That’s counts as bad news, right?

Staff at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine sent a message to Ukrainian media and government authorities warning that the Russian troops that took the plant are now laying down explosives around it in order to "blackmail the whole of Europe."

— MK-ULTRA (@mkultranews) March 4, 2022

Lee Camp is unemployed.

Okay, I see what happened, RT America has shut down completely. Do you know any details about how/why that happened? BTW, I will be sure to follow your work elsewhere. https://t.co/VAR53xmTL8

— Jeff the Russian Bot #EndApartheid #FreePalestine (@leftyvegan) March 3, 2022

It’s not a good look to call for somebody’s assassination publicly, especially if one is a prominent politician oneself.

Watch highlights from Cooper Kupp’s performance at the 2017 NFL combine

This is what happens when Rams linebackers stop playing with Aaron Donald. Littleton and Fowler. pic.twitter.com/rqcE9Fd7rx

— Super Bowl Broly (@UnleashedBroly) March 1, 2022

zn wrote:

It’s actually in Russia’s interests to not feel threatened by NATO. When Russia de-escalates in relation to Europe, Europe de-escalates in relation to them. Again the only thing they lose is westward re-expansion.

Except that’s not true. The deal when the USSR collapsed was no NATO expansion in exchange for a unified Germany. Germany unified.

But NATO went ahead and added the Baltic states and Poland and Hungary and Czech and whatever anyway. And there was talk about Ukraine being added. True or not.

Plus western oil corps were in there trying to develop Ukrainian oil/gas, including the president’s son, so – NATO or not – that was pulling Ukraine into Euro-American hegemony, and threatening Russia’s income stream from gas.

zn wrote:

wv wrote:

Usual weirdness in the media:

Yeah.

Yeah.

Here is the article again, this time without formatting, and without the pages of footnotes.

Ukraine: Foreign Intervention, Copious Propaganda, Lies and the Rise of Neo-Nazis

By Joe Giambrone

(This term paper, for the University of California, sought to set the record straight on the 2014 destabilization and coup d’etat in Kyiv. The professor of the required political science class had infused his lectures with mindless pro-US propaganda for the entire semester. My intent was to school him, so that he would stop propagandizing the impressionable young students. Eighty-six footnotes, he had to give it an A.)

With current German best seller “Gekaufte Journalisten” (“Bought Journalism”) telling the true story of Udo Olfkotte being paid by the CIA for twenty-five years in order to spin the news in favor of US/NATO interests,1 the plummeting public confidence in corporate mainstream news is more than warranted.2 Of course Operation Mockingbird,3 a CIA scheme to influence and pay US journalists in the same manner,4 has long been exposed and yet is seldom discussed on public airwaves. A German TV sketch comedy troupe, Die Anstalt, satirized the glaring journalistic malfeasance in the media’s interpretation of the 2014 Ukraine conflict, to raucous applause.5 Closer to home, CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson revealed the white house’s manipulation of and collusion with domestic mass media, when she was screamed at by an Obama spokesman, “The Washington Post is reasonable, the LA Times is reasonable, The New York Times is reasonable. You’re the only one who’s not reasonable!”6

This paper will argue that Western propaganda, in coordination with the U.S. State Department and the new Kyiv junta, has repeatedly and deceptively mischaracterized the complex events in Ukraine this past year and continues to recklessly instigate a dangerous conflict between nuclear armed Russia and NATO/United States.

