Multiple rounds of Russia/Ukraine peace talks accomplished nothing, another to take place in Istanbul, most likely on Tuesday.

From his hideout in Poland on Sunday, Zelensky recited lines scripted by his US master.

Saying he’s ready to discuss neutrality ignored that he has no say over anything related to all things Russia and Ukraine — no decision-making authority without US approval.

His public remarks are scripted for and approved by dominant Biden regime Russophobes.

Journalist John Helmer stressed what’s indisputable, saying:

At a time of war, “no US president (was) ever…as incapacitated in command and control as (the fake) Biden, nor as impotent…as Zelensky.”

“Rule by crock and rule by stooge aren’t rule at all.”

At the same time, Helmer stressed that hatred of Russia by dominant hardliners in the US and Ukraine is so intense that perhaps “there can be no end to this war unless Ukraine is destroyed, or Russia, or Europe, or the US.”

See my same-day article, titled: WW III Already Began?

The prospect for restoration of peace and stability in Ukraine is virtually nil at a time when US/NATO regimes are hell bent for pouring more weapons and munitions into the country for permanent war on Russia to the last Ukrainian foot soldier and foreign mercenary.

Implacable US hostility toward Russia is also evident from the fake Biden’s anti-Putin vitriol last week.

Calling him a “thug…a war criminal…a murderous dictator,” urging regime change, saying he “cannot remain in power,” barely stopped short of recklessly declaring war.

Aside from saying he’s ready to consider neutrality, Zelensky refuses to discuss demilitarization, deNazification, or renounce Kiev’s aim to regain control over Crimea and Donbass — as ordered by his higher power in Washington.

He also absurdly said that anything agreed on with Russia would be put to a referendum vote when conflict ends and its forces withdraw from positions held.

Insisting on security guarantees from other countries sounds like a proposal for US/NATO troops to control territory now held by Russia’s military.

On Sunday, Russian journalists interviewed Zelensky via Zoom.

In response, Russia’s media and telecommunications watchdog, Roskomnadzor, said the following:

“Several Russian mass media outlets, including foreign agent mass media, conducted an interview with Zelensky.”

“Roskomnadzor warns the Russian mass media about the necessity of refraining from publishing this interview.”

“A check has been launched in respect of the mass media outlets, which conducted this interview, to determine the degree of responsibility and take measures.”

Zelensky’s public remarks state what his US master wants expressed.

They reflect Biden regime policy toward Russia, transmitted directly, by other NATO regimes, and US-installed Kiev puppet.

In similar fashion to earlier remarks in the run-up to and since Russia’s special military operation began, Zelensky again recited a litany of bald-faced Big Lies about what’s going on.

His perversion of reality resembles MSM fake news about all things Russia.

Separately, Sergey Lavrov said no meeting between Vladimir Putin and Zelensky will take place until “we have clarity on all key issues,” adding:

At this time, “the main thing is to stop pandering to the Ukrainians who only seek to generate an image of negotiations and settlements.”

“They succeeded in this when they sabotaged the Minsk agreements shortly after they inked them in February 2015, and as a result declared that they would not implement them.”

“That’s why their ability to mimic the process is well known to us.”

“This time they won’t get away with it.”

“We need a results-based outcome of the negotiations, which will be enshrined by” Vladimir Putin and US-installed puppet Zelensky.

“We are interested in these negotiations (with Kiev) being wrapped up with a result that will achieve our fundamental goals.”

“First of all, an end to the killing of civilians in the Donbass region, which has been going on for eight long years.”

“The entireWestern community” ignored it.

Its ruling regimes “never even made critical comments, although everyone watched the bombing of civilian infrastructure, hospitals, kindergartens, clinics, and residential buildings” in Donetsk and Lugansk.

“We have been drawing attention to these problems for many years.”

“The West did not listen to us. Now they have heard.”

“The people in Donbass must never again suffer from the Kiev regime.”

Vladimir Putin stressed that Moscow “will strive to demilitarize and deNazify Ukraine, as well as bring to justice those who committed numerous bloody crimes against against peaceful residents” of Donbass and Russia.

Separately in its latest fake news edition that features Biden regime, Pentagon and Kiev press release reports on Russia and Ukraine over truth and full disclosure, NYT propaganda pretended that smashed Ukrainian forces “retook several towns (sic),” adding:

What didn’t happen “potentially mark(ed) a significant breakthrough for Ukraine’s counteroffensive (sic) that punches a hole in Russia’s…encircle(ment) (of) Ukrainian cities.”

Despite indisputable evidence of all-out Russian efforts to protect civilian lives and infrastructure, the Times cited Ukrainian fake news, falsely accusing Russian forces of committing “genocide.”

Ukraine’s so-called deputy prime minister’s Big Lie was quoted, falsely saying:

“Russian forces around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant put “hundreds of thousands of Europeans” at risk of radiation (sic).”

Russian forces took control of the mothballed plant to ensure against the risk of sabotage to spread radiation.

What the Times called “seesaw battle(s) for critical areas” are entirely one-sided.

Ukrainian forces have a choice. Lay down their weapons and surrender or be wiped out.

Thousands chose the former option.

The Times and other MSM pretended not to notice even though their so-called correspondents are in Ukraine.

Instead, rubbish like the following is featured:

“The Russians are bombing civilians, women and children (sic).”

Donetsk and Lugansk are “at war with Ukraine (sic).

The Times and other MSM pretend that Nazi-infested Ukraine is Russian propaganda.

They falsely accused Russia of atrocities committed by Nazified Ukrainian troops.

They suppressed evidence of tortured Russian POWs by Ukrainian Nazis.

Their reports read like US, Western, Kiev press releases.

What’s most important to explain is filtered out and concealed.

What’s featured is Russia bashing rubbish.

stephenlendman.org

Even the wars that historians judge to have been noble and beneficial rely on popular support marketed and sustained by lies. Contrary to what the English government told its people during World War I, German soldiers didn’t bayonet Belgian babies in their cribs. The “cocaine” U.S. troops claimed to have found in Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega’s home was nothing of the sort. The Taliban offered to turn over Osama bin Laden — it was George W. Bush who refused to take him because to accept would have denied him his excuse to invade Afghanistan.

As Gen. and Director of British Military Intelligence John Charteris observed after World War I, “to make armies go on killing one another it is necessary to invent lies about the enemy.”

America’s incipient proxy war against Russia over Ukraine is no exception to the rule. BS has been flying fast and furious as media outlets dutifully align behind the U.S. government war machine and the array of defense contractors that influence it. As usual, their purpose is clear: spook the American people into supporting a war in a country they hardly know anything about, take the side of a highly problematic regime and create a world of death and destruction for the benefit of greedy warmongers before the rubes/voters figure out they’ve been conned.

Let’s take a look at some of the biggest lies being used to garner and prop up support for the Ukrainian government of President Volodymyr Zelensky:

Lie No. 1: Ukraine is a democracy.

Zelensky won the presidency in a fair election in 2019. But context is critical. The 2019 election was held in the immediate aftermath of a brutal coup d’etat. In 2014, a violent mob comprising neo-Nazi extremist groups like the Azov Battalion and Right Sector, and covertly supported by the Obama administration, forced President Viktor Yanukovych, democratically elected and pro-Russian, to flee for his life.

The new revolutionary government held an election in 2014, which Petro Poroshenko won. Zelensky is Ukraine’s second post-coup ruler.

Here’s an analogy for Americans: Instead of failing, Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 coup succeeds. Biden flees to Canada and, even though he lost, Trump serves a second term. Trump endorses Mike Pence in 2024. Pence wins that election. Is Pence a legitimate president? Is America a democracy?

