By Kit KLARENBERG

On March 9th, shocking news of a deliberate Russian airstrike on a maternity hospital in Mariupol, eastern Ukraine, began spreading widely via social media and news outlets.

Fiery condemnation from Western officials, pundits, and journalists was immediate. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, for his part, claimed the act was proof of the “genocide” Russia was perpetrating against the civilian population, and urged European leaders to condemn the “war crime” and “strengthen sanctions” to stop the Kremlin’s “evil” deeds in the country. NPR suggested the attack was part of Russia’s “terrible wartime tradition” of purposefully targeting health facilities and medics during conflicts, dating back to Chechnya.

But newly released testimony from one of the incident’s main witnesses punctures the official narrative about a targeted Russian airstrike on the hospital. The witness account indicates the hospital had been turned into a base of operations by Ukrainian military forces and was not targeted in an airstrike, as Western media claimed. Her testimony also raised serious questions about whether at least some elements of the event were staged for propaganda purposes – and with the cooperation of the Associated Press.

The new testimony (watch below) comes on the heels of evidence strongly suggesting that the destruction of a dramatic theater in Mariupol on March 16 was staged by the Azov Battalion, and that nearly all civilians had evacuated a day before. And as we will see below, new reports of a Russian massacre of scores of civilians in the town of Bucha also contain suspicious details suggesting a pattern of information manipulation aimed at triggering Western military intervention.

“They said it was no airstrike. So our opinion got confirmed. We didn’t hear the airplane, they didn’t hear it either.”

At that moment we heard an explosion. Instinctively I personally put a duvet on myself. That’s when we heard the second explosion. I got covered by glass partially. I had small cuts on my nose, under my lips and at the top of my forehead but it was nothing serious…

Mariana Vishegirskaya, a pregnant resident of Donetsk who was present at the maternity hospital during the widely reported incident, has evacuated from Mariupol and is now speaking out. Photos showing a bloodied Vishnevskaya fleeing the building with her personal belongings became a centerpiece of coverage of the attack, along with a photo of another woman being carried away pale and unconscious on a stretcher.

In the wake of the incident, Russian officials falsely claimed the pair were the same person, citing Vishegirskaya’s background as a blogger and Instagram personality as evidence she was a crisis actor and the incident a false flag. Though that assertion was not true, as we shall see, the hospital had been almost completely taken over by the Ukrainian military.

In a video (above) reviewed by The Grayzone which began circulating via Telegram April 1st, Vishegirskaya offers a clear and detailed account of what took place on and in the days leading up to March 9th. The witness begins by noting how many residents of Mariupol attempted to evacuate following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, but says authorities ensured it was “impossible to leave.”

On March 6th, with the birth of her child impending, she checked into maternity hospital number three, the city’s “most modern” facility. She was not there long before the Ukrainian military arrived and evicted all the hospital’s patients, as they sought access to the building’s solar panels, one of the last remaining sources of electricity in the besieged city.

“We were moved to the only small maternity hospital left. It had only one small generator… Husbands of women in labor settled in the basement and cooked meals for us on the street. Residents of neighboring houses also brought us meals,” Vishegirskaya says. “One day soldiers came. They didn’t help with anything. They were told the food is for women, how could they ask for it? They replied they hadn’t eaten in five days, took our food and said, ‘you can cook some more.’”

On the night of the 8th, the pregnant women “slept peacefully” as there were “no shootouts.” The next day, the soon-to-be mothers heard a shell explode outside. Vishegirskaya “instinctively” covered herself with her duvet, but still, shattered glass from a nearby window cut her lip, nose and forehead, though she says it was “nothing serious.”

“After the second explosion we got evacuated to the basement,” Vishegirskaya recalled. “We proceeded to discuss whether it was an airstrike. They said it was no airstrike. So our opinion got confirmed. We didn’t hear the airplane, they didn’t hear it either. They told us it was a shell. After the first two explosions there were no other explosions.”

As she waited, she noticed “a soldier with a helmet” taking pictures of her, and demanded he stop, “because obviously it was not a good time for that,” and she did not want to be photographed in her current state. The soldier complied. Back upstairs, the same individual began filming her and others again, refusing to stop until his subjects had demanded several times he do so.

Vishegirskaya’s husband later told her the man wasn’t a soldier, but an Associated Press correspondent, one of many on the scene at the time. She believes these journalists had been there “from the beginning,” as they were ready and waiting outside to snap the woman being led away on a stretcher, the first to emerge from the building in the wake of the shell attack, “as soon as she came out.”

The next day, after her baby was delivered via cesarean section, the same Associated Press staffers interviewed her, asking her to describe what happened. They enquired point blank if an airstrike had taken place, to which she responded, “no, even the people that were on the streets didn’t hear anything, nor did anyone.”

Later, when she was in safer “ living conditions,” Vishegirskaya began scouring the internet, attempting to track down the interview. She found “everything else” the Associated Press staffers recorded – but not her denials that an airstrike had occurred.

The AP’s narrative on the hospital incident grows shaky

The Associated Press’ initial report by Evgeniy Maloletka on the March 9th incident provided the primary foundation and framing of all mainstream coverage thereafter. It categorically asserted the hospital was targeted by a deliberate “airstrike,” which “ripped away much of the front of one building” in the hospital complex and left nearby streets strewn with “burning and mangled cars and trees shattered.” The report suggested that the heinous act was a testament to Russia’s invasion force “struggling more than expected.”

Countless Western news outlets recycled this content, with particular emphasis on the claimed “airstrike.” These outlets served as eager conduits six days later when Associated Press issued a followup, revealing that the pregnant mother being stretchered out of the hospital had died, as had her unborn child. A doctor stated her pelvis had been crushed and “hip detached,” which the agency attributed to the hospital having been “bombarded” by the Russian air force.

However, the Associated Press made no mention in its follow-up report of any part of any building being “ripped away.” In fact, the words attributed by the AP to Vishegirskaya indicate she was completely unaware of how the damage was actually caused.

“We were lying in wards when glass, frames, windows and walls flew apart,” she told the AP. “We don’t know how it happened [emphasis added]. We were in our wards and some had time to cover themselves, some didn’t.”

Did the Associated Press insert ambiguity and uncertainty into Vishegirskaya’s mouth in order to maintain the bogus narrative of an airstrike? Even if quoted accurately, she could easily have been describing an explosion nearby which inflicted shockwave damage on the building.

Reinforcing that interpretation, an Associated Press video purporting to document the aftermath of the “airstrike” showed a large hole in the ground within the maternity hospital complex grounds, said to be “a blast crater” from the wider assault. Was this merely the impact zone of a shell that intentionally or not landed near the building, rather than one vestige of a targeted aerial onslaught?

Whatever the truth of the matter, other aspects of Vishegirskaya’s newly released testimony relate to  major mysteries surrounding the Mariupol maternity hospital bombing. For example, she affectingly attests that the pregnant woman stretchered out of the building died. Yet for all the superficial damage inflicted, no photo or video evidence yet to emerge from the scene – bar a seemingly blood-soaked mattress – indicates how and where the fatal injuries could have been inflicted.

Even more curiously, the Associated Press implausibly claimed that due to “chaos after the airstrike,” no one on the ground learned the dead woman’s name before her husband arrived to collect her body – her identity remains unknown to this day. Still, doctors were “grateful” the nameless woman did not end up buried in one of the mass graves dug for Mariupol’s dead.

Associated Press embeds with the Azov Battalion

The number of people who lost their lives in the maternity hospital incident, and precisely how, are likewise conundrums. In a televised address that evening, Zelensky claimed three individuals, including a child, had been slain via “airstrike,” while others remained trapped under rubble. The next day, though, Donetsk regional government chief Pavlo Kyrylenko said zero deaths had been confirmed, and there were no confirmed injuries among children.

