While Russia’s special operation in Ukraine continued, Western media launched an intense disinformation campaign in parallel with this operation. In this context, the nature of the Ukrainian administration, the neo-Nazi forces fighting against the Donbass and the facts about the background are being destroyed.

Although Western countries and media, especially the USA, have expressed the opinion that Russia’s operation is the result of a kind of “expansionism”, the attacks that intensified after the Maidan coup in 2014 and the extreme right-wing nature of the Kyiv regime is the result of a long-term political transformation and its origins date back to before the Second World War.

The historical figures who gave the Ukrainian administration its far-right and anti-Soviet/anti-Russian character are today remembered as “national heroes” throughout the country. The biggest common point of these names is that they have an extreme right ideology.

Among the names that Ukrainian nationalists consider as historical references, Simon Petlyura draws attention.

It is estimated that 35 thousand to 50 thousand Jews were killed in the pogroms organized during the period of Petyura, who was the leader of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, which was declared unilaterally between 1917-1921.

Petlyura, who was killed by Sholom Schwartzbard, a Jewish anarchist whose family was murdered in Odessa, is among the names seen as “heroes” by the ruling elite and Nazi forces in Ukraine.

In Vinnitsa, Western Ukraine, a monument to Petlyura was unveiled in 2017, and Vinnitsa Region Executive Chairman Valeriy Korovy claimed that Petlyura was “a man who loved his country dearly and tried to be honest with his people, and the Soviets did their best to discredit him.”

In the same period, a bust of Petlyura, who signed one of the bloodiest pages in the history of Ukraine, was erected in Kiev and a plaque was made in his memory in Poltava.

While the anti-communist and anti-Soviet political positions of the Ukrainian rulers were manifested in the mass murders of both Jews and communists in Ukraine, the start of World War II led to the strongest periods of the far right movements in the country.

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which was established to cooperate against the Nazi invaders, committed massacres not only in Ukraine, but also in Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia.

One of the ideologues of the organization, Dmitriy Dontsov, was a “journalist” who translated Mussolini’s famous “Fascism Doctrine” and advocated “to stand together with Russia’s enemies, no matter who they are”.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Ukrainian nationalists, who act with the same attitude today, are the continuation of Dontsov. Because, just like Petlyura, Dontsov is among the “unforgotten” national figures in Ukraine today.

The memorial plaque ’in honor of Dontsov’, which was installed in the Ukrainian Ukrinform National News Agency building in Kiev earlier this year, proves the ideological continuity between the current administration and the Ukrainian right

Historical leader of Ukrainian nationalists: Stepan Bandera

After the division of the Ukrainian Nationalists Organization, which was established to cooperate with the Nazis, the Ukrainian Stepan Bandera, who led one of the wings of the organization, started massacres against the Jews by the Nachtigal Battalion he founded.

It is estimated that Bandera and his organization carried out about 140 pogroms in which a total of 13 thousand to 35 thousand Jews were massacred in various regions, especially in Ternopil, as the Nazi army progressed.

However, Hitler’s dictatorship, which opposed Bandera and his organization’s plans to establish an “Independent Ukraine”, arrested Bandera, who declared independence in 1941, and his deputy Yaroslav Stetsko and dissolved the organization.

Bandera and Stetsko’s re-emergence on the stage of history took place with the establishment of the “Ukrainian Insurgent Army” (UPA) during the retreat of the Nazis against the Soviet army in the Battle of Stalingrad.

During the Nazi retreat, the UPA carried out attacks in which 90,000 Poles and thousands of Jews, as well as many communists, were murdered and tortured.

Despite being an open-id Nazi collaborator, Bandera continued to be used against the USSR by Western intelligence units, especially the USA, until he was killed by the KGB in Munich in 1959.

Bandera’s deputy, Yaroslav Stetsko, who would later become one of the founders of the World Anti-Communist Union, was personally welcomed by the 40th U.S. President Ronald Reagan at the White House in 1983 and received the praise of “Your struggle is our struggle”.

Ukraine’s reversal: the rise of the right-wing in the post-Soviet era

The neo-Nazi structures that took the stage in Ukraine after 1991 became stronger after the color revolution in 2004 and the Maidan coup in 2014 and took steps to make Ukraine a ram head of NATO’s strategy to contain Russia. Taking these steps meant the dominance of a criminal climate that aimed to create ’social unrest’ throughout the country and change the power in favor of the West. All these were developments within the scope of the post-Soviet Ukraine’s strategy of ’returning Europe’.

In parallel with these developments, Ukraine adopted the EU-Ukraine Declaration signed on 2 December 1991. Again, Ukraine became the first former Soviet republic to sign a partnership and cooperation agreement with the EU in the political, economic and cultural fields in 1994. This new route that Ukraine drew after the USSR was an important step in the opening of Ukraine to exploitation through international companies, especially underground resources.

What ignited the process leading up to the Maidan coup d’etat was that the Ukrainian government of the time suspended the association process with the EU on 21 November 2013.

Maidan coup

The destruction of the statue of Lenin in Kiev on December 8, 2013 in Ukraine was a symbolic sign that Ukraine would never be the same again. Although an ’anti-corruption’ scenario was written in the Western media regarding the protests, which started during the former president Yanukovych’s reign, those who led the protesters who took to the streets were none other than nationalist figures.

The ’Social-Nationalist Party’, which was founded in the country in 1991 and resembles Hitler’s ’National Socialist Party’, later took the name ’Svoboda’, which means ’Liberty’, ironically.

This party, which is one of the most important actors of the Maidan coup, took an active part in the actions in 2014 with the youth organization ’Ukrainian Patriot’.

Founded in Ukraine in 2002 and later transformed into the Azov Battalion, the nationalist organization named ’Trizub’ (also the name of the weekly magazine published by Petlyura) was imprisoned when he and his supporters blew up the statue of Lenin and was released after the Maydan coup and entered the parliament. Nazi Andrey Biletskiy has become one of the symbols that best reflects the character of the Maidan regime.

On the other hand, Praviy Sektor, which was founded by Dmitry Yarosh, one of the directors of the Trizub, became one of the leading neo-Nazi organizations during through Maidan coup. Another important feature of Yarosh was his appointment as the chief adviser to the Chief of the General Staff of Ukraine.

The biggest supporter of the Maidan coup in the international arena was the USA. Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs of the U.S. State Department, even handed cookies to Ukrainian activists as the protests continued.

Nuland, who was involved in determining who will be in the new administration that will be shaped after the coup, said that the U.S. spent 5 billion dollars for Ukraine in the last twenty years. Nuland’s swearing at the European Union in a phone call with the U.S. Ambassador to Kyiv, Geoffrey Pyatt, was an indication that the U.S. even wanted to disable the EU in the Ukraine coup.

Another important indicator of why the Maidan coup was so much supported by the USA was the appointment of Hunter Biden, the son of today’s U.S. President Joe Biden, to the board of directors of Bursima, the country’s largest energy company.

The Western camp, led by the USA, used Ukraine against Russia during the Soviet revolution, during the Second World War, during the Cold War, and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and did not even hesitate to organize a coup in the country for this purpose.

The necessity of reshaping Ukraine with the Maidan coup was a very important pillar of NATO’s historical strategy of “containing Russia”, which was established against the “Soviet threat” that contradicted the political agenda of the USA in the post-Soviet period.

The first actions of the nationalist government established after the Maidan coup were to try to erase the Soviet past of the country and to make moves against the Russians living in the country within the scope of this strategy.

The Ukrainian administration banned Russian from the public sphere, statues of Nazi collaborators, especially Bandera, were erected, his birthday announced a public holiday, Red Army veterans and members of Nazi collaborator organizations were considered equal, neo-Nazi organizations were officially affiliated with the Ukrainian army, Communist Party and socialist organizations were banned, Its members were killed, and intense attacks were launched against Russian civilians, especially in the Odessa massacre, in which more than 40 people were killed.

The Russians, mainly living in the east of the country, built anti-fascist units with Anti-Maidan actions to protect against these attacks, and the “Novorossiya Federal State” consisting of Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics was established.

Despite the Minsk protocol signed by the representatives of Ukraine, Russia, Donetsk, Lugansk and OSCE in order to achieve a ceasefire in the region, the Ukrainian forces continued their attacks on Donbass. Although this was one of the most important reasons for Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, it became one of the facts ignored by the Western media.

Especially starting from 2019, there has been a significant increase in the attacks of the Ukrainian army, which is armed by NATO countries, against Donbass, although it is not a NATO member. A large number of settlements under the administration of Donetsk and Lugansk were shot using weapons that were prohibited under the Minsk agreements. This was another important reason for the start of the Russian operation.

The fact that the vast majority of the attacks were carried out by the neo-Nazi forces affiliated with the Ukrainian administration is one of the most important factors in the Russian administration’s decision to “denazification”.

As the conflicts between Russian forces, Ukrainian troops and neo-Nazis continued within the scope of Russia’s ongoing operations, the information war initiated by the West in parallel with these conflicts was the scene of important sanctions against Russia, especially the Russian media.

While countless fake news are being circulated in this information war, the Western world is trying to portray the events as an invasion operation “suddenly started” by Russia, without showing the extreme right-wing nature of the regime it has built with its own hands and the human rights violations against civilians in the region.

TJ COLES

“[I]f you can learn all modalities of war, then you can be the god of war,” so said a Ukrainian artillery commander in 2016 while receiving training from the US Army.

The unnamed commander was quoted by Lt. Claire Vanderberg, a mortar platoon leader training soldiers as part of the Pentagon’s Joint Multinational Training Group-Ukraine. The training has taken place at the absurdly named International Peacekeeping and Security Center, which sits close to the border with Poland near the Ukrainian town of Yavoriv. Western media reported Russia’s recent cruise missile attack on the base, but chose not to mention what has taken place inside.

The relationship described above is a snapshot of a decades-long US-NATO effort to not only pull Ukraine from Russia’s orbit, but to actively weaponize the country against Moscow.

US national security state acknowledges “Russia is pushing back,” not pushing first

In their internal documents, the Pentagon and other arms of the US national security state reiterate the same arguments the anti-war left does when it explains how Ukraine has been used to provoke Russia into a military escalation. The principal difference is that the Pentagon speaks from an unabashedly imperialist perspective in which such provocations are seen as an important component of US power projection.

Recently, the US Director of National Intelligence’s Annual Threat Assessment reported: “Russia is pushing back against Washington where it can—locally and globally—employing techniques up to and including the use of force.” Note: Russia is “pushing back,” not pushing first.

A report from 2021 by the National Intelligence Council concedes of Russia and China: “Neither has felt secure in an international order designed for and dominated by democratic powers,” with “democratic” meaning the US and friends. Both Russia and China “have promoted a sovereignty-based international order that protects their absolute authority within their borders and geographic areas of influence.”

In October 2017, US Army Field Artillery School Assistant Commandant, Col. Heyward Hutson, who is responsible for training Ukrainians, explained: “Ukraine wants to become a NATO nation, but Russia doesn’t want them to be a NATO nation. Russia wants to have a buffer zone.” He added that another “problem is a lot of Eastern Ukraine is pro-Russia so the civilian population there is divided.” A 2016 US Army War College report reiterated: “Russia’s basic national security strategy is to keep its ‘neighboring belt stable’, NATO weak, China close, and the United States focused elsewhere.”

Another, from 2007, explains that the “pro-reform forces in power since the Orange Revolution” (read: pro-US forces) “would like to move Ukraine squarely into the Euro-Atlantic community with only limited deference to Russia.”

The document goes on to note that, at the time, the “Ukrainian political and military leadership has remained divided over the question of whether Ukraine should pursue a collective security approach or retain its neutral status.” It concluded that, while “[m]ost senior [Ukrainian] commanders have pro-reform credentials… there are still large numbers of senior leaders within the Main Defense Forces who have no or only limited exposure to Western training and operations.”