Democrats would answer no — as do the 49% of Ukrainians, including many ethnic Russians who voted for Yanukovych. They feel the same way about Zelensky, that he’s not legitimate — which is why ethnic-Russian areas in the eastern Donbas region, Donetsk and Luhansk, declared independence and broke away from Ukraine after the 2014 coup, and ethnic-Russian Crimeans greeted Russian forces when they annexed the peninsula.

To half its people, Ukraine doesn’t feel like a democracy.

Lie No. 2: Ukraine is a free society.

Ukraine is an authoritarian state with a veneer of democracy. Zelensky recently signed a decree ordering that all TV broadcasters in the country show the same exact government-controlled programming on every channel. “It’s important that the country has a unified information policy” under martial law, read the edict. This followed his banning of 11 rival political parties, threatening “a tough response” to politicians who disagree with him.

Lest these repressive measures be excused as regrettable wartime excesses, Zelensky also banned three “pro-Russian” TV channels a year before Russia’s invasion “in order to protect national security,” his spokesperson said. An opposition politician and ally of the stations’ owner was locked under house arrest and accused of treason. Anti-government protesters in Zelensky’s Ukraine are brutally beaten and jailed. In May 2021, the mayor of Kiev said that Zelensky sent thugs from the Ukraine state security agency SBU to his apartment, where they demanded that he toe the line of Zelensky’s policies or else.

“U.S. officials have long been fond of portraying Ukraine as a plucky democracy fending off the menace of aggression from an authoritarian Russia,” Ted Galen Carpenter of the libertarian Cato Institute wrote in 2021, before the war. “Washington’s idealized image has never truly corresponded with the murkier reality, but the gap has now become a chasm.”

Lie No. 3: Ukraine is an ally that we have an obligation to defend.

If Ukraine were a member of NATO, the United States would have a duty to defend it against Russia. But important members of the alliance like France and Germany oppose Ukrainian membership because it is riddled with corruption and not a full-fledged democracy. “In a 2020 analysis, Transparency International, an anticorruption watchdog, ranked Ukraine 117th out of 180 countries on its corruption index, lower than any NATO nation,” according to The New York Times.

Ukraine is not a U.S. ally. It is in Russia’s sphere of influence every bit as much as Canada and Mexico are in ours. We have no historic or cultural ties to Ukraine.

We have no legal or moral obligation whatsoever toward Ukraine.

Lie No. 4: Russia’s attack was unprovoked.

I’m not going to endorse Russia’s invasion. But arguing that the move was unprovoked is ridiculous. Ukraine wants to join the EU and NATO, a Cold War-era relic formed as a U.S.-led military counterbalance to Russian influence in Europe. Ukraine has been shelling the Donetsk and Luhansk breakaway regions for years, killing an estimated 14,000 people, mostly ethnic Russians. Not only is Ukraine on Russia’s border but it’s the same exact route Nazi Germany took to invade the Soviet Union during World War II. Ukraine is Russia’s most vulnerable border — and it wants to join a heavily armed, nuclear-capable alliance of states determined to destroy Russia.

Imagine, if you can, Mexico trying to join a Russian-led military alliance. How would we respond?

Lie No. 5: The neo-Nazi thing is overblown Russian propaganda.

Zelensky is Jewish; he lost family members in the Holocaust. How, goes the argument that concerns about right extremism are mere disinformation, could Ukraine and its government be heavily influenced by neo-Nazism? Well, Barack Obama was Black. Why is the American police still full of racists? Because the president of a country can only do so much. He governs the country he inherits, not the one he wants.

Ukraine has a long and infamous history of far-right politics in which Nazism and antisemitism play a starring role. While it’s true that Europe and the United States also have such nasty groups, no other country in the world has as many as a percent of the population. None legitimizes Nazism and fascist collaboration during World War II the way that Ukraine does. “Ukraine is erecting new plaques and monuments to Nazi collaborators on a nearly weekly basis,” The Forward reported last year. Stefan Bandera, a notorious Nazi collaborator, is a national hero with numerous statues in his honor. France had Philippe Petain and Norway had Vidkun Quisling, but both are officially condemned.

And certainly no other country in the world has police and soldiers openly serving as Nazis, drawing government paychecks while wearing swastikas and other fascist insignia on duty.

Most Ukrainians, arguably an overwhelming majority, are not pro-Nazi. However, an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians, including Zelensky and his government, are highly tolerant — to an obnoxious, intolerable degree — of Nazis serving openly in parliament, controlling a substantial portion of the police and national guard as well as the military. They allow neo-Nazis to control the historical narrative of their country, even elevating traitorous antisemites to founding heroes who deserve statues in the streets of major cities.

Lie No. 6: We have to do something.

It’s a big world. Misery abounds. At any given time, there are invasions, proxy wars, regional conflict, civil strife and illegal occupations on almost every continent. Yemen is on fire. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict grinds on. Afghanistan is starving. Those are three cases where the United States is involved, as usual on the wrong side. There are dozens of other conflicts in which the United States has little to no interest. The only reason we are involved in Ukraine is because the media tells us to be.

It is entirely reasonable to look at the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and decide that it’s simply not our business, that neither side is worthy of support.

creators.com

The war taking place in Ukraine has been understood on one side – the wider western view – in terms of the secular expression of today’s western culture. Typically, it is cast as a struggle of this culture, loosely packaged as ‘democracy’ versus the authoritarian culture of Russia, Iran and China – cultures that reflect offensive, nativist and repressively ‘incorrect’ values.

It is believed that Putin is held “to have sensed weak political leadership in America – and like a chess player who sees weakness on the board, and an opening for an attack – takes it”.

This represents the authentic reading of a majority in the West. It is not hard to see why it should have become the settled view. It comports closely with today’s zeitgeist that all politics is but a Manichaean tapestry of the ‘good’ who see things in a ‘modern’ and culturally-aware way – and those who have failed to ‘decolonise’ from their past.

This does not however, fully explain the frenzy of hostile passion directed at Putin, Russia and everything Russian. Nothing close to this has been seen since World War II. Even then, it was not everything German that was cast as evil.

Notwithstanding the passion, this western reading of the world has an underlying logic. And it is a logic which is ineluctable and fraught with peril: For example, Zelensky’s speech to the U.S. Congress underscored a nation facing unprovoked attack; a nation that has drawn support and sympathy from the rest of the world, but one that is not a member of the NATO alliance. The message was simple and clear: “I call on you [the West] to do more”.

In response, former defence secretary Leon Panetta described Zelensky this week as “probably the most powerful lobbyist in the world right now”. Again, the logic behind the construct that Russia has launched – unprovoked – the biggest land war in Europe since WW2 for tactical gain ‘on the chessboard’ ineluctably defines the inevitable response: More military support for Kiev is necessary, so that Putin senses the danger on the board, and acts to protect his high-value ‘chess pieces’.

So far, the U.S. support falls just – but only just – short of NATO intervention. Zelensky’s words and the video he shared (albeit clearly crafted by a professional PR agency – roughly shaven, fatigue t-shirt, etc.), carried an emotional impact that turned this appearance (and those in other Capitals) from the ordinary to the extraordinary. To what it will lead, is the obvious question.

Panetta suggested in riposte, “If Putin is doubling down, the U.S. and NATO have to double down”.

We should be clear: Panetta is not alone. The info-war; the frenzy for war, is gathering pace. There are those urging Zelensky to keep up the messaging; telling him that ultimately NATO’s refusal to intervene will crack.

But what if the above consensus analysis is WRONG? What if it constitutes a potentially catastrophic misreading of Putin and his team and – more importantly – of the mood amongst the majority of Russians?

Simply to view the conflict through such a reductionist lens, omits and erases all the hidden religious, racial, historic, political and cultural overtones to the conflict. It facilitates a banal stereotyping that can lead to bad decision-making.