By contrast, numerous media outlets have since reported, or at least heavily implied, that several children were killed, and their bodies deposited in the aforementioned mass graves on the “outskirts” of Mariupol. Why it would be necessary or sensible to transport corpses far away from the city center, and why a child’s parents would consent to such an undignified burial, remains unclear.

We know about these supposed mass graves thanks to Associated Press correspondent Evgeny Maloletka, who has published photos and authored articles detailing their construction. His content has been widely repurposed by other Western outlets, the grim images traveling far and wide.

Maloletka also happened to be an eyewitness to the maternity hospital incident; he took the infamous shot of the pregnant woman being stretchered out of the building. Maloletka, in fact, has managed to place himself in the vicinity of many dramatic events instantly portrayed as titanic Russian war crimes.

A glowing March 19th Washington Post profile of Maloletka praised him for sharing “the horror stories of Mariupol with the world.” The article described the Ukrainian as a “longtime freelancer” for Associated Press, previously covering the Maidan “revolution” and “conflicts in Crimea” for the agency. There was no mention of the fact that Maloletka was a fervent supporter of the “revolution,” however.

In a lengthy multimedia presentation on the coup and resultant war in Donbas featured on his personal website, Maloletka claims to be “indifferent to the situation in my country.” However, his affinities are abundantly clear. He frames the US-backed regime change operation as a courageous fight against “corruption and social injustice,” while making no reference to both the Maidan protesters and their leadership being riddled with neo-Nazis.

This may be relevant to consider, given Maloletka has also been a key source of photos of training provided to Ukrainian civilians by Azov Battalion. Whether he sympathizes with the paramilitary’s fascist politics is unclear, but there can be little doubt he has been in extremely close quarters with the neo-Nazi regiment since the war began.

Maloletka’s protection, that of his Associated Press coworkers, and their collective ability to provide Western media an unending deluge of atrocity propaganda can only be guaranteed through the Azov Battalion, the primary defense force in Mariupol. This has obvious ramifications for the objectivity and reliability of all Associated Press coverage of the war.

As The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal revealed in his investigation of the suspicious March 16th Mariupol theater incident, Associated Press published photos of the site bearing Azov Battalion’s watermark and a link to the neo-Nazi unit’s Telegram channel.

A South China Morning Post caption (lower right corner) indicates the AP receiving photos from the Azov Battalion

The dubious narrative of the explosion at the Mariupol theater bears strong similarities to the official verson of the maternity hospital incident, particularly the wildly conflicting estimates of casualties and purported presence of the same people at both sites. Sky News alleged March 26th that pregnant women rescued from the hospital had been moved to the theater “for safety,” being coincidentally housed at “exactly the point” later said to have been bombed by Russian forces, of all places.

The perishing of eyewitnesses to the real events at the maternity hospital is convenient for the Associated Press and Azov Battalion alike. After all, dead people tell no tales. Having anyone able to testify to the on-the-ground reality of incidents such as the dubious theater bombing or the maternity hospital “airstrike” is inherently problematic to the Ukrainian cause.

And though the AP has has reporters on the ground in Ukraine throughout the conflict with Russia, the organization remains silent about transgressions unfolding right before the eyes of its staff.

Case in point: the presence of an AP photographer at the hospital gave it a front row seat for Azov Battalion’s occupation of the facility and its transformation of the site into a base of operations. But the agency avoided any mention of this critical piece of context, showing Western audiences what Azov Battalion wants them to see – and what its overtly pro-Kiev staff deem fit for public consumption.

The information war escalates in Bucha

Hours before the publication of this article, on April 2nd, claims of Russia’s most hideous alleged war crime to date erupted across social media. Footage and photos of scores of dead bodies – some with their hands tied – littering the streets of Bucha, a small city near Kiev, testified to an apparent massacre of military-aged men by Russian troops, as they retreated from the battered city two days earlier.

The gruesome visuals have triggered intensified calls for direct Western military confrontation with Russia. But as with the incident at the maternity ward in Mariupol and numerous other high profile events initially portrayed by Ukrainian authorities as Russian massacres, a series of details cast doubt on the official story out of Bucha.

Within hours of Russia’s withdrawal from the Bucha on March 31st, its mayor announced that his city had been liberated from “Russian orcs,” employing a dehumanizing term widely used by Azov Battalion. An accompanying article noted the Russians had “mined civilian buildings and infrastructure,” but no mention was made of any mass killing of local citizens, let alone scores of corpses left in the street, which one might reasonably expect would be top of any news outlet’s agenda when reporting on the event.

#Bucha – a thread.

March 31. Mayor of Bucharest records a video, saying Russian troops have left. Not a word about “massacre”. 1/ pic.twitter.com/M7lmzQ46Jj

— Irina Molotova (@IrinaGalushkoRT) April 3, 2022

On April 2, within hours of the publication of photos and videos purporting to show victims of an alleged Russian massacre, Ukrainian media reported that specialist units had begun “clearing the area of saboteurs and accomplices of Russian troops.” Nothing was said about dead bodies in the streets.

The National Police of Ukraine announced that day that they were “cleaning the territory…from the assistants of Russian troops,” publishing video that showed no corpses in the streets of Bucha and Ukrainian forces in full control of the city.

Ukrainian national police inspected the streets of Bucha from saboteurs and Russian associates, on 02.04,2022, we see clean streets. There are no corpses on the video.
the recording is original from the Ukrainian police. pic.twitter.com/NuhUII4Opy

— Spriter (@spriter99880) April 4, 2022

A clip of the reported “clean-up operation” published by Sergey Korotkikh, a notorious neo-Nazi Azov member, shows one member of his unit asking another if he can shoot “guys without blue armbands,” referring to those without the marking worn by Ukrainian military forces. The militant stridently responds, “fuck yeah!” Korotkikh has since deleted the video, perhaps fearing it implicated his unit in a war crime.

Lat night, Sergey “Boatsman” Korotkikh, infamous Neo-Nazi & member of Azov, posted a video titled “The BOATSMAN BOYS in Bucha”. At the 6 second mark you can clearly hear the dialogue:

“There are guys without blue armbands, can I shoot them?”
“Fuck yeah” pic.twitter.com/n8WY1D0xRe

— Russians With Attitude (@RWApodcast) April 3, 2022

Whether real or fake, and whoever the perpetrators are, the alleged extermination of civilians comes at a critical time for the Ukrainian government. Evidence of atrocities and war crimes committed by Ukrainian troops against civilians and captured Russians – including the shooting of helpless Russian POWs in their knees, and other heinous forms of torture – has come to light for the first time.

What’s more, Russia has virtually eliminated Ukraine’s fighting and logistics capabilities in much of the country, including its entire navy, air force, air defenses, radar systems, military production and repairs facilities, and most fuel and ammunition depots, leaving Kiev unable to transport large numbers of troops between different fronts, and consigning what forces remain in the east to encirclement and almost inevitable defeat.

As Zelensky has made clear, Ukrainian forces are desperate for direct Western intervention – in particular the so-called “closing of the sky.” With compelling but highly questionable atrocity propaganda filtering from media operations of the Azov Battalion and the Associated Press, public pressure for a major escalation is rising.

thegrayzone.com

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.

As reports of atrocities and human rights violations in Ukraine mount, corroborated by extensive witness testimony and much tangible evidence (and here), it becomes paramount to consider ways and means of punishing instigators, enablers, and direct perpetrators of these outrages. It is equally important to preserve the legal and historical record of thesе crimes and to administer suitable punishments in order to deter other potential war criminals in the Ukrainian theatre. Finally, the purpose of such a Tribunal would be educational, to impress upon that segment of Ukrainian society which had become swayed by extremist Nazi propaganda the enormity of the misconduct perpetrated in their name and in furtherance of a criminal agenda that, actively or passively, deliberately or unwittingly, some of them may have supported. For, unless there is a sober confrontation with these crimes against humanity by Ukrainians vulnerable to the extremist narrative, and as soon as possible, stability and civility will continue to evade Ukraine for a long time to come.

