formidable source of truth is former senior CIA operative John Stockwell who has given copious testimonies and authored books on how the CIA runs media disinformation campaigns on a massive, worldwide scale.

In Europe, former German newspaper editor Udo Ulfkotte wrote a tell-all exposé of how the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies recruit staff in all major European media outlets to act as their eyes, ears, and mouths. It is also known that the British state-owned broadcaster, the BBC, was, and perhaps still is, vetted by its national intelligence service, MI5.

While such revelations were known and publicized, it was always a quiet conversation to avoid amplifying scandal for a profession that preens itself as a guardian of independent public interest, freedom of speech and thought, critical of political power, and all sorts of other noble accolades.

It was always a Western conceit to denigrate state propaganda as something that was done in the Soviet Union and in today’s Russia, China, and other alleged “autocratic” states.

How the pot calls the kettle black! The Western media have long been far more guilty of peddling outrageous disinformation in the service of their military-security establishments. The WMD hoax that led to the genocidal war in Iraq in 2003 was perhaps the nadir among countless other disreputable episodes. Further back there was the bogus Gulf of Tonkin incident leading to the Vietnam War. More recently there was the alleged but bogus raping campaign by soldiers under Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi that led to the NATO bombing of Libya and the murder of Gaddafi in 2011. The NATO bombing of Syria was presaged by widespread false Western media claims of chemical weapons atrocities that were actually carried out by NATO-backed regime-change proxies.

In Ukraine, the war was precipitated by NATO weaponizing a Nazi regime that was attacking ethnic Russian people in the Donbass. Since the war erupted on February 24 after eight years of provocations, the Western media have accused the Russian military of bombing hospitals and theatres and now of executing civilians in cold blood.

This is from the same media who now openly admit to being operatives for disinformation and who appear to have no shame about it. Indeed, they are proudly boasting of their role of deception as somehow noble. Such media are complicit in fueling conflict and war. Their function is to fill the public with ignorance and jingoism in order to bolster the cause of warmongering industries and economies. In this twisted Orwellian climate, to speak the truth is to commit thought-crime and be vilified by those who exalt in lying.

The United States reportedly boosted its import of Russian oil last month, according to official figures from the Energy Information Administration. The extra imported volume accounted for a 43 percent increase.

This is in spite of an executive order by U.S. President Joe Biden on March 8 to ban all energy and hydrocarbon commodities from Russia. That draconian measure was declared in response to Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine that was launched on February 24.

Admittedly, the United States does not rely heavily on Russia for its crude oil supply. Russia is not in the top five suppliers to the U.S., according to the EIA. Nevertheless, the apparent ramping up of U.S. purchase of Russian oil strikes a bizarre chord.

It comes as Washington is demanding European allies to cut energy trade with Russia. And it’s not just the Europeans that are being ordered to do so. India and other Asian countries are also harangued by the Americans to likewise reduce imports of Russian gas, oil and petroleum products.

Given today’s date, one could be forgiven for thinking this is some kind of April Fools joke. It’s not. But it is a laughable illustration of how reckless and ridiculous American hubris has become.

Washington wants its so-called allies to commit economic suicide by cutting off vital energy trade with Russia all in a bid to satisfy its de facto Cold War agenda of trying to isolate Moscow and draw all countries under U.S. hegemony. The same geopolitical agenda applies to China, although that has taken somewhat of a backseat given the immediate tensions with Russia.

The U.S. may not have large dependence on Russian oil and gas, but many other countries do. Russia is among the largest global suppliers of gas, oil and petroleum products. Washington’s attitude is one of demanding others to cut their noses off to spite their face, or put another way, to shoot themselves in the foot. Meanwhile, the American rulers think they can insulate themselves from harm. Although this week, in a sign of how futile this all is, Biden ordered the biggest release of U.S. strategic oil reserves in order to dial down crazy American pump prices.

It is astounding the level of arrogance among American politicians. If so-called allies conform to Washington’s dictates, it would result in immediate devastation of their economies. In the not-so-long run, too, the American economy will also be ruinously impacted from global supply chains.

The global energy crisis and general economic inflation (or poverty in plainer language) has become the central political problem across the world. The Covid-19 pandemic is part of the precipitating cause to accelerate the demise of U.S.-led global capitalism. The tensions between the West and Russia over the conflict in Ukraine have further amplified the problem. The war in Ukraine could have been avoided if the United States and its NATO allies had engaged respectfully with Moscow to resolve its oft-repeated security concerns. But the Western powers repudiated Russia’s proposals and appeals for genuine diplomacy.

There are tentative signs that several rounds of talks between Ukraine and Russia – the latest round hosted by Turkey this week – might be making progress. The Ukrainian side has reportedly accepted Russia’s demands for neutrality from NATO and recognition of Moscow’s historic claim to Crimea as well as the independence of the Russian-speaking Donbass republics. That outcome is similar to what Russia had been demanding in the months before the tensions boiled over into war. The unnecessary suffering is a tragedy that could have been averted if the U.S. and NATO had any reasonable attitude.

It remains to be seen, however, if Washington will cast a veto over the talks making progress since it is supporting the Kiev regime with weapons and financial loans. One suspects peace is not what the United States wants ultimately. It wants, indeed needs, permanent conflict and tensions because that in essence is the way it maintains U.S. global hegemony.

To everyone else though, it should be clear that a political settlement in Ukraine and more generally between the West and Russia is urgently required for peace and long-term security.

It is counterproductive that Washington and its European allies are insisting on harsher sanctions against Russia instead of addressing the root causes of NATO expansionism and U.S.-led transatlantic dominance. This is only leading to a downward spiral in the global economy on a historic scale that will impact every nation, particularly the poorest and most vulnerable, to price shocks.

American hubris and European servility seem to know no bounds. The Western nations froze Russia’s foreign assets amounting to $300 billion. Now Russian President Vladimir Putin has decreed that all future gas purchases must be made in rubles instead of dollars or euros. Failure to meet Russia’s demands will result in gas exports being cut off. The reciprocal move by Moscow is justified. If the Western powers feel entitled to unilaterally change the terms of trade then why shouldn’t Russia?

It is incredible that some European governments seem willing to toe the American line even when that line is leading them over the abyss. The economic repercussions of this masochistic policy are unleashing social mayhem as citizens in Europe and the U.S. bear the brunt of excruciating living costs. The Biden administration and his Democratic Party are facing an electoral backlash in the forthcoming mid-term elections this autumn.

