Remember the Maine: To Hell With Spain. My Lai. Weapons of Mass Destruction. Saddam Hussein will kill us all. Evil Assad. Gadaffi’s viagra. We came, we saw, he died. Abu Ghraib. We tortured some folks.

The USA and her closest allies have committed the most unspeakable war crimes in every corner of the earth, their own included. Don’t even get me going on the Philippines where the USMC hunted their quarry down like mountain rabbits, made necklaces of their ears and sang about it over half a century later during their Vietnamese extermination campaign.

But what about Bucha and media outlets like SCF, which are on the sanctions’ naughty list. Let’s take Bucha first. Atrocities were committed in Bucha; that much is clear and agreed upon, as too as are the only suspects, the Russian army and the Ukrainian militias allied against them; that too is clear. Let’s take both suspects in turn.

Retreating or frustrated armies sometimes massacre at will; the British Army have done so in Kenya, India and Ireland and the Americans have done it in Texas, Wounded Knee, Vietnam and Iraq. Therefore, using the British and American armies as our metrics, it is possible the Russians, rogue Russians, to use the Anglo-Americans’ get out of jail card, are the culprits.

The Russians, in their defense, would argue that theirs was an orderly and tactical retreat, that there are major time and other discrepancies with NATO’s accounts and there is evidence that those who were executed were Russian sympathizers.

For me, the jury is still out. I simply do not know because NATO and their Irish lapdogs deny me the means to know. They even want to shut me up, as evidenced by their sanctioning of this very outlet.

Though I cannot be called for a witness over Bucha, I could help appropriate authorities with their inquiries into similar atrocities in Syria, which were timed to allow NATO, to coin NATO’s own arch war criminal Curtis LeMay, bomb Syria back into the Stone Age.

In a previous article, I cited Robert Stuart’s forensic work about one such atrocity. Though I could cite many more, suffice to say that the Tlass family, who are central players in Stuart’s expose and who are also high priests in the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist network, were discovering evidence of Assad’s weapons of mass destruction wherever they looked. They and their NATO sponsors wanted an excuse to bomb Syria back to LeMay’s Stone Age and Assad’s alleged use of biological weapons, despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary, was the contrived excuse.

Cui bono? Who gains by the atrocities NATO uncovers? Not Gadaffi’s Libya, which was destroyed and its wealth stolen. Not Saddam’s Iraq, which was destroyed, its museums and gold vaults ransacked and its wealth stolen. And not the heroes of the Syrian Arab Army, who, at incalculable cost, have been resisting American occupation and American proxies for over a decade.

So, who benefits from Bucha? The usual suspects, who oppose Russian sovereignty, and mutually beneficial trading relations between Russia, Ukraine and Germany. That much is clear. As regards who pulled the Bucha triggers, we can never know until there is a full, independent inquiry, a process NATO have opposed in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Latin America and a host of African countries just as they now oppose it in Ukraine.

When all the evidence in Libya, in Syria, in Abu Ghraib or in Bucha point to the usual NATO suspects, we should arrest and imprison their political and military top brass as the serial war criminals that they are. But, as NATO confesses to nothing, we cannot arrest them; they’ve even promised a LeMay on the Netherlands if their puppets ever dare think of indicting one of their butchers. They just deny and lie, deny and lie, deny, deny, deny. Remember the Maine!

As my own gut feeling is that Ukrainian militias committed the Bucha atrocities, I am already being called a Chechen apologist, just as NATO’a media have previously labelled me a dangerous extremist (The Sunday Times), a controversial academic who writes for a think-tank run by a Vladimir Putin ally (Mail on Sunday), an Assad apologist… on an Interpol watchlist (Mail on Sunday), an Assad and Putin apologist (James Bickerton, political editor of Backbencher), an alleged member of a Putin-linked policy group (Daily Mail), a dangerous Assad apologist (Sunday Express), an apologist for tyrant Bashar Assad (Marco Giannangeli, Sunday Express), a dangerous extremist (Sunday Express), a notorious Assad apologist (Order-Order, a notorious far-right Tory website) and on and on.

British MP (and former SAS death squad officer) Crispin Blunt believes “Hayes’ views on the merits of NATO and Western values, and the democratic freedoms that NATO seeks to protect, will not give any comfort to those whose duty it is to protect the UK,” and NATO chemical and biological weapons’ apologist Colonel Hamish de Bretton Gordon has opined that “The fact that the leader of the (British) opposition was getting advice from someone (Hayes) who is peddling the Russian story is worrying and distressing.”

Clearly then, despite my experience and qualifications and despite the fact not an iota of my testimony can be credibly refuted, I am not a good egg. As I even write for this publication, which is under sanctions, I best say some words on this further evidence I am Putin’s puppet before a Ukrainian hangman comes knocking at my heavily fortified door.