The first step is to set the framework within which Ukrainian war crimes investigations and trials ought to be conducted. It is possible, of course, to entrust this task to the judicial authorities of Donetsk and Lugansk because obviously they have territorial and subject matter jurisdiction. However, for the impartiality and credibility of the proceedings to be preserved, it would be preferable for Ukrainian war crimes investigations and resultant trials to be conducted under the auspices of an international forum, removed as much as practicable from the parties on the ground.

Clearly, a replication of the founding of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at the Hague (ICTY) in the 1990s is unlikely in the present case. Setting aside technical issues concerning the legitimacy of such a tribunal under the UN Charter, three out of five governments permanently represented on the Security Council are potential suspects for active collusion with and logistical support extended to direct perpetrators of war crimes in the Ukraine. That makes it extremely improbable that this time round they would agree to the establishment of a similar court. The solution, therefore, must be sought elsewhere.

Taking into account the ongoing decline of the global Western hegemonic system, a process which was greatly accelerated precisely by the political, military, economic, and financial fallout of the Ukraine conflict, it would be advisable to look for another way to elevate the Ukrainian war crimes inquiry to the international level. One possible approach would be to place the matter under the auspices of the Collective Security Treaty Organization. CSTO nations are now effectively the global counterpart to the moribund West-centered “international community” which, in the 1990s, was still able to manipulate the UN in furtherance of its political aims, and to a lesser extent is still able to do that today.

Assuming that CSTO could be a viable option to serve as the supranational patron for the Ukraine war crimes tribunal, the next step would be to carefully define the Tribunal’s remit and to devise its procedural rules to avoid ICTY’s errors. In order to blunt inevitable efforts from the West to discredit the new Tribunal, much of the general language found in corresponding ICTY foundational documents should be utilised, always taking great care to identify and discard those provisions of ICTY Statute and Rules of Evidence and Procedure which are not compatible with best legal practice, and substituting for those provisions universally accepted legal principles.

The next important issue that would have to be dealt with is the staffing of the Ukraine International Criminal Tribunal. Recruitment of judges, investigators, prosecutors, and support staff need not, and in fact should not, be confined to personnel from CSTO states. Persons who satisfy the criterion of professional integrity should be encouraged to participate regardless what country they are nationals of.

The Ukraine Tribunal will also have to select a conceptual framework, a set of main legal principles that it will apply in the conduct of its proceedings. Three major concepts or devices come immediately to mind that have been used by ICTY (the “Mechanism,” which is its successor, is included by reference) to secure often questionable convictions. Those concepts are: Joint Criminal Enterprise, Command Responsibility, and Plea Bargaining.

With the likely exception of the pernicious practices of accepting uncorroborated confessions and plea bargaining, which in the form as applied at ICTY have radically undermined rather than promoted the administration of justice, JCE and Command Responsibility could conceivably be reconfigured and preserved in modified form, at least to the extent that they are not in conflict with the tasks of determining objective facts and administering politically neutral justice. For instance, JCE (detached from some of its more absurd variants invented by ICTY judges specifically to facilitate incrimination and conviction by any means) could be a useful tool not only for linking perpetrators acting with criminal intent and in concert, but also for establishing overarching connections between direct on-the-ground perpetrators and their instigators and supporters from beyond the borders of Ukraine.

Another conceptual issue that inevitably will have to be addressed is the scope of the investigations to be carried out beyond the factual matrix of the particular crimes being adjudicated. There is also the further and related question of the nature of broader historical and contextual evidence that should be considered probative and allowed to be presented in court. From the standpoint of securing justice, ICTY’s performance in that regard has been most unsatisfactory, not to say dismal and flagrantly prejudicial to the accused parties.

That is the case because even when ICTY attempts to apply seemingly sound principles it regularly twists them to serve its politically compromised agenda. Background “evidence” presented by ICTY historical, military, media, and other “expert” witnesses had invariably been geared not to shed light on relevant and probative circumstances but to heap maximum discredit upon the targeted parties. The resulting hugely prejudicial reputational damage, that under normal conditions would be inadmissible in a trial court, was designed to impact not just the individual defendant but, even more importantly, the entire ethnic group (at ICTY, in practical terms that meant the Serbs) the defendant happened to belonged to. A particularly obnoxious example were the attempts of ICTY “expert witnesses” to contextually portray verses of nineteenth century Serbian poet Njegoš as no less than the inspiration for the alleged genocide in Srebrenica.

Hopefully, the Ukrainian Tribunal will not have to resort to such pseudo-academic and pseudo-judicial skulduggery because it will operate scrupulously and above board, without fabricating or shaping facts to fit preconceived conclusions dictated by political controllers. That will be its huge moral and professional advantage.

There is no formal reason why the Ukrainian war crimes Tribunal should not be established within the ambit of the judicial systems of the Donbass republics, because such a court would be dealing primarily with criminal conduct in violation of international humanitarian law as it affected the population of those two entities. But it would carry greater weight and would thus be preferable for the task of investigating, apprehending, trying, convicting, and incarcerating offenders to be entrusted to an international body, backed by the legitimacy of recognised and indisputably sovereign nation-states.

Such an approach would make the Ukraine Tribunal’s factual findings and verdicts unquestionably legitimate, which might not entirely be the case with verdicts issued by some local courts. It would serve also an additional important purpose. It would dovetail perfectly with the emergence of the Fair World Order, intended to replace its relatively short-lived “NWO” counterpart. Taking advantage of the convenient opportunity presented by the current crisis, the Ukraine Tribunal could lay the groundwork for a revitalised system of international criminal law, serving as an essential foundational component of a broadly acceptable, inclusive, and viable future global order.

As of now, it’s a relatively safe bet to believe that the Donbass region will be severed from Ukraine, with the remaining Ukrainian state having a neutral status. This diminished Ukraine might’ve (at least in the short term) a greater per capita anti-Russian dynamic, which could prove problematical for that state.

Russia has been losing the propaganda war. Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to be looking long term. At one time, the current Head of the Chechen Republic (official title) Ramzan Kadyrov, had opposed the Russian government. Now, he’s on very good terms with the Kremlin.

In time, a greater number of Ukrainians might begin questioning Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, as someone who (under the influence of some nationalists) further instigated and prolonged a conflict, whose end result could’ve occurred on better terms for Ukraine, without the deaths, displacement and destruction, resulting from Russia’s military action.

In turn, Putin could be increasingly viewed as someone who for years had tried to reasonably see a peaceful implementation of the 2015 UN approved Minsk Protocol and need for a new European security arrangement.

Likewise, contrary to the Kiev regime and Western mass media propaganda, Russia has so far waged a limited military operation, causing far less civilian deaths, when compared to the US military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Among the issues, are armed combatants using civilians and civilian areas as cover.

For those selectively seeing Putin as a monster, consider Madeleine Albright’s infamous comment on the large-scale Iraqi deaths caused by US military action and how she has been given kudos by the likes of Wesley Clark.

A number of Kiev regime claims about Russia’s military action have been later proven false. It’s therefore prudent to not automatically believe everything that government says before a fully substantiated overview.

In an interesting April 1 RT CrossTalk discussion, University of Rhode Island Professor Nicolai Petro foresees a more nationalistic Ukraine. Petro adds that this nationalism might’ve a noticeable anti-Western sentiment as well. Kiev regime propaganda has repeatedly suggested that the West hasn’t done enough to help their side. Over the years, some pro-Stepan Bandera Ukrainians have a xenophobic element, which is negative towards Jews, Poles and Russians.