But the sense is that the political repercussions are much bigger than election backlash. The U.S. policy of confrontation with Russia and China and others is re-creating a Cold War global order that is completely untenable and is rapidly breaking down. European lackey governments are going along with this self-defeating ideology out of cowardice or failure of understanding. Even though the upshot is the ruination of their economies and societies.

The United States through its pursuit of hegemony is cratering the foundations of its own power. European allies following this insanity are causing their own demise from economic devastation. The political elites in the West are fomenting social chaos in their own nations.

Russia’s move to price its gas and other commodities in rubles is a tangible step away from the era of reserve currencies of the dollar and euro. China, India and other nations are beginning to embrace a world without Western financial diktat. A new global multipolar order is emerging in which Western powers are no longer tolerated as privileged.

The contradictions that stem from American and European arrogance have finally hit breaking point. Their attitude of, “Do as we say, not as we do”, is the damnedest April Fool joke today.

U.S. President Joe Biden flew to Europe this week with the presidential nuclear codes on display by his entourage. Among the fleet of presidential aircraft was the “doomsday plane” – a specially fitted-out Boeing 747 capable of withstanding nuclear radiation and serving, if-needs-be, as a “Pentagon in the sky”.

Biden attended three back-to-back emergency summits of the G7, NATO and the European Union leaders in Brussels. It was reportedly the first time an American president has ever been invited to attend such an EU leaders’ summit.

There was a palpable sense of over-the-top contrived drama regarding the ongoing war in Ukraine. Russia’s military intervention in that country is now in its fourth week. Moscow has claimed reasons of self-defense and protection of Russian-speaking people in Donbass from a NATO-backed Nazi regime in Kiev.

The Western media and their governments, on the other hand, have claimed Russia’s actions are unprovoked aggression and the worst episode of barbarism since the Second World War. There is feverish Western media fears of Russia deploying chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. There are also hysterical fears of Russia next attacking Poland, the Baltics, and the rest of Europe.

Western media are portraying Biden’s visit to Europe as a replay of the supposed American defense of Europe from Nazism and Communism.

This is an incredible distortion by the Western media. The whole background of the conflict in Ukraine fomented by the U.S. and NATO over the past three decades has been scrubbed into a memory hole. So too scrubbed is the U.S. and NATO blitzkrieg on Yugoslavia whose 23rd anniversary occurred this week. The aggressive expansionism of NATO and hostility towards Russia have culminated in the present war in Ukraine. Yet Western media present this as due to alleged one-sided Russian aggression and maniacal tyranny in Moscow.

During his half-century career as a politician, Joe Biden fervently backed the U.S. and NATO war in Yugoslavia, as well as countless other criminal imperialist wars and regime-change operations. He is personally responsible for fomenting the coup regime in Kiev from 2014 onwards. The U.S. and NATO weaponization of Ukraine, including the functioning of Pentagon-sponsored biowarfare laboratories, is associated with Biden’s direct involvement in supporting the anti-Russian Kiev regime and its Nazi paramilitaries.

The irony of Biden warning about Russia using WMDs in Ukraine is sickening beyond words. The jihadist terrorists whom the US backed in Syria were responsible for atrocities with chemical weapons as provocations for NATO bombing of Syria. Biden’s son, Hunter, is implicated in funding bioweapons laboratories in Ukraine through his Pentagon-connected capital investment firm, Seneca.

And yet despite this flagrant imperial corruption and criminality, Biden was welcomed this week by European leaders who are demonstrating beyond doubt that they are nothing but an embarrassing collection of vassals.

The upshot is that Biden is selling massively more American weapons to Europe than ever before. He is sending more U.S. troops to European bases. The EU has imposed way more sanctions on Russia than the United States has, thus inflicting much more damage on European economies than the American one. Biden is to sign new deals with Europe on supplying American gas exports that are more expensive than Russian gas. The killing off of European-Russian energy trade is the crowning achievement for American imperialist interests.

Across the European Union, draconian media censorship has blacked out entirely the Russian news outlets Sputnik and RT. European citizens are being denied any alternative information or analysis. What the EU is doing is far more repressive than what the U.S. is even doing in terms of censoring media. European so-called democracy is coming out of the closet as proto-fascism.

It is a pathetic spectacle. European governments are prostrated before the American empire.

It is blatant what President Biden is asserting. A new Cold War that is reshaping Europe under American hegemony, selling weapons and expensive gas to Europe while excluding Russia from developing any normal relations with its continental neighbors. The war in Ukraine has been a long time coming because of U.S. policies facilitated by politicians like Joe Biden and Madeleine Albright, the former Secretary of State who led the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, who died this week.

It is incredible that not one of the incumbent European Union leaders has voiced criticism or dissent from the U.S.-contrived new Cold War. Of course not. They are bought and paid for like the whores they are, while their populations suffer from poverty, militarism, and the shadow of nuclear war.

The European leaders are like quislings licking the boot of their master. Their abject subjugation is emboldening American imperial warmongering against Russia. They seem willing to let their own people suffer the consequences of U.S.-led conflict, even to the point of facilitating a Third World War in Europe.

There is a misconception that fascism in Europe was somehow a unique development in Nazi Germany. The Third Reich had many European collaborators in Poland, the Baltics, Italy, France, Spain, and other covert sources like the British establishment during the 1930s.

U.S. and Western media present Biden and the European so-called leaders as a model of democracy and righteousness. The truth is we are seeing the return to fascism in Europe under the leadership of U.S. hegemony. When Biden took up office in the White House in January 2021, he declared, “America is back”. For anyone paying attention to history and U.S. power ambitions that kind of jingoistic bragging was seen as ominous. It’s becoming more ominous from every step the U.S. takes to wind up reckless tensions with Russia and indeed China.

America is back all right, and the European vassals are on their backs, and also their fronts… because, you know, we have to be gender pluralist in our new touchy-feely fascist era.

What’s even more shameful is the European political class is acting as a doormat for American imperialism against the urgent interests of European citizens. The ultimate interest is one of having peace. That contradiction is a harbinger of massive social upheaval across Europe in revolt against their treacherous leaders.

The United States and Russia continued this week with furious sparring over the issue of biological laboratories in Ukraine. The U.S. accuses Russia of “disinformation” about the labs, saying that they were standard sanitary facilities studying common diseases and epidemiology. For its part, Russia claims that the laboratories were conducting far more sinister and illicit research into developing biowarfare weapons.

