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.

Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who has gained international respect for his independence and integrity as a commentator on conflicts and foreign relations. This week, he was banned on the Twitter social media platform for challenging Western claims of a massacre in Bucha, Ukraine, allegedly carried out by Russian troops. Moscow denies the claims, as have other independent analysts who point to evidence that the incident was a false-flag provocation perpetrated by NATO-backed Ukrainian Nazi regiments to undermine Russia internationally and bolster Western objectives. It is a foreboding sign of the times that Ritter should be banned for daring to question dubious narratives. (He was later reinstated following a public outcry against censorship.)

In the following interview for Strategic Culture Foundation, he makes the crucial point that Russia’s intervention in Ukraine is exposing the involvement of the U.S. and NATO in the training and weaponizing of that country’s dominant Nazi regiments. That is why Western media have been so vehement in trying to distort the conflict and blame Russia. The truth about Western dirty involvement in Ukraine would be too much to bear for the Western public.

When Ritter served as a UN weapons inspector in Iraq during the 1990s he later challenged Western media and government claims that Iraq was harboring WMDs. Those claims were used as a pretext for the U.S.-British war on Iraq launched in 1993 that cost over one million lives, destroyed a nation, created millions of displaced and millions of casualties, as well as spawned international terrorism. It later turned out that the WMD claims were based on deliberate lies for which no Western leader has been held accountable. Scott Ritter was vindicated in his warnings against that war and it is one reason why he is widely respected among international public opinion.

Ritter is a critical commentator on U.S. conflicts and foreign relations. He is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the Soviet Union implementing nuclear arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and as a UN inspector in Iraq (1991-98) overseeing the disarmament of weapons of mass destruction. He is the author of Scorpion King: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump (Clarity Press, 2020).

Interview

Question: Do you think that Russia has a just cause in launching its “special military operation” in Ukraine on February 24?

Scott Ritter: I believe Russia has articulated a cognizable claim of preemptive collective self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter. The threat posed by NATO expansion, and Ukraine’s eight-year bombardment of the civilians of the Donbass fall under this umbrella.

Question: Do you think Russia has legitimate concerns about the Pentagon sponsoring biological weapons programs in laboratories in Ukraine?

Scott Ritter: The Pentagon denies any biological weapons program, but admits biological research programs on Ukrainian soil. Documents captured by Russia have allegedly uncovered the existence of programs the components of which could be construed as having offensive biological warfare applications. The U.S. should be required to explain the purpose of these programs.

Question: What do you make of allegations in Western media that Russian troops committed war crimes in Bucha and other Ukrainian cities? It is claimed that Russian forces summarily executed civilians.

Scott Ritter: All claims of war crimes must be thoroughly investigated, including Ukrainian allegations that Russia killed Ukrainian civilians in Bucha. However, the data available about the Bucha incident does not sustain the Ukrainian claims, and as such, the media should refrain from echoing these claims as fact until a proper investigation of the evidence is conducted, either by the media, or unbiased authorities.

Question: Do you think the alleged Russian bombing of a hospital and an art theater in Mariupol were false-flag provocations?

Scott Ritter: Both locations are available for detailed forensic examination that would either confirm or refute Ukrainian allegations that these locations were struck by Russian aerial bombs. Other data, such as the existence of any NATO radar data that would put Russian aircraft over these two locations at the time of the alleged attack, should be collected. A detailed forensic examination of each site would go a long way in proving or disproving the Ukrainian claims through the collection of weapons fragments and the evaluation of environmental samples which would show the chemical composition of any explosive used, thereby allowing a better idea of what weapon or explosive was used to destroy the sites.

Question: Western governments and mainstream media have denigrated Russian objectives to “demilitarize and deNazify” Ukraine. The West says Russia has invented or grossly exaggerated these problems as a pretext for invasion. Do you think this Western denialism is because it doesn’t want to acknowledge that Russia may indeed have legitimate concerns, and secondly that to acknowledge would mean admitting that the West is part of the problem in the current war?