If the West is wrong in its stereotype of an ‘unprincipled authoritarian leader’ – Putin, taking his country into war for some ephemeral tactical gain against the West – then the West may also be wrong in thinking that it is fighting a tactical war; and wrong therefore in imagining that tactical moves consisting in loading pain onto the Russian pan to tip the scales will result in ‘a climb down, by a Putin cut down to size’.

What we would have then is total war practiced on the one hand by Russia, cast as one in which Russia either defends itself, or it ceases to exist; and on the other side, a ‘west’, locked into the logic of its own construct, and edging closer to its own (secularised) ‘holy war’.

Zelensky’s words and video carried a heavy emotional impact across western capitals – clearly intended to feed into a heated atmosphere of emotions, at almost break-point. This emotional charge adds to the angst of America in decline; to the evidence that fewer countries instinctively now bow to the U.S., as readily as they did in the past. It is unsettling. It can trigger aggressive feelings of wanting to hit back at whoever it is that is belittling the notion of a nation with a unique destiny.

This emotional content already is blinding western commentators to military realities on the ground which are ignored and effaced by daily claims of heart-rending atrocities. In today’s West, analysis has become a mere expression of correct culture, and any mention of ground realities, almost a crime. It is the perfect context for mistakes to be made.

To what will it lead: The logic is compelling: A western total war?

An award-winning Russian filmmaker, Nikita Mikhalkov, made his own address to the Russian people – a parallel to Zelensky’s address to Congress, perhaps:

“Look at us [the Russian people] and remember that they will do the same thing to you when you show weakness … Brothers, remember the fate of Yugoslavia and do not allow them to do the same to you. I am personally convinced that this is not a war between Russia and Ukraine, this is not a war between Russia, Europe and America. This is not a war for democracy that our partners want to convince us of. This is a global and perhaps the last attempt of Western civilization to attack the Russian world, Orthodox ethics, on traditional values. He who is brought up on these values will never agree to what they offer us, from same-sex marriages to the legalization of fascism. War is a terrible thing. I don’t know a normal person who thinks war is a good thing. But Ukraine, America and Europe began preparing for this war back in 1991 … There are two ways out of this situation – we will either defend ourselves; or we will cease to exist. In the end, I offer the wise words of a smart man: “It is better to be hanged for loyalty, than to be rewarded for betrayal”.

Mikhalkov is no ‘outlier’. Dr Mariya Matskevich of the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences explains that a large part of the Russian population views the war in Ukraine as “a holy struggle” and “a war of Russia with the entire rest of the world.” She adds that this is a position many Russians find far more congenial than any cooperation with the outside world., She notes that polls consistently, and generally accurately, demonstrate this pattern, as well as the widespread belief that what Russia is doing in Ukraine is defending itself against a Western attack. Because of this, popular Russian support for Putin, his government, and even his United Russia party, has risen since the start of hostilities.

The notion of ‘total war’ was expressed forcefully on a primetime TV channel by a prominent Russian thinker and author, Professor Dugin. His views drew wide support:

• The war in Ukraine is not only existential for the Russian state, but is existential for the Russian people; its culture and its civilisation.
• A successful outcome in Ukraine is key to the creation of a New World order.
• Until now, the West would never accept Russia as a partner, but the operation in Ukraine will change that.

You may agree or disagree with this view, but that is not the point. The point is whether it be an authentic view, or not, of the Russian people. If it is, then Putin and Russia will not back-down over a new raft of western sanctions, nor even new drones or weapons supplied to Kiev: total war is, of course, existential – to the end.

An eminent Serbian academic, Professor Vladusic, puts this into wider context: “There is a map of civilizations in Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations: On that map, Ukraine and Russia are painted the same colour, because they belong to the same, Orthodox civilization. And right next to Ukraine, the dark colour with which Huntington marks the civilization of the West – begins:

“[As I] look at war through Huntington’s eyes, here is what I conclude: the war between Russia and Ukraine is a great catastrophe for Orthodox civilization. The hypothetical disappearance of Russia would also be the end of Orthodox civilization, because there is no other, sufficiently powerful Orthodox country to defend other Orthodox nations. Huntington then whispers to me that it has never happened in history for a country to move from one civilization to another, not because some countries did not try, but because, simply put, other civilizations never accepted them permanently. Without Russia, the geopolitical price of the remaining Orthodox countries would fall so much that other civilizations would, at best, bring them down to the level of dying colonies. This, of course, also applies to Ukraine. At the moment when Russia would be defeated, which means, most likely, divided into several states, the same fate would probably befall Ukraine. We all know what the word Balkanization means”.

It looks as if total war may become inevitable. The two different interpretations of ‘reality’ touch at no point. The logic is ineluctable. Within these architectures of hatred, selected or invented historical facts about Russia, its culture, and its racial nature are taken out of context – and slotted into prearranged intellectual structures to indict President Putin as a ‘thug’ and a ‘war criminal’.

If we are heading in this direction, it will be down to the potentially catastrophic error of perceiving Russia as a mere transactional actor – an approach which stems from the West’s denunciation of its own cultural legacy. The process is simple: in the past, a work of art, a great book was read to throw light and understanding on past events. Today, it is understood only as an expression of contemporary culture. It is enough to present this culture as politically incorrect (as white, misogynist or colonial), and immediately it becomes politically incorrect, which means that any mention of it is a crime. How then, can Russian history be understood? Simply, it can’t.

It cannot be understood how Russia might read history as a long, thousand-year succession of attempts to cancel Russia; of ancient antagonism and racism directed towards Slavs; of how Russians might read the U.S.’ recent intervention in Traditional Orthodoxy, through the Patriarchy in Constantinople as designed to foster a schism in the Orthodox Community in order both to undermine the Moscow Patriarchate (the bulwark of traditional social thinking), and to infuse the seeds of western liberalism, and western cultural values into the national Orthodox Churches. Many pious Russians do see the Ukrainian conflict as a ‘Holy War’ to preserve traditionalist ethos from a western nihilistic cultural impulse.

They might understand too, how many Russians view the Bolshevik revolution, the U.S. neo-liberal intervention of the Yeltsin era, and today’s woke culture, as all cut from the same cloth (Bolshevism being but ‘first edition’ wokeism): i.e. a struggle to nullify Russian civilisation and the Orthodox ethos.

We might read history differently, yet the above, nonetheless, may represent something of the authentic view of most Russians. That is the point. It carries implications for war and peace.

Peak fake news reached a climax in early March when social media circulated a video of the Ukrainian president singing a duet with his wife.

A music video of a cover of Diana Ross and Lionel Richie’s “Endless Love” has been miscaptioned online, with social media users claiming it depicts Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky and Olena Zelenska, the first lady of Ukraine singing. The performers in the video, however, were English singer Connie Talbot and Boyce Avenue’s singer Alejandro Manzano.

What is particularly worrying is how quickly it circulated and just how many people were prepared to believe it – as it fitted nicely into their polarized and distorted view of the conflict in the Ukraine, with Zelensky portrayed as some sort of saint and Putin the devil. Zelensky, who probably walks on water and invented a cure for cancer while still in school, has become, due to western media’s obsession with oversimplifying all conflict, almost sub-human, ironicised as a living prophet.

This surely can be the only explanation as to why western journalists have so much trouble reporting him for stashing almost 600m USD in share options in the British Virgin Islands – which he transferred just days before the invasion to a close friend – or any number of other news items which challenge the lucid black and white picture we are asked to accept with regards to the conflict.

Does he also have links to far right groups, which have for decades also been supported by the CIA and State Department? Probably.

These and other awkward questions which journalists once upon a time were expected to ask, are now left off the table completely as western media has gorged itself on the idea that there is no nuances worth looking at in the war and no place for any factual reporting.