If Petro’s projection takes shape, there could be a continued tense political division in a hypothetically diminished Ukraine, formally divorced from Crimea and Donbass. Pro-Russian sentiment within Kiev regime-controlled Ukraine hasn’t been comp​letely eliminated.

The abrasive Ukrainian nationalism idolizing Bandera is an anathema to many Ukrainians. The Banderite element in the Ukrainian Rada has been attempting to officially ban the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, that’s loosely affiliated to the Moscow Patriarchate.

The Moscow Patriarchate affiliated Orthodox Church has for centuries been by far the most popular church in Crimea, Donbass and numerous other areas of the former Ukrainian SSR. It’s quite arrogant for the Kiev regime to lay claim on lands, where the latter oppose the censoring trends favored by the former. There’re no Kiev regime calls to cancel culture Bandera.

In Western mass media, no context is ever given when the black and red Banderite flag is shown. BTW, the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church with loose Moscow Patriarchate ties, has spoken against the Russian military action, as have numerous clerics of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate.

On the flip side, the ongoing military conflict is seeing casualties among Ukrainian neo-Nazis. In a somewhat roundabout way, Zelensky appears to have acknowledged the negative attributes of these extremists, during an April 1 Fox News segment – an exchange that the network has apparently omitted in its archive. The failed neo-Nazi advocacy could eventually lead to a significant drop in its influence.

At the outbreak of the Russian military action, I proposed a settlement having Crimea fully recognized as Russian, along with a recognition of Donbass as a very autonomous part of Ukraine and an end to the anti-Russian sanctions. I’m now not as sure that Russia would accept this proposal.

The implemented sanctions against Russia have created a boomerang effect, which could become more evident. Over the long haul, it’s not so easy to isolate a country as powerfully determined Russia. Much of the world hasn’t gone along with the West’s anti-Russian sanctions.

Given time, the sanctions against Russian athletes and artists could end on the realization that this action is farcical in its hypocritically implemented bigotry. Using the same premise, it wouldn’t be so difficult to justify the banning of athletes and artists from other countries, when their respective nation (in the not-too-distant past) engaged in military action that killed and displaced many.

With a consistent standard in mind, Ukrainian athletes and artists could be banned for the Kiev regime carnage in Donbass over the past eight years. The Kiev regime can be credibly held accountable for about 10,000 deaths (overwhelmingly civilian) and displacing up to one million to Russia. Donbass is on the other end of the former Ukrainian SSR, farther away from the EU. Hence, the Donbass victims of Kiev regime terror don’t get much, if any Western mass media compassion and coverage.

US President Joe Biden will probably and deservingly be a one term president. His likely Republican successor might be in a better position to improve US-Russian relations – somewhat on par to what happened with US-Soviet relations after Ronald Reagan’s victory over Jimmy Carter.

In the meantime, it’s imperative for responsible voices within the US and elsewhere to not throw in the towel. Western mass media censorship can only go so far.

eurasiareview.com

On March 10 when CIA director Bill Burns addressed the U.S. Senate and declared “Russia is losing the information war over Ukraine”, he repeated a claim that had already been amplified by Anglo-American media since the start of Russia’s military operations in Ukraine. Though his statement is factually true, it doesn’t tell us why and mainly reflects the West’s perspective. As usual the reality is a lot more complicated.

The U.S. information warfare capability is unparalleled: when it comes to manipulating perceptions, producing an alternate reality and weaponizing minds, the U.S. has no rivals. The U.S. coercive deployment of non-military instruments of power to bolster its hegemony, and attack any state that challenges it, is also undeniable. And that’s precisely why Russia was left with no other option than the military one to defend its interests and national security.

Hybrid warfare, and information warfare as an integral part of it, evolved into standard U.S. and NATO doctrine, but it hasn’t made military force redundant, as proxy wars demonstrate. With more limited hybrid warfare capabilities, Russia has to rely on its army to influence the outcome of a confrontation with the West that Moscow regards as an existential one. And when your existence as a nation is at risk, winning or losing the information war in the Western metaverse becomes rather irrelevant. Winning it at home and ensuring that your partners and allies understand your position and the rationale behind your actions inevitably takes precedence.

Russia’s approach to the Ukraine question is remarkably different from the West’s. As far as Russia is concerned Ukraine is not a pawn on the chessboard but rather a member of the family with whom communication has become impossible due to protracted foreign interference and influence operations. According to Andrei Ilnitsky, an advisor to the Russian Ministry of Defence, Ukraine is the territory where the Russian world lost one of the strategic battles in the cognitive war. Having lost the battle, Russia feels all the more obliged to win the war – a war to undo the damage to a country that historically has always been part of the Russian world and to prevent the same damage at home. It is rather telling that what U.S.-NATO call an “information war” is referred to as “mental’naya voina”, that is a cognitive war, by this prominent Russian strategist. Being mainly on the receiving end of information/influence operations, Russia has been studying their deleterious effects.

While it is too early to predict the trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and its political outcomes, one of the main takeaways is that the U.S. employment of all instruments of hybrid warfare to instigate and fuel this conflict, left Russia no alternative than the recourse to military power to solve it. You can’t win the battle for hearts and minds when your opponent controls them. You first need to restore the conditions that will make it possible to reach them and even then it will take years to heal wounds, undo the psychological conditioning.

Though disinformation and deception have always been a part of warfare, and information has long been used to support combat operations, within the framework of hybrid warfare information plays a central role, so much so that in the West combat is seen as taking place primarily through it and vast resources are assigned to influence operations both online and offline. In 2006 retired U.S. Maj. General Robert H. Scales explained a new combat philosophy that would later be enshrined in NATO’s doctrine: “Victory will be defined more in terms of capturing the psycho-cultural rather than the geographical high ground.”

In the U.S.-NATO lexicon, information and influence are interchangeable words. “Information comprises and aggregates numerous social, cultural, cognitive, technical, and physical attributes that act upon and impact knowledge, understanding, beliefs, world views, and, ultimately, actions of an individual, group, system, community, or organization.”

The U.S. information war arsenal is unmatched because it controls the Internet and its main gatekeepers of content such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia… It means the U.S. can exercise control over the noosphere, that “globe-spanning realm of the mind” that RAND in 1999 was already presenting as integral to the American information strategy. For this reason no government can ignore the profound impact of the Internet on public opinion, statecraft and national sovereignty. Because neither Russia nor China can beat the U.S. in a game where it holds all the cards, the smart thing to do is to leave the gaming table, which is exactly what both powers are doing, each drawing on its specific strengths.

The “information war over Ukraine” didn’t start in response to Russia’s military operations in 2022. It was initially unleashed in Ukraine. Since 1991 the U.S. spent billions of dollars, and the EU tens of millions, to tear this country apart from Russia, not to mention the money spent by Soros’ Open Society. No price was deemed too high due to the importance of Ukraine on the geopolitical chessboard. U.S. influence operations led to two colour revolutions, the Orange Revolution (2004-05) and EuroMaidan (2013-14). After the 2014 bloody coup, with the removal of any counterweight, U.S.-NATO influence turned into full control and violent repression of dissent: those who had opposed Maidan lived in fear – the Odessa massacre being a constant reminder of the fate that would befall anyone who dared to resist the new regime.

The promotion of Neo-Nazi tendencies intensified, together with the cult of Nazi collaborationist Stepan Bandera; members of terrorist organizations such as the Azov Battalion and other ultranationalist groups joined government and the Ukranian National Guard, the past was erased and history re-written, Soviet monuments were destroyed, Russian-speakers faced daily threats and discrimination, pro-Russian parties and information outlets were banned, Russophobia was inculcated in children starting from kindergarten. In 2020 alone ultranationalist projects, such as the “Young Banderite Course”, “Banderstadt Festival of Ukrainian Spirit”, etc. received almost half of all the funds allocated by the Ukrainian government for children’s and youth organisations.