It is impossible to assess the media reports concerning Ukraine without a comprehensive understanding of the events on the ground over this past year. Of particular significance is the question: who is attacking whom? The main meme that has been bulldozed by Western corporate news services appears to be that Russia has allegedly “invaded” the Ukraine in some sort of resurgent Soviet “empire”7 experiment. This is glaringly a case of the cart before the horse, framing the debate in terms of Vladimir Putin’s alleged intentions in nearly every major US news source. Ilya Somin writes in The Washington Post, “Russia already invaded Ukraine in a much more blatant and obvious way months ago when it occupied and annexed Crimea.”8

This is utter nonsense on its face. The Russian naval base at Sevastopol was always present, and so Russian forces did not “invade” at all. The base was located there by treaty, leased from the Ukraine government until 2042.9 The political situation in Crimea was decided by a popular referendum, democratically voted on by the people who live in the province, who overwhelmingly and unquestionably voted to secede from the illegitimate Kyiv coup d’etat regime that overthrew the democratically elected Yanukovych government in February of 2014. Results of this Crimean referendum vary from “96.77%” in favor of secession at Russia Today10, to the Kyiv Post conceding that “93 percent of Crimeans voted to join Russia, and street celebrations under way.”11 The obvious meaning of this referendum, that democracy was working, soon washed away and tales of “invasion” on Russia’s part became the main western propaganda narrative that European and American citizens would hear about on their televisions.

John Kerry took point in preemptively denouncing the Crimean exercise in democracy when he issued threats to Russia on March 13th.12 He also claimed that, “There is no justification, no legality to this referendum that is taking place.” This was from the man who recognized the violent Kyiv street mobs as the legitimate government of the entire nation of Ukraine after they seized power through chaos, Molotov cocktails, firearms and wounding upward of “500” police.13 Kerry’s boss, Barack Obama, even went to the absurd length of calling the Nuland/Yatsenyuk coup d’etat government “duly elected.”14

In response to the US claim of illegality, Russian president Vladimir Putin responded directly:

“Moreover, the Crimean authorities referred to the well-known Kosovo precedent — a precedent our western colleagues created with their own hands in a very similar situation, when they agreed that the unilateral separation of Kosovo from Serbia, exactly what Crimea is doing now, was legitimate and did not require any permission from the country’s central authorities. Pursuant to Article 2, Chapter 1 of the United Nations Charter, the UN International Court agreed with this approach and made the following comment in its ruling of July 22, 2010, and I quote: ‘No general prohibition may be inferred from the practice of the Security Council with regard to declarations of independence,’ and ‘General international law contains no prohibition on declarations of independence.’ Crystal clear, as they say.”15

One wonders if Kerry and Obama would have held the democratic aspirations of the people of Scotland in similar regard, and whether Edinburgh would currently be bombed with artillery and aerial assaults had that nation voted slightly differently this past August. The prize for the most shrill hysteria over Crimea, though, should go to Hillary Clinton: “It’s what Hitler did back in the 30s.”16

The political transition in Crimea was the most peaceful of all major recent political events in Ukraine, not exactly the stuff of military “invasions.” While Right Sector, Svoboda, UNA and SNA neo-nazi/fascist elements violently stormed Kyiv’s government buildings in a hail of firebombs, gunfire and berserk mob violence this February, and Kyiv’s later military assaults on Donetsk and Luhansk have killed thousands of civilians to date, the events in Crimea were an example of actual peaceful democracy in action. And so of course the State Department vehemently opposed it.

Political support for the Yanukovych presidency was based primarily in the east,17 and so this divide between eastern and western Ukraine reflects deep longstanding ethnic divisions. These have since been exploited by the Maidan coup coalition. This cultural division was noted for decades, even rising to the level of a civilizational dividing line in Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, separating, “the more Catholic western Ukraine from Orthodox eastern Ukraine.”18

The primary spoken language in the eastern provinces, notably in the Donbass region of Luhansk and Donetsk, is Russian. When the junta deposed president Yanukovych one of their first legal acts was to outlaw Russian as an official language.19 Russian is spoken by “40%” of Ukrainians.20 “‘This makes Russian-speakers feel like second-class citizens,’ [said] Ruslan Bortnik, vice chairman of Russian-Speaking Ukraine, an advocacy group.”21 Further, with the onslaught of fascist street violence in Kyiv, a Rand Corporation analyst explained that the Ukrainian language law was, “perceived as taking away rights enjoyed by the Russian-speaking population, and potentially a sign that there might be growing discrimination against them.”22 The barbarism and anti-democratic nature of this new junta23 prompted a strong reaction by eastern Ukrainian citizens whose spoken language and heritage are, of course, Russian.