The US-sponsored coup of 2013-14 enabled Washington to smooth over that contradiction by launching an extensive program to train units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

President Bill Clinton signs NATO enlargement legislation, May 21, 1995

NATO is “not an exercise in diplomacy and deterrence as before”

When the Soviet Union collapsed, so too did its military alliance, the Warsaw Pact. But the West not only refused to disband its alliance—the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—it expanded up to Russia’s borders.

NATO’s own records state that in 1992, “Just four months after Ukraine’s declaration of independence” from the USSR, “NATO invited its representative to an extraordinary meeting of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council, the body set up to shape cooperation between NATO and the states of the former Warsaw Pact.”   

Russia did not propose a similar pact with America’s neighbors.

In 1994, Ukraine joined the so-called Partnership for Peace (PFP). Citing the UN Charter, the PFP states that signatories agree “to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, to respect existing borders and to settle disputes by peaceful means.” A US State Department primer reveals that the PFP had an ulterior motive. Its real aim was not neutrality but to move Ukraine and other signatories closer to NATO. “Participation in PFP does not guarantee entry into NATO, but it is the best preparation for states interested in becoming NATO members.”

The primer also lists the 52 actual and planned military exercises in which PFP members initially engaged on or near Russia’s borders.

Bill Clinton-era policymakers explained that “NATO is not merely an exercise in preventive diplomacy and deterrence as before.” NATO expansion had a political agenda. They considered “NATO enlargement [a]s a democratization policy.” As above, “democratization” means pro-US. Citing President Clinton’s 1996 campaign speeches, the report notes that in their minds NATO “will provide the stability needed for greater economic development in Central and Eastern Europe.” In other words, post-USSR NATO was designed, in part, to guarantee US led-“free markets” (which are often neither free nor markets, but monopolies,) in ex-Soviet nations where state-ownership of businesses was the norm.

In 1997, NATO and Ukraine signed the Charter on a Distinctive Partnership. The Charter was a prima facie violation of the PFP in that it compromised Ukraine’s political independence. It proposed several areas of NATO-Ukraine cooperation, “including civil emergency planning, military training and environmental security.” NATO brags: “cooperation between NATO and Ukraine quickly developed” in the form of “retraining for former military officers … and invit[ing] Ukraine to participate in NATO-led exercises.”

Making Ukraine a “military partner of the US”

The US Army says: “Ukraine has been a military partner of the U.S. dating back to the mid 1990s.” In 1998, America’s Special Operations Command Europe hosted a Special Operations Forces (SOF) conference in Stuttgart, Germany. The US Army reports: “This benchmark even brought military personnel from Moldova, Georgia, and the Ukraine together to view U.S. SOF demonstrations and discuss opportunities for future Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) and Joint Contact Team Program (JCTP) events.”

In June 2000, the US Marines reported that the Navy’s amphibious warship, the USS Trenton, had sailed from the Aegean to the Black Sea and had docked in Odessa (Ukraine). The 24^th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) “got to experience some of Odessa’s history first hand when they climbed the Prymorsky, or ‘Maritime’, Stairs.” In addition to the pleasantries, “the focus for MEU personnel and USS Trenton crew [was] NATO’s next exercise – Cooperative Partner 2000 (CP00) – of which Ukraine is the host nation.”

In addition to Ukraine’s participation in the US-led NATO training and exercises, Ukrainian soldiers fought in American-led wars. After 9/11, they participated in the occupation of Afghanistan via NATO’s so-called International Security Assistance Force. Ukrainian troops also aided the US-British-occupation of Iraq. In 2008, the Army lauded their comrades: “More than 5,000 Ukrainian troops have served in Iraq during Ukraine’s five years of service in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

After backing 2014 coup, US provides “lethal security assistance”

Established in 2014 during the US-backed coup, the Ukraine component of the US State Department and Pentagon’s Global Security Contingency Fund (GSCF) provides tens of millions of dollars-worth of training and equipment to “develop the tactical, operational, and institutional training capacities of its Ministry of Defense and National Guard.” The State Department says: “The GSCF has also supported Ukrainian Special Operations Forces in developing tactical and institutional capabilities that are compatible with Western models.”

According to one Pentagon-linked journal: “Arsen Avakov, the Minister of Internal Affairs from 2014 to 2021[, …] enabled the expansion and later integration of paramilitary forces into the National Guard,” including the nazi Azov Battalion.

From 2015, the Pentagon’s European Command oversaw the Joint Multinational Task Force-Ukraine (JMTF-U), in which the US Army and National Guard trains the Ukrainian Armed Forces. In addition, officers were trained in the US through the International Military Education and Training program. The Congressional Research Service reports that, “[s]eparately, U.S. Special Operations Forces have trained and advised Ukrainian special forces.” In addition, the US participates in the annual NATO Partnership for Peace exercise, Rapid Trident.

In November 2015, supposedly at the request of the new pro-US regime, the Obama administration sent two AN/TPQ radar systems to Ukraine. “President Petro Poroshenko had the opportunity to review the equipment, and was briefed by U.S. military personnel on its capabilities.”

The US Army later revealed that the radar system was not purely defensive. A team from US Army Europe, Fort Sill’s Fires Center of Excellence (FCoE), and the Army Security Assistance Training Management Organization (SATMO) “conducted four weeks of operator training.”

Since the initial delivery, “Ukraine received four additional Q-36 radars … and training by U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Command with support from the FCoE and USSATMO.” The publication quoted one trainer as saying that “the U.S. team showed their brigade, battalion and platoon commanders how to tactically employ the radar system to support fire and maneuver efforts.”

Since 2016, SATMO’s Doctrine Education Advisory Group (DEAG) “has advised Ukrainian Security Forces at the operational level to revise doctrine, improve professional military education, enhance NATO interoperability and increase combat readiness.” In January this year, DEAG brought the first load of $200m-worth of “lethal security assistance, including ammunition for the frontline defenders of Ukraine.”

US and Canadian military officers meet uniformed members of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion during a November 2017 multinational training session in Ukraine.

Photos from a deleted page on Azov’s website: https://t.co/08C1FLQ6Ee pic.twitter.com/5RAIif6OFf

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 20, 2022

US trains Ukrainians to “blend into the local populace” waging warfare in civilian-heavy areas

One of the more immoral US actions in Ukraine has been the training of armed forces to fight in civilian areas, goading Russia to fight in densely-populated locations with the effect of scoring anti-Russia propaganda points when Russians kill Ukrainian civilians.

In 2015, the US Marines implied that American service personnel would travel to Ukraine to fight. “Unofficial travel (leave or liberty) to any country in Africa or the following European countries [including Ukraine and its neighbors] requires command O-6 level approval … The countries are subject to change based on the Foreign Clearance Guide (FCG), Department of State (DOS), Combatant Command, and/or Intelligence threat notifications.” This suggests preparation for “irregular” warfare.

An undated document published by the US Special Operations Center of Excellence (SOCE), apparently from around 2017, states that “the United States should learn from the Chechnya rebels’ reaction” to Russia’s invasion of Chechnya in the ‘90s. It explains that the “rebels” engaged in “decentralized operations,” using social media to “blend into the local populace.” Russia’s enemies used “misinformation” to manipulate Russians into killing the rebels’ enemies.

The SOCE paper goes on to note that the Army Special Operation Forces “are trained to thrive in these environments.” The document explicitly advocates for the US to train irregular forces to provoke Russia: “The United States should form an interagency working group with the Department of State, members of the intelligence community and SOCOM,” the Special Operations Command, which would “serv[e] as the DoD lead/representative.” It suggests that such a working group “understand that SOCOM actions will need to be unconventional and irregular in order to compete with Russian modern warfare tactics.”

By bolstering Ukraine’s armed forces and goading Russia, US elites have openly used Ukrainian civilians as pawns. For many years, Ukrainian forces were trained in urban combat by US personnel: i.e., to fight Russians in densely-populated civilian areas. “Task Force Illini” is comprised of 150 soldiers from the 33rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team of the Illinois Army National Guard.

In September 2020, the US Army reported that Armed Forces Ukraine soldiers “honed their urban operations skills as Task Force Illini advisors lent their expertise at Combat Training Center in Yavoriv” – the Western Ukrainian de facto NATO base near Poland’s border.

You may have heard about the International Peacekeeping & Security Center in Ukraine since Russia struck it. Previously, US & Canada used it to host trainings of Ukrainian forces. Here’s a trainee with two black US servicemembers geotagging himself in Zimbabwe & posting “14/88” pic.twitter.com/dzsNsKzZEC

— Alex Rubinstein (@RealAlexRubi) March 16, 2022

“Thunderbirds” train Ukrainian in full-scale vehicular combat

The Oklahoma-based “Thunderbirds” have gone through several incarnations over the last century. The army unit was originally known as the 45th Infantry Division and is now the 45th Infantry Brigade Combat Team. By early-2017, the JMTG-U mission fell under the 7th Army Training Command and US Army Europe, which paired Thunderbirds from the 1st Battalion, 179th Infantry Regiment with soldiers from the Ukrainian 28th Mechanized Brigade and 79th Airborne Brigade. Their goal was to prepare Ukrainians for full-on vehicular combat.

Putin claims that Ukraine is a pawn of NATO. US propaganda rejects the notion, attempting to prove it by publicly ruling out Ukraine’s membership in the Alliance. But in April 2017, the US Army admitted that under the JMTG-U, the Thunderbirds’ mission was “to train the Ukrainian army to NATO standards, develop their noncommissioned officer corps, and help them to establish a combat training center, so that in the future, they can continue to train themselves.” So, if the Ukrainian military is trained to NATO standards and is overseen by a US puppet president, it might as well be part of NATO, minus the US obligation to come to its defense.

The proposed center became the Yavoriv Combat Training Center. The US Army reported that in October 2017, “a new grenade range was opened. Maj. Montana Dugger said: “We’ve helped them build long-range maintenance plans so they’ll be able to use these facilities for the next 20, 30-plus years.”

Seemingly ignorant of the comical doublespeak, the US Army also explained that Ukrainian’s Combat Training Center “is being established at the International Peacekeeping and Security Center near Yavoriv.” Also ironic is that while the Thunderbirds train a military incorporating neo-Nazi units to fight Russians in Ukraine, its pre-1930s insignia was a swastika, which its Oklahoma-based museum describes as “an Ancient American Indian symbol of good luck.”

From the 45th Infantry Division Museum, the unit’s original pre-1930’s swastika patch

CIA covert operations’ goal: “kill Russians”

In addition to the overt but under- or non-reported events outlined above, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has run a covert, eight-year training program. Why the need for covert ops in the face of extensive overt projects? The CIA specializes in assassination, proxy warfare, psychological operations, and false flags. This suggests that their efforts include tactics prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.

Yahoo! News reported that in 2014, under a doctrine called “covert action funding,” “a small, select group of veteran CIA paramilitaries made their first secret trips to the frontlines to meet with Ukrainian counterparts.” The training was conducted by the CIA’s Special Activities Center, which suggests that even if the officers were “ex-CIA” and Special Forces, they were given access to Langley at high-levels, making it a de facto official mission.

One operative is quoted as saying that the officers attempted to Talibanize the Ukrainian paramilitaries in the sense that the Afghan Taliban had no sophisticated hardware that was vulnerable to enemy blinding. Ergo, basic, non-tech warfare training was required. The report says that the trainers:

“taught their Ukrainian counterparts sniper techniques; how to operate U.S.-supplied Javelin anti-tank missiles and other equipment; how to evade digital tracking the Russians used to pinpoint the location of Ukrainian troops, which had left them vulnerable to attacks by artillery; how to use covert communications tools; and how to remain undetected in the war zone while also drawing out Russian and insurgent forces from their positions, among other skills, according to former officials.”

In addition, one former senior source said (paraphrased by the reporter): “The agency needed to determine the ‘backbone’ of the Ukrainians … The question was, ‘Are they going to get rolled, or are going to stand up and fight?”

So who tends to have “backbone,” i.e., a ruthless and psychopathic fighting spirit? Fascists and ultra-nationalists. Indeed, it has been widely reported by even US corporate media that the Ukrainian Armed Forces and paramilitary units were infested with Nazis. Today, the same media refer to the Nazis as mere nationalists.