Ukrainians who lived in the separatist People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk and couldn’t be targeted by influence operations were targeted by rockets, bombs and bullets: the former compatriots had been recast as enemies almost overnight. While all quality of life indicators revealed a marked decline, large segments of the population lived in a permanent state of cognitive dissonance: they were told that discriminating LGBT is wrong but discriminating Russian speakers is right, remembering Soviet soldiers who had fought Nazism in WW2 and liberated Auschwitz is wrong, remembering the Holocaust is right. Because cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling, people resorted to denial and self-deception, embraced whatever opinion was dominant in their social environment to seek relief.

Since the mindset of an entire population cannot be changed overnight, even with an army of cognitive behaviour specialists, the groundwork was laid in stages. The Orange Revolution helped foster Ukrainian national identity but precisely because it leveraged on existing cultural and linguistic differences it ended up being the most regionally divided of all colour revolutions: western Ukrainians dominated the protests and eastern Ukrainians largely opposed them. The Orange Revolution had a profound effect on the way Ukrainians perceived themselves and their national identity but it didn’t succeed in severing the political, cultural, social, and economic ties between Ukraine and Russia. Most people on both sides of the border continued to regard the two countries as inextricably intertwined.

A second revolution, Euromaidan, would finish the job started in 2004. This time the narrative had a wider appeal: its proponents identified corruption and lack of economic prospects as the main grievances of the population, indicated Ukraine’s leadership and its ties to Russia as the main cause of the country’s troubles and proposed integration into the EU as a cure-all solution.

Turning Russia into a scapegoat for all societal and economic problems, fuelling an anti-Russian sentiment was exactly what a myriad of U.S. and U.S.-funded players had been doing since the fall of the Soviet Union. Ukraine, like the rest of post-Soviet countries, was teeming with media outlets, NGOs, educators, diaspora groups, political activists, business and community leaders whose status was artificially inflated by their access to foreign resources and international networks.

These “vectors of influence” introduced themselves as purveyors of “global standards and best practices”, “democratic rules”, “participatory development and accountability”, used marketing buzzwords for their work of demolition of existing practices, frames of reference and their sostitution with new ones, often of inferior quality. Under the guise of fighting corruption, offering a path to modernization and development these players became entrenched in Ukraine’s civil society, shaped its collective consciousness and demonized both Russia, local politicians and public figures who advocated closer relations with Moscow.

The work of these agents of influence was instrumental in demolishing worldviews, beliefs, values and perceptions that dated back to Soviet times, thus altering the population’s self-understanding. It ensured that younger generations would be ignorant about their country’s history and embrace a new fictional identity.

But colour revolutions require both brain and brawn to topple governments and defend the power of the new ruling class. The brute force that was necessary to intimidate and attack those who were impervious to influence operations could only be provided by fringe elements in society who had been seduced by the ultra-nationalist rhetoric.

These violent fringe groups were organized and empowered to exercise greater influence in Ukraine and thus attract more followers. A romanticized, imaginary identity was radicalized by absurd claims that Ukrainians and Russians cannot be called brotherly nations because Ukrainians are “pure-blood Slavs”, while Russians are “mixed-blood barbarians”. Nothing was beyond the pale: sleek re-enactments of Nazi propaganda tropes like torchlight parades that looked impressive on social media, speeches that echoed Hitler’s, xenophobic and anti-Semitic rhetoric, the cult of Bandera and those who fought with the Nazis against the Soviet Army.

While foreign groups sharing the same ideological tool box were labelled extremist and terrorist organizations just across the border, in Ukraine they received advice, financial and military support by the U.S. military and the CIA. At the same time the CIA presentable spin-off, NED, was giving out funds, grants, scholarships and media awards to their globalist, politically-correct, “freedom, democracy and human rights” country fellows. The latter cohort would whitewash the crimes of the former. After all, if members of Al-Qaeda donning white helmets in Syria became the darlings of Western media and even won an Oscar, Neo-Nazis could be marketed as defenders of democracy just as easily.

Ukraine’s population was subjected to the sort of psychological operations that would make it want more of a medicine that not only didn’t cure the disease but could kill the patient. In order to turn the country into a beachhead from which to launch hostile operations aimed at weakening Russia and creating a rift between Moscow and Europe, Russophobia had to become a sort of state religion, anyone who didn’t practise it was to be marginalized and eventually excluded from public discourse. The pressure to conform was so strong that it impaired judgement.

The discursive construction of an enemy required the constant demonization of Russia (Mordor), Russians (uncivilized Eurasian barbarians) and Donbass separatists (savages, subhumans).

When neo-Nazi narratives and Russophobia are normalized and allowed to shape both policies and dominant discourse, when people are “weaned” from critical thinking, from their own history, and wage an 8-year long war against their fellow countrymen, that’s a sign people’s minds have been weaponized.

Public consciousness was actively manipulated both at the level of meaning and at the level of emotions. Selective perception and consolatory fantasies were some of the psychological mechanisms ensuring that the population would manage the stress of living in a state of cognitive dissonance where facts and fiction could no longer be separated. By offering cheap passage through a complex world, these narratives provided emotional certainty at the cost of rational understanding.

The emotionally satisfying decision to believe, to have faith, inoculated individuals against counter-arguments and inconvenient facts. The election of an actor on the basis of his convincing performance as a president in a TV series titled “Servant of the People” confirmed the successful substitution of politics with its spectacular simulation: it wasn’t simply the blurring of illusion and reality, but the authentication of illusion as more real than the real itself. The majority of Ukrainians voted for a brand new party that was named after the TV fiction and was the brainchild of the same people. A party that even used billboards advertising the series for Zelensky’s election campaign.

With the global streaming of the TV series by Netflix and its broadcasting by more than a dozen TV channels in Europe we see the marketing of Zelensky to foreign audiences as an image-object whose immediate reality is its symbolic function in a semiotic system of abstract signifiers that take on a life of their own and generate a parallel, virtual reality. This virtual reality in turn generates its own discourse.

For instance, to foreign audiences the 8-year long war in Donbass that caused 14,000 deaths is less real than images extrapolated from a videogame and passed off as “the bombing of Kiev.” That’s because the war in Donbass has been largely ignored by international media.

Images of atrocities, whether taken from other contexts or fabricated, have become free-floating signifiers that can be repurposed according to the needs of propagandists, while real atrocities must be hidden from view. After all it doesn’t matter whether the narrative is true or false, as long as it is convincing.

In post-Maidan Ukraine one could see an anticipation of the fate that awaited the rest of Europe, almost as if Ukraine had been not only a laboratory for colour revolutions, but also a testing ground for the kind of cognitive warfare operations that are leading to the rapid destruction of whatever vestige of civility, logic and rationality is left in the West.

Cognitive warfare integrates cyber, information, education, psychological, and social engineering capabilities to achieve its ends. Social media play a central role as a force multiplier and are a powerful tool for exploiting emotions and reinforcing cognitive biases. Unprecedented information volume and velocity overwhelms individual cognitive capabilities and encourages “thinking fast” (reflexively and emotionally) as opposed to “thinking slow” (rationally and judiciously). Social media also induce social proofing, wherein the individual mimics and affirms others’ actions and beliefs to fit in, thus creating echo chambers of conformism and groupthink. Shaping perceptions is all that matters; critical opinions, inconvenient truths, facts that contradict the dominant narrative can be cancelled with a click, or by tweaking the algorithm. NATO uses machine learning and pattern recognition to quickly identify the locations in which social media posts, messages, and news articles originate, the topics under discussion, sentiment and linguistic identifiers, pacing of releases, links between social media accounts etc.