Scott Ritter: The irony is that the West had thoroughly documented the extent of the Nazi ideology in Ukraine’s civil, political, and military structures during and after the 2014 Maidan coup. This documented reality was deliberately obscured by the same sources that had previously documented its existence once the Russian invasion occurred. To acknowledge the existence of this odious ideology by NATO would require NATO to acknowledge the role it played in training and equipping Azov regiment personnel since 2015. The Russian documentation of its ongoing de-Nazification effort in Ukraine is a source of continual embarrassment to NATO, as it exposes the scope and scale of NATO’s role in empowering the militarization of Nazi ideology in Ukraine.

Question: For about four months before the Russian intervention in Ukraine, the Biden administration was asserting non-stop that Moscow was planning an invasion. Do you think this is a case of great intelligence on the part of Washington or the culmination of provocation by Washington resulting in Russian military action in Ukraine?

Scott Ritter: We now know that the U.S. intelligence community under the Biden administration is committed to a policy of haphazardly “declassifying” intelligence for the purpose of shaping public opinion (so-called “getting ahead of the story”). There is no evidence that the intelligence regarding potential Russian military action was based upon anything other than politicized speculation derived from a crude analysis of Russian military dispositions void of any context. Any genuine intelligence assessment regarding the timing of any Russian military action would have incorporated the domestic political imperative of getting Duma [Russian parliamentary] approval for the deployment of Russian forces outside the borders of Russia, which carries with it the requirement of a cognizable justification for this military action under the UN Charter. This required political steps such as Donetsk and Lugansk declaring independence, and then petitioning the Russian parliament to recognize this independence, so that Russia could legitimately invoke Article 51. None of these factors was knowable when the Biden administration was issuing its warnings of imminent attack, thereby certifying the “intelligence” as being derived from fact-free speculation, and not intelligence at all.

Question: The Western media are reporting that the Russian military operation in Ukraine is floundering because it has not over-run Ukraine entirely. As a military expert, how do you see the Russian operation proceeding?

Scott Ritter: Russia is fighting a very difficult campaign hampered by its own constraint designed to limit civilian casualties and damage to infrastructure and the fact that Ukraine possesses a very well-trained military that is well led and equipped. Russia deployed some 200,000 troops in support of this operation. They are facing some 600,000 Ukrainian forces. The first phase of the Russian operation was designed to shape the battlefield to Russia’s advantage while diminishing the size and capacity of the Ukrainian ability to wage large-scale conflict. The second phase is focused on destroying the main Ukrainian force concentration in eastern Ukraine. Russia is well on its way to accomplishing this task.

Question: Do you see danger from Ukraine being turned into a proxy war by the United States and NATO partners against Russia in a way that attempts to repeat the West’s covert war in Syria or the Afghanistan war (1979-89) with the Soviet Union? There are reports of foreign legions being sent to Ukraine via NATO countries. Do you think there is a Western plan to embroil Russia in a proxy war that is aimed at sapping Russia politically, economically, and militarily?

Scott Ritter: The Ukrainian conflict is a proxy war, but one which Russia is poised to win decisively. While there appears to be a NATO/western plan to embroil Russia in a “new Afghanistan”, I don’t see any risk of this conflict dragging on for more than a few more weeks at the most before Russia accomplishes a strategic victory over Ukraine.

Question: There is an arrogant assumption among Western governments that they can impose crippling economic sanctions on Russia in a similar way to what they did on Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea among others. But would you agree that if Russia begins to impose its own counter-sanctions by restricting oil and gas exports then the Western states may end up reaping a whirlwind that is devastating to their societies?