Beginning 2015, the CIA’s Ground Department arranged for Ukrainians to be trained in the US south. The operations continue to the present and have been expanded under the Biden administration. “The multiweek, U.S.-based CIA program has included training in firearms, camouflage techniques, land navigation, tactics like ‘cover and move,’ intelligence and other areas.” One senior officer is quoted as saying: “The United States is training an insurgency … to kill Russians.”

In February this year, shortly before the Russian invasion, it was reported that the CIA had been “preparing Ukrainians to mount an insurgency against a Russian occupation.” Against an occupation? Or an insurgency to provoke an occupation?

In addition to the CIA, the US military has its own covert operations. Under the Resistance Operating Concept started in 2018, the Pentagon appears to have been training territorial defense units comprised of Ukrainian civilians. This seems to have led to the creation by Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces creating a National Resistance Center that teaches civilians guerrilla tactics.

Ukraine military build-up brings the world to the brink

After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, pro-Russian eastern protests erupted in Donetsk and Luhansk. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) noted: “The government in Kyiv responded with military force and employed local militias to help push back the separatists.” The CRS added that the US leads Britain, Canada, and Lithuania in the Multinational Joint Commission on Defense Reform and Security Cooperation. The Pentagon’s European Command had a European Reassurance Initiative at the time, which is now called the European Deterrence Initiative. Under this program, dozens of Ukrainians were trained in Huntsville, Alabama, in RQ-11B, hand-launched Raven drone operations. Seventy-two drones were sent to Ukraine in 2016.

A January 2016 UK House of Commons Library research briefing states: “Fighting between Ukrainian government forces and Russian-backed separatists has killed more than 9,000 people since April 2014 and injured more than 20,000.” The briefing goes on to note that after the UN Security Council-backed Minsk II agreement, which called for a ceasefire and the withdrawal of frontline forces on both sides, the Ukrainian parliament granted special status and enhanced autonomy to parts of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions.

The Royal United Services Institute is a UK Ministry of Defense-linked think-tank. One of its reports concedes that Russia had a largely “defensive policy” when it came to Ukraine. It says: “Russian officials have become alarmed by expanding and overlapping Western alliances from an enlarged NATO and EU, to AUKUS and the Coalition of Democracies promoted by both the US and the UK.”

Part of Russia’s strategy has its roots in the US-led destruction of Libya in 2011, the report explains. The NATO bombing of Libya and overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi “underscored how strong Western alliances were able to bypass or manipulate the [UN Security Council] UNSC, essentially circumventing a forum where Russian interests could be protected.”

Indeed, on February 27th, 2022, the UNSC adopted Resolution 2623, which states: “the lack of unanimity of its permanent members at the 8979th meeting has prevented it from exercising its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security.”

The absence of international diplomacy, the weakness of a domestic anti-war movement in the US, and the cheerleading for war by many leftists and liberals under the doctrine that Putin is an evil villain has pushed the world as close to terminal nuclear disaster as it has been since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis; perhaps even closer. Many Russians have taken to the streets to clamor for a ceasefire. After looking the other way as their leaders spent the past 8 years weaponizing Ukraine against Russia, Western publics have yet to demand the same.

thegrayzone.com

“You’re denying the agency of Ukrainians!”

This is a line you’ve probably had bleated at you by propagandized empire livestock if you’ve engaged in online debate about the role western powers have played in paving the way to this war.

One of the many, many tricks that imperial spinmeisters have pulled out of their hats in their shockingly frenetic campaign to manage the narrative about what’s happening in Ukraine is to insist that it’s outrageous and disgusting to suggest that Ukraine is being used as a sacrificial pawn in the grand chessboard maneuverings of the US-centralized empire, because it is denying the “agency” of that nation. The argument is that Ukraine freely chose to enter into the situation in which it now finds itself, with no outside pressure or influence of any kind whatsoever.

All these circulating arguments about “NATO expansion” ignore that Ukrainians have agency.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) March 13, 2022

Seemingly overnight it became not just wrong to say that the US hegemon has played a role in giving rise to this war, but actually monstrous and evil. My online notifications are currently flooded with furious empire apologists screaming at me for assigning any degree of responsibility in this conflict to western power structures with the kind of vitriol people normally reserve for Holocaust deniers or pedophelia advocates.

Imperial narrative managers have even been working overtime to make the word “westsplaining” happen, which is their progressive-sounding term for when one makes the self-evident observation that western powers influence world events. Mainstream westerners are actively trained to regurgitate lines like “Stop westsplaining to Ukrainians about coups and proxy conflicts! You’re denying their agency!”

Calling this a “proxy war” between Russia and the United States or calling Kyiv a “puppet regime” of Washington is strictly taboo now. That Ukraine has lacked independent agency in this war and the events leading up to it is something you are simply not allowed to say.

Well, I’m saying it. This is a proxy war. Kyiv is a puppet regime. Ukraine does not have independent agency in any meaningful way. This is not the fault of the Ukrainian people, who are obviously far and away the greatest victims of the Russian invasion, but of the giant western power structure which deliberately worked to take away the nation’s agency many years before the invasion took place.

I mean, my god. The US and its allies are pouring billions of dollars worth of weapons into Ukraine from around the world, the CIA has been training Ukrainians to kill Russians, the US intelligence cartel is directly sharing military intelligence with Kyiv as we speak, and this follows US-backed coups in Ukraine in 2014 and in 2004 before that.

This is a proxy war. This is exactly the thing that a proxy war is. The only “agency” Ukraine has is the Central Intelligence kind.

All these circulating arguments about “NATO expansion” ignore that Ukrainians have agency.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) March 13, 2022

In an excellent article for Multipolarista titled “Ukrainian leftist criticizes Western war drive with Russia: US is using Ukraine as ‘cannon fodder’”, Ukrainian-American Yuliy Dubovyk writes the following:

Like any other US puppet regime, Ukraine doesn’t have any real independence. Kiev has been actively pushed to confront Russia by every US administration, against the will of the majority of Ukrainian people.

…

The support for Ukraine that fills the Western media now is not out of real solidarity with the people of Ukraine. If that were the case, the US wouldn’t have overthrown our government twice in a decade; it wouldn’t have supported the policies that made us the poorest country in Europe; it wouldn’t have fueled a brutal civil war for the past eight years.

The reason US media outlets and politicians are all backing Ukraine now is because they want to use the Ukrainian military and civilian population as cannon fodder in a proxy war with a political adversary.

Yes indeedy. Amid all the phony profile pic activism and concern trolling about denial of Ukraine’s “agency”, no concern whatsoever has been shown for actual, known assaults on Ukrainian independence by the US-centralized empire.

Where was all this reverence for Ukraine’s “agency” in 2004, when The Guardian was reporting that “while the gains of the orange-bedecked ‘chestnut revolution’ are Ukraine’s, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes”?

Where was the respect for Ukraine’s “agency” in 2014, when a leaked phone call between Victoria Nuland (now working on Ukraine under the Biden administration) and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt showed US officials casually discussing who they were going to select as Ukraine’s next Prime Minister following a US-backed coup in Kyiv?

Where was all this respect for Ukraine’s “agency” in 2018, when Joe Biden openly boasted before the Council on Foreign Relations that he had used his power as Obama’s Vice President to brazenly interfere in Ukraine’s judicial system?

Obama VP Joseph Biden brags about how he rigged the judicial system of another country. pic.twitter.com/BC4u7AUPHB

— Defend Assange Campaign (@DefendAssange) January 27, 2018

The US power alliance does not care about Ukraine’s sovereignty beyond what measures need to be taken to actively subvert it. When people object to criticisms of the way the empire has actively robbed Ukrainians of any real agency, what they are actually doing is defending the most powerful empire that has ever existed from attempts to highlight its malfeasance.

I’m not just spouting off about a far away nation from my safe home here in Australia, for the record. This is a dynamic which affects my country directly, and is very likely to affect it a lot more as the empire’s “great power competition” with China heats up.

It is very likely that in the not-too-distant future, Australia will end up playing a crucial role in the empire’s grand chessboard maneuverings to stop the rise of China. When that occurs, I will most certainly be saying that we are being used as pawns in a proxy conflict, and I will most certainly be saying that our agency in this matter has been stolen from us.

As in Ukraine, there have been US-backed coups in Australia not once but twice. This nation is now functionally little more than a US military and intelligence base with a smattering of suburbs and kangaroos, which is why the puppet regime in our capital Canberra has done nothing whatsoever to end Washington’s brutal persecution of Australian journalist Julian Assange. John Mearsheimer, now the subject of great controversy for his completely accurate predictions years ago that US and NATO actions would lead to this exact war in Ukraine, told an Australian think tank in 2019 that the US will destroy Australia if Canberra doesn’t align with imperial agendas against Beijing. And he was right.

And yes, just as there are Ukrainians supporting the imperial line against Moscow, when the time comes for Australia to make great sacrifices for US unipolarist agendas against the Chinese government there will absolutely be Australians supporting it. Because of a massive propaganda campaign in this nation facilitated by our Murdoch-dominated press and imperial narrative management operations like the empire-funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute, there are many Australians who intensely despise China right now. I know. I’ve met them.

But that won’t mean our sovereignty wasn’t robbed from us, by mass-scale oligarchic psyops, by CIA coups, by secret deals, by the threat of knowing we’d be immediately attacked by a murderous empire if we tried to pivot to Beijing or even to simply espouse a neutral posture. What’s true of Ukraine is also true of Australia: we have no meaningful agency in the most important decisions made by this nation.

Denying the western role in subverting Ukrainian sovereignty doesn’t benefit ordinary Ukrainians, it hurts them. You can’t fix a problem you don’t understand, and until there’s widespread understanding of the way the US empire uses proxies to advance its agendas of global domination, nothing can be done to stop these ugly proxy wars from happening.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

Viewing the Ukraine war as starting with the current Russian invasion leads to very different conclusions than if you consider that the starting point of this war was the 2014 US-orchestrated coup in Ukraine. The coup, which had elements of an authentic popular revolt, has been used by outside powers to pursue geopolitical ends.

The conception that the war started on February 24 of this year is like viewing the “invasion” by the US and its allies of Normandy in June 1944 against the “sovereign” and “democratic” Vichy French as the start of World War II. Never mind that the Vichy government was a puppet of the Nazis; that the opportunities to negotiate had long been rejected; that the war had been raging for years; and that the only option for stopping the Nazis was militarily.

The US imperial army

NATO, it should be understood, is an army in the service of the US empire. Viewing it simply as an alliance of nominally sovereign entities obscures that it is commanded as a tool of US foreign policy in its stated quest of world dominion; that is, “full spectrum dominance.” The “alliance” members must fully integrate their militaries under that command along with purchasing US war equipment and offering up their own citizens as troops.

After the implosion of the Soviet Union and the supposed end of the first cold war, instead of NATO being disbanded, the opposite occurred. There was no “peace dividend” and no honoring of the promise that NATO would not expand any further. Instead, NATO stampeded east towards the borders of the Russian Federation adding fourteen new members of former USSR republics and allies.

Even before the 2014 coup, the US’s fateful decision in 2006 to draw Ukraine into NATO posed an existential threat to Russia. By December 2021, according to “realpolitik” international relations scholar John Mearsheimer, a US-armed Ukraine had become a de facto member of NATO, crossing a redline for Russia. Mearsheimer concludes, “the west bears primary responsibility for what is happening today.”

Failure of peaceful negotiations

Speaking before the UN on March 2, the Venezuelan representative identified the breach of the Minsk Protocols, with the encouragement of the US, as the precursor of the present crisis in Ukraine.

After the 2014 coup in Ukraine, the Minsk Protocols were an attempt at a peaceful settlement through “a ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons from the front line, release of prisoners of war, constitutional reform in Ukraine granting self-government to certain areas of Donbas, and restoring control of the state border to the Ukrainian government.” Moscow, Kyiv, and the eastern separatists were all parties to the agreements.