Such system allows real-time monitoring and provides alerts to NATO and its social media partners, who invariably comply with its requests to remove or ‘shadow ban’ content and accounts deemed problematic.

A polarized, cognitively disoriented population is a ripe target for a type of emotional manipulation known as thought-scripting and mind-boxing. A person’s thinking comes to congeal around increasingly set scripts. And if the script is arguable, it is unlikely to be changed through argument. The well-boxed brain is impervious to information that doesn’t conform to the script and defenceless against powerful falsehoods or simplifications that it has been primed to believe. The more boxed a mind, the more polarized the political environment and public dialogue. This cognitive damage makes all efforts to promote balance and compromise unattractive, in the worst cases even impossible. The totalitarian turn of Western liberal regimes and the insular mentality of Western political elites seem to confirm this sad state of affairs.

With the ban on Russian information outlets, the exclusion and bullying of anyone who seeks to explain Russia’s position, the equivalent of ethnic cleansing of public discourse has been achieved and its cheerleaders have a mad grin on their face that doesn’t bode well.

Examples of irrational mob frenzy are too many to list, those who have fallen victims to this pseudo-religious fervour demand that Russia and Russians be cancelled. For that matter you don’t even need to be human or alive to become a target of mass hysteria: Russian cats and dogs have been banned from competitions, Russian classics banned from universities, Russian products taken off the shelves.

The relentless manipulation of people’s emotions has unleashed a dangerous whirlwind of mass insanity. As in Ukraine, so in Europe citizens are supporting decisions and calling for measures against their own interests, prosperity and future. “I’ll freeze for Ukraine!” is the new epitome of virtue-signalling among those who access only U.S.- approved information, the kind of script compatible with a frame of reference that excludes complexity. In this fictional, parallel universe, a sort of safe, reassuring, compensatory metaverse that has broken free from the messiness of reality, the West always occupies the moral high-ground.

By and large international media coverage of the war in Ukraine has been not only fictional but also completely aligned with narratives provided by Ukrainian propaganda units that were set up and funded by USAID, NED, Open Society, Pierre Omidyar Network, the European Endowment for Democracy et al.

Dan Cohen in an article published by Mint Press News described in detail how the system of Ukrainian strategic information works. Ukraine, with the help of foreign consultants and key media partners, built an effective network of PR-media agencies that actively churn out and promote fake news. In NATO countries whoever dares to question the correctness of this information is accused of being a “Putin’s agent”, attacked and excluded from public debate. The information space is so heavily guarded that it resembles an echo-chamber.

Ukrainian disinformation campaigns affect the judgment of both Western audiences and lawmakers. On March 8 when Ukrainian President Zelensky addressed the British House of Commons remotely, many members of parliament had no earphones to listen to the simultaneous translation of his speech. It didn’t matter. They liked the show and applauded enthusiastically. In their boxed-minds Zelensky had already been framed as “our good guy in Kiev”, and any script, even an incomprehensible one, would do. On March 1 diplomats from Western countries and their allies walked out during a video link address by Russia’s Foreign Minister Lavrov at the UN Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. Boxed-brains are cognitively incapable to engage in discussions with those who hold different views, making diplomacy impossible. That’s why in lieu of diplomatic skills we see theatrics and media stunts, empty suits who deliver script lines and project moral superiority.

The West has found refuge in this media-generated make-believe world because it can no longer solve its systemic problems: instead of development and progress we see economic, social, intellectual and political regression, anxiety, frustration, delusions of grandeur and irrationality. The West has become completely self-referential.

Dystopian ideological and social-engineering projects such as Trans-humanism and the Great Reset are the only solutions Western elites can offer to address the inevitable implosion of a system they contributed to wreck.

These “solutions” require the suppression of pluralism, the curtailing of freedom of information and expression, the widespread use of violence to intimidate critical thinkers, disinformation and emotional manipulation, in short, the destruction of the very foundations of modern democracy, public discourse, rational debate and informed participation in decision-making processes. The cherry on top is that it is cynically packaged and marketed as a “victory of democracy against authoritarianism.” To project democracy first they had to kill it and then replace it with its simulation.

But a global communication and information space that doesn’t respect the principle of pluralism and mutual respect inevitably produces its own gravediggers. We already see how this global space is fragmenting into heavily defended information spaces along the lines of geopolitical spheres of influence. The U.S.-led globalization project is unravelling and that’s mainly due to its overambition.

The U.S. might be winning the information war in the West but any victory in the parallel universe created by the media could easily turn into a Pyrrhic one when reality reasserts itself.

Recent history tells us that carefully crafted narratives, disinformation and demonization of the opponent radicalize and polarize public opinion, but victory in the information battlefield doesn’t necessarily translate into military or political victory, as we have seen in Syria and Afghanistan.

While the collective West revels in its success after the nuclear option of banning all Russian media from the global infosphere it controls, it’s too blinded by hubris to even notice the inevitable fallout. Total control over the narrative is achieved through authoritarian measures and the repression of dissenting voices, that is a reversal of those inclusive democracy and universalist values that the West hypocritically claims to defend and is actively projecting in the Global South. In the ideological confrontation with countries it defines “authoritarian” the West is losing the edge it claimed to possess.

The unipolar, U.S.-led world order is coming to an end and the West is fast losing its influence. Russia is paying attention and in the future it might invest more energy in reaching non-Western audiences instead, that is people who aren’t as indoctrinated and impervious to truth, facts and reason as their Western counterparts.

While at the beginning of the information revolution China took measures to protect its digital sovereignty, for many reasons it took Russia longer to recognize the danger posed by a communication and information system that despite initial claims of being an open, level playing field, was actually rigged in favour of those who controlled it.

Russia’s initiative in Ukraine is not only a response to attacks on the population of Donbass and a way to forestall Ukraine’s accession to NATO. Its avowed goal to denazify Ukraine is a defensive response to the intense cognitive war operations that the U.S. has been conducting both inside Russia and in neighbouring countries. NATO’s eastward expansion wasn’t simply a military expansion, it led to the occupation of the psycho-cultural, information and political space as well.

After losing a strategic battle in the cognitive war, watching the normalization of Neo-Nazi Russophobia and realizing that hostile forces, both domestic and foreign, have become entrenched in Ukraine, Russia feels all the more obliged to win the war, as Andrei Ilnitsky explained in an interview to Zvezda. Ilnitsky recognized that “The main danger of cognitive warfare is that its consequences are irreversible and can manifest themselves through generations. People who speak the same language as us, suddenly became our enemies.” The erection of monuments to Stepan Bandera while those of Soviet soldiers were being destroyed, was not only an intolerable provocation for Russia – a country that lost 26.6 million people fighting Nazism in WW2 – it was also a tangible expression of the kind of erasure and rewriting of history that is not limited to Ukraine.

The current conflict in Ukraine shows that restoring a sense of reality exacts a heavy and bloody toll. Unfortunately in matters of national security painful decisions cannot be postponed indefinitely.

By Pepe ESCOBAR

At the time of writing the war in Ukraine has been going on for a handful of days and thanks to the power of hypersonic missiles and the fact that the majority of Ukraine’s southern and eastern populations see themselves as Russian, Kiev is utterly broken. Russian and LPR/DPR forces are taking and holding many kilometers per day and now Zelensky is willing to go to the negotiation table after 8 years of pleas from Moscow begging Kiev and the West to stop the genocide in the Donbass. Russia is being cut from SWIFT and every Russian bank and individual of note is being sanctioned. Russia’s divorce from Europe looks to be over and along with it is the birth of our much anticipated Multipolar World. Given this context what should Russia do at this moment in history?