I have written what I want to here and, though I have penned some explanatory notes to the editors, there has been no editorial interference and nor has there been any suggestions of topics to opine on. I have been a free agent, working to my own open and very transparent agendas, which I even adumbrated in prior articles.

Rap Sheet

As my NATO critics would then retort I am a useful idiot, let’s look at the rap sheet against this outlet.

1. SCF “engaged in foreign interference in the 2020 U.S. presidential election”.
2. SCF has “continued to make attempts to reach an audience.”
3. SCF posted content alleging that the United States was supporting Ukraine in order to “debilitate Russia.”
4. SCF media “spread many types of disinformation about international organizations, military conflicts, protests, and any divisive issues that they can exploit.”
5. One of the SCF’s main tactics is to publish Western fringe thinkers and conspiracy theorists, giving them wider reach, while trying to obscure the Russian origins of the journal. This tactic helps the site appear to be an organic voice within its target audience of Westerners.

Count 1 alleges that SCF tried to influence the U.S. Presidential elections where the CIA cancelled incumbent President Donald Trump from social media and banned the massive criminal activity in Ukraine of the challenger, Irish Joe Biden from being exposed. Given SCF’s very modest reach, these Russophobic charges are ridiculous and part of a wider NATO campaign of controlling and manipulating their war narratives. I would, however, welcome an informed, independent debate on this.

Counts 2 alleges that SCF tries to reach audiences. As that is what all sites try to do, the charge is laughably pathetic, all the more so if, like all media purportedly try to do, SCF is trying, as the rap sheet alleges, to hold NATO to account.

Count 3 alleges that SCF see the USA’s Ukrainian campaign as an attempt to debilitate Russia. Though NATO’s eastwards expansion and a host of articles, often from their own mouths, cataloguing the USA’s complicity in the Maidan coup and its efforts to stop Germany’s oil and gas co-operation with Russia show U.S. culpability at every turn, the USA continues its long record of denying and lying. Charge dismissed.

Count 4 charges SCF with spreading misinformation, perhaps the same types of misinformation that the USA employed to kickstart its direct and proxy wars with Spain, Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Libya, Syria and a host of Latin American countries. Although I would be happy to debate the USA anywhere on any of that, my own experience, as well as the evidence in front of all our eyes, is that the cancel culture of the USA and her proxies have closed down debate in all NATO’s media and university outlets. As the USA’s attacks on SCF and allied outlets follow that pattern, charge dismissed.

Though I earlier addressed count 5, a previous article of mine deliberately set out to destroy the oxymoronic conspiracy theory canard. Though there may be “fringe thinkers” writing for SCF, I am not aware of them, I am not one of them and it is not my role to identify, promote or defend them if they exist. My self-appointed role in all this is to put my own compasses in virtual print, my own small and almost insignificant contribution to building peace in our time and in times to come.

If I am involved in some perfidy here or elsewhere, then by all means debate me about it. If I have to be treated as a pariah, just as Jews objecting to joining Israel’s massively over-subscribed army are treated in Israel, that is ok as it would put me in good company.

The New Horizons group which, NATO’s Irish agents allege, got me to speak at one of their Tehran gatherings, might facilitate such a debate, even though, like so many others, they are under severe sanctions. Though I also allegedly conferred with some of Dugin’s Russian chums at that gathering, my main takeaway, which I relayed to the Iranian and Russian Ambassadors in Dublin, was of young Iranian women, who turned to me, imploring me to explain why everybody hates Iranians.

I certainly don’t hate Iranians because there is no mileage for me or interest in me in doing any such thing and, like many other visitors, I was struck by their friendliness (and good cooking). It is NATO, post Shah, that spreads that bile, the same hateful and bellicose bile it now spreads against Russia for the same sick reasons.

And then we have Putin and Asma Assad, today’s one dimensional James Bond villains. The caricature of Putin as an evil maniac who bathes in lambs’ blood and drinks all kinds of age-defying concoctions that would make Dracula wretch is funny, even though it is effective thanks to the West’s media, who feed unending streams of sport and porno to its docile men and whatever and whomsoever the British and American Royal Families are wearing or copulating with to their uncritical women.

And then we have the multicultural, multilingual cosmopolitan Asma Assad, Vogue Magazine’s Rose of the Desert before she went all Putin with baths in goats’ milk and new born babies’ blood. Give me a break.

Funny, ridiculous but very effective as these slurs are, outlets like SCF are needed to temper them and the deaths that emanate from them. That is my belief anyway. Here I stand. I cannot and will not do otherwise.

Not only do I share the controlled outrage of Russia’s former President Medvedev over how Russia’s Paralympians were treated but I would feel defiled if any of their tormentors came anywhere near me. However, I would relish the chance to debate them, preferably in Damascus, Moscow or Tehran.