The Russian perception of negotiations with the western alliance in the runup to the invasion, as reported by the New York Post, was described using insensitive terminology as “like the mute with the deaf” by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on his meeting with his British counterpart. (NOTE: the NYP, even in the updated version of the article, refers to Lavrov as the “Soviet” Foreign Minister, forgetting that the USSR hasn’t been around for over 30 years.)

Following the latest round of “sweeping” US-imposed sanctions on Russia, their Foreign Ministry announced, “we have reached the line where the point of no return begins.” Such sanctions are a form of warfare as deadly as bombs.

Upsides of war for the US and the downsides for everyone else

War is a great diversion for Joe Biden, whose popularity has been slipping due to a lackluster domestic performance. The US empire has much to gain: further unifying NATO under US domination, reducing Russian economic competition in the European energy market, justifying increasing the US war budget, and facilitating sales of war material to NATO vassals.

NATO has dumped over a trillion dollars in arms and facilities into the border countries next to Russia and continues to this day to pour lethal weapons into Ukraine. The leader of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi C14 recently bragged on YouTube (while other voices are censored): “We are being given so much weaponry not because as some say ‘the west is helping us,’ not because it is best for us. But because we perform the tasks set by the west…because we have fun, we have fun killing.”

More than 14,000 people have been killed in the eastern Ukraine region of Donbas in warfare between ethnic Russians and Ukrainian regular military/right-wing paramilitaries in the eight years since the coup. The self-proclaimed People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, beleaguered enclaves in the Donbas of largely ethnic Russians, seceded from Ukraine and were recognized by Russia on February 21.

The semi-governmental (over 80% US government funded) Rand Corporation’s playbook for the US and its allies says it all: “pursue across economic, political, and military areas to stress – overextend and unbalance – Russia’s economy and armed forces and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad.”

The conflict could have ruinous consequences for the Russian Federation, according to western sources and even some people who identify as left in Russia. As a bonus for the US, according to Juan S. González, the US National Security Council’s senior director for the Western Hemisphere, the sanctions against Russia are “by design” intended to hurt Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, all targeted by Washington for regime change. And, of course, for Ukrainians of all ethnicities there is no winning in a war.

It is difficult to think what other options Russia has to defend itself. Perhaps there are some, but surely they are slim. It should be clear that the US has continually been the aggressor even if some do not agree with the Russian response. As Phyllis Bennis with the Institute for Policy Studies argues, the US provoked this war.

Severing Russia from Europe

The peaceful integration of Russia with the rest of Europe would be a great threat to the US empire. A unified or even a cordial Europe could truly herald the end of US hegemony. The long-game geopolitical goal of preventing the unification of Europe may well be the fundamental aim of US foreign policy in that continent.

What would become of “US strategic interests” if peace were to break out in Europe, and Russia would become partners with Germany, France, and Italy? A potentially more independent Europe, including Russia, would challenge the US-dominated Atlanticist project.

The extreme hostility that the US took to the Nord Stream 2 project, which would have piped Russian natural gas under the Baltic Sea directly to Germany, went beyond the narrow economism of favoring US liquefied natural gas (LNG) suppliers. Where Washington’s earlier efforts of imposing illegal unilateral economic sanctions on its NATO ally faltered, the current conflict will surely discourage any rational and cooperative economic association of Russia with its western neighbors.

The severing of Russia from the rest of Europe is a tremendous victory for the US imperial project. This is especially the case, when there were recent moves in the direction of economic, cultural, and political exchange, which have now been reversed.

Spheres of Influence and inter-imperialist rivalry

Russia shares a 1,426-mile border with Ukraine and considers that region within its security perimeter, vital to its national security. The US, which is 5,705 miles from Ukraine, considers the world its sphere of influence. Clearly, there is a conflict of interest.

The contemporary geopolitical dynamic has evolved from the one Lenin described in 1916 in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which was then characterized as one of inter-imperialist rivalry. This theory is not entirely adequate to understand today’s world dominated by a single superpower (with its European Union, British, and Japanese junior partners). Surely, national centers of capital continue to compete. But over-arching this competition is a militantly imposed unipolar pax Americana.

There is just one superpower with hundreds of foreign military bases, possession of the world’s reserve currency, and control of the SWIFT worldwide payment and transaction system. Simply reducing the conflict to one of contesting capitalists obscures the context of empire.

Further, even if one just understands the present situation as one of a clash of two imperialist camps, that does not preclude taking sides. Surely World War II was an inter-imperialist war, but that did not prevent socialists from opposing the Axis pole and supporting the allies. The US is ever more aggressively stirring up the pot, not only in Ukraine, but also Taiwan, Africa, and elsewhere.

Asymmetry of the Forces

The forces are asymmetrical in this contest. Russia and the US may have comparable nuclear arsenals, but Russia has no bases of any kind in North America compared to at least six nuclear and many more conventional bases for the US in Europe. The US military budget is 11.9 times the size of Russia’s, not to mention the war chests of Washington’s NATO allies. Similarly, the US economy is 12.5 times as large as Russia’s. Of the Fortune 500 top international corporations, only four are Russian compared to 122 from the US. Russia’s labor productivity is only 36% of the US’s. In terms of finance capital, the US has 11 of the world’s top 100 banks; Russia has one. Far from being a key exporter of capital, Russia is a leader in capital flight, in part owing to sanctions imposed by the US and its allies.

As analyst Stansfield Smith concludes, Russia “plays very little part in the quintessential imperialist activity: the export of capital to the periphery and the extraction of profit from developing countries’ labor and resources.” Russia is a target of US-led imperialism; Ukraine is caught in the crossfire.

Hypocrisy of the “international community”

If only the outrage over the Russian invasion had some ethical grounding by what is misleadingly called the “international community,” but is in reality the US and its subalterns. Biden’s touted “rules based order” is one where the US makes the rules and the rest of the world follows its orders, in contradiction to the Charter of the UN and other recognized international law.

From Cuba, journalist Ángel Guerra Cabrera laments: “our region witnessed flagrant US violations of those principles in Guatemala, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Grenada and Panama, the last three through direct invasions. Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua are current examples of a US policy that flatly denies its assertion, not to mention Puerto Rico.”

International law expert Alfred de Zayas reminds us that the so-called “international community seems to have accepted egregious violations of Art. 2(4) [of the UN Charter] by the US against Cuba, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Haiti, Nicaragua, Panama, Venezuela; by NATO countries against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yugoslavia; by Israel against all its Arab neighbors, including the Palestinians and Lebanese; by Saudi Arabia against Yemen; by Azerbaijan against Nagorno Karabakh, by Turkey against Cyprus, etc.”

How this war will end

Regardless of how one sides – or not – in the new cold war, it is instructive to understand the context of the conflict. This is especially so when views outside the dominant US narrative, such as those of Russian outlets Sputnik and RTthat hosted US intellectuals like Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges, are being silenced.

This article addressed how this war began. How it will end or even if it will end is another story. The world is spiraling into a new cold war, emanating from a region formally at peace under socialism.

Expressing a view from the standpoint of the Global South, former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva commented: “we do not want to be anyone’s enemy. We are not interested, nor is the world, in a new cold war…which is for sure dragging the whole world into a conflict that could put humanity in danger.” If there is a lesson to be learned, it is that the end of endless war will come with end of the US imperial project that provoked this crisis.

counterpunch.org

Emmanuel Macron said in a speech Wednesday it’s a lie that Russia is fighting Nazis in Ukraine. But in 2014, the BBC, the NYT, the Daily Telegraph and CNN — not just CN — reported on the Nazi threat.

NYT Discovers Ukraine’s Neo-Nazis at War

Exclusive: Throughout the Ukraine crisis, the U.S. State Department and mainstream media have downplayed the role of neo-Nazis in the U.S.-backed Kiev regime, an inconvenient truth that is surfacing again as right-wing storm troopers fly neo-Nazi banners as they attack in the east, Robert Parry reports.

The New York Times reported almost in passing on Sunday (Aug. 10) that the Ukrainian government’s offensive against ethnic Russian rebels in the east has unleashed far-right paramilitary militias that have even raised a neo-Nazi banner over the conquered town of Marinka, just west of the rebel stronghold of Donetsk.

That might seem like a big story a U.S.-backed military operation, which has inflicted thousands of mostly civilian casualties, is being spearheaded by neo-Nazis. But the consistent pattern of the mainstream U.S. news media has been since the start of the Ukraine crisis to white-out the role of Ukraine’s brown-shirts.

Only occasionally is the word “neo-Nazi” mentioned and usually in the context of dismissing this inconvenient truth as “Russian propaganda.” Yet the reality has been that neo-Nazis played a key role in the violent overthrow of elected President Viktor Yanukovych last February as well as in the subsequent coup regime holding power in Kiev and now in the eastern offensive.

On Sunday, a Times article by Andrew E. Kramer mentioned the emerging neo-Nazi paramilitary role in the final three paragraphs:

“The fighting for Donetsk has taken on a lethal pattern: The regular army bombards separatist positions from afar, followed by chaotic, violent assaults by some of the half-dozen or so paramilitary groups surrounding Donetsk who are willing to plunge into urban combat.

Officials in Kiev say the militias and the army coordinate their actions, but the militias, which count about 7,000 fighters, are angry and, at times, uncontrollable. One known as Azov, which took over the village of Marinka, flies a neo-Nazi symbol resembling a Swastika as its flag.

In pressing their advance, the fighters took their orders from a local army commander, rather than from Kiev. In the video of the attack, no restraint was evident. Gesturing toward a suspected pro-Russian position, one soldier screamed, ‘The bastards are right there!’ Then he opened fire.”

Burying this information at the end of a long article is also typical of how the Times and other U.S. mainstream news outlets have dealt with the neo-Nazi problem in the past. When the reality gets mentioned, it usually requires a reader knowing much about Ukraine’s history and reading between the lines of a U.S. news account.

For instance, last April 6, The New York Times published a human-interest profile of a Ukrainian nationalist named Yuri Marchuk who was wounded in the uprising against Yanukovych in February. If you read deep into the story, you learn that Marchuk was a leader of the right-wing Svoboda Party from Lviv, which if you did your own research you would discover is a neo-Nazi stronghold where Ukrainian nationalists hold torch-light parades in honor of World War II Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera.

Without providing that context, the Times does mention that Lviv militants plundered a government arsenal and dispatched 600 militants a day to Kiev’s Maidan square to do battle with the police. Marchuk also described how these well-organized militants, consisting of paramilitary brigades of 100 fighters each, launched the fateful attack against the police on Feb. 20, the battle where Marchuk was wounded and where the death toll suddenly spiked into scores of protesters and about a dozen police.

Marchuk later said he visited his comrades at the occupied City Hall. What the Times doesn’t mention is that City Hall was festooned with Nazi banners and even a Confederate battle flag as a tribute to white supremacy.

The Times touched on the inconvenient neo-Nazi truth again on April 12 in an article about the mysterious death of neo-Nazi leader Oleksandr Muzychko, who was killed during a shootout with police on March 24. The article quoted a local Right Sektor leader, Roman Koval, explaining the crucial role of his organization in carrying out the anti-Yanukovych coup.

“Ukraine’s February revolution, said Mr. Koval, would never have happened without Right Sector and other militant groups,” the Times wrote.

Burning Insects

The brutality of these neo-Nazis surfaced again on May 2 when right-wing toughs in Odessa attacked an encampment of ethnic Russian protesters driving them into a trade union building which was then set on fire with Molotov cocktails. As the building was engulfed in flames, some people who tried to flee were chased and beaten, while those trapped inside heard the Ukrainian nationalists liken them to black-and-red-striped potato beetles called Colorados, because those colors are used in pro-Russian ribbons.

“Burn, Colorado, burn” went the chant.

As the fire worsened, those dying inside were serenaded with the taunting singing of the Ukrainian national anthem. The building also was spray-painted with Swastika-like symbols and graffiti reading “Galician SS,” a reference to the Ukrainian nationalist army that fought alongside the German Nazi SS in World War II, killing Russians on the eastern front.