It is time for Moscow to negotiate with Warsaw and Budapest, not Kiev.

Kiev was unwilling to negotiate for 8 years, they took that time to ban the Russian language while torturing and murdering locals out east, now they are clearly awaiting some NATO aircraft and other goodies in the hope to change the tide of the war at least psychologically. Meeting and discussing anything with them is pointless and only serves Kiev’s interests. If Russia has finally declared them a “Fascist Regime” then there is no room for negotiations, they have to be broken.

Image: Option B sounds really good.

Russia has already declared the Donbass Republics to be independent, but Kharkov and Odessa should not be punished for rising up unsuccessfully as they did in 2014, their independence movements were and are just as valid as the Donbass’ and the Russians should conveniently acknowledge any such movement within these oblasts as independent nation states. Moscow has heavily invested in ending the genocidal nightmare to the south and should have zero shame in taking what they consider theirs and making sure that history doesn’t repeat itself. Everything east of the Dnepr and south of the northernmost tip of the Moldovan-Ukrainian border should be declared independent, i.e. de facto Russian immediately.

If Kiev moves to Lvov the problem of having a Russophobic Murderous Banderite Regime next door will not go away. Russia should appeal to Poland’s Narcissism and Hungary’s Pragmatism and offer every Russophobic square meter of the remainder of Ukraine to them, with a possible chunk going to Romania for historical reasons. This offer will create an interesting wave of reaction within the EU/NATO. The Poles have dreamed of expansion, especially taking back Lvov for quite some time and it will be interesting to see the mental gymnastics that their leadership will have to do when Washington tries to forbid the move.

Poland is Russophobic, but not insane. Having a very elongated Hungary closer to Russia will allow Moscow and Budapest to engage in further cooperation and Hungarian identity does not rest on hating Russians. Two-thirds of the fake nation of Ukraine can go to the Russians and one-third can go to bordering NATO members. The Ukrainian experiment needs to come to a final end and be deleted from the map entirely.

Russian patriotic economists can now put all of our money where their mouths have been for decades.

Russia has always had the threat of economic isolation thrown at it as a form of punishment. This has caused the Kremlin to tolerate a lot of seemingly odd policies and institutions. Strange figures like Anatoly Chubais, Elvira Nabiullina and Alexei Kudrin have the public perception of pursuing Globalist interests on Russia’s kopeck yet have been tolerated over and over again. The Russian Central Bank which is somehow both private and responsible to the government, the former seeming to be the dominant policy, may also no longer be required. If Russia is truly on its own then it is time to “Make the Ruble Russian Again”.

Text: “Sergey Glazyev: Our Economy is Subordinate to Foreign Powers”.

Various Patriotic and YouTube star economists including, Katasonov, Hazin, Delyagin, and most importantly godfather of the Eurasian Economic Union Sergey Glazyev, can now have free reign to finally enact the policies they have wanted to do for countless years. Glazyev’s ideas are very complicated but in short they focus on having Russia’s economy, resources and currency serve Russia itself and follow in the footsteps of some of China’s most successful projects. Whether this will work or not is a question of time, but now with the new found economic freedoms in Russia these “patriotic economics” can finally be attempted or at the very least the Central Bank can be reformatted. #EndTheFed.

Russian media oriented at foreign markets will take a hard right turn.

For years Russia has had to really restrain itself in terms of how it projects government funded media as they feared by being banned. One complaint to Ofcom could be enough to get an entire project shutdown all over the UK. Well now that RT, Sputnik and everything else have been banned regardless of their actions, there is no point in walking on eggshells anymore.

RT: Now has a lot more freedom to express itself.

Russia’s foreign media was always forced to project itself through a Liberal prism in order to play ball. Now they must do the exact opposite and “play to the base” of Conservatives and Traditionalists who are willing to download Telegram, make a VK account and scour other resources to continue to maintain contact with Russia’s English-Language Media.

RT, Sputnik and the others must adjust to hold onto and expand the audience that agrees with them despite the difficulties with all the blanket banning. For years I have urged Russian media figures to take a turn to the Right, especially under my leadership, now we may just have our chance, which comes at a great time as my car is getting quite old.

In closing…

The shackles of compromise have been lifted. If Russia can survive economically it no longer has to listen to the nagging of the “International Community” or try to force its culture and especially economy to fit inside of a Liberal box. This is a major opportunity for things to be different, and for those who believe in Lev Gumilyov’s Passionarity Theory of History this all comes at a great moment of military triumph. This is the opportunity that Russian patriotic forces have dreamed of for quite some time, now they have to pick up the ball and not completely blow this.

(Click on the image to enlarge)

Despite having at our disposal the most powerful communication technologies ever assembled, people around the world are arguably less knowledgeable about the true nature of current events than at any time in the past. How to explain such a paradox?

Here’s a rhetorical question for the proponents of lightning fast 5G technologies: What does it really matter how speedy an internet system works if the most critical information it is meant to process is hidden or outright censored? In reality, the people don’t need excessive speed, they need truth.

It would be just as well, all things considered (exposure to hazardous electromagnetic radiation, for starters) if the hyperactive human race simply went back to reading the morning paper over breakfast and watching the news in the evening. Or is warp-speed internet service primarily designed to keep everyone’s brains comfortably numb on Netflix productions?

Whatever the case may be, something rotten is afoot in the electronic neighborhood. For example, the most powerful search engines, namely the monolithic giant Google, are determining user results based on surreptitiously tuned and very powerful algorithms – so powerful, in fact, that they are reportedly able to determine the outcome of elections.

In 2019, Robert Epstein, Ph.D., Senior Research Psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research, testified before a U.S. Senate investigatory committee that, according to his research, “Google displays content to the American public that is biased in favor on one political party [i.e. the Democrats] – a party I happen to like, but that’s irrelevant.”

The good doctor went on to reveal the shocking bit of trivia that Google has been “determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the national elections worldwide since at least 2015. This is because many races are very close and because Google’s persuasive technologies are very powerful.”

Aside from achieving near dominance in the field of politics, the mainstream media, in cahoots with social media, possesses the power to forbid any sort of conversation that challenges the narrative on treating Covid-19. ‘Facts’ are now the sole purview of the all-powerful ‘fact-checkers,’ like, for example the altruistic Atlantic Council, one of the most influential i.e. pro-war establishment think tanks of the last quarter of a century. In essence, these institutions now have the power to ‘fact-block’ in order to keep a particular narrative going strong.

Thus, one group’s opinion (even Facebook has admitted that ‘fact checks’ are based on nothing more than personal perspectives), can deny people the right to a second medical opinion. Joe Roan discovered this the hard way when the entire left of the political spectrum had a conniption fit just because he hosted two doctors who did not subscribe to the official Covid-19 narrative that one can hear parroted from every mainstream media outlet with disturbing uniformity. Such a dystopian nightmare flies in the face of scientific inquiry, which has been built over millennia on intelligent people questioning each other on a range of diverse issues, few of which are ever fully understood.

But now, the notoriously unethical and corrupt pharmaceutical industry stands to earn tens of billions of dollars on the sale of vaccines as the government forces these unproven drugs on millions of people. At the same time, medical practitioners who attempt to prescribe preventive therapies are ostracized from polite society. These atrocities, which are allowed due to overt media complicity and censorship, don’t end there; media tyranny has a direct influence on questions relating to war and peace.

I played the below LIVE on my CENSORED & NEVER RELEASED episode with @JoeRogan 3 wks ago, where I named Trudeau specifically as a WEF acolyte & told Rogan I’d met him

Why won’t @Spotify CEO @eldsjal release it?