But debate, which NATO’s censorship of SCF and hosts of other sites stifle, is not nearly enough. The graveyards of Damascus, Moscow and Tehran are full of those who were murdered as a result of the failure of NATO to choose war over dialogue and debate with those who represent their victims.

Because NATO’s shock and awe tactics, used so effectively to slaughter millions of Iraqis, has stalled in Ukraine, America is now tweaking its tactics for the same nefarious ends. Here in Ireland, as fully fledged Nazis continue to besiege their legation, four Russian diplomats are being expelled because Ireland’s secret service has recently determined they are spies.

Coincidentally, this is just when Germany, Lithuania and a host of America’s other European dependencies have discovered that vast numbers of Russian diplomats have also being spying on them and so they too are Moscow bound.

Dublin’s secret service should buy themselves a celebratory non-Russian vodka over that. This is the same secret service that was thoroughly infiltrated by the British Embassy as long ago in 1972 and that stands complicit in Dublin’s massive no-warning bombings, the biggest peace time bombings in either Britain or Ireland, that are still subject to government gagging orders, that occurred at that time and about which no debate is allowed, not even in the Irish Parliament, where Britain’s and now America’s secret service have long been represented.

This is the same Irish Parliament that the American funded Sinn Féin group want to make Russia’s Ambassador, before they ostentatiously expel him, listen to Ukraine’s president, a billionaire clown by profession, propound, for the umpteenth time, his scripted side of events.

Perhaps it is time to send in these NATO’s bankrolled clowns. After all, when George Galloway, a Scottish fox with a way with words, was let loose in Capitol Hill’s hen house, he had them all for breakfast when they tried to scapegoat him for their own war crimes in Iraq. Although Galloway indisputably won that round, NATO’s hucksters simply retreated and regrouped to fight anew in Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria and now Ukraine.

The simple truth of the matter is, whether Galloway says it, whether I say it, whether Southfront, New Horizons, SCF, the Queen of Sheba’s “Western fringe thinkers and conspiracy theorists” or one of Russia’s sanctioned cats say it, NATO cannot debate their crimes with anyone possessing Galloway’s linguistic proficiency and they cannot tolerate anyone from the Pope on his throne in Rome to the lowliest SCF scribe saying otherwise.

One only has to consider the plight of political prisoner Julian Assange to see the veracity of all that. Although Wikileaks still exists, whatever Chelsea Mannings are lurking in NATO’s long grass are all too aware of the Chinese kill the chicken maxim to pass on information to them. To spill the beans on NATO’s crimes is to join Assange in jail for an effective eternity.

As against that, Irish Catholic Bishop Donal Lamont, when faced with imprisonment by NATO’s Rhodesian regime, affirmed Dostoevksy’s Siberian experience that there is much to be said for the life of contemplation a prison cell offers; Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory express similar sentiments. NATO can ban, bully and block SCF but they cannot kill its message. The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice, the truth will out and the truth will set us free from NATO’s hellish forces.

The most powerful empire that has ever existed, which is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and continuously works to destroy any nation who challenges its global dominion, claims that it is in a global power struggle against “authoritarianism”.

* * *

Russia will lose the propaganda war on every front, at least in the west. It will lose every narrative dispute about alleged war crimes in the court of public opinion, whether those allegations are true or not. The US military is beatable, the US dollar is beatable, but the US propaganda machine is an unstoppable juggernaut.

* * *

Can’t believe we’ve been watching people lose their social media accounts for posting “misinformation” this whole time only for US officials to come right out and admit that they’ve been running an active disinformation campaign where they knowingly circulate lies about Russia.

A random guy says something on social media that differs from mainstream consensus? That’s misinformation; he needs to be de-platformed. The most powerful government in the world uses the most powerful media institutions in the world to circulate disinfo? That’s just fine normal stuff.

It’s actually really disturbing that US empire managers now feel comfortable just leaking the fact that they are blatantly lying to the public to win a psywar against Putin. It means they’re confident they can get the public to consciously consent to their rulers lying to them for their own good.

Three U.S. officials tell NBC News that U.S. claims based on “intelligence” on Russia were made up simply to “preempt the Russians”

One U.S. official: “It doesn’t have to be solid intelligence when we talk about it..” pic.twitter.com/Yv9udq05ex

— Camila (@camilapress) April 6, 2022

* * *

US officials: We are circulating disinformation in an infowar against Russia.

Me: Those US officials said they’re circulating disinformation in an infowar against Russia.

Liberals: Oh yeah right Caitlin, everything’s just a big, giant conspiracy!

* * *

Twitter consults with the US government when deciding what to censor, consults with US government-funded think tanks to determine what people see on the platform, conducts censorship in favor of US government narratives, and has the gall to label others “state-affiliated media”.

Twitter is state-affiliated media.