Scott Ritter: Russia was warned well in advance about the scope and scale of U.S.-led sanctions that would be imposed if Russia were to invade Ukraine. Russia has prepared its own counter-sanction strategy which will not only defeat the Western sanctions but further strengthen Russia’s economy by decoupling it from the West and Western control/influence. We see evidence of the effectiveness of this counter-campaign as the Russian ruble is strengthened, the Russian stock market enjoys positive traction, and Europe and the U.S. flounder economically. The West has sown the wind in sanctioning Russia; Russia will not reap the whirlwind.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Historical leader of Ukrainian nationalists: Stepan Bandera

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maidan coup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Ramzy BAROUD

Much has been said and written about media bias and double standards in the West’s response to the Russia-Ukraine war, when compared with other wars and military conflicts across the world, especially in the Middle East and the Global South. Less obvious is how such hypocrisy is a reflection of a much larger phenomenon which governs the West’s relationship to war and conflict zones.

Like every NATO-led war since the inception of the alliance in 1949, these wars resulted in widespread devastation and tragic death tolls.

On March 19, Iraq commemorated the 19th anniversary of the US invasion which killed, according to modest estimates, over a million Iraqis. The consequences of that war were equally devastating as it destabilized the entire Middle East region, leading to various civil and proxy wars. The Arab world is reeling under that horrific experience to this day.

Also, on March 19, the eleventh anniversary of the NATO war on Libya was commemorated and followed, five days later, by the 23rd anniversary of the NATO war on Yugoslavia. Like every NATO-led war since the inception of the alliance in 1949, these wars resulted in widespread devastation and tragic death tolls.

None of these wars, starting with the NATO intervention in the Korean Peninsula in 1950, have stabilized any of the warring regions. Iraq is still as vulnerable to terrorism and outside military interventions and, in many ways, remains an occupied country. Libya is divided among various warring camps, and a return to civil war remains a real possibility.

Yet, enthusiasm for war remains high, as if over seventy years of failed military interventions have not taught us any meaningful lessons. Daily, news headlines tell us that the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, Spain or some other western power have decided to ship a new kind of ‘lethal weapons‘ to Ukraine. Billions of dollars have already been allocated by Western countries to contribute to the war in Ukraine.

In contrast, very little has been done to offer platforms for diplomatic, non-violent solutions. A handful of countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia have offered mediation or insisted on a diplomatic solution to the war, arguing, as China’s foreign ministry reiterated on March 18, that “all sides need to jointly support Russia and Ukraine in having dialogue and negotiation that will produce results and lead to peace.”

Though the violation of the sovereignty of any country is illegal under international law, and is a stark violation of the United Nations Charter, this does not mean that the only solution to violence is counter-violence. This cannot be truer in the case of Russia and Ukraine, as a state of civil war has existed in Eastern Ukraine for eight years, harvesting thousands of lives and depriving whole communities from any sense of peace or security. NATO’s weapons cannot possibly address the root causes of this communal struggle. On the contrary, they can only fuel it further.

If more weapons were the answer, the conflict would have been resolved years ago. According to the BBC, the US has already allocated $2.7bn to Ukraine over the last eight years, long before the current war. This massive arsenal included “anti-tank and anti-armor weapons … US-made sniper (rifles), ammunition and accessories.”

The speed with which additional military aid has poured into Ukraine following the Russian military operations on February 24 is unprecedented in modern history. This raises not only political or legal questions, but moral questions as well – the eagerness to fund war and the lack of enthusiasm to help countries rebuild.

After 21 years of US war and invasion of Afghanistan, resulting in a humanitarian and refugee crisis, Kabul is now largely left on its own. Last September, the UN refugee agency warned that “a major humanitarian crisis is looming in Afghanistan”, yet nothing has been done to address this ‘looming’ crisis, which has greatly worsened since then.

The amassing of NATO weapons in Ukraine, as was the case of Libya, will likely backfire. In Libya, NATO’s weapons fueled the country’s decade long civil war.

Afghani refugees are rarely welcomed in Europe. The same is true for refugees coming from Iraq, Syria, Libya, Mali and other conflicts that directly or indirectly involved NATO. This hypocrisy is accentuated when we consider international initiatives that aim to support war refugees, or rebuild the economies of war-torn nations.