The problem with this is that it only encourages sloppy journalism both on the ground and back in the newsrooms of western capitals where both groups of hacks start to actually cross the line of ‘fact’ to ‘perceived truth’ and start to make shit up.

Cast your mind back to just two weeks ago when big title media ran with the angle that China wasn’t supporting Putin and Beijing was very angry about the invasion etc etc.

Is this really true? Many western titles fervently pushed this narrative but struggled really to come up with anything concrete to support it. And then more recently reports emerged that China was refusing to supply Russia with parts for its aircraft, only to be followed by a report in the NYT, citing anonymous U.S. officials, that China was indeed “supporting” Russia in its invasion in Ukraine. Surely if China is not assisting Russia, then there would be no reason to threaten Beijing with sanctions which is precisely what Jake Sullivan did when he met Chinese Politburo officials in Rome just recently.

But China is actually making a killing as well in the Ukraine war but far from the battlefields, which might explain why the confused reporting helps surround it and others with an opaqueness which suits it quite well. Beijing is looking to cut news deals with Russia while buying cut price oil from the Saudis – which wouldn’t be too much of a body blow normally to the U.S., if the deal wasn’t done in Yuan rather than dollars. China really couldn’t have pulled off a better win-win stunt at the price of Ukrainian blood, if it wanted to, so it’s hard to swallow the jaded narrative that it has somehow fallen out with Putin. India is also cleaning up by buying cheap oil at discount prices from Russia.

Those two countries alone make up a huge slice of global business, bypassing U.S. sanctions. The war in Ukraine is part of a decades-long failed policy by the West to impose its financial and geopolitical ideologies on so-called Eastern countries while not having to invest in the political risks associated with military ‘hard power’.

Libya, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and even Yugoslavia in the early nineties have all fallen victim to uprisings backed by Washington which attempted to overthrow allies of Russia in a new post-Cold War agenda. How Ukraine and the reporting on the ground is presented to us is to avoid making any comparisons whatsoever with those other failed coups d’etat and the tawdry handling by western agents who have way too much blood on their hands. Ukraine, despite the incredibly sad pictures of civilians being killed in the most horrific way, hardly compares in numbers to what the U.S. is capable of doing when it wants to show force. In Iraq, 6000 civilians were mowed down by an advancing U.S. army in a number of a few days.

What is unique however about Ukraine and its conflict is that it will create a new cold war as the polarization of two blocs had already begun before it started, but has now got well under way with Russia, China and India emerging as a new empire which doesn’t need the Swift banking system or U.S. business (directly) and stopped taking the U.S. seriously when Obama threated to, er, do something to Assad in Syria if he crossed a line on chemical weapons. Soft diplomacy is only useful if you punctuate it with its harder version which is what real superpowers do. The real story about Ukraine is that it probably wouldn’t have happened if Joe Biden wasn’t vice president in 2014 and started to play a dirty game of installing his own puppet as leader of the country to score points against Putin. And it wouldn’t continue now with the bloodshed if Biden wasn’t so weak and fearful of Putin. Zelensky’s address to the U.S. Congress to ask for a NATO no fly zone might as well be a duet he sings with his wife as it will fall on deaf ears to a U.S. president who we can only hope will not refer to the Ukrainians as “Iranians”.

The war is not going well for Kyiv, and it would be unreasonable to expect that to change. As a vastly superior military force overwhelms the US client state, reality is in the process of crashing down hard in the face of western liberals who bought into the war propaganda that the brave, sexy comedian was leading an upset victory to kick Putin’s ass out of Ukraine.

Zelensky is now raging at NATO powers for refusing to intervene militarily against Russia, apparently having previously been given the impression that the US-centralized empire might risk its very existence defending its dear friends the Ukrainians from an invasion.

“Unfortunately, today there is a complete impression that it is time to give a funeral repast for something else: security guarantees and promises, determination of alliances, values that seem to be dead for someone,” Zelensky said Friday.

“All the people who will die starting from this day will also die because of you,” Ukraine’s president added. “Because of your weakness, because of your disunity.”

It must be hard, the process of learning that you were never actually a valued partner in western civilization’s fight for freedom and democracy. That you were always just one more sacrificial pawn on the imperial chessboard.

New: Zelensky in late night address tonight slams NATO over ruling out no-fly zone. “This is the self-hypnosis of those who are weak, insecure inside, despite the fact they possess weapons many times stronger than we have,” he said.

— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) March 4, 2022

In a new article titled “U.S. and allies quietly prepare for a Ukrainian government-in-exile and a long insurgency”, The Washington Post reports that US officials anticipate Russia will reverse its early losses and successfully drive the Zelensky regime out of the country, after which “a long, bloody insurgency” is planned against the invaders backed by billions of dollars in US funding.

The US has a history of working to draw Moscow into gruelling, costly military quagmires which monopolize its military firepower while leaching it of blood and treasure. Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, author of US hegemonic manifesto The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, openly bragged about having lured Russia into its own Vietnam fighting the US-backed mujahideen in Afghanistan for a decade.

Just two years ago then-US Special Representative for Syria engagement said during a video event hosted by the Hudson Institute that his job was to make Syria “a quagmire for the Russians”.

So this isn’t something new or out of the blue, and what it means is that all the self-righteous posturing by the western political/media class about the need to pour weapons into Ukraine is not really about saving Ukrainian lives (only negotiating a ceasefire can do that), but about seizing this golden opportunity to hurt Russia’s geostrategic interests as much as possible. Ukraine on its own is powerless to stop Russia from taking Kyiv no matter how many weapons are sent, but those weapons can be used to fight a “long, bloody insurgency” after that happens which costs many more lives, keeps Moscow militarily preoccupied and hemorrhaging money, and ultimately hurts Putin’s popularity at home.

The US government’s strategy of creating and funding an insurgency gave birth to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, and then did the same with ISIS in Syria.

Now Washington is going to repeat this with bloodthirsty neo-Nazis in Ukraine.

What could possibly go wrong! https://t.co/XHUwgAmB57

— Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) March 5, 2022

This by itself would do a great deal to advance US interests, but on top of that you’ve got the even greater benefit of manufacturing international consent for unprecedented acts of economic warfare against the entire nation of Russia, as well as killing Nord Stream 2 and rallying immense support for NATO and the imperial military/intelligence machine. The western world is now a united front against the Sauron-like menace of Vladimir Putin in much the same way it united against the threat of global terrorism after 9/11, and we’re probably only seeing the beginnings of the agendas this will be used to roll out.

We can expect these agendas to be used in an attempt to impoverish, undermine, agitate, and ultimately collapse and balkanize Russia, as the CIA and Washington swamp monsters have wanted to do since the fall of the Soviet Union. This would leave China standing alone without its nuclear superpower guard bear and much more vulnerable to imperial operations geared toward thwarting the emergence of a true multipolar world, a goal US imperialists have had in writing for three decades.

That’s a whole lot of potential benefit to the US empire just for losing Ukraine. Kind of like sacrificing a pawn to get the queen in chess.

I think a big part of why I and others wrongly underestimated the likelihood of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine was that the cost-to-benefit math never made sense; on paper Moscow stands so much more to lose by this action in the long term than it stood to gain. There was also a bit of an assumption that the empire would rather Russia not take Ukraine, preferring to gradually encroach with NATO salami slicing tactics than give up a useful client state on Russia’s border, and would adjust its actions accordingly.

But chess is all about out-maneuvering your opponent to leave them nothing but bad options to choose from, and in the end leaving the king with no safe moves. The drivers of empire would have known that, as the late Justin Raimondo explained all the way back in 2014 for Antiwar, Putin could not afford to lose Ukraine to the west without losing crucial support in Russia. Combine that with increased attacks on Donbas separatists and the west’s adamant refusal to make even the most meaningless concessions like guaranteeing they wouldn’t add a nation to NATO who they had no intention of adding anyway, and you can understand if not support Putin’s drastic course of action.