Please sign petition here: https://t.co/BcTK212XkK#ReleaseMAAJID https://t.co/YXbsez8S54

— Maajid أبو عمّار (@MaajidNawaz) February 17, 2022

For eight long years, the Western media has turned a blind eye on the plight of Donbass, a separatist region of Eastern Ukraine that distanced itself in 2014 from Kiev following the ouster of the democratically elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych. What the people of Ukraine wound up with was a U.S.-supported puppet government with affiliations to neo-Nazi organizations.

That tragic ‘oversight’ has, undoubtedly, fueled the war now raging between Russian and Ukrainian forces. Very few people had heard anything about the Donetsk Peoples’ Republic (DPR) and the Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR), where the homes of innocent people in Eastern Ukraine, many of them Russian speakers, were being routinely shelled in the middle of the night as they slept. This indiscriminate slaughter, Moscow warned on numerous occasions, had all the potential to turn into genocide. But nobody listened because so few heard.

Nor did the Western media attempt to inform their audiences on the Minsk Protocol, a multinational agreement that sought to ensure an immediate ceasefire between Ukrainian forces and those of the Donbass. Not only were the conditions of the agreement regularly ignored, but various member states of NATO, covetous of Ukraine one day joining its ranks, began pouring armaments into the country. At the same time, Ukraine’s comedian-turned-president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, began openly talking about NATO membership, a clear red line for Russia, as would be witnessed soon enough.

Such a disturbing turn of events prompted Moscow to send the United States a draft security treaty that would require Washington to halt further eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), as well as deny accession to the military bloc to former Soviet republics. Additionally, with Ukraine specifically in mind, the Russian draft stipulates that NATO would not build military bases in former Soviet states that are not NATO members, nor develop military cooperation with them.

For all intent and purposes, Western audiences, completely in the dark as to the true nature of the Ukrainian standoff, have no idea to the back story that led to the events of February 24, 2022. Moreover, the media failed to provide them information on the attacks against Russians in Eastern Ukraine.

Had the American and European people been in possession of a media complex that was not wedded to political and corporate power, where journalists are encouraged to ask the uncomfortable questions regardless as to what political agenda is at stake, Moscow and NATO would likely have found other ways to resolve the standoff. But because the Western media found it more expedient to keep the world in the dark about the true nature of the crisis, Russia was left with just one option, and certainly not the most attractive one.

There’s a curious contradiction in the stance of the United States and its NATO allies. They are making out that Russian leader Vladimir Putin is the new Hitler and the Russian military operation ordered in Ukraine is but the beginning of disastrous aggression against Europe.

U.S. President Joe Biden has denounced Russia’s “invasion” of Ukraine. Britain’s Defense Minister Ben Wallace claims Putin has “lost his mind” and that the Russian military will next turn to attack Eastern European states. Wallace compared Putin with Hitler on the cusp of Nazi Germany’s war of conquest unleashed on the rest of Europe.

The analogy with Hitler and World War II is all over the Western media. The Washington Post headlined: “Putin’s attack on Ukraine echoes Hitler’s takeover of Czechoslovakia”. It goes on to say: The Nazi leader used similar tactics to dismember and devour Czechoslovakia before World War II.”

There are shrill calls to not “appease” Putin in the same way that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain is accused of being soft on Hitler in 1938 around the time that the Fuhrer was planning to invade Czechoslovakia.

The Washington Post piece is particularly ominous. It implies that Putin’s actions in Ukraine are prefiguring designs on the Baltic states and Poland in an attempt to revive Czarist Russia. Even more darkly, it postulates that the Holocaust inflicted by the Third Reich is potentially unfolding under Putin.

Yet, here is the contradiction. If Western leaders and media really believed in their Putin-Hitler analogy then why are they balking at going to war with Russia?

Biden is busy moving thousands of U.S. troops around NATO countries but insists that there will be no American forces deployed in Ukraine. Likewise, the British are refusing to commit any direct military support for the Kiev regime. Ben Wallace, the defense minister, said the imposition of a No-Fly Zone in Ukraine by British warplanes would mean an open confrontation with Russia, which, he said, was not what London wanted.

But their logic is not consistent. If they believe in the dire comparison of Putin and Hitler, Russia and Nazi Germany, then they should act decisively. But they are not.

Of course, it is possible that the Western powers fear that if they were to go to war with Russia then the outcome could be a nuclear cataclysm.

Another possibility for why they are not willing to go to war for the sake of defending Ukraine is simply this: their analogy of Putin-Hitler is downright false. And they know it.

Granted, Hitler did exploit the presence of ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland as justification for expansionism. He hailed the defense of their rights for invading the eastern strip of land adjacent to Germany.

On a superficial level, that move may resemble Putin’s declared recognition of the Donbass republics and defense of the ethnic Russian population. However, the big difference is that Russia’s argument is actually true, unlike Hitler’s pretense of defense in Sudetenland.

(Besides, it should also be noted that the U.S. and Britain are past-masters for cynically using “protection of human rights” as a pretext for their criminal imperialist wars, as in Libya, Syria and many other interventions. So all their posturing and pontificating have a deafening ring of hypocrisy and self-projection.)

It is a verifiable fact that the Russian population in Donbass was besieged and assailed for nearly eight years by the Kiev regime’s forces. If people in the West are unaware of that it is largely because their media chose to ignore the conflict. The Western media also concealed the nature of the Kiev regime and its Neo-Nazi brigades. The regime was brought to power in 2014 by an illegal coup orchestrated by the United States and other NATO powers. The new authorities were and are infested with Neo-Nazi politics and intense anti-Russia phobia. This is who the U.S., Britain and other NATO countries are sending weapons and trainers for.

The shelling of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics by Neo-Nazi brigades persisted for nearly eight years. Moscow vainly held on to the desire that the Kiev regime might implement the Minsk peace accords negotiated in 2014 and 2015. But it had become apparent that the accord would never be implemented. An internal solution was no longer tenable.

As the United States, Britain and other NATO powers flooded Ukraine with lethal weapons – as well as turning a blind eye by France and Germany to systematic violations of the Minsk deal – the Kiev regime was being given license to kill in the Donbass.

Given this background, Russia was forced to take action to defend its compatriots in southeast Ukraine. The hysterical warnings of an impending Russian invasion by Biden and Britain’s Boris Johnson were intended to do two things: incite the Kiev regime forces to ramp up violence; and to stifle Russia from acting because Moscow could then be accused of “invading” as the Western powers had “predicted”.

Moscow says it has no intention of occupying Ukraine. Its objective is to “demilitarize and denazify” the regime that the NATO bloc had installed in Kiev. The priority was to stop a genocide against the people in the Donetsk and Lugansk republics. Recent discoveries of mass graves show that this is not hyperbole, despite the flippant response from Western politicians and media.

If that’s Russia’s objective then it is justified and principled. It will also show that Western analogies of Nazi aggression on the rest of Europe and the Holocaust are grotesque fear-mongering.

A more accurate analogy to contemporary events is found in the Russian-Georgian war in the summer of 2008. The brief war erupted because the United States and other NATO allies incited Georgia to ramp up aggression in the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Putin ordered in Russian troops and quashed the NATO-Georgian offensive. Today, there is a modicum of peace in the Caucasus because Tbilisi backed off from the NATO conspiracy to harass Russia, and to come to terms with its separatist regions.

Will the Kiev regime, or whoever replaces it, likewise come to realize that the NATO-incited aggression against the Donbass and Russia is a path to destruction? A path that the NATO powers do not have the courage nor conviction to actually deploy on.

As ever, the bigger picture here is the steadfast refusal by the United States to commit to a peaceful security order in Europe with Russia. Making up false historical analogies as Western leaders and media are doing is preventing a rational, intelligent discussion to resolve deep-seated problems.