Surely, the quickest way to discern the relative validity of concerns is the following basic fact. The research facilities numbering up to 30 locations in Kiev, Kharkov, Kherson, Lvov, Odessa and Poltava, among other cities, were being funded by the Pentagon to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. The figure is estimated at $200 million and, it seems, the research has been going on for several years up until recently. If the laboratories were involved in benign disease investigations then why was the Pentagon the sponsor and liaison organization? Why not the U.S. Department of Health, or Center for Disease Control, instead of the Department of Defense? And why were the laboratories ordered to destroy their samples when Russia launched its military intervention in Ukraine – an intervention that Moscow claims is justified on the grounds of self-defense?

This week the Russian Ministry of Defense named the Pentagon’s liaison officer formerly at the U.S. embassy in Kiev who was responsible for the laboratory programs as Joanna Wintrol. It was suggested that American lawmakers should ask this person to give testimony on the purpose of the facilities.

The involvement of the Pentagon in the activities of dozens of laboratories across Ukraine is the most strident fact pointing to concerns that the research was being conducted for the nefarious purpose of developing biological weapons.

It is telling, too, that anyone who raises questions about the activity is immediately denounced as a Russian propagandist. They are vilified as trying to amplify Moscow’s justification for its military intervention into Ukraine that began on February 24. A diverse range of American public figures has called for a transparent investigation into concerns over U.S. bioweapons being developed in Ukraine. They include journalists like Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald, former U.S. Marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter, former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, and professor of international law Frances Boyle.

Russia is endeavoring to have the matter raised at the UN Security Council despite American objections. China has also endorsed Russia’s concerns and calls for a full investigation. Given that China has previously raised questions about U.S. covert laboratory work on coronaviruses at Fort Detrick, Maryland, as possibly being responsible for releasing the Covid-19 coronavirus and the ensuing global pandemic it is understandable why Beijing is now taking a keener interest in the discovery of shadowy Pentagon laboratories in Ukraine. China has angrily rejected American attempts to smear it as the originator of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In any case, the matter of Pentagon-funded laboratories in Ukraine can’t simply be dismissed by arrogant assertions of innocence by Washington. After all the lies the U.S. has told about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that were used for justifying a war that killed over one million Iraqis, the Americans have no credibility whatsoever. The irony here is that Russia went into Ukraine and seems to have actually found evidence of WMD unlike the Americans when they invaded Iraq in 2003.

The background to the present inquiry is that Russia has long expressed fears that the United States was engaged in biological warfare research at facilities set up in former Soviet republics. This concern over clandestine facilities has been shared by independent investigative journalists such as Dilyana Gaytandzhieva who has reported on U.S. bioweapon laboratories in Georgia among other places.

Officially, the United States has sought to deny all allegations of such illicit activities which would put it in gross violation of the Biological Warfare Convention (1983). The Pentagon has claimed that laboratories in Ukraine and elsewhere have been charged with securing Soviet-era bioweapons. But decades later, surely that explanation is wearing thin, if not altogether obsolete.

The issue flared up again – unintentionally – when Victoria Nuland, the U.S. Under Secretary of State with responsibility for Ukraine (responsibility in more ways than her formal title indicates) admitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 8 that there were dangerous biological research laboratories in Ukraine funded by Washington. So dangerous, indeed, that Nuland openly expressed concern that Russian forces might come into their possession. To do what? Use them as weapons? Or, more realistically, be able to prove that the Pentagon was funding the development of bioweapons in Ukraine?

Some American media have gladly quoted a few Russian biologists who are dismissive of Moscow’s claims of U.S. bioweapons in Ukraine. They assert the strains of pathogens are not particularly dangerous. How they can be so insouciant is curious. The Russian military experts on biological weapons say the samples being experimented on in Ukrainian laboratories included pathogens causing a host of deadly diseases, ranging from brucellosis, diphtheria, dysentery, and leptospirosis. Pathogens being studied included anthrax and coronaviruses. Furthermore, the research also involved investigating animal to human transmission of these diseases, such as through bird migration paths specific to Russia. There is also evidence of local outbreaks of these diseases in recent years that are atypical for seasonal conditions.

The documents demonstrating Pentagon sponsorship of the Ukrainian laboratories are original and verifiable, according to Moscow. It has published some of the documents which appear to be genuine. Of course, with Western draconian censorship against Russian news outlets, it is harder for the international public interest to avail of relevant information.

Still, however, the case for an international investigation under the auspices of neutral biowarfare experts is one that is valid and urgent.

We have already seen the worldwide impact of the Covid-19 disease that erupted in late 2019. The last thing Europe and the world needs are a chain of potentially deadly bioweapons facilities in Ukraine that the Pentagon is desperate to cover up.

Many questions need answering seriously. It is contemptible to simply brush these questions aside as “Russian propaganda”. The U.S. has a long and vile history of using bioweapons dating back to killing native American populations with smallpox and later civilian populations in Central America and Cuba. Thus, the U.S. has forfeited any benefit of the doubt owing to its well-documented practices of bioterrorism; especially considering the conspicuous involvement of the Pentagon in Ukraine’s laboratories.

The issue also opens up the bigger picture of Russia’s demands for a security treaty in Europe and the end to NATO expansionism and decades of aggressive threatening. Right now the Western media is saturated with anti-Russian smears and Russophobia. Yet, this is precisely why the questions about the U.S., NATO, Pentagon, and their connections to Ukraine need to be focused on.

Russia has insisted on Ukraine and other former Soviet republics being excluded from the U.S.-led military bloc – for good reasons. The turning of Ukraine into a platform of hostility towards Russia since the CIA-backed coup in Kiev in 2014 is the essential background to why the current war has manifested in Ukraine. The apparent involvement of Pentagon biowarfare laboratories in Ukraine is one reason among several why Russia was compelled to take defensive action with its intervention in Ukraine.

If we are ever to restore peace, then we need to understand where the hostility comes from, how, and why.

Russia provided more evidence this week that NATO and the Kiev regime were planning a deadly offensive on Donbass, which Russia pre-empted with its military intervention beginning on February 24. Russia has called its intervention a special military operation, while Western states have condemned it as “an unprovoked invasion” of Ukraine.

One senses that it is absolutely imperative for Western media to deny all Russian claims for why it took military action. To do so might lead to some acknowledgement that Russia has just cause, as well as attribute onerous responsibility to Western governments.