The US Is Not Trying High-Level Diplomacy to End the Fighting in Ukraine
Pentagon leaders haven’t spoken to their Russian counterparts, and Biden has no plans to talk with Putin
by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Ukraine #Russia #Biden #Putin https://t.co/IzZWgzCwXV pic.twitter.com/xr4ZV5j6fk

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) March 5, 2022

If the US/NATO had the option of choosing between (1) ending the war in Ukraine tomorrow by assuring Russia Ukraine will never join NATO, or (2) having every Ukrainian die in a long war of resistance against Russia, they will pick (2).

The US/NATO dont want a diplomatic solution

— Josh || 김은총 (@JoshC0301) March 5, 2022

No meaningful diplomatic effort is being made by Washington to end the violence. Ukrainian lives are being spent like pennies to facilitate the agenda of US planetary domination by whipping up international support for the strangulation of Russia while pouring vast fortunes into the military-industrial complex rather than taking even the tiniest step toward de-escalation, diplomacy and detente.

And it’s entirely possible that this was all planned years in advance.

Is it a coincidence that before this started we were bombarded with shrieking anti-Russia narratives for five years, all of which were initiated by secretive and unaccountable intelligence agencies and none of which have ever been substantiated with hard evidence? The discredited conspiracy theories that there was a Kremlin asset in the Oval Office had nothing to do with Ukraine. Neither did the plot hole–riddled and still completely unproven claim that Russian hackers intervened in the US election, or the baseless claim that St Petersburg trolls did the same. Neither did the claim that Russia was paying Taliban-linked fighters to kill US troops in Afghanistan, which was eventually walked back by the same intelligence cartel that made it.

All these hysterical anti-Russia narratives were shoved in everyone’s face day after day, year after year, with nothing really uniting them apart from the fact that they drove up general anxiety about Russia and that they were initiated by the US intelligence cartel. Even the empty Ukrainegate scandal which led to Trump’s unsuccessful impeachment was initiated by a CIA officer who just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

And while all those shrill narratives about a Putin puppet serving as America’s commander-in-chief were being aggressively hammered into public consciousness, Trump’s actual policies toward Moscow were extremely hawkish and aggressive. Beneath the narratives about Kremlin servitude, a new cold war was being dangerously escalated.

And now, lubricated years in advance by these mass-scale anti-Russia narratives, I’ve got western liberals in my social media notifications with blue and yellow profile pictures calling me a Russian propagandist and a Kremlin shill all day, every day. Because of that mass-scale propaganda campaign, we were paced to this point all the way from where we were at a few years ago when Obama was mocking Mitt Romney for his then-outlandish Russia hawkishness.

So we’re looking at increasingly aggressive confrontations between the US power alliance and the China-Russia bloc for the foreseeable future in a struggle which has already erupted in hot war and could easily get infinitely worse. All because a few manipulators in high places convinced the US establishment that global unipolar domination would be a good thing. Many of these unipolarist empire architects were involved in the murderous and influential Project for a New American Century (PNAC), whose founding members are now providing expert punditry on what should be done about the war in Ukraine.

Michael Parenti saw this all coming long ago:

The PNAC plan envisions a strategic confrontation with China, and a still greater permanent military presence in every corner of the world. The objective is not just power for its own sake but power to control the world’s natural resources and markets, power to privatize and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world, and power to hoist upon the backs of peoples everywhere — including North America — the blessings of an untrammeled global “free market.” The end goal is to ensure not merely the supremacy of global capitalism as such, but the supremacy of American global capitalism by preventing the emergence of any other potentially competing superpower.

There is a temptation to engage China to further isolate Russia. This will not work. We are in a new cold war. China and Russia are allies. They’re out to get us. The west needs to understand that we’re out to get them too.

— Eli Lake (@EliLake) March 3, 2022

We should not have to live this way. We should not have to see the horrors of war inflicted upon humanity with the risk of total nuclear annihilation hanging over our heads every minute of every day, all for some dopey grand chessboard maneuverings of a few sociopaths who can’t just let humanity be.

There is no good reason why nations cannot simply collaborate with each other for everyone’s benefit. There is no good reason we should accept these omnicidal games of planetary conquest as inevitable, normal, or fine. If our minds weren’t so pervasively locked down by mass-scale psychological manipulation, there is no way we would stand for this madness.

I don’t know if the US will succeed in this grand strategic confrontation to prevent the rise of a multipolar world. From where I’m sitting it depends on which side of the conflict has more tricks up their sleeve, and that could easily be the emerging China-centralized alliance of which Russia is a key player. But I do think it’s far too early for anyone to declare that the US-led world order is over and a true multipolar world has solidified.

There are many moves on the chessboard still to be played.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

While Western media deploys Volodymyr Zelensky’s Jewish heritage to refute accusations of Nazi influence in Ukraine, the president has ceded to neo-Nazi forces and now depends on them as front line fighters.

By Alexander RUBINSTEIN and Max BLUMENTHAL

Back in October 2019, as the war in eastern Ukraine dragged on, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky traveled to Zolote, a town situated firmly in the “gray zone” of Donbas, where over 14,000 had been killed, mostly on the pro-Russian side. There, the president encountered the hardened veterans of extreme right paramilitary units keeping up the fight against separatists just a few miles away.

Elected on a platform of de-escalation of hostilities with Russia, Zelensky was determined to enforce the so-called Steinmeier Formula conceived by then-German Foreign Minister Walter Steinmeier which called for elections in the Russian-speaking regions of Donetsk and Lugansk.

In a face-to-face confrontation with militants from the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion who had launched a campaign to sabotage the peace initiative called “No to Capitulation,” Zelensky encountered a wall of obstinacy.

With appeals for disengagement from the frontlines firmly rejected, Zelensky melted down on camera. “I’m the president of this country. I’m 41 years old. I’m not a loser. I came to you and told you: remove the weapons,” Zelensky implored the fighters.

President of Ukraine Zelensky has visited disengaging area in Zolote today https://t.co/scFZLt45C2 pic.twitter.com/JlD1cWPQ39

— Liveuamap (@Liveuamap) October 26, 2019

Once video of the stormy confrontation spread across Ukrainian social media channels, Zelensky became the target of an angry backlash.

Andriy Biletsky, the proudly fascist Azov Battalion leader who once pledged to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen”, vowed to bring thousands of fighters to Zolote if Zelensky pressed any further. Meanwhile, a parliamentarian from the party of former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko openly fantasized about Zelensky being blown to bits by a militant’s grenade.

Though Zelensky achieved a minor disengagement, the neo-Nazi paramilitaries escalated their “No Capitulation” campaign. And within months, fighting began to heat up again in Zolote, sparking a new cycle of violations of the Minsk Agreement.

By this point, Azov had been formally incorporated into the Ukrainian military and its street vigilante wing, known as the National Corps, was deployed across the country under the watch of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, and alongside the National Police. In December 2021, Zelensky would be seen delivering a “Hero of Ukraine” award to a leader of the fascistic Right Sector in a ceremony in Ukraine’s parliament.

A full-scale conflict with Russia was approaching, and the distance between Zelensky and the extremist paramilitaries was closing fast.

This February 24, when Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukrainian territory on a stated mission to “demilitarize and denazify” the country, US media embarked on a mission of its own: to deny the power of neo-Nazi paramilitaries over the country’s military and political sphere. As the US government-funded National Public Radio insisted, “Putin’s language [about denazification] is offensive and factually wrong.”