The death by fire of dozens of people in Odessa recalled a World War II incident in 1944 when elements of a Galician SS police regiment took part in the massacre of the Polish village of Huta Pieniacka, which had been a refuge for Jews and was protected by Russian and Polish partisans. Attacked by a mixed force of Ukrainian police and German soldiers on Feb. 28, 1944, hundreds of townspeople were massacred, including many locked in barns that were set ablaze.

The legacy of World War II especially the bitter fight between Ukrainian nationalists from the west and ethnic Russians from the east seven decades ago is never far from the surface in Ukrainian politics. One of the heroes celebrated during the Maidan protests in Kiev was Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, whose name was honored in many banners including one on a podium where Sen. John McCain voiced support for the uprising to oust Yanukovych, whose political base was among ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.

John McCain addressing crowd in Kiev, Dec. 15, 2013. (U.S. Senate/Office of Chris Murphy/Wikimedia Commons)

During World War II, Bandera headed the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists-B, a radical paramilitary movement that sought to transform Ukraine into a racially pure state. OUN-B took part in the expulsion and extermination of thousands of Jews and Poles.

Though most of the Maidan protesters in 2013-14 appeared motivated by anger over political corruption and by a desire to join the European Union, neo-Nazis made up a significant number and surged to the front during the seizure of government buildings and the climatic clashes with police.

In the days after the Feb. 22 coup, as the neo-Nazi militias effectively controlled the government, European and U.S. diplomats scrambled to help the shaken parliament put together the semblance of a respectable regime, although at least four ministries, including national security, were awarded to the right-wing extremists in recognition of their crucial role in ousting Yanukovych.

As extraordinary as it was for a modern European state to hand ministries over to neo-Nazis, virtually the entire U.S. news media cooperated in playing down the neo-Nazi role. Stories in the U.S. media delicately step around this neo-Nazi reality by keeping out relevant context, such as the background of coup regime’s national security chief Andriy Parubiy, who founded the Social-National Party of Ukraine in 1991, blending radical Ukrainian nationalism with neo-Nazi symbols. Parubiy was commandant of the Maidan’s “self-defense forces.”

Last April, as the Kiev regime launched its “anti-terrorist operation” against the ethnic Russians in the east, Parubiy announced that his right-wing paramilitary forces, incorporated as National Guard units, would lead the way. On April 15, Parubiy went on Twitter to declare, “Reserve unit of National Guard formed #Maidan Self-defense volunteers was sent to the front line this morning.” (Parubiy resigned from his post this past week for unexplained reasons.)

Now, however, as the Ukrainian military tightens its noose around the remaining rebel strongholds, battering them with artillery fire and aerial bombardments, thousands of neo-Nazi militia members are again pressing to the front as fiercely motivated fighters determined to kill as many ethnic Russians as they can. It is a remarkable story but one that the mainstream U.S. news media would prefer not to notice.

consortiumnews.com

By Pepe ESCOBAR

The year 2022 started with Kazakhstan on fire, a serious attack against one of the key hubs of Eurasian integration. We are only beginning to understand what and how it happened.

On Monday morning, leaders of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) held an extraordinary session to discuss Kazakhstan.

Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev framed it succinctly. Riots were “hidden behind unplanned protests.” The goal was “to seize power” – a coup attempt. Actions were “coordinated from a single center.” And “foreign militants were involved in the riots.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin went further: during the riots, “Maidan technologies were used,” a reference to the Ukrainian square where 2013 protests unseated a NATO-unfriendly government.

Defending the prompt intervention of CSTO peacekeeping forces in Kazakhstan, Putin said, “it was necessary to react without delay.” The CSTO will be on the ground “as long as necessary,” but after the mission is accomplished, “of course, the entire contingent will be withdrawn from the country.” Forces are expected to exit later this week.

But here’s the clincher: “CSTO countries have shown that they will not allow chaos and ‘color revolutions’ to be implemented inside their borders.”

Putin was in synch with Kazakh State Secretary Erlan Karin, who was the first, on the record, to apply the correct terminology to events in his country: What happened was a “hybrid terrorist attack,” by both internal and external forces, aimed at overthrowing the government.

The tangled hybrid web

Virtually no one knows about it. But last December, another coup was discreetly thwarted in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek. Kyrgyz intel sources attribute the engineering to a rash of NGOs linked with Britain and Turkey.

That introduces an absolutely key facet of The Big Picture: NATO-linked intel and their assets may have been preparing a simultaneous color revolution offensive across Central Asia.

On my Central Asia travels in late 2019, pre-Covid, it was plain to see how western NGOs – Hybrid War fronts – remained extremely powerful in both Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.

Yet, they are just one nexus in a western nebulae of Hybrid War fog deployed across Central Asia, and West Asia for that matter. Here we see the CIA and the US Deep State crisscrossing MI6 and different strands of Turkish intel.

When President Tokayev was referring in code to a “single center,” he meant a so far ‘secret’ US-Turk-Israeli military-intel operations room based in the southern business hub of Almaty, according to a highly placed Central Asia intel source.

In this “center,” there were 22 Americans, 16 Turks and 6 Israelis coordinating sabotage gangs – trained in West Asia by the Turks – and then rat-lined to Almaty.

The op started to unravel for good when Kazakh forces – with the help of Russian/CSTO intel – retook control of the vandalized Almaty airport, which was supposed to be turned into a hub for receiving foreign military supplies.

The Hybrid War west had to be stunned and livid at how the CSTO intercepted the Kazakh operation at such lightning speed. The key element is that the secretary of Russian National Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, saw the Big Picture eons ago.

So, it’s no mystery why Russia’s aerospace and aero-transported forces, plus the massive necessary support infrastructure, were virtually ready to go.

Back in November, Patrushev’s laser was already focused on the degrading security situation in Afghanistan. Tajik political scientist Parviz Mullojanov was among the very few who were stressing that there were as many as 8,000 imperial machine Salafi-jihadi assets, shipped by a rat line from Syria and Iraq, loitering in the wilds of northern Afghanistan.

That’s the bulk of ISIS-Khorasan – or ISIS reconstituted near the borders of Turkmenistan. Some of them were duly transported to Kyrgyzstan. From there, it was very easy to cross the border from Bishek and show up in Almaty.

It took no time for Patrushev and his team to figure out, after the imperial retreat from Kabul, how this jihadi reserve army would be used: along the 7,500 km-long border between Russia and the Central Asian ‘stans’.

That explains, among other things, a record number of preparation drills conducted in late 2021 at the 210th Russian military base in Tajikistan.

James Bond speaks Turkish

The breakdown of the messy Kazakh op necessarily starts with the usual suspects: the US Deep State, which all but “sang” its strategy in a 2019 RAND corporation report, Extending Russia. Chapter 4, on “geopolitical measures”, details everything from “providing lethal aid to Ukraine”, “promoting regime change in Belarus”, and “increasing support for Syrian rebels” – all major fails – to “reducing Russian influence in Central Asia.”

That was the master concept. Implementation fell to the MI6-Turk connection.

The CIA and MI6 had been investing in dodgy outfits in Central Asia since at least 2005, when they encouraged the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), then close to the Taliban, to wreak havoc in southern Kyrgyzstan. Nothing happened.

It was a completely different story by May 2021, when the MI6’s Jonathan Powell met the leadership of Jabhat al-Nusra – which harbors a lot of Central Asian jihadis – somewhere in the Turkish-Syrian border near Idlib.

The deal was that these ‘moderate rebels’ – in US terminology – would cease to be branded ‘terrorists’ as long as they followed the anti-Russia NATO agenda.

That was one of the key prep moves ahead of the jihadist ratline to Afghanistan – complete with Central Asia branching out.

The genesis of the offensive should be found in June 2020, when former ambassador to Turkey from 2014 to 2018, Richard Moore, was appointed head of MI6.

Moore may not have an inch of Kim Philby’s competence, but he does fit the profile: rabid Russophobe, and a cheerleader of the Great Turania fantasy, which promotes a pan-Turk confederation of Turkic-speaking peoples from West Asia and the Caucasus to Central Asia and even Russian republics in the Volga.

MI6 is deeply entrenched in all the ‘stans’ except autarchic Turkmenistan – cleverly riding the pan-Turkist offensive as the ideal vehicle to counter Russia and China.

Erdogan himself has been invested on a hardcore Great Turania offensive, especially after the creation of the Turkic Council in 2009.

Crucially, next March, the summit of the Confederation Council of Turkic-speaking States – the new Turkic Council denomination – will take place in Kazakhstan. The city of Turkestan, in southern Kazakhstan, is expected to be named as the spiritual capital of the Turkic world.

And here, the ‘Turkic world’ enters into a frontal clash with the integrating Russian concept of Greater Eurasia Partnership, and even with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) that, crucially, does not count Turkey as a member.

Erdogan’s short term ambition seems at first to be only commercial: after Azerbaijan won the Karabakh war, he expects to use Baku to get access to Central Asia via the Caspian Sea, complete with Turkey’s industrial-military complex sales of military technology to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Turkish companies are already investing heavily in real estate and infrastructure. And in parallel, Ankara’s soft power is on overdrive, finally collecting the fruits of exercising a lot of pressure, for instance, to speed up the transition in Kazakhstan from Cyrillic script to the Latin alphabet, starting in 2023.

Yet both Russia and China are very much aware that Turkey essentially represents NATO entering Central Asia. The organization of Turkic states are cryptically called the Kazakh operation ‘fuel protests’.

It’s all very murky. Erdogan’s neo-Ottomanism – which comes with massive cheerleading by his Muslim Brotherhood base – essentially has nothing to do with the pan-Turanic drive, which is a racialist movement predicating domination by relatively ‘pure’ Turks.

The problem is that they are converging while becoming more extreme, with Turkey’s right-wing Grey Wolves deeply implicated. That explains why Ankara intel is a sponsor and, in many cases, a weaponizer of both the ISIS-Khorasan franchise and those Turan racists, from Bosnia to Xinjiang via Central Asia.

The Empire handsomely profits from this toxic association, in Armenia, for instance. And the same would happen in Kazakhstan if the operation is successful.

Bring on the Trojan Horses

Every color revolution needs a ‘Maximum’ Trojan Horse. In our case, that seems to be the role of former head of KNB (National Security Committee) Karim Massimov, now held in prison and charged with treason.

Hugely ambitious, Massimov is half-Uyghur, and that, in theory, obstructed what he saw as his pre-ordained rise to power. His connections with Turkish intel are not yet fully detailed, unlike his cozy relationship with Joe Biden and son.

A former Minister of Internal Affairs and State Security, Lt Gen Felix Kulov, has weaved a fascinating tangled web explaining the possible internal dynamics of the ‘coup’ built into the color revolution.

According to Kulov, Massimov and Samir Abish, the nephew of recently ousted Kazakh Security Council Chairman Nursultan Nazarbayev, were up to their necks in supervising ‘secret’ units of ‘bearded men’ during the riots. The KNB was directly subordinated to Nazarbayev, who until last week was the chairman of the Security Council.

When Tokayev understood the mechanics of the coup, he demoted both Massimov and Samat Abish. Then Nazarbayev ‘voluntarily’ resigned from his life-long chairmanship of the Security Council. Abish then got this post, promising to stop the ‘bearded men,’ and then to resign.

So that would point directly to a Nazarbayev-Tokayev clash. It makes sense as, during his 29-year rule, Nazarbayev played a multi-vector game that was too westernized and which did not necessarily benefit Kazakhstan. He adopted British laws, played the pan-Turkic card with Erdogan, and allowed a tsunami of NGOs to promote an Atlanticist agenda.

Tokayev is a very smart operator. Trained by the foreign service of the former USSR, fluent in Russian and Chinese, he is totally aligned with Russia-China – which means fully in sync with the masterplan of the BRI, the Eurasia Economic Union, and the SCO.