Compare the lack of enthusiasm in supporting war-torn nations with the West’s unparalleled euphoria in providing weapons to Ukraine. Sadly, it will not be long before the millions of Ukrainian refugees who have left their country in recent weeks become a burden on Europe, thus subjected to the same kind of mainstream criticism and far-right attacks.

While it is true that the West’s attitude towards Ukraine is different from its attitude towards victims of western interventions, one has to be careful before supposing that the ‘privileged’ Ukrainains will ultimately be better off than the victims of war throughout the Middle East. As the war drags on, Ukraine will continue to suffer, either the direct impact of the war or the collective trauma that will surely follow. The amassing of NATO weapons in Ukraine, as was the case of Libya, will likely backfire. In Libya, NATO’s weapons fueled the country’s decade long civil war.

Ukraine needs peace and security, not perpetual war that is designed to serve the strategic interests of certain countries or military alliances. Though military invasions must be wholly rejected, whether in Iraq or Ukraine, turning Ukraine into another convenient zone of perpetual geopolitical struggle between NATO and Russia is not the answer.

commondreams.org

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

By Curt MILLS

At each pivotal moment,” the senator said, warning the worst would not come to pass, “[the president] has chosen a course of moderation and deliberation… I believe he will continue to do so.… The president has made it clear that war is neither imminent nor inevitable.”

Speaking on the floor in October 2002, then-Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware would proceed to vote to give President George W. Bush the ultimate power: permission to wage war. Bush, of course, took Biden up on his offer—co-signed by Senators John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Charles Schumer, Harry Reid, Chris Dodd, and supermajorities in both houses—five months later.

By summer that year, the war in Iraq was a transparent disaster.

American elites, particularly the ruling Republicans, became determined to drown out news of a savage insurgency taking out American men and women almost daily, with a drip-drip that the forces of evil were, actually, losing the day. Pay attention to the miserable fate of the Hussein family, settled by New Year’s 2004, not that the search for the war-justifying weapons of destruction concluded the whole thing was a farce by that January; certainly don’t look too closely at the bodies of American contractors in Fallujah, strung up on a bridge in April 2004.

The idea that the people of the world could actually want an alternative to American-style politics and consumerism, or that we actually didn’t know all that much about conflicts a world away, was laughed off as (to use a 2000s term) noob analysis, loony-bin throwback stuff from capital-H History. An emissary of that perspective, Britney Spears told cable news host Tucker Carlson then, “We should just trust our president in every decision he makes.”

There the parallel to today’s mistake—and that is what the present American course on Russia and Ukraine: a flashing-red-light mistake—in trusting the president, there the parallel to the Noughties collapses for a yard.

Because evidently, contra the advice of Ms. Spears, President Joe Biden’s own team doesn’t “just trust” the president in every decision he makes.

The White House immediately walked back Biden’s clarion call for regime change in the Kremlin this weekend—“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” 46 closed his address in Poland. A senior administration official said, “The president’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region. He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.”

Donald Trump is frequently reported on as a liar, but outside of “fifteen days to slow a spread,” I’m unsure his White House told a more consequential lie than this world-insulting one the Biden administration just tried out.

As Asia Times Spengler columnist David Goldman noted, “Biden blurted out what Admin officials have been saying in private, as Niall Ferguson leaked in Bloomberg last week. Can’t walk it back.”

Summarizing his reporting, Stanford’s Ferguson said: “As I said last week, the Biden administration has apparently decided to instrumentalize the war in Ukraine to bring about regime change in Russia, rather than trying to end the war in Ukraine as soon as possible. Biden just said it out loud. This is a highly risky strategy.”

Here, the Iraq parallel resumes.

For many Republicans, Iraq was “Operation Unfinished Business,” a reprisal for Saddam’s apparent assassination attempt on the retired first President Bush, and an itch-scratch for those who felt the U.S. should have marched to Baghdad in 1991, during the first Gulf War. Vladimir Putin occupies a similar bogeyman position for leading Democrats, many of whom unironically still hold that the Kremlin anointed Trump president.