In its bid to deflect from the influence of Nazism in contemporary Ukraine, US media has found its most effective PR tool in the figure of Zelensky, a former TV star and comedian from a Jewish background. It is a role the actor-turned-politician has eagerly assumed.

But as we will see, Zelensky has not only ceded ground to the neo-Nazis in his midst, he has entrusted them with a front line role in his country’s war against pro-Russian and Russian forces.

The president’s Jewishness as Western media PR device 

Hours before President Putin’s February 24 speech declaring denazification as the goal of Russian operations, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “asked how a people who lost eight million of its citizens fighting Nazis could support Nazism,” according to the BBC.

Raised in a non-religious Jewish family in the Soviet Union during the 1980’s, Zelensky has downplayed his heritage in the past. “The fact that I am Jewish barely makes 20 in my long list of faults,” he joked during a 2019 interview in which he declined to go into further detail about his religious background.

Today, as Russian troops bear down on cities like Mariupol, which is effectively under the control of the Azov Battalion, Zelensky is no longer ashamed to broadcast his Jewishness. “How could I be a Nazi?” he wondered aloud during a public address. For a US media engaged in an all-out information war against Russia, the president’s Jewish background has become an essential public relations tool.

Watch left & right wing factions of MSM unite to declare any allegations of Nazism in Ukraine to be Russian fake news because President Zelensky is Jewish. Featuring Senators Marsha Blackburn & Mark Warner, former CIA spy Dan Hoffman & “Ukraine Whistleblower” Alexander Vindman pic.twitter.com/vruyDUoWxv

— Alex Rubinstein (@RealAlexRubi) February 28, 2022

A few examples of the US media’s deployment of Zelensky as a shield against allegations of rampant Nazism in Ukraine are below (see mash-up above for video):

• PBS NewsHour noted Putin’s comments on denazification with a qualifier: “even though President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish and his great uncles died in the Holocaust.”
• On Fox & Friends, former CIA officer Dan Hoffman declared that “it’s the height of hypocrisy to call the Ukrainian nation to denazify — their president is Jewish after all.”
• On MSNBC, Virginia Democratic Senator Mark Warner said Putin’s “terminology, outrageous and obnoxious as it is — ‘denazify’ where you’ve got frankly a Jewish president in Mr. Zelensky. This guy [Putin] is on his own kind of personal jihad to restore greater Russia.”
• Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn said on Fox Business she’s “been impressed with President Zelensky and how he has stood up. And for Putin to go out there and say ‘we’re going to denazify’ and Zelensky is Jewish.”
• In an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Gen. John Allen denounced Putin’s use of the term, “de-Nazify” while the newsman and former Israel lobbyist shook his head in disgust. In a separate interview with Blitzer, the so-called “Ukraine whistleblower” and Ukraine-born Alexander Vindman grumbled that the claim is “patently absurd, there’s really no merit… you pointed out that Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish… the Jewish community [is] embraced. It’s central to the country and there is nothing to this Nazi narrative, this fascist narrative. It’s fabricated as a pretext.”

Behind the corporate media spin lies the complex and increasingly close relationship Zelensky’s administration has enjoyed with the neo-Nazi forces invested with key military and political posts by the Ukrainian state, and the power these open fascists have enjoyed since Washington installed a Western-aligned regime through a coup in 2014.

In fact, Zelensky’s top financial backer, the Ukrainian Jewish oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, has been a key benefactor of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and other extremists militias.

Backed by Zelensky’s top financier, neo-Nazi militants unleash a wave of intimidation

Incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard, the Azov Battalion is considered the most ideologically zealous and militarily motivated unit fighting pro-Russian separatists in the eastern Donbass region.

With Nazi-inspired Wolfsangel insignia on the uniforms of its fighters, who have been photographed with Nazi SS symbols on their helmets, Azov “is known for its association with neo-Nazi ideology…[and] is believed to have participated in training and radicalizing US-based white supremacy organizations,” according to an FBI indictment of several US white nationalists that traveled to Kiev to train with Azov.

Igor Kolomoisky, a Ukrainian energy baron of Jewish heritage, has been a top funder of Azov since it was formed in 2014. He has also bankrolled private militias like the Dnipro and Aidar Battalions, and has deployed them as a personal thug squad to protect his financial interests.

In 2019, Kolomoisky emerged as the top backer of Zelensky’s presidential bid. Though Zelensky made anti-corruption the signature issue of his campaign, the Pandora Papers exposed him and members of his inner circle stashing large payments from Kolomoisky in a shadowy web of offshore accounts.

When Zelensky took office in May 2019, the Azov Battalion maintained de facto control of the strategic southeastern port city of Mariupol and its surrounding villages. As Open Democracy noted, “Azov has certainly established political control of the streets in Mariupol. To maintain this control, they have to react violently, even if not officially, to any public event which diverges sufficiently from their political agenda.”

Attacks by Azov in Mariupol have included assaults on “feminists and liberals” marching on International Women’s Day among other incidents.

In March 2019, members of the Azov Battalion’s National Corps attacked the home of Viktor Medvedchuk, the leading opposition figure in Ukraine, accusing him of treason for his friendly relations with Vladimir Putin, the godfather of Medvedchuk’s daughter.

Zelensky’s administration escalated the attack on Medvedchuk, shuttering several media outlets he controlled in February 2021 with the open approval of the US State Department, and jailing the opposition leader for treason three months later. Zelensky justified his actions on the grounds that he needed to “fight against the danger of Russian aggression in the information arena.”

Next, in August 2020, Azov’s National Corps opened fire on a bus containing members of Medvedchuk’s party, Patriots for Life, wounding several with rubber-coated steel bullets.

Breaking! A bus carrying supporters and members of #Ukraine‘s opposition party “Patriots For Life” was attacked by Ukrainian National Corps and Azov Battalion in the east of the country (Kharkov), unconfirmed reports that some of the passengers have been murdered. pic.twitter.com/O0hB2sqbRA

— The Eurasianist  (@Russ_Warrior) August 27, 2020

Zelensky failed to rein in neo-Nazis, wound up collaborating with them

Following his failed attempt to demobilize neo-Nazi militants in the town of Zolote in October 2019, Zelensky called the fighters to the table, telling reporters “I met with veterans yesterday. Everyone was there – the National Corps, Azov, and everyone else.”

A few seats away from the Jewish president was Yehven Karas, the leader of the neo-Nazi C14 gang.

During the Maidan “Revolution of Dignity” that ousted Ukraine’s elected president in 2014, C14 activists took over Kiev’s city hall and plastered its walls with neo-Nazi insignia before taking shelter in the Canadian embassy.

As the former youth wing of the ultra-nationalist Svoboda Party, C14 appears to draw its name from the infamous 14 words of US neo-Nazi leader David Lane: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

By offering to carry out acts of spectacular violence on behalf of anyone willing to pay, the hooligans have fostered a cozy relationship with various governing bodies and powerful elites across Ukraine.

A March 2018 report by Reuters stated that “C14 and Kiev’s city government recently signed an agreement allowing C14 to establish a ‘municipal guard’ to patrol the streets,” effectively giving them the sanction of the state to carry out pogroms.

As The Grayzone reported, C14 led raid to “purge” Romani from Kiev’s railway station in collaboration with the Kiev police.

The C14 Nazi terror gang signed an agreement with the Kiev municipal government to patrol its streets. This footage taken just a few months later in 2018 shows them carrying out a pogrom against a Romani camp. pic.twitter.com/9aAA86K8TQ

— Alex Rubinstein (@RealAlexRubi) February 28, 2022

Not only was this activity sanctioned by the Kiev city government, the US government itself saw little problem with it, hosting Bondar at an official US government institution in Kiev where he bragged about the pogroms. C14 continued to receive state funding throughout 2018 for “national-patriotic education.”