It should also be noted, although this is denied too in Western media, that Moscow assiduously tried to address its security concerns through dialogue with the United States and its NATO partners. But those efforts were continually rebuffed. Moscow was treated like it was a non-entity whose long-held security concerns were non-existent or a figment of its imagination.

Russia’s latest information this week substantiating its claims involves a grave multidimensional national security threat. The gravity of the threats makes them impossible to ignore, which makes Western media silence all the more damnable. Moscow says its security analysts are still processing the full extent of information and it will provide more details at a future date. Suffice to say that so far, Russia has identified three major areas where its national security was being threatened by the U.S. and NATO-backed regime in Ukraine. Those threats were greater and more pressing than previously understood, which then presaged the military conflict that is underway in Ukraine.

First, there has emerged more information that the Kiev regime was planning to launch a major offensive on the self-declared people’s republic of Donetsk and Lugansk. The military formations assigned for the attack were the National Guard whose ranks are packed with Neo-Nazi brigades such as the notorious Azov Battalion. Those brigades have been trained and weaponized by the United States, Britain, Canada, Poland, and other NATO members. The Kiev regime has been waging a low-intensity war on the Russian-speaking populations of the Donetsk and Lugansk republics for the past eight years since the CIA-backed coup in 2014. Some 14,000 people have been killed and up to one million displaced from their homes. The new intensified offensive was to be launched this month. Thus when Moscow recognized the independence of the Donbass Republics on February 21 and went to their defense three days later on February 24, it effectively preempted a military attack that in all probability would have been coordinated by NATO powers. Russia has said that its objectives in Ukraine are to denazify and demilitarize the Kiev regime. That necessarily means taking the military operation to the Ukrainian capital and terminating it as a hostile power center.

Second, the threat to turn Ukraine into a nuclear weapon state was a real covert project, not some idle threat, according to Russian foreign intelligence. It claims to have evidence that the U.S. and other NATO powers were well aware of plans for Ukraine to acquire nuclear weapons. When Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky mentioned at the Munich Security Conference on February 19 that his country might abrogate the 1994 Budapest Memorandum banning such weapons in the former Soviet Republic it was not merely an idle whim or braggadocio.

Third, it has now transpired that the United States was funding biowarfare laboratories at dozens of sites across Ukraine. This has long been a Russian concern over many years since Ukraine’s independence in 1991. But this week, the Russian authorities were able to cite documents recovered from laboratories that showed that these facilities were indeed engaged in producing deadly pathogens or bacterial warfare agents. The facilities were apparently ordered to hastily destroy samples on February 24. Such activity is a violation of international bacterial warfare treaties and posed an unacceptable national security threat to Russia. The Pentagon is on record for publicly funding the laboratories. The State Department official with responsibility for Ukraine, Victoria Nuland, this week confirmed in congressional hearings that the laboratories were involved in producing hazardous materials because she expressed fears that Russian forces might obtain them. If they weren’t hazardous or illicit then why was Nuland so alarmed?

All in all, these three subject areas provide prima facia evidence for why Russia needed to launch its military operation into Ukraine nearly three weeks ago. Ever since the CIA-orchestrated coup d’état in 2014 against an elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, the country has been riven by civil war and used as a cat’s paw to destabilize eastern neighbor Russia. This of course conforms neatly with the deep imperial planning by the United States as articulated by people like Zbigniew Brzezinski for pursuing its hostility towards Russia and for continued Cold War division of geopolitical relations.

What is instructive, however, is the near-total silence among Western media outlets on all of the above. To his credit, Tucker Carlson at Fox News has been almost alone among the corporate media outlets in highlighting the warmongering duplicity of the Biden administration and its NATO acolytes.

By and large, though, the vital circumstances explaining the present conflict in Ukraine have been ignored or omitted by Western media. Any brief mention of Russia’s concerns that may be aired is quickly dismissed and ridiculed as “Kremlin propaganda”. It certainly does not help the public interest that Western states have recently taken draconian steps to ban Russian news media from broadcasting. The hypocrisy of Western claims about free speech is astounding.

But what is even more deplorable is the attempt by Western governments and their dutiful media to demonize and criminalize Russia. The climate of Russophobia is giving license to violent attacks on Russian citizens abroad. One reprehensible incident was a truck-ramming attack at the Russian embassy in Ireland.

The ignorance and bigotry being fostered by supposedly free media is lending policies of hostility and aggression by NATO powers. Weapons and war finance are being funneled to Ukraine from U.S. and European taxpayers under the guise of “defending democracy from Russian aggression”. There are real reasons for why the conflict in Ukraine has erupted and there is grievous responsibility by NATO governments. The silence of Western media on the causes of confrontation and the criminal involvement of their own governments is complicity in creating conditions for war.

This week the Russian government expressed again a readiness for diplomatic engagement to end the war in Ukraine. It wants a commitment to end the systemic threat of NATO, the end of aggression by the NATO-backed Kiev regime, and recognition of its historic territorial claim to Crimea. Rational dialogue can solve conflict and ensure peace. But how is dialogue feasible when Western governments and media do not even begin to accept an alternative perspective, let alone one that might even be valid?

France’s Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire revealed more than he intended when he declared this week that Western states were waging a “total war” on Russia’s economy. That he quickly sought to retract his words as inappropriate shows that the senior French government official realized the gravity of what he was disclosing about the response of NATO powers to Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine.

It is two weeks since President Vladimir Putin ordered Russia’s military into Ukraine in what Moscow claims to be a “special operation” primarily to defend the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine. The Donbass self-declared republics of Donetsk and Lugansk – now officially recognized as independent states by Russia – were coming under intensified military attack from the NATO-backed forces of the Kiev regime. Former Ukrainian prime minister Nikolay Azarov claimed this week that Russia’s intervention prevented a NATO-Kiev offensive that would have resulted in thousands of deaths.

It should also be noted for important context that Moscow’s repeated calls for a security treaty with the NATO powers concerning the future exclusion of Ukraine from the alliance were roundly and arrogantly rebuffed. The neighboring country posed an existential security threat to Russia that no Western power would remotely tolerate on its borders.

In any case, the response by the United States and its European NATO allies to Russia’s intervention has been one of blankly denying that Moscow had any reasonable cause. Indeed, the Western media has dutifully mounted a massive campaign of smearing Russia as “an aggressor without any provocation”.

Rather than recognizing any of Russia’s long-held security concerns regarding NATO’s expansion and in particular the role of Ukraine in projecting a threat to Russian national security, the Western states have doubled down on an agenda of systematic hostility. The extremely dangerous situation is at risk of sliding into direct war – a Third World War – between Russia and the NATO powers which would inevitably lead to nuclear annihilation, as Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned this week.