Biden has cut a contradictory figure throughout his half-century in power—a self-described coat-and-tie Democrat during the year of drippy hippies, a real-deal CIA stan during the Southern progressive years of Jimmy Carter, then against the first Gulf War, then the second Bush’s man early on as Senate Foreign Relations chair, then Machiavellian, anti-war would-be president, then Old Guard vice president, and now a Democratic establishment president who was not the first choice of the Democratic establishment.

Biden’s move last summer on Afghanistan appeared to open up the possibility that the Biden presidency would be a caretaker administration that ended some of America’s wars. Because this was a capstone, or maybe just because he didn’t give a damn at his age, he could get away with it.

There was hope, among the restraint-friendly right and the progressive left, that this was the real Joe Biden, a throwback to when he and then-President Barack Obama were dovish voices of caution within their own administration (how did that kind of staff happen, again?).

He has real Americana charm, but Biden’s career, properly understood, has not been one at the center of the American electorate, but at the center of the Democratic Party establishment. It is, after all, how the scrappy middle class white guy with middling credentials finally ascended to the presidency leading the credentialists’ party.

Though logorrheic—the young version could talk—both the young and old Biden would never, ever rock the boat. And so it is, when America senses (in my view, erroneously) it can surgically wield a killing stroke against the Great Satan of the Democratic Party, Vladimir Putin.

“You don’t have to do this,” Obama once told Biden, trying to talk him out of running for president in 2020. Now as then, Biden evidently feels he does.

The new American president has abandoned one misguided crusade in Central Asia, only to open a new, much more dangerous one in Europe, all while (once again) letting America’s true enemy in Beijing off the hook. Which is, sadly, another hallmark of Biden’s powerful career.

theamericanconservative.com

The Pentagon has produced its latest National Defense Strategy (NDS), a report made every four years to provide the public and the government with a broad overview of the US war machine’s planning, posturing, developments and areas of focus.

You might assume with all the aggressive brinkmanship between Moscow and the US power alliance this year that Russia would feature as Enemy Number One in the 2022 NDS, but you would be assuming incorrectly. The US “Defense” Department reserves that slot for the same nation that’s occupied it for many years now: China.

Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp writes the following:

The full NDS is still classified, but the Pentagon released a fact sheet on the document that says it “will act urgently to sustain and strengthen deterrence, with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as our most consequential strategic competitor and the pacing challenge for the Department.”

The fact sheet outlines four priorities for the Pentagon:

1. Defending the homeland, paced to the growing multi-domain threat posed by the PRC
2. Deterring strategic attacks against the United States, Allies, and partners
3. Deterring aggression, while being prepared to prevail in conflict when necessary, prioritizing the PRC challenge in the Indo-Pacific, then the Russia challenge in Europe
4. Building a resilient Joint Force and defense ecosystem

China Identified as Top ‘Threat’ in New National Defense Strategy
US military activity near China increased significantly in 2021
by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #China https://t.co/L8gkis0WTF pic.twitter.com/22wbJFyEF6

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) March 29, 2022

“The Pentagon says that while China is the focus, Russia poses ‘acute threats’ because of its invasion of Ukraine,” DeCamp writes, showing the empire’s view of Moscow as a second-tier enemy.

Ahead of a meeting with China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has made some comments which clearly illustrate the US-centralized empire’s actual problem with Moscow.

“We, together with you, and with our sympathisers will move towards a multipolar, just, democratic world order,” Lavrov said to the Chinese government on Wednesday.

And that right there ladies and gentlemen is the real reason we’ve been hearing so much hysterical shrieking about Russia these last five or six years. It’s never been about Russian hackers. Nor about a Kremlin pee pee tape. Nor about Trump Tower. Nor about GRU bounties in Afghanistan. Nor about Manafort, Flynn, Bannon, Papadopoulos or any other Russiagate Surname of the Week. It’s not even actually about Ukraine. Those have all been narrative-shaping constructs manipulated by the US intelligence cartel to manufacture support for a final showdown against Russia and China to prevent the emergence of a multipolar world.