* * *

Don’t take life advice from unhappy people, don’t take creative advice from people who don’t create, don’t take career advice from people whose careers aren’t where you want yours to be, don’t take advice on the Ukraine war from people who supported the Iraq invasion.

* * *

People tell me, “Talk to Ukrainians!”

No matter how many Ukrainians I talk to, it will still be an objective fact that the US government and western media have a well-documented history of lying about every war, and that wanting direct hot warfare between nuclear superpowers is fucking insane.

* * *

It’s amazing how many arguments I run into that essentially boil down to “Your opinion is Russian.” It’s like the word “Russian” stopped referring to a nation and its population and now refers to some sort of metaphysical quality of one’s soul, similar to the word “Satanic”.

* * *

The other day a longtime lefty follower called me a bootlicker for saying the US military should not directly attack the Russian military in Ukraine. Opposing US military interventionism and World War 3 is bootlicking now. War propaganda is turning people’s brains into soup.

* * *

The agenda to create a one world government is not some hidden conspiracy involving secret societies and shadowy figures with Jewish surnames. The US empire is openly working to unite the planet under a single power structure which effectively functions as one government.

* * *

Washington DC is the hub of the imperial political machine, Virginia is the hub of the imperial war machine, California is the hub of the imperial propaganda machine.

* * *

In the end we’re just a confused species who entered into an awkward developmental transition phase because our brains evolved too fast.

We wound up with the ability to think abstract thoughts but without the wisdom to refrain from identifying with them. With the ability to invent nuclear weapons but without the wisdom to refrain from building them. The ability to conquer our ecosystem without the wisdom to refrain from doing so. To write vast tomes of philosophy that contain not one line telling us how to feel content in our own bodies, on our own home planet. To construct entire belief systems that are utterly useless for living in harmony with what is.

I’m sure birds and whales went through awkward evolutionary transition phases as well before they turned into the graceful flyers and swimmers they are today. Their early ancestors probably looked downright ridiculous for a while. It’s just that their transitions didn’t involve giant prefrontal cortices in their skulls that make childbirth painful and could easily give rise to the end of all life on earth.

The birth of a human baby is difficult due to the size of our enormous, rapidly evolved brains relative to the more slowly evolved pelvic bone. The birth of a sane humanity will be difficult for similar reasons.

I do believe we have the ability to make the jump from this awkward transition phase to become a truly conscious species. But it looks like if we make it, it’s going to be by the skin of our omnivore teeth.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The apparent mass murder of civilians in Bucha and other locations in Ukraine has enraged Western public opinion against Russia.

Russia is facing mounting accusations of genocide and its president Vladimir Putin and other senior Russian officials are condemned as war criminals to be prosecuted in international tribunals similar to the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders.

Western media are blaring like foghorns while Russian media and other independent outlets are banned or stifled by the toxic anti-Russia political climate. In this grossly imbalanced situation, propaganda is amplified manyfold. There is a sense that the wholesale shutdown of media prior to the latest alleged massacres in Ukraine is all part of the orchestration.

When the Kiev regime and Western media warn of more massacres to follow in Ukraine that is a sinister prediction.

There are now unprecedented calls for Russia to be denied its seat as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, a seat it has occupied along with having veto powers since the end of the Second World War (prior to 1991 as the Soviet Union). Russia’s veto power, along with China’s, has been a constant bane of the United States and its Western allies who have complained of Moscow’s obstructionism to their foreign wars and other intrigues.

Sanctions are being wielded with unprecedented hostility. The United States and European Union are ratcheting up economic and diplomatic sanctions against Moscow in an unbridled attempt to destroy its economy. The blockade of Russia’s economy would normally be seen as an act of war by the West.

U.S. President Joe Biden has ordered more anti-tank Javelin missiles and other weapons to be sent to Ukraine.

Peace talks underway between Ukraine and Russia are coming under intense pressure to collapse amid the heightened vilification of Russia for “war crimes”. Thus, the war in Ukraine is likely to be prolonged. Notably, the Bucha massacre and other alleged atrocities emerged just when Ukrainian and Russian negotiators appeared to be making progress last week on agreeing to a peace settlement that would involve Ukraine declaring neutrality and renouncing future NATO membership.

What’s more, any attempt by Russia to contest the allegations is dismissed with a torrent of derision and contempt. Normal diplomatic relations have been blocked. A request by its UN envoy Vasily Nebenzia to convene an emergency meeting by the Security Council to discuss the killing of civilians in Ukraine was rejected out of hand by Britain which currently holds the presidency of the council.

Russian diplomats are being expelled pell-mell from Western countries en masse. This week, several European states have banned dozens more Russian envoys.

Russian media outlets have been banned outright across social media channels and the internet across the European Union and Britain. One has to use arcane proxy servers to access such media. Journalists, analysts and academics who question Western media claims are scorned as being “apologists” for a “criminal regime”.