The concerted response by Washington and other Western capitals to mount an economic blockade on Russia over the Ukraine crisis is a sign of the strategic agenda to subjugate. An agenda, it has to be said, that is criminal and a violation of the UN Charter. American, British, French and other NATO leaders have relished the prospect of collapsing the Russian economy. (The same kind of state-sponsored economic terrorism that Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and others have to endure for not bending the knee to Western demands.)

In addition to this economic warfare, the NATO powers are continuing to pile weapons and private military contractors into Ukraine to fight what is becoming a proxy war against Russia. Over the past year alone, it is estimated that the Biden administration has assigned $1 billion in U.S. military aid to Ukraine. Britain has also been plying Ukraine with weapons and now Germany this week – breaking a decades-long taboo – has joined other NATO members to supply arms.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg claims that the alliance is not a party to the conflict. But that assertion is a barefaced lie. NATO has weaponized the Kiev regime ever since the CIA-backed coup d’état in 2014 which brought to power a Neo-Nazi cabal. Special forces from NATO countries have been training ultranationalist battalions donning Waffen SS insignia in the use of weapons to attack the ethnic Russian population in Donbass who refused to recognize the Kiev regime.

The economic and proxy military war is concomitant with the overwhelming media propaganda campaign across Europe and North America to demonize and criminalize Russia. U.S. politicians are openly calling for the assassination of Russia’s President Putin, while British parliamentarians are demanding the deportation of all Russian nationals. Russian cultural and sports figures are being banned. In a frenzy of Russophobia, even international events such as cat shows are being targeted with bans. The latter example is almost laughable but it does illustrate the total effort underway to demonize and isolate Russia.

The next logical step is the nefarious one of making war on Russia and its people a “just cause” by the Western powers.

In this hysterical geopolitical climate, it is vital to retain a historical analysis of why the present conflict pertains.

For years now, it has been openly advocated by imperial planners in the U.S. and its NATO surrogates to label Russia (and China) as an enemy preventing American-led global dominance. The Rand Corp, for instance, has brazenly touted regime change in Moscow.

The orgy of wars that Washington and its European allies have waged over the past three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union has all been driven by an agenda of asserting hegemony and curtailing any opposition from Russia, China and others. The relentless, threatening eastward expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders is integral to that as was the coup in Ukraine in 2014.

We are where we are because of this U.S.-led strategic hostility towards Russia.

This is not merely about Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. Western media aim to present that as Moscow’s alleged aggression against Europe even though Putin this week reiterated for the nth time that Russia has no ill intention towards Europe. Western pundits pontificate about Putin’s purported revanchism to restore the Soviet Union. Sanctions are imposed supposedly to demonstrate Western defense of “democratic values” – as the U.S. and Europe use every available instrument to censor Russian media from giving an alternative view.

The “Total War” rhetoric is not a slip of the tongue or an unfortunate malapropism. The repeated expressed desire and preference to confront Russia – including to kill its leadership – shows that there is a strategic, long-term dynamic to what is unfolding. If Washington and its NATO partners were genuinely interested in peaceful relations they would not have repudiated Moscow’s security proposals put forward in December. They would not be weaponizing the Kiev regime. To that end, it is disturbing that the NATO powers seem to be impeding discussions currently taking place between Russia and Ukraine to find a peaceful settlement to their conflict.

More sinisterly, perhaps the last time the phrase “Total War” was heard articulated in public with regard to Russia it came out of the mouth of Nazi Germany’s Josep Goebbels.

The conflict and suffering in Ukraine are regrettable. But what is even more regrettable and deplorable is the way NATO powers have created the conflict. And what’s more, now Western elites and their malleable media are forging a casus belli against Russia under the cynical guise of concern for Ukraine, democracy, international law, and peace.

What Russia is seeking is a more comprehensive security agreement with the U.S. and NATO for Europe.

The dramatic events in Ukraine this week have a much bigger timescale and background. It is not the culmination and provenance of Western claims of a Russian invasion. Those claims have become more feverish over the past four months. What this is really about is Russian national security concerns continually being ignored or rejected. No more.

Moscow had warned that if its reasonable security proposals were not reciprocated, then there would be “military-technical measures”. Having exhausted the initiative for dialogue and mutual respect, the next phase is the use of more “physical language” to convey meaning to people who seem unresponsive to normal dialogue. It is the Western powers and their arrogant presumption of superiority that are responsible for the impasse and now the repercussions.

For nearly three decades since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, U.S. imperialism has been on a roll. War after war in country after country – often with the NATO alliance serving as a willing, brutal instrument – the United States has been pursuing a totalitarian objective of “full-spectrum dominance”. Russia has emerged as the target for U.S. and NATO aggression due to it being perceived as an obstacle to American imperial hegemony. Its intervention in Syria to thwart the United States-led covert war for regime change in the Arab country is a classic example.

China is also targeted, perhaps more so because of its global economic ascent challenging decades of American capitalist dominance; as are several other nations who are courageous and principled in not willing to comply with Washington’s presumed global writ. They include Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, among others.

The United States-backed coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014 – assisted by NATO and the European Union – was just one link in a long chain of aggression. But a link that was particularly unacceptable to Russia given the proximity. The coup regime installed in Kiev was animated by extreme anti-Russia and Neo-Nazi politics, facts that are omitted by Western media. This was not an accident. The purpose of the coup was to make Ukraine a catspaw against Russia. The flaunting of possible NATO membership and the prospective installation of American missiles in Ukraine on Russia’s border was a red line for Moscow.

For eight years, the U.S. and NATO-sponsored Kiev regime has waged a genocidal war against the Russian population in the Donbass region of southeast Ukraine. Again, Western media ignored this appalling reality. The hatred and barbarity of Kiev’s “anti-terror operation” were unleashed by Vice President Joe Biden in 2014 during the Obama administration when he was the point man for Washington to Ukraine. By the way, during many visits to that country, Biden also made a lot of profitable shady business for his son on the side.

For eight years, Russia appealed for a political settlement to the civil war as mandated by the Minsk peace accords (negotiated in 2014 and 2015). The US-backed Kiev regime repudiated the political path at every step despite the accords being authorized at the highest international level by the United Nations Security Council.