The US government has had a policy in place since the fall of the Soviet Union to prevent the rise of any powers which could challenge its imperial agendas for the world. During the (first) Cold War the strategy promoted by empire managers like Henry Kissinger was to court China out of necessity to pull it away from the USSR, which was when we saw business ties between China and the US lead to immense profits for certain individuals in both nations and the influx of wealth which now has China on track to surpass the US as an economic superpower.

Once the USSR ended, so too did the need to remain on friendly terms with China, and subsequent decades saw a sharp pivot into a much more adversarial relationship with Beijing.

Speaking at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum, Hillary Clinton admits there was an expectation in Washington Russia would have no choice but to become the West’s junior partner due to the fear China could take over the Russian Far East. /1https://t.co/pJQeF0eCxf

— Artyom Lukin (@ArtyomLukin) November 20, 2021

In what history may one day view as the US empire’s greatest strategic blunder, empire managers forecasted the acquisition of post-soviet Russia as an imperial lackey state which could be weaponized against the new Enemy Number One in China. Instead, the exact opposite happened.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Bloomberg New Economy Forum last year that she’d “heard for years that Russia would become more willing to move toward the west, more willing to engage in a positive way with Europe, the UK, the US, because of problems on its border, because of the rise of China.” But that’s not what occurred.

“We haven’t seen that,” Clinton said. “Instead what we’ve seen is a concerted effort by Putin maybe to hug China more.”

The empire’s expectation that Moscow would come grovelling to the imperial throne on its own meant that no real effort was expended trying to establish goodwill and win over its friendship. NATO just kept on expanding and the empire got increasingly aggressive and belligerent in its games of global conquest. This error has led to the strategist’s ultimate nightmare of having to fight for global domination against two separate powers at once. Because empire architects incorrectly predicted that Moscow would end up fearing Beijing more than it fears Washington, the tandem between China’s economic power and Russia’s military power that experts have been pointing to for years has only gotten more and more intimate.

And now here we are with Russian and Chinese officials openly discussing their plans to create a multipolar world while Chinese pundits crack jokes about the US empire’s transparent ploys to turn Beijing against Moscow over the Ukraine invasion:

Can you help me fight your friend so that I can concentrate on fighting you later?

— CGTN LIU Xin 刘欣 (@LiuXininBeijing) March 19, 2022

On the empire’s grand chessboard, Russia is the queen piece, but China is the king. Just as with chess it helps to take out your opponent’s strongest piece to more easily pursue checkmate, the US empire would be well advised to try and topple China’s nuclear superpower friend and, as Consortium News editor-in-chief Joe Lauria recently put it, “ultimately restore a Yeltsin-like puppet to Moscow.”

Basically all we’re looking at in the major international news stories of our time is the rise of a multipolar world crashing headlong into an empire which has espoused the belief that unipolar domination must be retained at all cost, even if it means flirting with the possibility of a very fast and radioactive third world war.

This is the Hail Mary pass of the US hegemon. Its last-ditch effort to secure control before forever losing any chance at it. Many anti-imperialist pundits I read regularly seem quite confident that this effort will fail, while I personally think those forecasts may be a bit premature. The way the chess pieces are moving it definitely does look like there’s a plan in place, and I don’t think they’d be orchestrating that plan if they didn’t believe it had a chance to succeed.

One thing that does seem clear is that the only way the empire has any chance of stopping the rise of China is by maneuvers that will be both highly disruptive and existentially dangerous for the entire world. If you think things are crazy now, just you wait until the imperial crosshairs move to Beijing.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

During his recent four-day European tour, U.S. President Joe Biden made headlines when, during a meeting with Polish President Andrzej Duda, he described Russian President Vladimir Putin as “a man who I quite frankly think is a war criminal,” adding “I think it will meet the legal definition of that as well.”

Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, condemned Biden’s comment as “unacceptable and unforgivable rhetoric on the part of the head of a state whose bombs have killed hundreds of thousands of people around the world.”