The information war has evolved over many years. Previously, the outpouring of condemnations against Russia in Western media could at least be countervailed with critical, alternative media. When Western media tried to incriminate Russia over the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner over Ukraine in July 2014, there were plenty of critical sources to convincingly challenge those allegations and direct attention to the Western-backed Kiev regime as being culpable.

When Western media cried foul over the alleged Novichok poisoning assassination bids on the Skripals in England in 2018 and again on CIA-provocateur Alexei Navalny in 2020, there was a healthy public skepticism borne out of critical alternative media outlets.

Now though the information war has been optimized by the near-complete shutdown of alternative media. The Western media narrative has no competitor. The media foghorns can blare all they want without hardly a dissenting voice tolerated, let alone heard.

It’s all the more vital to retain a skeptical mind in these times of untrammeled bias where Western news media and government departments openly quote the Nazi Azov Battalion as credible sources of information.

When Russian forces withdrew from Bucha and other locations near the capital Kiev on March 30 they did so as a concession to facilitate the peace negotiations. The mayor of Bucha Anatoly Fedoruk in a video on March 31 celebrated the departure of the Russian military but he did not mention anything about atrocities. Now he is telling Western media outlets about alleged widespread killings.

The images of corpses strewn on streets only emerged on and after April 2, two days after Russian forces withdrew. It was reported that Azov Battalion entered Bucha and locations quickly after Russian forces pulled out. The Azov fighters were openly vowing to carry out “cleansing operations” which can be taken as a grim reference to dealing with people deemed to have collaborated with the Russian military during their brief occupation.

Several analysts cited here have debunked the widely circulated video footage that was put out by the Kiev regime forces purportedly showing corpses of people executed by Russian troops. The videos have strange anomalies such as supposedly dead bodies moving, stage-managed scenes, and the use of attractive female models purporting to be anti-Russian fighters. Cadavers that are supposedly weeks old are actually seen to belong to people who were killed in recent days, quite possibly after the Russian forces withdrew. Furthermore, some of the corpses are shown to have white armbands indicating that they were pro-Russian supporters. That suggests that the real perpetrators of the mass killings were the Azov Battalion and other NATO-backed regiments.

Russia categorically denies the alleged violations, claiming that the videos are part of a false-flag provocation to criminalize Russia in the eyes of the world. Would Russia be so stupidly reckless to commit such crimes?

The same manufactured media methods have been used in the alleged bombing by Russia of the maternity hospital in Mariupol on March 9 and a public theater in the same city. Videos released by one side are broadcast unquestioningly by Western media along with ready-made condemnations by Western leaders. This is reminiscent of the media model used by the NATO-sponsored Jihadists and White Helmets in Syria.

The big difference now, however, is that Western propaganda has near-total dominance because all other critical, independent sources have been silenced or blackballed.

The criminalization of independent journalism as the persecution of Julian Assange prefigured is now bearing evil fruit.

In an appearance on the MSNBC show Velshi, The Modern War Institute’s John Spencer explicitly advocated direct US military conflict with Russia due to allegations of war crimes in the Ukrainian city of Bucha.

“I’m ready to commit at this moment — unlike I was before this day — to put people in direct contact with Russia, to stop Russia,” Spencer said. “Call it peacekeeping. Call it what you will. We have to do more than provide weapons. And by ‘we,’ I mean the United States. Yes, we’ll do it as a coalition with lots of other people, but we are the example. So put boots on the ground, send weapons directly at Russia.”

Notice the bizarre verbal gymnastics being used by Spencer to obfuscate the fact that he is advocating a hot war with a nuclear superpower: “put people in direct contact with Russia,” “send weapons directly at Russia”. Who talks like that? He’s calling for the US military to fire upon the Russian military, he’s just saying it really weird.

To be clear this isn’t just some arms industry-funded think tanker saying this; The Modern War Institute is part of the Department of Military Instruction for the United States Military Academy, which is operated directly by the Pentagon.

Asked by the show’s host Ali Velshi what he thought of warnings that direct military confrontation with Russia could lead to nuclear war, Spencer said, “It is a huge risk, I understand that. But today is different.”

Velshi himself was much more to the point than his guest, both online and on social media.

“We are past the point of sanctions and strongly-worded condemnations and the seizing of oligarchs’ megayachts,” Velshi told his MSNBC audience. “If this is not the kind of moment that the United Nations and NATO and the UN and the G-20 and the Council of Europe and the G-7 were made for, what was the point of these alliances if not to stop this? The world cannot sit by as Vladimir Putin continues this reign of terror.”

“The turning point for the west and NATO will come when the sun rises over Kyiv on Sunday, and the war crimes against civilian non-combatants becomes visible to all,” Velshi said on Twitter over the weekend. “There is no more time for prevarication. If ‘never again’ means anything, then this is the time to act.”