What was happening in Ukraine over the past eight years partly mirrored what has been happening over the last three decades as the United States and its NATO allies expanded eastwards with increasing military threats to Russia. In December last year, Moscow formulated its long-held concerns into proposals for a Europe-wide security arrangement that would enshrine a legally binding treaty covering the prohibition on further eastward expansion of NATO.

Those proposals were rejected out of hand by Washington and its European allies. Their rejection also repudiated past written commitments to the principle of indivisible security under the auspices of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

What’s more, the United States and NATO powers began flooding Ukraine with offensive weapons under the cynical guise of “defense”. This resulted in the Russophobic Kiev regime stepping up its aggression towards the Russian population in the Donbass region.

On Monday this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared his country’s recognition of the self-declared republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. Putin said the move should have been done a long time ago, but that the delay was due to Moscow’s attempt at urging the Kiev regime to implement the Minsk accords. Due to the West turning a blind eye, the Minsk peace deal was systematically violated. In short, killed.

Russia, therefore, had no choice but to recognize the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR). It was a matter of fact that the Kiev regime was neither a legitimately constituted sovereign authority nor willing to enter into any kind of negotiated peace with the Donbass population. Indeed, due to callous Western support, including tonnes of new weapons and military trainers from several NATO powers, the Kiev regime forces were increasing the shelling of the separatist region. A bloodbath was unfolding as of last week.

When Putin declared recognition of the DPR and LPR as independent states that automatically conferred Russia’s military support for their security. The declaration was followed by a demand on Kiev to cease its military offensive on the Donbass. That demand was ignored and the deadly shelling continued.

This objective context puts U.S. and European rhetoric about “sovereignty” and “territorial integrity” into proper perspective. Their pious talk is empty and disingenuous. How dare they lecture given their sordid and blood-stained history of mutilating countless nations’ sovereignty, including that of Ukraine with the violent coup in 2014.

A NATO-backed anti-Russia regime on Russia’s doorstep attacking Russian people is clearly unacceptable. The volume of NATO weapons flowing into Ukraine over recent weeks was pointing to a larger war footing. Then at the Munich Security Conference last weekend Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky dropped the incendiary threat that Ukraine could develop nuclear weapons. Clearly, the security situation for Russia was crashing several red lines.

Of course, the chorus of condemnation from the United States and its Western partners is shot through with hypocrisy. They claim that Russia has “shattered peace in Europe” and they have moved to impose an all-out economic blockade to “strangle the economic functioning of Russia”. The U.S. and NATO have for years trashed international law and the UN Charter with their criminal wars and regime-change operations. Their duplicity and hysterics are adding more layers of confusion to the problem.

Western media have systematically concealed the global problem of U.S. and NATO aggression. The misinformation and disinformation are manifest with claims that Russia is embarked on “a barbaric venture” and “unprovoked war”. To claim “unprovoked” betrays extreme ignorance of the situation.

Russia has for years warned that U.S. and NATO aggression was posing a critical danger to international security and had to stop. The revoking of arms control treaties by the U.S. (the ABM, INF, Open Skies Treaty) and the expansion of missile threats near Russia’s borders were no longer tolerable. Ukraine is really just one element of the bigger picture. But this week, Russia has moved finally to stop the aggression. It is a historic watershed.

Moscow says that its aim is to deNazify and demilitarize an illegitimate NATO-backed regime in Kiev. It says it has no intention to occupy Ukraine. As of this writing, Moscow has indicated it is open to negotiating as it always has been. What Russia is seeking is a more comprehensive security agreement with the U.S. and NATO for Europe.

More widely, the United States must also end its belligerent ideological view of Russia and China as enemies. The U.S. has to come to terms with a multipolar world order in which its unilateral diktat is no longer tenable, legally, politically, or morally. That is the ultimate challenge for international peace and security.

Well, there it is for the whole to see. Great expectations and theatrical predictions that Russia would invade Ukraine this week failed spectacularly to materialize.

But the situation is far from funny nor far from the danger of war being yet incited. That’s largely because the United States, from its president and his top officials to an army of ghoulish media pundits, are crying wolf even more hysterically.

The combustible conflict in Ukraine between a U.S.-backed Neofascist regime and Russia-backed separatists is threatening to explode. The provocations are coming from the U.S.-backed side which is armed to the teeth, yet Western media are blaming Russia. The hysterical anti-Russian claims are recklessly driving towards war as the NATO-backed Kiev regime feels emboldened to use military force to settle a civil war. And then, as if to insult common sense and morality, President Joe Biden had the gall this week to talk about “seeking the path of diplomacy” and not harboring any enmity towards Russian people.

Not checked by any sense of shame for having been exposed as fantasists and warmongers, the United States and its British partner, in particular, have doubled down with further lurid claims that Russia is going to invade Ukraine “any day”.

The insanity of the situation is highlighted by the U.S.-armed Ukrainian regime itself rejecting the claims that Russia is planning a military assault. Moscow has also repeatedly and categorically denied it has any intention of attacking its neighbor with whom the country shares centuries of cultural ties and fraternity. Russians and many Ukrainians are united by families, language and religion.

There is no logical or plausible reason articulated by Washington for why Russia would launch an offensive against Ukraine. It has simply been asserted over and over by the U.S., amplified by British lackeys, as well as the dutiful corporate-controlled news media, that Russian troops are preparing to invade Ukraine. Russian troops are in established military bases within Russian territory. If they are on alert in recent months it is because of the madcap, intensified narrative accusing Russia of aggression coming from the U.S. and NATO, who are actually building up offensive forces near Russian borders.

Even when Russian forces were withdrawn this week from Belarus and southern parts of Russia on completion of scheduled military exercises that was not enough to satisfy the U.S. and its partners. President Biden said Russian troops were building up even more to invade Ukraine. His Secretary of State Antony Blinken feverishly warned the UN Security Council that Russia was manufacturing a false-flag provocation to act as a cover for imminent invasion.

In all this delirious disinformation, Moscow has remained steadfast in making its reasonable demand. That is, the need for a long-term security treaty for Europe between the U.S.-led NATO alliance and Russia. There must be eventually a legally binding commitment from the NATO bloc to cease its eastward expansion around Russian territory. That’s what the current crisis is about. Washington and its NATO partners do not want to give Moscow a security guarantee. That’s because for the United States, in particular, NATO is a convenient instrument to harass Russia. Biden’s talk about NATO being defensive and not threatening Russia is absurd given the multiple wars that the U.S. and its NATO instrument have waged in recent years. The entire bloc is an affront to international law and a grave source of global insecurity from its wanton violation of nations’ sovereignty and borders. It also prompted the coup d’état in Kiev in 2014 bringing to power the present Neo-Nazi regime which Western states ludicrously refer to as “democratic” and “sharing our values”.