Biden made his remarks following a statement issued by Secretary of State Antony Blinken in which Blinken announced that the State Department had made a formal assessment that the Russian military had committed war crimes in Ukraine. “Based on information currently available,” Blinken said, “the U.S. government assesses that members of Russia’s forces have committed war crimes in Ukraine. “Our assessment,” Blinken added, “is based on a careful review of available information from public and intelligence sources.”

According to Blinken, “Russia’s forces have destroyed apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, critical infrastructure, civilian vehicles, shopping centers, and ambulances, leaving thousands of innocent civilians killed or wounded. Many of the sites Russia’s forces have hit have been clearly identifiable as in-use by civilians.” Blinken declared that this category “includes the Mariupol maternity hospital” as well as “a strike that hit a Mariupol theater, clearly marked with the word ‘????’ — Russian for ‘children’ — in huge letters visible from the sky.”

Blinken’s accusations echo those made by the Ukrainian government and organizations such as Amnesty International. Karim Khan, the lead prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, has announced that his office will begin investigating allegations of Russian war crimes committed during its ongoing military operation in Ukraine.

The narrative that paints Russia and the Russian military as perpetrators of war crimes, however, runs afoul of actual international humanitarian law and the laws of war. The issue of jus in bello (the law governing conduct during the use of force) set forth a framework of legal concepts which, when allied to specific actions, help determine whether an actual violation of the law of war has occurred.

Jus in bello is derived from treaties, agreements, and customary international law. Two sets of international agreements, the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, and the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, serve as the foundation for the modern understanding of jus in bello, regulating, respectively, what is permissible in the execution of war, and the protections provided to non-combatants, including civilians and prisoners of war. “Grave breaches” of jus in bello can be prosecuted in courts of relevant jurisdiction as war crimes.

Starting from the proposition that war is little more than organized murder, the issue of how to define what constitutes murder sufficient to be categorized a being of a criminal nature is far more difficult that one might think. Michael Herr gave voice to this reality in his book, Dispatches, about America’s war in Vietnam, when he observed that, “Charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.”

Distinction, Intention, Necessity

Israeli air and artillery attacks against apartment building, Beirut 2006. (Hamed Talebi/Mehr News Agency/Wikimedia Commons)

One of the key considerations that distinguishes a legitimate act of war, and a war crime, is the notion of “military necessity.” According to the precepts set forth in the law of war, military necessity “permits measures which are actually necessary to accomplish a legitimate military purpose and are not otherwise prohibited by international humanitarian law. In the case of an armed conflict the only legitimate military purpose is to weaken the military capacity of the other parties to the conflict.”

Working hand in glove with the concept of military necessity is the issue of “humanity”, namely that a military operation cannot inflict suffering, injury, or destruction that is not necessary to accomplish a legitimate military objective. While “humanity” is difficult to define (is there ever a humane way to take a human life during war?), it does relate to another principle of international humanitarian law, “proportionality.”

Proportionality in wartime has yet to be strictly codified, but in basic terms it revolves around “the idea that military means should be proportionate to their anticipated ends.”

In short, if there is an enemy sniper in a room on the third floor of an apartment building, proportionality would be met if the force necessary to eliminate the sniper in the room in question was used; if there were any civilians in the room at the time, this would not constitute a violation of the laws of war, as the civilians would unfortunately (and tragically) fall under the notion of “collateral damage.”

If, however, force is applied that results in the destruction of the entire apartment complex, killing scores if not hundreds of civilians, then a case could be made that the use of force was disproportionate to the expected military result, and as such constitutes a war crime.

The final principle of note is that of “distinction”, which holds that parties to an armed conflict must “at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives.” Distinction prohibits “indiscriminate attacks and the use of indiscriminate means and methods of warfare,” such as carpet bombing, or an artillery bombardment which lacked a specific military purpose.