Karas has claimed that the Ukrainian Security Serves would “pass on” information regarding pro-separatist rallies “not only [to] us, but also Azov, the Right Sector and so on.”

“In general, deputies of all factions, the National Guard, the Security Service of Ukraine and the Ministry of Internal Affairs work for us. You can joke like that,” Karas said.

Throughout 2019, Zelensky and his administration deepened their ties with ultra-nationalist elements across Ukraine.

After Prime Minister attends neo-Nazi concert, Zelensky honors Right Sector leader

Just days after Zelensky’s meeting with Karas and other neo-Nazi leaders in November 2019, Oleksiy Honcharuk – then the Prime Minister and deputy head of Zelensky’s presidential office – appeared on stage at a neo-Nazi concert organized by C14 figure and accused murderer Andriy Medvedko.

Zelensky’s Minister for Veterans Affairs not only attended the concert, which featured several antisemitic metal bands, she promoted the concert on Facebook.

Also in 2019, Zelensky defended Ukrainian footballer Roman Zolzulya against Spanish fans taunting him as a “Nazi.” Zolzulya had posed beside photos of the World War II-era Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera and openly supported the Azov Battalion. Zelensky responded to the controversy by proclaiming that all of Ukraine backed Zolzulya, describing him as “not only a cool football player but a true patriot.”

In November 2021, one of Ukraine’s most prominent ultra-nationalist militiamen, Dmytro Yarosh, announced that he had been appointed as an advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Yarosh is an avowed follower of the Nazi collaborator Bandera who led Right Sector from 2013 to 2015, vowing to lead the “de-Russification” of Ukraine.

A month later, as war with Russia drew closer, Zelensky awarded Right Sector commander Dmytro Kotsyubaylo the “Hero of Ukraine” commendation. Known as “Da Vinci,” Kosyubaylo keeps a pet wolf in his frontline base, and likes to joke to visiting reporters that his fighters “feed it the bones of Russian-speaking children.”

Ukrainian state-backed neo-Nazi leader flaunts influence on the eve of war with Russia 

On February 5, 2022, only days before full-scale war with Russia erupted, Yevhen Karas of the neo-Nazi C14 delivered a stem-winding public address in Kiev intended to highlight the influence his organization and others like it enjoyed over Ukrainian politics.

Watch Yevhen Karas the leader of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi terror gang C14’s speech from Kiev earlier this month. Straight from the horses’ mouth, he dispels the many narratives pushed by the left, the mainstream media and the State Department. pic.twitter.com/VWJqWPUGUp

— Alex Rubinstein (@RealAlexRubi) February 27, 2022

“LGBT and foreign embassies say ‘there were not many Nazis at Maidan, maybe about 10 percent of real ideological ones,’” Karas remarked. “If not for those eight percent [of neo-Nazis] the effectiveness [of the Maidan coup] would have dropped by 90 percent.”

The 2014 Maidan “Revolution of Dignity” would have been a “gay parade” if not for the instrumental role of neo-Nazis, he proclaimed.

Karas went on to opine that the West armed Ukrainian ultra-nationalists because “we have fun killing.” He also fantasized about the balkanization of Russia, declaring that it should be broken up into “five different” countries.

“If we get killed…we died fighting a holy war”

When Russian forces entered Ukraine this February 24, encircling the Ukrainian military in the east and driving towards Kiev, President Zelensky announced a national mobilization that included the release of criminals from prison, among them accused murderers wanted in Russia. He also blessed the distribution of arms to average citizens, and their training by battle-hardened paramilitaries like the Azov Battalion.

With fighting underway, Azov’s National Corps gathered hundreds of ordinary civilians, including grandmothers and children, to train in public squares and warehouses from Kharviv to Kiev to Lviv.

As US media celebrated average Ukrainian citizens taking up arms against Russian troops, the ultra-nationalist Azov Battalion’s National Corps published a propaganda video of its fighters training and passing out arms to residents of Kharkiv, transforming them into combatants. pic.twitter.com/RVL1nyWkfw

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 1, 2022

On February 27, the official Twitter account of the National Guard of Ukraine posted video of “Azov Fighters” greasing their bullets with pig fat to humiliate Russian Muslim fighters from Chechnya.

Azov fighters of the National Guard greased the bullets with lard against the Kadyrov orcs

Бійці Азова Нацгвардії змастили кулі салом проти кадировських орків

Підписуйтесь на наш телеграм канал https://t.co/SBQltMr4bM pic.twitter.com/A1ci7tZL8r

— НГУ (@ng_ukraine) February 27, 2022

A day later, the Azov Battalion’s National Corps announced that the Azov Battalion’s Kharkiv Regional Police would begin using the city’s Regional State Administration building as a defense headquarters. Footage posted to Telegram the following day shows the Azov-occupied building being hit by a Russian airstrike.

Besides authorizing the release of hardcore criminals to join the battle against Russia, Zelensky has ordered all males of fighting age to remain in the country. Azov militants have proceeded to enforce the policy by brutalizing civilians attempting to flee from the fighting around Mariupol.

According to one Greek resident in Mariupol recently interviewed by a Greek news station, “When you try to leave you run the risk of running into a patrol of the Ukrainian fascists, the Azov Battalion,” he said, adding “they would kill me and are responsible for everything.”

Footage posted online appears to show uniformed members of a fascist Ukrainian militia in Mariupol violently pulling fleeing residents out of their vehicles at gunpoint.

BREAKING  Ukrainian NAZI are preventing people from leaving Mariupol and are shooting at them.

Residents of #Mariupol do not move around the city, Mariupol will soon be liberated!#EndTheBandera#StopUkrainianNazism
#Ukraine #Russia #DPR #LPR #DNR #LPR #Donbass pic.twitter.com/AakZGyNxQx

— Deus Abscondis (@Deus_Abscondis) February 26, 2022

Other video filmed at checkpoints around Mariupol showed Azov fighters shooting and killing civilians attempting to flee.

On March 1, Zelensky replaced the regional administrator of Odessa with Maksym Marchenko, a former commander of the extreme right Aidar Battalion, which has been accused of an array of war crimes in the Donbass region.

Meanwhile, as a massive convoy of Russian armored vehicles bore down on Kiev, Yehven Karas of the neo-Nazi C14 posted a video on YouTube from inside a vehicle presumably transporting fighters.

“If we get killed, it’s fucking great because it means we died fighting a holy war,” Karas exclaimed. ”If we survive, it’s going to be even fucking better! That’s why I don’t see a downside to this, only upside!”

thegrayzone.com

As of this writing, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is hunkered down in his bunker somewhere in Kiev, as the sound of the encroaching war gets closer and closer. A grim scene, to be sure.

All the US and EU kisses and roses leading up to this end have turned to dust and barbed wire, as a no-doubt deeply bitter Zelensky has nothing left but to cry out in anger:

Zelensky earlier: “Who is ready to fight with us? I do not see anyone. Who is ready to give Ukraine a guarantee of NATO membership? Everyone is afraid.”

— ASB News / MILITARY (@ASBMilitary) February 25, 2022

The chips are down, as much of the US-equipped and backed Ukrainian military appears to have turned and ran as Russian forces approached. That is not to say that there has not been death and destruction on both sides. The battle for Kherson was brutal, with plenty of Russian losses. But nevertheless, as of this writing, it has fallen to Russian control.

Kiev in the main may well fall within the next 12-24 hours. Russian troops are already in the city. And Zelensky is in his bunker with fewer and fewer to take his calls. The cavalry he believed was promised him will not be coming to rescue him. Ukraine will be de-militarized and Ukraine will be neutral. Once held up as a great ally of Washington and Brussels, Zelensky is alone.