There is also the U.S. objective of preventing any normalization of relations between Russia and the rest of Europe. That way would lead to greater Eurasian integration and the loss of global hegemonic ambitions in Washington. The Wolfowitz Doctrine (ca. 1992) for maintaining U.S. imperialist power in the post-Cold War world was very much focused on countering Russia, China and Eurasian integration. A specific prize in wrecking this kind of emerging multipolar world order is the sabotage of the Nord Stream 2 energy trade between Russia and the European Union.

What we, therefore, see in the current crisis over Ukraine is a premeditated choice to confront Russia and to create a geopolitical rupture. Ukraine is only a pawn in the bigger scheme of U.S. imperial planning. This is what the whole hysterical gaslighting about a Russian invasion is all about. Washington is contriving a crisis to splinter international relations along Cold War lines. It is revanchist, regressive and destructive, not to mention completely anathema in today’s world. But such is Washington’s addiction to fix its supremacist lust. Even though the gambit is running the risk of inciting war in Europe, a war that could escalate into a nuclear conflagration.

Countless wars or military interventions by the United States over many decades have been presaged by propaganda stunts and hyper-media psychological operations, quaintly labeled “news reporting”. One notorious example is the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 which the U.S. used to launch its genocidal Vietnam War. Another is the non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction which was used as a fabricated pretext to mount the genocidal U.S.-British war on Iraq. Countless others can be cited, from alleged Soviet infiltration of Central America in the 198os eliciting the deployment of U.S.-trained death squads, to the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria during recent years to give cover for American and NATO bombing of that country. Lest we forget, Libya was destroyed in 2011 and its leader Muammar Gaddafi was brutally murdered by a NATO operation based on lies about “protecting human rights”. The people involved in that war crime are active today: President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, among others.

Surely, the biggest global scandal – never reported of course by the Western propaganda “free press” – is the dirty American habit of waging wars based on lies and provocations. Millions of people and dozens of nations have been destroyed based on Washington’s lies.

The U.S. predictions of Russia invading Ukraine this week – and no doubt next week and thereafter continuously, at a theater near you, folks! – fall into the same category of historic propaganda for creating tensions, confrontation and ultimately war.

What is deeply unsettling, however, is the massive, unprecedented supply of U.S. and NATO lethal weaponry piling right now into Ukraine. The anti-Russia Kiev regime is the party that has massed offensive forces on a contact line with the Russian population in southeastern Ukraine. The shelling of civilian areas is escalating in recent days. And yet demonically, the American president is accusing Russia of shelling the area to create a pretext for invasion, and poo-poohing claims of genocide as “Russian propaganda”.

Western media are complicit in selling war propaganda by distorting the danger and falsely attributing the aggression to Russia.

Who has the unparalleled decades-long form for dirty tricks, lies, aggression and wars? Who has the overwhelming geo-strategic motive for perpetrating the current aggression? Ask yourself: why are these questions never asked and never answered in Western media? That’s because the truth would become obvious. The emperor would be seen to be naked with nothing but blood-covered hands.

Britain’s Foreign Minister Liz Truss was given a cool reception in Moscow this week. The guarded attitude is understandable for Truss has shown no respect to Russia or any attempt at genuine diplomacy. Her boorish warmongering and arrogant conduct should have been dealt with by denying her entry to Russia.

Granted, in the world of diplomacy there are supposed to be always open doors and it is recommended that uttering the word “no” is forbidden. So, one could argue that the Russian government was obliged to receive Britain’s top diplomat this week.

Nevertheless, Liz Truss has shown herself to be spectacularly unbecoming as a diplomat. For weeks now, she has been ramping up belligerent rhetoric towards Russia, baselessly accusing it of planning to invade Ukraine. Her surname translates in the Russian language as “patsy” and she has certainly demonstrated such a dubious quality from her repeated indulgence of wanton Anglo-American propaganda. That propaganda has recklessly wound up tensions over Ukraine with Russia. The recklessness is inciting conflict and the danger of war in Europe. Arguably, Truss and her ilk should be prosecuted for incitement, not pandered to.

Not surprisingly then, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov gave his British counterpart a cold shoulder when she arrived in Moscow on Thursday. Lavrov said lecturing and threats to Russia of the kind that Truss has peddled for weeks are a dead-end street. Truss continued making provocative and ignorant statements while in Moscow, urging Russia to “de-escalate” and “choose the path of diplomacy or else face severe consequences”.

The embarrassing lack of preparation by the British minister was revealed when Lavrov at one point during their discussions asked Truss ironically if Britain recognized Russia’s sovereignty over Rostov and Voronezh. They are located within the Russian Federation where there are military bases. Truss reportedly retorted: “The UK will never recognize Russia’s sovereignty over those regions.” Apparently, she mistook them for being in Ukraine.

This is not the first time that the British diplomat has come up short on basic knowledge when presuming to pontificate about subjects. Recently, while on a tour of Australia, Truss held forth about the medieval history of Kievan Rus declaring that “Ukrainians” have defended their territory from “invasions by the Mongols to the Tatars”, apparently not realizing that the 13th-century events were part of the one “Mongol-Tatar Yoke” imposed on several Slavic peoples.

Regrettably, Liz Truss is more adept at showboating than genuine diplomacy. She has a penchant for photo-ops rather than policy. When she was in Moscow this week, she was dressed all in black and wearing a traditional Russian fur hat. Commentators noted how the attire was not appropriate for the unseasonably mild weather and that the image-conscious Truss was trying to evoke memories of the formidable British leader Margaret Thatcher on her landmark visit to Moscow in 1987 during the Cold War.

Indeed there is open speculation in the British media that Truss has her eye on taking over as prime minister in the event of Boris Johnson being ousted from Downing Street over his scandal-ridden tenure. Before leaving for Russia, Truss made defiant comments about how she would be warning Moscow to “de-escalate”.

The contrast was salient with French President Emmanuel Macron’s earlier visit to Moscow on Monday. Macron said he had “rich and substantive” talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin over five hours. There were no high-handed ultimatums or spurious demands. There was instead an earnest effort to find a diplomatic resolution to the tensions between the US-led NATO bloc and Russia over Ukraine.