From these basic precepts and principles, the international community has codified specific acts that constitute war crimes in the form of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, in particular Article 8 (War Crimes). Here we find enumerated various actions which give rise to most, if not all, of the accusations made by Biden and Blinken when leveling their accusations of war crimes at Putin and the Russian military:

• Intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities;
• Intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects, that is, objects which are not military objectives;
• Intentionally directing attacks against personnel, installations, material, units, or vehicles involved in a humanitarian assistance or peacekeeping mission in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, as long as they are entitled to the protection given to civilians or civilian objects under the international law of armed conflict; and
• Intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects.

The Elements

Extreme example of lack of proportionality with intent: The bombing of Nagasaki as seen from the town of Koyagi, about 13 km south, taken 15 minutes after the bomb exploded. In the foreground, life seemingly went on unaffected. (Hiromichi Matsuda/Wikimedia Commons)

Each of the crimes listed above consist of two elements, each of which must be proved as a matter of law, before the accusation of a war crime can be cognizable. These are the physical element, or actus reaus, namely the act itself, and the mental element, or mens rea, which constitutes specific intent, or dolus specialis, to commit the act in question.

Even if you can prove the physical element of an alleged crime, such as the bombing of a hospital or apartment complex, unless one can prove the actual intent behind the attack (i.e., not just directing attacks against a civilian population, but rather intentionally directing these attacks), no crime has been committed.

One of the main mitigating circumstances against most alleged war crimes is the principle of “military necessity.” Take, for example, the act of bombing a hospital. If a bomb strikes a hospital, one has established de facto actus reas. Now, let’s say there exists a written order from a commander to a pilot ordering the pilot to bomb the hospital in question—dolus specialis has now been established, and a war crime has been committed.

Not so fast.

While the law of war prohibits direct attacks against civilian targets, such as housing, schools, and hospitals, as the International Committee of the Red Cross makes clear, “a hospital or school may become a legitimate military target if it contributes to specific military operations of the enemy and if its destruction offers a definite military advantage for the attacking side,” or if it is “being used as a base from which to launch an attack, as a weapons depot, or to hide healthy soldiers/fighters.”

Herein lies the rub. “Increasingly,” a recent article published in The Washiпgton Post noted, “Ukrainians are confronting an uncomfortable truth: The military’s understandable impulse to defend against Russian attacks could be putting civilians in the crosshairs. Virtually every neighborhood in most cities has become militarized, some more than others, making them potential targets for Russian forces trying to take out Ukrainian defenses.”

Moreover, “Ukraine’s strategy of placing heavy military equipment and other fortifications in civilian zones could weaken Western and Ukrainian efforts to hold Russia legally culpable for possible war crimes.”

Who is Guilty?

The bottom line is that if Russia has intelligence that Ukraine is using an otherwise protected civilian target for military purposes, and if a decision is made to attack the target using force deemed proportional to the threat, then no war crime has been committed.

Indeed, given what The Washington Post has documented, it appears that it is Ukraine, not Russia, which is committing war crimes. According to Richard Weir, a researcher in Human Rights Watch’s crisis and conflict division quoted in the Post article, the Ukrainian military has “a responsibility under international law” to either remove their forces and equipment from civilian areas, or to move the civilian population from the areas where military personnel and equipment are being stored.

“If they don’t do that,” Weir said, “that is a violation of the laws of war. Because what they are doing is they are putting civilians at risk. Because all that military equipment are legitimate targets.”

The bottom line is that while the Ukrainian government, American politicians, and human rights groups can make allegations of war crimes by Russia in Ukraine, proving these allegations is a much more difficult task.

Moreover, it appears that, upon closer examination, the accuser (at least when it comes to the Ukrainian government) might become the accused should any thorough investigation of the alleged events occur.

If the Ukrainian government contends that specific sites struck by Russia fall into a protected category, and that by attacking them Russia has committed a war crime, then it must be assumed that any undertaking by Ukraine to place military personnel and equipment in the vicinity of these targets constitutes “an intentional co-location of military objectives and civilians or persons hors de combat with the specific intent of trying to prevent the targeting of those military objectives.”

That is the legal definition of a human shield, which is in and of itself a violation of the laws of war.

consortiumnews.com