Asked what specifically he meant by this, Velshi clarified that he was advocating “Direct military involvement.”

“Lines have been crossed and war crimes have been committed by Putin that make direct military intervention something NATO now must seriously consider,” Velshi added.

Hi Caitlin. Thank for your response. I tweeted because the choice of letting Russia invade a sovereign country & nuclear war is not binary. We cannot possible subscribe to a world order that abhors authoritarian and war crimes, yet allow this to happen.

— Ali Velshi (@AliVelshi) April 3, 2022

When I called Velshi a fucking lunatic for expressing these views (to my mind the only sane response to such madness), he argued that going to war with Russia for Ukraine would not necessarily lead to nuclear war, claiming that “A no fly zone is not so different from the endless supply of weaponry the west is sending in to Ukraine.”

These are not sane or acceptable things for mainstream pundits to be telling people. Directly attacking the Russian military would indeed risk unleashing a chain of rapid escalations that could easily lead to full-scale nuclear war; there would be far too many small, moving parts for this to be anywhere remotely close to predictable or controllable. A no-fly zone over Ukraine would immediately put NATO powers in direct hot war with Russia, which is in fact completely different from shipping weapons to Ukrainian forces.

The fact that a nuclear superpower cannot be regarded in the same way as a nation without nukes has been basic, common sense orthodoxy for all major powers since Stalin got the bomb. This is not some kind of advanced esoteric understanding that you can only grasp if you’ve been studying this stuff for years; as far as I know children are still learning about the history of nuclear weapons and Mutually Assured Destruction in grade school. This isn’t something you should have to explain to grown adults, much less influential mainstream news media pundits.

But it’s becoming more and more common. The line that we’re already in World War 3 and need to begin acting accordingly is showing up more and more often. The idea that NATO powers might be able to get away with attacking the Russian military in Ukraine without sparking a nuclear exchange is fast becoming its own genre of western foreign policy punditry, and that trend looks to accelerate with the latest (arguably pretty dubious) claims of Russian atrocities in this war.

Already we’ve got Velshi’s cries for World War 3 joined by the likes of Human Rights Foundation Chairman Garry Kasparov, who apparently spent so long training to beat a machine that he turned into one:

You’ve also got opinion makers in outlets like The New York Times telling people that “The United States and NATO should be less deferential to Mr. Putin’s attempt to wield the threat of nuclear weapons — not only for the sake of supporting Ukraine but also to ensure global geopolitical stability in the future.”

There’s also the galling White House press conferences in which ambitious reporters aggressively demand to know why the Biden administration isn’t doing more to escalate against Russia, as clear an illustration as you could ask for of the fact that the mainstream press are only allowed to be pushy and confrontational with US government officials when they’re demanding more bloodshed.

As we’ve discussed previously, even if these increasingly loud calls for hot war between nuclear superpowers don’t immediately succeed, what they do is push the Overton window of mainstream discourse all the way over toward the most warmongering extreme possible so that calls for more escalation seem moderate and calls for de-escalation look like extremist apologia for Vladimir Putin. In the very best-case scenario they leave people far more open to consenting to far more nuclear brinkmanship than any thinking person should ever consent to.

This is wild pic.twitter.com/CNZZ1wVzcz

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) March 16, 2022

This is not okay. It is not okay for them to do this to us. It is not okay for them to normalize the idea of escalations that could easily end humankind. That is the most insane position that any person could possibly take. More insane than Nazism, or any other extremist ideology you could think of. Supporting actions that may lead to human extinction makes these people enemies of our entire species.

Ukraine is still accepting foreign volunteers. If these omnicidal war sluts are so horny for “direct military involvement” against Russia, I wish they would just get on a plane and go do it themselves without trying to drag all of humanity into it with them.

You want direct military involvement? Fine. Go do it yourself. Be the direct military involvement you want to see in the world.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

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.

There is no Nazi presence in Ukraine, the Azov Battalion are merely excellent fighters, and Russian claims of denazifying the regime are cynical falsifications to justify aggression, according to the BBC.

In a sneaking way, one has to admire the aplomb of the British Broadcasting Corporation which promotes itself as one of the world’s “most trusted” news brands. While it smears and sneers at Russian news media as “state-owned” and “Kremlin propaganda machines”, the BBC is itself 100 percent state-owned and totally aligned with British government and NATO propaganda aims. That propaganda includes distortion and fabrication presented with the arrogant assertion of being independent news information.

Propaganda, old chap, is something that the Russians do. But not the British Bullshit Corporation. Oh no, heaven forbid, we’re British after all… fair play, objective, cricket, stiff-upper-lip, London Calling, fight them on the beaches, and so on, all the self-admiring epithets of a self-declared benign empire.