But in order to ascertain how this conflict became the most dangerous flashpoint on earth, pitting heavily nuclear-armed states against one another, we need to put the horse back in front of the cart and go backward in time. Eight-term former US Congressman, Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) lectured right-wing pundit Bill O’Reilly on Ukraine, with a particularly cogent jab: “Bill O’Reilly, if you don’t believe in cause and effect, I don’t know what I can do for you.”24 Kucinich went on to call out CIA, State Department, USAID and particularly the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) for meddling in Ukraine’s internal politics. This was of no interest to the show’s host, O’Reilly, who repeatedly attempted to turn the focus back toward Vladimir Putin. Asking Kucinich, a former presidential candidate, what he would do as US president in this current situation, Kucinich answered,

“What I’d do is not have USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy working with U.S. taxpayers’ money to knock off an elected government in Ukraine, which is what they did. I wouldn’t try to force the people of Ukraine into a deal with NATO against their interest or into a deal with the European Union, which is against their economic interest.”25

Before O’Reilly cut off the exchange, Kucinich was able to clearly mention “sixty-five programs” in Ukraine, “supported by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).” This is not an aberration but has been standard procedure since the fall of the Soviet Union to meddle in the internal politics of the former Soviet republics and to install regimes friendly to US business interests and to NATO military base expansion. Culminating, in Ukraine itself, in the 2004 so-called “Orange Revolution,” the UK Guardian reported a “US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev.” Official US admissions put the total money spent to install Yushchenko as president at “around $14m.” Foreign money entered the Ukrainian political scene via the “Democratic party’s National Democratic Institute, the Republican party’s International Republican Institute, the US state department and USAid… Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros’s open society institute.”26

Moving ahead to 2013, it was not Vladimir Putin on the streets of Ukraine handing out snacks and meeting with coup plotters against the democratically elected Yanukovych government, but one Victoria Nuland, the current Assistant Secretary of State in the Obama administration.27 Nuland was repeatedly photographed with the coup plotters including the head of the ultra-right Svoboda Party, Oleh Tyahnybok, UDAR party head Klitschko and the currently installed junta Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk.28

Oleh Tyahnybok, and his neo-fascist Svoboda party, were flagged by the European Parliament in 2012, which warned that, “racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic views go against the EU’s fundamental values and principles and therefore appeals to pro-democratic parties in the [Ukrainian] Verkhovna Rada not to associate with, endorse or form coalitions with this party.”29

Victoria Nuland made international headlines with her “Fuck the EU” quip, which indeed served to distract many from the substance of the leaked telephone call between herself and the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt. The call was likely recorded by Russian intelligence on an open phone line. The exchange begins with Pyatt announcing, “I think we’re in play.”

“Nuland: I think Yats is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience. He’s the… what he needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside. He needs to be talking to them four times a week, you know. I just think Klitsch going in… he’s going to be at that level working for Yatseniuk, it’s just not going to work.”30

So the Assistant Secretary of State of the United States was revealed choosing who would serve and who would not serve in a new Ukrainian junta, after deposing the elected president Yanukovych. As “Yats,” Arseniy Yatsenyuk, indeed entered this new junta as Prime Minister, and the scenario played out exactly as the transcript revealed, this conversation is further evidence of US meddling in the internal affairs of Ukraine, a violent breach of state sovereignty it turns out. American and European interference destabilized Ukraine in February of 2014 and created the ongoing crisis.