It brings to mind that great quote I often recycle from RPI academic advisor John Laughland, written as the early US-backed color revolutions rampaged through the former Soviet world in the early 2000s:

It is better to be an enemy of the Americans than their friend. If you are their enemy, they might try to buy you; but if you are their friend they will definitely sell you.

Zelensky has now learned the bitter truth, which previously favored foreign leaders also learned. Most of their lessons have been even harder than Zelensky’s (at least to this point).

The bitter truth is that Washington’s foreign policy establishment never actually considered Zelensky – or his predecessor Poroshenko – to be allies or partners of the United States. Overflowing with a toxic mix of ignorance, arrogance, and extreme cynicism, Washington’s elites have always viewed Ukraine as a tool to “regime-change” a Russia that, after its post-Yeltsin recovery, would no longer take its direction from them.

The false gods of American exceptionalism are jealous ones indeed.

The American foreign policy establishment wanted a perpetual “Yanks to the Rescue” Russia, whereby US “consultants” and spooks would ensure that the most obsequious candidate would continue to win and rule. A string of Russian presidents who would, à la Shevardnadze and a whole string of other post-Soviet leaders, run the country like a family business: lots of biznis deals for family members…and maybe 10 percent for the “big guy.”

Americans are victims (willing or not) of a mass media system as propagandistic as any that existed during Soviet Communism. The “party line” is established and it is unwaveringly followed whether the favored flavor is Fox or MSNBC. When it became obvious that Yeltsin’s one-time understudy, Vladimir Putin, wasn’t going to play that way, the party line came down that he must be demonized.

Not carefully studied and where appropriate opposed (on the basis of actual US interests), but rather Putin had to be demonized and, ultimately, “regime-changed.”

Discourse in the US is so infantile that just writing this objective truth will no doubt land this author in the “Putin’s puppet” purgatory. Not for the first time.

Most Americans will not have heard – and those who have likely do not care – that twice when the Ukrainian people elected a president who was in favor of maintaining good relations with its Russian neighbor the US intervened and overthrew the government. First time in the 2004-5 “Orange Revolution” and then the fateful 2014 “Maidan” revolt, which was explicitly and overtly supported by senior US government officials on the ground in Kiev including Victoria “F**k the EU” Nuland and the late neocon warmonger Sen. John McCain.

In the meantime tens of millions of dollars flow from the US taxpayer to favored think tanks, civic organizations, and media outlets via the National Endowment for Democracy (sic) and numerous US-funded related organizations. The goal is the same: manipulate Ukraine so that it remains on Washington’s preferred path (toward conflict with Russia).

It is fashionable – particularly over the past two days – for even antiwar and “restraint”-promoting scribblers and jaw-boners to fall into tune with the warmongers’ songbook of “Russian aggression” as the sole cause of recent bloodshed and destruction.

While anyone with an ounce of decency deeply regrets and opposes the use of such massive military force as we have seen recently in Ukraine, if there is one lesson to be learned from this entire miserable chapter (and by “chapter” I mean the entirety of post-Cold War US foreign policy) it is this: There are consequences that come with the belief that the key to peace and prosperity is to remake the world in your own image through the use of overt and covert, violent and non-violent means. That lesson should have been learned with the fall of Soviet communism itself, but the “victors” were too full of hubris to pause for a moment of humility.

Wishing reality was one thing and accepting that it is another are two very different things. The distinction must be made or the mass mental illness of “American exceptionalism” can never be cured. Otherwise the consequences next time the tectonic plates shift may be far closer to home.

Whether America and the EU like it or not, the era of ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality” is well and truly over. Its end is not to be mourned but to be celebrated. The only pro-America foreign policy is non-intervention in the affairs of others.

Ukrainian President Zelensky is unlikely to survive his turn being America’s cat’s paw to wrong-foot Russia. While he sits in his bunker contemplating his fate, he may well be visited by the ghosts of Saddam and Gaddafi and all those who preceded him in this position. God help him.

ronpaulinstitute.org via unz.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The baptism of fire from western analysts and newsrooms is that the “invasion” of Ukraine is unjust and that “Putin will stop at nothing now” in his so-called quest to retake former Soviet bloc countries.

“Where will it end? Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic?” one harped, while millions nod their heads in a gang bang of blinded dogma and bigotry. Few care to look at the history and the nuances of what has happened in recent years which provoked such a reaction from Putin. From as far back as a decade ago when the West overthrew Ghadaffi and created a war there which it then backed with its own jihadists (which threw a major spanner in the works for Putin’s ambitions in Libya) to missiles placed strategically by NATO in Romania and Poland, for example, reported on as recently as 2018, which were wrapped in a sugar coating of narrative from the op-ed writers in the West who talked about Russia no longer being the threat, as the new enemy is Islamic terrorism etc etc.

Western newsrooms are still trying to pull the wool over our eyes about Ukraine, simplifying and distorting the facts, simply so as they can get on with their jobs of producing the fodder to keep them busy, while serving their masters in government who chuck them a bone every now and again with a leaked report.

The so-called “revolution” in Ukraine is always reported as a victory for the West as “democracy” finally slayed the evil powers of Soviet-esque influence as the latter is always painted as corrupt and the former candida.

But there are enough voices out there which call what happened in Ukraine back then as a U.S.-backed coup d’etat and Zelensky as the new useful idiot of the west. Even the Los Angeles Times put the boot in recently when, just days before the invasion, it painted a picture of the new president as a near-useless cretin masquerading as a political hero who had lost a colossus of political capital in recent months when the tensions started to be palatable last year.

Will any western hacks examine this further and look at the different accounts? Unlikely, as this “grey zone” is what nearly all western journalists hate as it represents masses of work and going against the grain of both the narrative from their own governments but also the grey-haired chiefs’ views in the newsroom. We saw this with Syria. Kudos to Peter Hitchens for standing alone and trying to offer a more objective point of view about the Ukraine invasion. I doubt if anyone will follow him.

The story for western media has already been written and neatly divided into two binary portions of tainted narrative which is an egregiously cruel part of war: truth usually is the first casualty when the bullets start flying.

But what about the promises of support from the West towards the Zelensky government? Isn’t that a morose act of sublime cruelty in itself? To promise to help, but in reality only offer token support of relatively small amounts of cash and military hardware? Will NATO send one soldier to the Ukraine to fight Russian soldiers there? Will any EU member state do the same?

Yet the narrative continues and you can see the strain on Zelensky’s face in his social media posts and his anger towards Washington, NATO and the EU.

As those sanctions start to bite, who really are the winners and losers? The embarrassing press conference given by Biden where, after finishing the painful autocue speech, he declares to one reporter that “sanctions won’t prevent anything” is baffling. The truth is that sanctions are really all that the EU and US has to fill in the widening gap, the radio silence from NATO which talks a great talk on supporting allies but looks more and more weak, ineffective and pointless as the days go on. Building up NATO troops in neighbouring countries will soon be seen for the empty gesture it is when the bloodbath starts as Ukrainians show resistance against Russian advances. As the whole world watches, soon NATO’s credibility will plummet even further as the implications of doing nothing but merely acting as a spectator will make the organisation tumble to an all-time low. The argument from many at NATO that Putin’s aim to push NATO back has backfired as it has only resulted in more troops being stationed now in Poland, for example, is a lame one at best. What is likely to emerge in the coming days and weeks is that the West is likely to become a bigger enemy of most Ukrainians when they see what the real deal is and Zelensky’s rallying call to the masses, if he is not toppled, will be a scathing attack on these so-called western values, with the EU itself being in his crosshairs – a win-win for Putin, many will note. War is cruelty on a level most of us can’t process. But even more cruel are those who orchestrate it and then run away and hide the moment the knife is drawn from the sheath. 

(Click on the image to enlarge)