And so in a recent broadcast, the BBC’s ever-so smug Ros Atkins had the brass neck to assure viewers that there were no Nazis in Ukraine. He said it was a myth concocted by the Kremlin as a pretext for its military intervention in Ukraine. Atkins downplayed the Azov Battalion as having some far-right members who were negligible. He also claimed that the Azov Battalion was formed to defend Ukraine from Russia’s aggression that began in 2014. The BBC’s distortion of the 2014 coup in Kiev is astounding.

The BBC’s barefaced denial of Azov and others Nazi regiments in the Ukrainian military stands in jarring contrast to the well-documented facts. Images of torchlit processions honoring Stepan Bandera and others Ukrainian SS collaborators, images of Nazi flags, Nazi salutes, and Nazi insignia are abundant. Azov leaders like Andrey Biletsky and Olena Semenyaka openly pay homage to the Third Reich.

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky may be Jewish and purportedly have relatives who died in the Holocaust. But he is owned by the Nazi brigades. His PR value as a Jewish face for the regime is a big asset (thanks CIA, MI6!). But it doesn’t change the fact that the Ukrainian military is a fascist force that waged a terror war against the Russian-speaking people of Southeast Ukraine for eight years since 2014 – killing 14,000 – until it was stopped by Russia’s intervention on February 24.

No wonder the BBC is covering for Azov when the British Ministry of Defense is training and arming their fighters, along with other NATO states.

In the same BBC broadcast, Atkins told viewers that the Russian army had bombed the Mariupol maternity hospital and the Mariupol theater resulting in civilian deaths. No evidence, no images of dead bodies. Just assumption of trust us, because, after all, “this is the BBC”.

Here the corporation goes from denial about the Azov and Nazis to actually promoting their propaganda lies. That’s because the BBC is employing and relying on Ukrainian journalists who are affiliated with far-right politics.

Civilians fleeing from Mariupol have testified to independent news organizations that the Azov fighters detonated both the hospital and the theater in a false-flag operation designed to smear Russia and to bolster NATO support for the Ukrainian regime.

What the BBC is doing here is echoed by U.S. media like CNN, NBC, and others. It is also a replay of how they reported on Syria where they accused the Syrian army and Russian allies of bombing civilians. The reality was that towns and cities like Aleppo were being held under siege by Western-backed mercenaries and their propagandists in the White Helmets who carried out false-flag atrocities. The BBC would tell viewers that the Syrian army and Russia were killing civilians when in reality the civilians were being liberated from a reign of terror. The same is happening with the Azov and other Nazis in Ukraine whom the BBC, CNN, etc., are whitewashing and promoting.

Ask yourself: why does the BBC no longer report from Syria? What about all those hysterical claims of war crimes against civilians when the Syrian army and Russia were liberating towns and cities? Why hasn’t the BBC followed up to interview Syrian civilians to find out how they feel about being liberated? The same BBC “journalists” are too busy spinning the next propaganda war for the British government and NATO in Ukraine.

This year marks the centennial anniversary of the “Beeb” as it is affectionately known. It was founded by the British government as a propaganda service. Earlier names included the British Empire Service. Up until recently, members of staff were vetted by MI5, the British state intelligence service. They no doubt still are, only now even more hush-hush covertly. By law, every British household must buy a TV license (£159 per year) to support the financing of the BBC. Failure to do so results in criminal prosecution and even jail.

The Orwellian reality of the Beeb should make it the world’s “most busted” propaganda outlet. But then again that’s what is so Orwellian about the BBC. It still retains a wholesome image for many people around the world. Even when the whitewashing of Nazis in Ukraine is its latest star turn.

It’s hard to believe that the last president spent his term pouring weapons into Ukraine, shredding treaties with Russia and ramping up cold war escalations against Moscow which helped lead us directly to the extraordinarily dangerous situation we now find ourselves in, and yet mainstream liberals spent his entire administration screaming that he was a Kremlin puppet.

A lot of anti-empire commentary is rightly going into criticizing how the Obama administration paved the way to this conflict in Ukraine with its role in the 2014 coup and support for Kyiv’s war against Donbass separatists. But what’s getting lost in all this, largely because Trumpites have been using their mainstream numbers to loudly amplify criticisms of the role of the Obama and Biden administrations in this mess, is what happened between those two presidencies which was just as crucial in getting us here.

Though it’s been scrubbed from mainstream liberal history, it was actually the Trump administration that began the US policy of arming Ukraine in the first place. Obama had refused forceful demands from neocons and liberal hawks to do so because he feared it would provoke an attack by Russia.

In a 2015 article titled “Defying Obama, Many in Congress Press to Arm Ukraine”, The New York Times reported that “So far, the Obama administration has refused to provide lethal aid, fearing that it would only escalate the bloodshed and give President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a pretext for further incursions.”