Part of the resolution involves a proper understanding of Russia’s strategic security concerns with regard to NATO’s historic, relentless expansion and, secondly, finding an urgent peaceful settlement of the eight-year Ukrainian civil war. At least Macron showed an understanding and respect for Russia’s perspective.

By contrast, Lavrov apparently had to explain to Truss why the Ukraine conflict continues because the NATO-backed Kiev regime refuses to implement its legally binding obligations to the 2015 Minsk Peace accords.

The stark conclusion is that Washington and London are not serious about dialogue with Moscow to find a diplomatic solution to all of these issues. American and British media claim that Washington and London are trying to “ease tensions”. The exact opposite is true. The Anglo-American axis has incited tensions and a sense of crisis that runs the risk of open war. This axis has greatly increased the supply of weapons and special forces to Ukraine, thus emboldening the Kiev regime to reject a peaceful path. The Americans and British have militarized Eastern Europe with unprecedented deployments of troops, warships and warplanes. While Truss was in Moscow, her nominal boss Boris Johnson was in the Polish capital Warsaw inspecting British troops that had just arrived to “defend” Poland and Eastern Europe from alleged Russian aggression.

Thus, it can be said that the current American and British officials are incapable or unwilling to engage in genuine diplomacy with Russia to find a peaceful resolution and a modus vivendi free of Cold War ideology. Liz Truss is more a propaganda operative and warmonger than a bona fide envoy committed to establishing understanding and improved relations.

Russia should not give such people an opportunity to insult with their provocative agenda. For such people, a closed door and Nyet are appropriate exceptions in diplomacy.

After weeks of alarmist claims that Russia is going to invade Ukraine, now the U.S. and Western media are speculating that Russian President Vladimir Putin will “hold off on a military invasion” in order to not spoil the Winter Olympic Games underway in China.

One could hardly make up such a farce, yet the U.S. and Western news media are peddling it with a straight face. Since November, the American and European media have dutifully disseminated the narrative pushed by the Biden administration that Russia is about to march troops into its eastern neighbor. Moscow has repeatedly dismissed those claims as hysterical and baseless.

Even the Russophobic, NATO-backed regime in Kiev has recently taken a divergent position, decrying what it calls “alarmist” warnings from Washington. Ukrainian state security officials have declared publicly that there is no sign of an imminent Russian invasion. Not so much out of truthful principle, the Kiev regime seems to be more concerned by the damage and instability that such warmongering hysterics are doing to the Ukrainian economy. So embarrassing is this split in the narrative that the White House announced this week it is no longer going to refer to alleged Russian military plans as an “imminent invasion”. In other words, after two months of fruitlessly crying wolf, Washington has decided to stop crying.

How then to rationalize the otherwise fatuous fallacy of predicting invasion? Well, perhaps – it is now desperately conjectured – the purportedly scheming Russian leader is postponing the alleged plan for taking over Ukraine out of deference to China’s President Xi Jinping.

The Washington Post, CNN and others are speculating that Putin is trying to win Xi’s favor by not spoiling China’s “Olympic moment”. The Winter games opened in Beijing this week and will run until February 20 with the eyes of the world gazing at the colorful spectacle. If Russian troops and tanks were to file into Ukraine then the games in China will be marred by the ensuing conflict and international outcry, so the fevered speculation goes.

Earlier, Bloomberg News published a dubious report in which it claimed that President Xi had asked Putin to hold off military intervention in Ukraine. Beijing swiftly rubbished that report as “sheer fiction”. But it seems the fantasy has taken hold in other U.S. outlets. The reason is because it is a necessary way to save face for the same media outlets who have shamelessly spouted about Russia invading Ukraine, which has wantonly wound up geopolitical tensions and the risk of sparking an all-out war in Europe.

In other words, the credibility of the Biden administration, its Western allies and the media is at stake from their empty predictions about Russia invading Ukraine. This misinformation amounts to barefaced lies. What can be seen therefore is the orchestration of a huge propaganda effort to incite tensions and conflict with Russia. That in itself is a form of criminal aggression. In order to cover up this reprehensible racking up of conflict, the U.S. media are now speculating about a Russian pact with China to postpone invasion. Thus, the farce is taken to a higher level.

This cynical gaming with the Olympics has taken other forms in recent months. The United States, Britain, Canada and Australia, as well as European Union states, have declared a diplomatic boycott of the event. At the opening ceremony this week, Western officials were absent in Beijing. However, the boycott does not extend to athletes participating which seems rather incongruous. If there were any principles in Western allegations of human rights violations by China then why are their athletes attending?

The Western media have toed the line ordained by Washington and its Western allies to smear China. This is all part of the bigger geopolitical game of trying to undermine Beijing and Moscow. The Western media’s dutiful amplification of human rights allegations against China has played into the policy of boycotting the Beijing Winter Olympics.

This is nothing short of contemptible manipulation of international sports by politics and ideology. The Olympics in China are being portrayed as an event for “non-democracies” because the Western governments have decided to avoid attending.

What’s really animating the hostility is the evident closeness and comity between Russia and China. Russian leader Vladimir Putin was given pride of place among international attendees when he was personally received in Beijing by his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping. Both leaders spoke confidently about the emerging multipolar world that is gradually supplanting the failing unipolar Western order under U.S. hegemony. Putin and Xi spoke of how the world is embracing new leadership of nations based on peaceful coexistence and respect for international law and the United Nations.

“There is a growing demand from the world community for leadership in the interests of peaceful and sustainable development,” a joint statement  declared, adding: “Some forces representing a minority on the world stage continue to advocate for unilateral approaches to solving international problems and resort to the politics of force, engage in interference in the internal affairs of other states, cause damage to their legitimate rights and interests, provoke contradictions, disagreements and confrontation, and hinder the development and progress of mankind, creating opposition from the international community.”

Western media have for too long carried water for warmongering and conflict, for destructive Cold War machinations and Orwellian thought-control. The latest episode is the non-event of Russian aggression against Ukraine which in reality is an inversion of reality. Added to this is the Western media spinning against China’s Olympics as some kind of “event for autocrats”.

What’s damningly demonstrated is this: if U.S. and Western media can’t explain reality then they resort to conjuring fantasy.

The world is changing for potential progress and peace in a way that exposes the bankruptcy of the already old U.S.-dominated imperial order.

Congratulations to China for hosting the XXIV Winter Olympics whose motto aptly is “Together for a Shared Future”. Congratulations, too, to the many nations that can celebrate common humanity and rise above the duplicity and hostility of geopolitical gaming.