Tokayev, much like Putin and Xi, understands how this BRI/EAEU/SCO triad represents the ultimate imperial nightmare, and how destabilizing Kazakhstan – a key actor in the triad – would be a mortal coup against Eurasian integration.

Kazakhstan, after all, represents 60 percent of Central Asia’s GDP, massive oil/gas and mineral resources, cutting-edge high tech industries: a secular, unitary, constitutional republic bearing a rich cultural heritage.

It didn’t take long for Tokayev to understand the merits of immediately calling the CSTO to the rescue: Kazakhstan signed the treaty way back in 1994. After all, Tokayev was fighting a foreign-led coup against his government.

Putin, among others, has stressed how an official Kazakh investigation is the only one entitled to get to the heart of the matter.

It’s still unclear exactly who – and to what extent – sponsored the rioting mobs. Motives abound: to sabotage a pro-Russia/China government, to provoke Russia, to sabotage BRI, to plunder mineral resources, to turbo-charge a House of Saud-style ‘Islamization’.

Rushed to only a few days before the start of the Russia-US ‘security guarantees’ in Geneva, this color revolution represented a sort of counter-ultimatum – in desperation – by the NATO establishment.

Central Asia, West Asia, and the overwhelming majority of the Global South have witnessed the lightning fast Eurasian response by the CSTO troops – who, having now done their job, are set to leave Kazakhstan in a couple of days – and how this color revolution has failed, miserably.

It might as well be the last. Beware the rage of a humiliated Empire.

thecradle.co

(Click on the image to enlarge)

The U.S. has declassified thousands of documents relating to its involvement in the ousting of Chile’s socialist President Salvador Allende and the installing of dictator Augusto Pinochet. Australia, on the other hand, continues to guard its classified documents on the pretext of security, drawing a discrepancy between its purported democratic principles and obstructing the public’s right to knowledge. As a country which welcomed Chileans fleeing the horrors of Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship, as well as harbouring Chilean agents – the most notable case being that of Adriana Rivas – Australia’s political and moral obligation should not be played down.

This month, the Australian Administrative Appeals Tribunal ruled that releasing documents relating to the Australian Secret Intelligence Service’s (ASIS) role in Chile would damage Commonwealth relations. “Protecting our ability to keep secrets – and being seen to do that – may require us to continue suppressing documents containing what may appear to be benign or uncontroversial information about events that occurred long ago,” the ruling partly stated.

In September this year, heavily redacted documents were declassified which confirmed ASIS working with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), following petitions signed by a former Australian intelligence officer, Clinton Fernandes, calling upon the government to clarify its role in Cambodia, Indonesia and Chile.

Fernandes had described Australia’s foreign policy complicity with the U.S. as “a profoundly undemocratic, unfriendly act.” Allende, after all, was democratically elected. U.S. interference to bring about the right-wing dictatorship was a strategy to impede other countries from following Chile’s example in democratic revolutionary socialism.

In 1971, ASIS was tasked to open a radio station in Santiago by the CIA through which spy operations were conducted. Australia’s involvement ceased when the newly-elected Labour Prime Minister Gough Whitlam ordered the closing down of operations, fearing that any public disclosure would make things difficult in terms of explaining ASIS’s presence. At the same time, Australia was also concerned that its decision would be interpreted as anti-American.

Australia’s decision is baffling, considering the amount of declassification which the U.S., as the main instigator of violence in Latin America, has undertaken. The Australian Administrative Appeals Tribunal did not make its proceedings public, thus Fernandes and his lawyer could not counter-argue the decision.

To state there not a sufficient passage of time has passed since Australia’s involvement in the coup stands in contrast with how Chile has proceeded since the democratic transition, where the rewriting of a new constitution spells the possibility of a thorough reckoning with the dictatorship legacy. While the Chilean military still holds on to its files and upholds its secret pact which National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) agents are bound to, thus refusing to collaborate with the courts for justice when it comes to locating the disappeared, for example, the Chilean government has been coerced to respond to the people’s call for change, thus ushering in an era where Pinochet’s legacy can be challenged and toppled.

There exists speculation that the Australian government would request permission from the CIA to reveal its role, based upon an agreement between the CIA and ASIS. In the early 90s, Chileans in Australia requested the expulsion of DINA agents living in Australia but were told that the government did not have permission from the CIA to heed the request.

Almost 50 years have passed since Pinochet took power, so what exactly is Australia afraid of? The petition was not calling for a revelation of names, but rather the actions which would shed light on Australia’s role in Chile at the behest of the CIA. Considering the exiled Chileans living in Australia, refusing declassification is a political infringement on their right to memory.

“Ignorance is bliss” my grandmother used to say when I was a child. That is the “American Way” I came to learn especially when the governments and military-intelligence agencies conduct all sorts of crimes against their own people and to other peoples and governments.

My grandmother had a point, because most “common” people accept this daily reality. They have learned to do so by watching what “their” governments do against those who seek information that the powerful wish to hide from us. That is why they want to kill our messenger Julian Assange. That is why they murdered the only U.S. president who challenged the might and will of the “deep state”, namely, the Central Intelligence Agency.

Spectacular Photos Of John F. Kennedy (allthatsinteresting.com)

This article summarizes some of that history and reports new evidence about murderous CIA.

The truth is that the CIA runs United States’ foreign policy covertly, along with the Pentagon and the weapons/oil/minerals industries, which are somewhat more visible. The Establishment knows the “intelligence community” murdered President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert F. Kennedy, who would have reopened the murder investigation of his brother had he been allowed to win the 1968 presidential campaign. New Evidence Implicates CIA, LAPD, FBI and Mafia as Plotters in Elaborate “Hit” Plan to Prevent RFK From Ever Reaching White House – CovertAction Magazine

The military-industrial complex dominates, Dwight Eisenhower—one of its generals and presidents—told us upon turning over the reins of official power to John Kennedy. Eisenhower and Vice-President Richard Nixon delivered its parting gift to Kennedy: Overthrow Cuba’s revolution and its legitimate government with an invasion, starting at the Bay of Pigs, southwest of Havana.

(See chapters 1-6 of my book, The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert, for the following information on U.S. aggression against Cuba.

On the day that Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth, April 12, 1961, the new president told the media there was no plan to invade Cuba. The day after, CIA’s Operation 40 was launched from Guatemala Fourteen hundred paramilitaries, mostly anti-revolutionary Cuban exiles, sailed on U.S. navy boats to the Bay of Pigs, 200 kilometers southwest from Havana. After just three days, local farmer militia and some military troops, led by President Fidel Castro, defeated the invaders.

Kennedy had refused to send in official U.S. aircraft to rescue the mission and the CIA was livid. It then set up Operation Mongoose, which included sabotage of production centers, food stores, a harbor, and even schools; assassinations of Cubans, including scores (eventually hundreds) of attempts on President Fidel Castro’s life. Later CIA-led operations included the use of chemical and biological warfare, which destroyed food crops, caused the entire loss of all its pigs, and caused diseases with deaths of hundreds of people. (See Backfire: The CIA’s Biggest Burn: Ridenour, Ron: 9780962497513: Amazon.com: Books, especially chapter 4, “Germ Warriors”).

Imagine any government acting that way against the United States! Cuba and its Soviet ally obviously had to protect the Cuban people and its state. Cuba received some Soviet nuclear missiles to discourage an all-out nuclear war, which the Pentagon and the CIA wanted Kennedy to undertake once they learned that missiles were in the process of being assembled for potential use. This led to the October Missile Crisis, October 1962.

Once again, this U.S. president chose to defy the warmongers—the only American president to do so where it really counts, other than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He had Big Business against him, even to the point of a plot to overthrow him—the same Big Business that helped finance Mussolini’s fascist regime, Franco’s and Hitler’s military. Nazis & America: The USA’s Fascist Past | History Cooperative and Business Plot – Wikipedia (See also chapter eight, The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert.)

Three decades later, President Kennedy rejected the Pentagon-CIA nuclear war plan. Instead, he ordered the navy to conduct a blockade to prevent any more Soviet ships from entering Cuba.

When U.S. Navy ships engaged one of four Soviet submarines sailing in international waters on the way to Cuba, the captains of the submarine thought the U.S. had started a war. U.S. naval depth charges had destroy the submarine’s communications. The Russians had no way to contact Moscow or the U.S. ships. They had one nuclear missile and one captain proposed using it. Another captain, Vasili Arkhipov talked him out of it. They surfaced and turned back to Russia as U.S. jets strafed their vessel. No one was killed.

At the Havana Conference on the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2002, a key organizer and leader of the non-governmental National Security Archives, Thomas Blanton, called Arkhipov, “the guy who saved the world.”

Vasili Arkhipov. Photo courtesy of M Yarovskaya and A. Labunskaya

Daniel Ellsberg, once a key figure in the Establishment who risked his life to show the world U.S. government-military-CIA crimes against humanity by revealing its own documents, the Pentagon Papers. In 2017, Ellsberg published a whistleblowing book, The Doomsday Machine. Here is evidence that the U.S. has always thought of using nuclear weapons in first strike.

Following the closest call ever to a nuclear Armageddon, President Kennedy resisted being the usual lackey president for big business and its war machine. He started to secretly contact Cuban leadership hoping to find a way out of the aggressive post he inherited. He did the same with the Vietnamese. Kennedy realized that the United States could not win a war against these resilient peoples, not without using nuclear weapons. He also realized that the U.S. could not drop atomic bombs again without retaliation, leading to an eventual nuclear world war.

When Kennedy’s Democrat president predecessor, Harry Truman, was preparing to kill hundreds of thousands Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviets already knew the Yankee and British governments were planning to do that and to manufacture additional bombs that could be used against them with the aim of taking over Russia-Soviet’s sovereignty.

Winston Churchill planned “Operation Unthinkable” for a summer 1945 invasion against Soviet controlled Eastern European areas, and to drop nuclear bombs on key Russian cities. Harry Truman developed a similar plan, “Operation Pincher”, on March 2, 1946—U.S. Joint War Plans. (Chapter 10 of The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert.)

Fortunately, for the safety of the world, some people working on the Manhattan Project gave information to the Soviets so they could make their own bombs, which they did by 1949 before the U.S. had made enough new bombs. Given that balance of nuclear power, the U.S. has not used its monstrous nuclear weapons again, other than less holocaust-causing weapons, known as depleted uranium, which the U.S. has used against many countries’ peoples.

The profit-making war-makers’ solution for everlasting growth, and its America Über Alles mission for world power, “eliminated” its key obstacle, President Kennedy. Under Kennedy’s gleeful successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, they continued their sabotage, and innumerable attempts to assassinate Cuba’s president and his closest comrades Raul Castro and Che Guevara.

The military-industrial complex needed more troops, more war machinery against the stubborn Vietnamese. Lyndon Johnson concocted the “Gulf of Tonkin incident”. He lied that its ship USS Maddox was attacked, on August 2, 1964, by North Vietnamese ships in Vietnam’s territorial waters. There were no U.S. casualties. Two days later, another “enemy attack” was reported. Johnson got the congress to grant him the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution allowing full war operations without declaring war. The war lasted another 11 years before the Vietnamese finally defeated the U.S. and its South Vietnamese lackeys. The war cost between three and five million peoples’ lives, including about 60,000 American lives over a 15-year period, plus several thousand suicides of depressed troops after returning home.

National Security Agency documents, which became public in 2005, show that the North Vietnamese did not engage either ship. Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, a war leader during JFK and LBJ administrations, later admitted it never happened.

Most of us know that the Warren Commission decided beforehand that Lee Harvey Oswald was the patsy for the one-lone-man lie, and therefore he had to be killed, immediately.

Jack Ruby shot Oswald surrounded by police in a police station two days after the president’s assassination. Ruby was connected to the Mafia, operating strip joints in Dallas. He was sentenced to death, which was later overturned. Ruby asked the Warren several times to take him to Washington D.C., so he could speak freely about the assassinations. He told the Commission “my life is in danger here”. “I want to tell the truth, and I can’t tell it here.”