For years, neocons and arms industry darlings like @RepAdamSchiff have sought to re-arm Ukraine and escalate the conflict in Donbas. By stirring up Russiagate, they finally got their deadly deal. My latest: https://t.co/pyJB4btOSk

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 8, 2018

It wasn’t until the Trump presidency that those weapons began pouring into Ukraine, and boy howdy are we looking at some “further incursions” now. This change occurred either because Trump was a fully willing participant in the agenda to ramp up aggressions against Moscow, or because he was politically pressured into playing along with that agenda by the collusion narrative which had its origins at every step in the US intelligence cartel, or because of some combination of the two.

In all the world-shaping news stories we’ve been experiencing lately, it’s easy to forget how the narrative that the Kremlin had infiltrated the highest levels of the US government dominated news coverage and political discourse for years on end. But in light of the fact that today’s major headlines now revolve around that exact same foreign government, this fact is probably worth revisiting.

The most important thing to understand about the Trump-Russia collusion narrative is that it began with western intelligence agencies, was sustained by western intelligence agencies, and in the end resulted in cold war escalations against a government long targeted by western intelligence agencies. It was the US intelligence cartel who initiated the still completely unproven and severely plot hole-riddled claim that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Trump. It was a “former” MI6 operative who produced the notorious and completely discredited Steele Dossier which birthed the narrative that Trump colluded with the Kremlin to steal the 2016 election. It was the FBI who spied on the Trump campaign claiming it was investigating possible ties to Russia. It was the US intelligence cartel which produced, and then later walked back, the narrative that Russia was paying Taliban-linked fighters to kill allied occupiers in Afghanistan which was leveraged by Democrats to demand Trump escalate further against Putin. It was even a CIA officer who just so happened to be in the right place at the right time that kicked off the flimsy impeachment narrative that Trump had suspended arms deliveries to Ukraine.

Every step of the way the mass media was fed reports by intelligence operatives and by elected officials sharing pieces of information they’d been told by intelligence operatives about potential indications of a conspiracy between Trump’s circle and the Russian government, which often faceplanted in the most humiliating ways as subsequent revelations debunked them. Day after day some new “BOMBSHELL” media report would surface tying some obscure Trump underling so some Russian oligarch in some way, the outlet which published it would be rewarded with millions of clicks, only to have it fizzle into a flat nothing pizza within a few days.

25 Times Trump Has Been Dangerously Hawkish On Russia

My response to @CNN‘s ridiculous and profoundly dishonest article “25 times Trump was soft on Russia”.https://t.co/nxX7gHC14m

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) November 18, 2019

Day after day mainstream liberals were promised major revelations which would lead to the entire Trump family being dragged from the White House in chains, and day after day those promises failed to deliver. But what did happen during that time was a mountain of US cold war escalations against Moscow, a very good illustration of the immense difference between narrative and fact.

Trump supporters like to believe that the Deep State tried to remove their president because he was such a brave populist warrior leading a people’s revolution against their Satanic globalist agendas, and surely there were some individual goons within their ranks who would have loved to see him gone. But in reality the major decision makers in the US intelligence cartel never intended to remove Trump from office. They’d have known from their own intel that the Mueller investigation wouldn’t turn up any evidence of a conspiracy with the Russian government, and they’d have known impeachment wouldn’t remove him because they know how to count Senate seats. Russiagate was never about removing Trump, it was about making sure Trump played along with their regime change plans for Moscow and manufacturing mainstream consent for the escalations we’re seeing today.

And now here we are. Joe Lauria has an excellent new article out for Consortium News titled “Biden Confirms Why the US Needed This War” which lays out the evidence that the Ukraine invasion was deliberately provoked to facilitate the longstanding agenda to oust Putin and “ultimately restore a Yeltsin-like puppet to Moscow.” The US could easily have prevented this war with a little bit of diplomacy and a few low-cost concessions, but instead it chose to provoke a war that could then be used to manufacture international consensus for unprecedented acts of economic warfare against Russia with the goal of effecting regime change.

Biden Confirms Why the US Needed This War https://t.co/k8YWZ9ylQH

— Consortium News (@Consortiumnews) March 27, 2022

Lauria writes:

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

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

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden said on Saturday at the Royal Castle in Warsaw.

This was all planned years in advance. Long before Biden’s presidency, and long before Trump’s. It is not a coincidence that we spent years being bombarded with anti-Russia propaganda in the lead-up to a massive confrontation with that same government. There’s no connection between the discredited allegation that Trump was a secret Kremlin agent and Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, yet the mainstream anti-Russia hysteria manufactured by the former is flowing seamlessly into mainstream opposition of the latter.

This is because this was all planned well in advance. We’re where we’re at now because the US empire brought us here intentionally.

caityjohnstone.medium.com