Ruby was taken to a hospital for pneumonia, December 6, 1966. Suddenly he had cancer and died extraordinarily quickly, January 3, one month before granted a new trial.

While the mass media covers up who is actually responsible for many mysterious deaths of important persons, from time to time bits and pieces slip out. Such happened recently in Miami of all places. Ricardo Morales Jr., is a son of Richard Morales, known as “Monkey”—“contract CIA worker, anti-Castro militant, counter-intelligence chief for Venezuela, FBI informant and drug dealer”, wrote the Herald. He spoke recently on Miami’s Actualidad Radio 1040 AM, and to the “Miami Herald”. He added new light to one of the theories of President Kennedy’s assassination.

“The Miami Herald”, and its Spanish kin, “El Nuevo Herald”, headlined Cuban-born Nora Gámez Torres’ blockbuster article, “Cuban exile told sons he trained Oswald, JFK’s accused assassin, at a secret CIA camp”. It is rare that Oswald is not named “the” killer. Ricardo “Monkey” Morales told sons he knew Lee Harvey Oswald | Miami Herald; Cuban exile told sons he trained Oswald, JFK’s accused assassin, at a secret CIA camp (msn.com) and Ricardo “el Mono” Morales le dijo a sus hijos que conocía a Lee Harvey Oswald | El Nuevo Herald

Morales Jr. said that his father was a sniper instructor in secret CIA camps where Cuban exiles and others trained to invade Cuba, and that he realized in the hours after JFK was murdered that the accused killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been one of his sniper trainees.

“Monkey” Morales told his son that he didn’t believe Oswald had killed Kennedy because he had witnessed him shooting, and said “there is no way that guy could shoot that well.”

Morales also told his two sons that two days before the assassination, his CIA handler told him and his “clean-up” team to go to Dallas for a mission. But after the assassination, they were ordered back to Miami without learning what the mission was about, wrote the “Miami Herald”.

The “Miami Herald” pointed to other serious reports “that a group of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, including the leader of the organization Alpha 66, Manuel Rodriguez Orcarberro, met at a house in Dallas days before the assassination, and that Oswald was seen visiting the house or been in the area. As that theory goes, Cuban exiles, who felt betrayed by Kennedy’s lack of support in the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation and his deal with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev after the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis not to invade Cuba, could have planned to kill JFK and blamed Castro so the U.S. would invade the island.”

These claims “point the finger at the CIA, which some observers believe could help explain why President Joe Biden backed off last week on declassifying the remaining documents in the case,” wrote journalist Nofra Gámez Torres.

Although Oswald was basically convicted by the government post mortem, the House Select Committee on Assassinations 1979 report contradicted the 1964 Warren Commission conclusion. “The committee instead concluded that the president was likely slain as the result of a conspiracy and that there was a high probability that two gunmen fired at him,” Gámez Torres referenced.

“The House Select Committee, which also interviewed Morales, said they couldn’t preclude the possibility that Cuban exiles were involved.”

“Whatever happened, Biden’s decision to postpone the declassification of the remaining 15,000 documents linked to the case is once again giving life to the conspiracy theories. Morales’ son believes the documents might never be made public.”

Although Biden had advocated for the release of all JFK murder documents, he suddenly ordered the postponement on October 22. The president claimed that the COVID pandemic caused the delay with the caveat for the “need to protect against identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure.”

Republican President George W. Bush signed a law, in 1992, requiring the release of all records concerning JFK’s murder within 25 years—before October 26, 2017. That Democrat President Biden disobeys this law is more evidence that Kennedy’s own party leaders are afraid of the CIA.
Biden’s previous boss, Barack Obama, also went along with the CIA. John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, sat with the official president every Tuesday to order who should be droned to death. Brennan also dreamed up the fairy tale Russiagate, that is, that President Vladimir Putin, seeking sovereignty and world peace, is behind every interference to the military-industrial complex mission: America Über Alles.

There might still exist some documents that could point to how the president’s fractured brain disappeared. The Mystery of JFK’s Brain: How Did it Disappear? – Historic Mysteries.

Maybe there is evidence showing that one “magic bullet” could not possibly have first penetrated through Kennedy’s back, puncturing his spine, then twisting around and exiting through the front of his neck smashing part of his brain. Then this same bullet penetrated the front seat into Texas Governor John Connally’s right rib, then exiting the front of his chest, wounding his right wrist, and finally stopping in his left thigh.

Maybe there are even papers that show how 17 eye-witnesses who saw what the Warren Commission was forced to hide from us—that there were shots from different directions—came to be murdered or died suddenly within a short time.

After an extensive search on the Bill Gates-founded Microsoft search machine, I could not find any major medium, other than MSN, that picked up on the “Miami Herald” story about the Morales revelations. Yet many media did report on President Joe Biden’s decision of October 22 to postpone for at least a year (or forever) the release of the remaining 15,000 documents held in secret concerning the murder of John Kennedy.

The British daily “Independent” headlined: “Is Biden blocking JFK records over hidden bombshells?” The “bombshell” being that the Central Intelligence Agency “eliminated the obstacle”.

Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana’s own biography-as-told-to his brother and godson, Double Cross (Warner Books, 1992), named the conspirators and killers. Mobster Giancana had close ties with the CIA when one of them, most likely, shot him in his home on June 19, 1975, the day before he was ordered to testify before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The Senate was investigating some of the CIA’s “dirty tricks”. Giancana’s family co-authors are convinced he would not have “double crossed” his cohorts in crime, but they double-crossed him.

This Day in History: June 19th- Giancana’s Demise (todayifoundout.com)

“The Independent” suggests that if the “remainder” of the documents are eventually released, we should not expect that anything revealing the actual murderers will be released: “National Security Act”. Is Biden blocking the JFK assassination files over hidden bombshells? – NewsBreak

That anti-democratic 1917 law protects “intelligence agencies” when they murder people, especially world leaders. This is also the reason why they seek to silence—kill one way or another—Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange.

“The Independent” wrote:

“Former Massachusetts Representative Patrick Kennedy said: “I think for the good of the country, everything has to be put out there so there’s greater understanding of our history”. His cousin Robert F Kennedy Jr, called the memorandum “an outrage against American democracy”. [RFK called the Warren Report, a “shoddy piece of craftsmanship.”]

“We’re not supposed to have secret governments within the government,” said Mr. Kennedy, whose father — Senator Robert Kennedy — reportedly did not believe that Oswald acted alone.”

“Kel McClanahan, an attorney specialising in national security law and information and privacy law who previously served as an associate editor for the American Intelligence Journal, told The Independent that those looking to see everything by the end of next year shouldn’t get too excited.”

Mr. McClanahan predicted that Mr. Biden would follow the bipartisan practice of deferring to intelligence officials’ wishes in keeping some records hidden, despite his December 2022 deadline.

“Unless you have a very strong willed president who will say: ‘I do not care because I am so pro-transparency’, they will defer to their intelligence people,” he said. He added that as time goes on and the Kennedy assassination fades from public memory, the clamour for new revelations will grow dimmer and dimmer.

Author James K. Galbraith wrote about the documents postponement on the website for the Assassination Archives and Research Center. Blog Page (aarclibrary.org)

“In reporting this story, The New York Times reminds us that an exhaustive, ‘yearlong inquiry into the murder led by Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.’ Oswald, like Kennedy, has been dead for 58 years. If he acted alone, and if an exhaustive inquiry established this fact 57 years ago, what secret could be left? If he acted alone, there were no other guilty parties. Not then, not 29 years later, and not today. The Times distinguishes between ‘researchers and conspiracy theorists.’ One may infer that researchers are those who trust the Warren Commission, whereas conspiracy theorists are those who do not. But apart from those few who have made careers out of defending the Commission against its many critics, why would anyone who didn’t distrust the official story be interested in this case? In fact, as the Times admits, people are interested, with surveys finding that ‘most Americans believe others were involved.’”

“…I take them [Biden and related agencies] at their word: that in their view, a full disclosure of all documents would compromise military, intelligence, and foreign relations. It is not difficult to imagine how. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that there was a conspiracy. Suppose that the remaining documents, together with those already released, were to establish – or permit private citizens to establish – what most Americans already believe. In that case, it would be obvious that the cover-up involved senior U.S. government officials – including the leaders of the very agencies currently being tasked with reviewing the records. And, as a point of logic, it follows that in every succeeding cohort, under every president, the cover-up has continued. Isn’t that the only plausible way the current interests of those agencies might be damaged?

“The irony is that by withholding the records, the government has already admitted, without saying so, that the Warren Commission lied and that there are vile secrets, which it is determined to protect. It concedes, without saying so, that there was a conspiracy and that there is an ongoing cover-up. If there were not, all the records would have been released long ago. You don’t have to be a ‘conspiracy theorist’ to see this. Biden’s 2022 deadline will come and go. The song and dance will continue. No one who remembers 1963 will live to see the U.S. government admit the full truth about Kennedy’s murder.”

No U.S. President Can Control the CIA

If the United States’ “Deep State” murdered its own president, there is little else that it would not do. The September 11, 2001 attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon, the most heavily guarded building in the world, were impossible to achieve without insider collaboration, at the very least.

What the U.S. government told the world about 9/11 is full of lies and impossibilities, just like the “magic bullet”. No steel building, such as the twin towers, has ever collapsed from fire alone. Never. Witnesses close by and inside heard explosions, like demolitions, inside the building.
Thousands of professional architects and engineers know that what we were told is impossible according to physics. Why lie? (See: Is There Any Truth in ‘The 9/11 Truth Movement?’ – 911Truth.Org; and Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth | WTC Twin Towers and Building 7 (ae911truth.org)

Following the murder of 3000 people, the Bush government created Homeland Security. This agency oversees all law-enforcement, and allows the arrest of people without cause and hold them indefinitely. It ordered the National Security Agency to create technology that allows it (along with the CIA) to spy on every human being in the world. To stop any semblance of a real free press, it now prohibits all journalists in the world from doing their job to report on “Deep State”/Pentagon crimes against humanity. That is why they had Julian Assange kidnapped and imprisoned, and tried to do the same to Edward Snowden. Due to Wikileaks skill and tenacity, they got Edward Snowden to Russia and into exile, although his destiny was Latin America. Implementing 9/11 Commission Recommendations | Homeland Security (dhs.gov)

The 9/11 attacks is the United States counterpart to Adolf Hitler/Herman Gøring’s Nazis burning of the German parliament, on February 27, 1933, so it could blame the legal Communist Party and Social Democratic Party from continuing to have any influence. They imprisoned 4,000 members of the CP within 24 hours. The Nazi firebombing allowed them to make the Reichstag Fire Decree, “legalizing” the round up and murder of tens of thousands opponents or dissidents, and laid the bases for the Holocaust against millions of Jews, Gypsies, Slaves, and 250,000 physically and mentally handicapped people. The Reichstag Fire | Holocaust Encyclopedia (ushmm.org). See also BBC’s “Rise of the Nazis” The First Six Months in Power (TV Episode 2019) – IMDb

The Nazi war caused the death of 14.5% of the 190 million Soviet people—27 million people, of them ca. 17 million civilians—plus the loss of 70,000 villages, 1,700 towns and 4.7 million house destroyed. The Nazi war caused the death of 0.32% of U.S. Americans—420,000 people, of them ca. 12,000 civilians. No destruction to its land except at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii by Japanese.

The CIA is not SS. In fact, it has more power than any United States president unlike the SS, which was under Hitler. The CIA lies, cheats, steals, murders and tortures just like SS and other Nazi murder institutions did. After WWII, the CIA used Nazi scientists for United States domination, and protected Nazi murderers by bringing them to the U.S., Chile, Bolivia and Argentina. Nazis “Arian Superiority” ideology replaced or complemented by, “American Superiority”.

The CIA sought total control over South America (also Central America) through its Operation Condor during the Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan periods. The CIA provided planning, training, arms, and torture to military juntas and right-wing coup governments that the CIA either supported or put into semi-power. Between 50,000 and 100,000 civilians were murdered, 30,000 “disappeared”, ca. 50,000 imprisoned with many tortured, often repeatedly.

The CIA euphemistically called this “a cooperative effort by the intelligence security services of several South American countries to combat terrorism and subversion.” Operation Condor, 1968-1989 | National Security Archive (gwu.edu) and Operation Condor – Wikipedia.

“Combating terrorism and subversion” is double speak to cover up for the fact that citizens wish for and struggle for democratic rights of free press and speech; the right to choose their own governments. It is also a classic case of the “intelligence community’s” psychological projection.

The Pentagon and CIA have long used torture themselves and trained others in the use of multi-torture methods. About – SOA Watch and School of the Americas – SourceWatch.

“Since its inception the CIA has taken a keen interest in torture, avidly studying Nazi techniques and protecting exponents such as Klaus Barbie,” wrote Jeffrey St. Claire.

Barbie was SS and Gestapo, an insidious torturer—the “Butcher of Lyon—of Jews and French resisters. The CIA protected him and sent him to work for right-wing governments in Bolivia.
See Douglas Valentine’s excellent exposé book on the CIA and its torturing of Vietnamese, The Phoenix Program.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lectured at Texas A&M University, on April 15, 2019. He responded to a question. “When I was a cadet [West Point] our motto was: You will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do… [when] I was the CIA director, we lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”

That is to say that lying, cheating, stealing (and, of course, constant warring with mass murder and torture) is “the glory of the American experiment”. As this criminal murderer told his story, he laughed and his audience joined him.

President Harry Truman, who created the CIA in 1947, came to the same conclusion as did Pompeo about the CIA but without thinking such behavior was “glorious”. He told his biographer, Merle Miller, that he regretted having created the CIA.

“The CIA doesn’t just report on wars and the like, they go out and make their own, and there’s nobody to keep track of what they’re up to. They spend billions of dollars on stirring up trouble so they’ll have something to report on…it’s become a government all of its own and all secret. They don’t have to account to anybody… If I had known what was going to happen, I never would have done [created] it.”

Presented with information that CIA Director Allen Dulles had assisted some French generals and French Nazi sympathizers to overthrow (murder) President Charles de Gaulle, in order to prevent an end to the war against Algeria’s independence, President Kennedy told de Gaulle’s ambassador in Washington, Hervé Alphand, that while he supported de Gaulle he could not vouch for the CIA.

Kennedy told Alphand that, ‘the CIA is such a vast and poorly controlled machine that the most unlikely maneuvers might be true.’” (See article by David Talbot, founder of “Salon”, and a CIA biographer).

Republican George W. Bush learned the same lesson regarding the CIA when President Vladimir Putin tried to accommodate the United States government.

“Putin met with [President George W. Bush] several times, and they described themselves as friends. At their first meeting, June 16, 2001, held in Slovenia, Bush said: ‘I looked him in the eye and got a sense of his soul. I could trust him.’” (Chapter 14 of “The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert”.)

Putin looked into Bush’s eyes and saw…- All Hat No Cattle

On the day of the terror attacks in New York, the Pentagon, and Pennsylvania, Putin and his wife attended their Russian Orthodox Church to light a candle for those killed and injured, and they prayed for them. He told National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice that all preexisting hostility between the two countries would be put aside while the U.S. dealt with the tragedy.

Putin even sent arms supplies to the U.S. Northern Alliance ally. He arranged for one of Russia’s close allies, the former Soviet Republic Kyrgyzstan, to let the U.S. military use one of its bases as a spy center and launching pad for flights to and from Afghanistan. The Yankees were there until June 2014. They had moved 5.3 million military personnel (some more than once) in and out of Afghanistan in 136,000 flights.

Two other former Soviet republics assisted. Uzbekistan allowed the U.S. to use a military base with 1,500 troops until 2005. Russia had a military division in Tajikistan, and it allowed the U.S. military to use it, in order to supply weapons and other cargo to its forces in Afghanistan. The U.S. trained some Tajikistan troops.

President Putin even considered joining NATO, but Bush turned that down. Instead, Bush withdrew from the Richard Nixon-signed Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, in 1972.

Putin spoke to Oliver Stone about this double standard.

“We assumed that the Cold War was over, that we had transparent relations with the United States, with the whole world, and we certainly counted on support. But instead we witnessed the American intelligence services support terrorists. And even when we confirmed that, when we demonstrated that Al Qaeda fighters were fighting in the Caucasus, we still saw the intelligence services of the United States continue to support these fighters.

“There was one episode. I told President Bush about that, and he said, ‘Do you have any

concrete data [which] specifically does what specifically?’ And I told him, ‘Yes, I do have such data,’ and I showed him, and I even named those persons of the American intelligence services who were working in the Caucasus, including in Baku…they also provided technical support, they helped transfer fighters from one place to another.”

Bush told Putin, “I’ll sort this all out.” This was in 2004-5, and Putin had to wait a long time.

Finally, “the CIA sent us a letter. The response was quite peculiar. ‘We support all the political forces, including the opposition forces, and we’re going to continue to do that.”

Putin told “The Moscow Times” that Russian intelligence had intercepted calls between separatists in the North Caucasus and the U.S. intelligence based in the former Soviet Republic Azerbaijan during the early 2000s, proving that Washington was helping the insurgents.

Putin said that President Bush promised to “kick the ass” (a favorite Bush expression) of the intelligence officers in question. But after the CIA letter came to Russia’s intelligence service, Federal Security Service (FSB), where Putin had been director, no more was heard from Kick Ass Bush.

Putin also told Stone that he thought it was wrong of the U.S. “to impose on other nations and peoples [their] own standards and models… Democracy cannot be imported from outside, it can only be born within society…I think it would be senseless and damaging if the Soviet Union itself was to impose on other peoples and other nations their rules of conduct.”

The problem is the U.S. does not want other peoples to decide how they want to live. It wants America Über Alles. Other than its brutal might, the biggest obstacle for ending this “kiss ass” machine is that the Establishment has captured or stunned most peoples’ minds. They have convinced so many that, yes, “ignorance is bliss”, just like granny cautioned me.

Recently declassified British files reveal how the Foreign Office prepared for a possible military coup in Colombia by secretly training the country’s armed forces in psychological warfare.

In 1970, Britain’s Cold War propaganda arm, the Information Research Department (IRD), secretly provided two weeks of counter-insurgency instruction to high-ranking Colombian military officials.

Part of the course was held at the Joint Warfare Establishment at Old Sarum in Wiltshire, where the Colombian officers were given special instruction in psychological operations.

At this time, the British ambassador encouraged the provision of military assistance to Colombia so as to “not find ourselves without lines to the government” in the case of a coup.

Eliminating Subversive Groups

In 1969, General Ricardo Charry Solano, the head of Colombian military intelligence, requested a British military training program for two high-ranking Colombian military officials.

General Charry was already known to British planners. In 1964, he became the first head of Colombia’s intelligence and counter-intelligence unit (BINCI), later known as the Charry Solano Military Intelligence Battalion.

Thereafter, he was a regular recipient of British propaganda material until his death in 1970.

According to Colombian newspaper El Espectador, BINCI was “created as a strategy to persecute and eliminate those who belonged to subversive groups, were from the left, or did not agree with the state model of the time.”

BINCI left a brutal legacy in Colombia. According to a report submitted to Colombia’s Truth Commission, human rights groups were already condemning the unit during the mid-1960s.

Between 1977 and 1998, BINCI was responsible for a series of homicides, forced disappearances, and cases of torture.

A U.S. cable released in 2007, for instance, revealed that during the 1970s BINCI “secretly created and staffed a clandestine terror unit […] under the guise of the American Anti-communist Alliance (AAA or Triple-A). The group was responsible for a number of bombings, kidnappings and assassinations against leftist targets during that period.”

One of the commanders assigned to BINCI during this operation was Mario Montoya, who was pictured in 2008 alongside Foreign Office official Kim Howells.

Coup Preparations

Carlos Lleras Restrepo, president of Colombia from 1966-1970, speaking, at right, in undated photo. (Iván Marulanda, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

General Charry selected two high-ranking Colombian military officials, Colonel Calixto Cascante and Lieutenant Colonel Oscar Botero Restrepo, for secret British training.

While Botero was relatively unknown to British planners, IRD field officer Keith Morris described Cascante as “the most experienced and best qualified intelligence expert the Colombian Armed Forces possess.”

One of Britain’s key objectives in providing the training was to curry favour with the Colombian military in the case of a coup. As British Ambassador to Colombia William H. Young noted, “with the military so much in the news elsewhere in the continent it is worth having a look at some recent moves at the top of the Colombian Armed Forces.”

Colombian soldiers. (Alejoturola, Pixabay)

Young continued, “one of our tasks here must clearly be to keep contact with the Army so that if they do intervene, we will not find ourselves without lines to the government.”Since the beginning of the 1960s, the military had seized power in neighbouring Brazil, Ecuador and Panama, as well as in Argentina and Bolivia. Britain had supported the coup in Brazil and played no small role in propaganda operations designed to insulate the dictatorship from criticism.

He added: “In this context it is very important that we should be able to fulfil an offer we have made to the Army, through General Charry, to send two intelligence officers to the U.K. next year”.

In 1967, Keith Morris, the IRD field officer in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, outlined Britain’s other commercial and strategic interests in Colombia. The country “has considerable untapped resources” and “Communist guerrillas based in Colombia could threaten the Panama Canal (a Colombian Communist Government might renew Colombian claims to Panama) and could easily create chaos in the Venezuelan oil fields which are in the frontier region.”

Secret Training in ‘Psychological Warfare’

London’s Carlton House, original home of the Information Research Department’s propaganda activities. (Suedwester93, Wikimedia Commons)

The Foreign Office agreed to provide Cascante and Botero with three months of training at the School of Military Intelligence in Ashford, Kent, followed by a fortnight of secret training with the IRD.

The training with the IRD was so secretive that not even the Colombian embassy in London was informed about it. Instead, the embassy was told that the officers would be taking a two week “holiday in London.”

Cascante and Botero’s training with the IRD lasted between June 22 and July 3,  1970. “The basic purpose of the course,” wrote senior IRD official Elizabeth Rosemary Allott, “is to equip them with sufficient specialist knowledge to set up a small IRD-type unit within the [Colombian] Ministry of Defence.”

Part of the training included a session at the psychological operations section of the Joint Warfare Establishment at Old Sarum — a military base which offered extensive training in psychological warfare and covert operations.

According to one document produced by the Joint Warfare Establishment, the aim of psychological operations was to:

“Support the efforts of all other measures, military and political, against an enemy, to weaken his will to continue hostilities and to reduce his capacity to wage war.”

It added:

“Psychological warfare relates to an emergency or a state of hostilities, and it is with the further subdivisions of strategic psywar, tactical psywar and psychological consolidation that its employment can best be examined.”

Similar training had already been given to two members of the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in June 1969, and plausibly included instruction in “special interrogation” techniques – an allusion to torture.

Britain & Colombia

Guards outside Buckingham Palace during a rehearsal for the Colombian state visit in 2018. (Defence Imagery, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

British involvement in Colombia’s counter-insurgency conflict thus began long before it became publicly known. This training supplemented wide-ranging U.S. counter-insurgency measures, which during the 1960s involved recommending the use of “counter-agent and counter-propaganda functions [and] as necessary [to] execute paramilitary, sabotage, and/or terrorist activities”.

During Tony Blair’s government, British military collaboration with Colombia reached new heights, and seemed to replicate Britain’s secret Cold War military assistance.

In 1999, U.K.  Defence Minister John Spellar told parliament that “advisory visits and information exchanges” had taken place between Colombia and Britain, focussing “on operations in urban theatres, counter-guerrilla strategy, and psychiatry.”

At this time, oil corporation BP was one of Colombia’s largest foreign direct investors. As Declassified U.K.  recently revealed, British military collaboration with Colombia is ongoing, with the army assisting in Colombia’s internal security operations, despite massive human rights abuses.

Declassified UK via consortiumnews.com