Victoria Nuland has not been shy about bragging of her efforts to alter the political landscape of Ukraine. In a speech she made on December 13th of 2013 to the US-Ukraine Foundation, standing in front of a Chevron logo no less, Nuland bragged of spending “$5 billion” of US taxpayers’ money in total, “as we take Ukraine into the future it deserves.”31

One might legitimately ask what she meant, with that “future” now able to be assessed in the world’s headlines each day: civil war, mass murders, atrocities, bombings, disappearances, Neo-Nazi ascendancy, destabilization, economic bankruptcy.32 Did Ukraine “deserve” such a future?

Events in Ukraine took a very nasty turn after Pyatt and Nuland’s machinations became “in play” in February of 2014. While western audiences were treated to a propaganda video entitled, I am a Ukrainian,33 this so-called “viral” video was actually executive-produced by Larry Diamond and “A Whisper to a Roar.”34 Diamond is connected to the National Endowment for Democracy as well as to the US State Department. “Larry Diamond is the founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and the co-chair of the Research Council of the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy.”35 The NED receives nearly its entire budget from US government grants, $134.9m in 2011 alone.36 It is a tool of regime change with a long history of interfering in foreign elections and even thwarting democracy abroad as in this case. It is described by journalist Robert Parry as a “$100 million U.S. government-financed slush fund that generally supports a neocon agenda.”37

Diamond’s propaganda video omitted the role of firebombings38 and countless acts of political violence during the Maidan revolution in its one-sided carefully constructed narrative. On February 20th of 2014 the Ukrainian government said that “More than 500 law enforcers have been injured since the start of violent clashes on Tuesday, 108 of them were shot, and 63 are in a serious condition.”39 In fact the violent actions of Right Sector, Svoboda and the other ultra-nationalists40 would obviously be considered terrorism by western leaders had they taken place in any other western capital city. The double standard was quite glaring, to some.

Ukraine came under hard economic times in 2013, and predictably responded with dissatisfaction and discontent among the electorate. This political environment was cynically exploited when the European Union issued the Yanukovych government an ultimatum.41 The EU’s trade offer demanded that Ukraine cut off trade with Russia to its east. The Russians made no similar ultimatum, and Ukraine found itself stuck in the middle of a trade war with a significant amount of trade with Russia at stake. Yanukovych declined the ultimatum, and that is when extra-constitutional means were unleashed to depose his government. The Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister explained:

“The government based itself on exclusively national interests, the interests of protecting employment, increasing the economic stability of the government and boosting productive potential… Ukraine had given up hopes of receiving International Monetary Fund credits as Kiev was unwilling to comply with demands to hike prices for household utilities by 40 percent.”42

The Yanukovych government made the best decision it could given the ultimatum, and so outside forces, circling like vultures, turned their focus toward destabilizing mob violence in order to change the situation on the ground, which did change. Yanukovych fell in late February.

The world’s press turned against him when snipers picked off a number of protesting rioters, and these deaths were naturally attributed to Yanukovych without the need for actual evidence of his guilt. The New York Times has led the propaganda from Ukraine, declaring on February 20th, “Ukraine’s Forces Escalate Attacks Against Protesters.”43 All killings are naturally attributed to the Yanukovych government, by now clearly the official US enemy du jour. Dozens of protesters were indeed killed by sniper fire on the 20th, but this fire originated from buildings controlled by the protesters themselves.

Specifically the Hotel Ukraina was where snipers fired for a long period of time down on advancing protesters. A German investigation showed that the hotel was occupied by Maidan forces, not the government.44 Eyewitnesses from the day confirmed what another leaked diplomatic call had revealed. The forensic evidence surprised the Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet and the European Union Foreign Affairs chief CathyAshton:

“PAET: …evidence shows that people who were killed by snipers from both sides, among policemen and people from the streets, that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides… So there is a stronger and stronger understanding that behind snipers it was not Yanukovych, it was somebody from the new coalition.

ASHTON: I think we do want to investigate. I didn’t pick that up, that’s interesting. Gosh.”45

“Gosh” indeed. The head of Ukraine’s security under Yanukovych, Aleksandr Yakimenko, has called the snipers “mercenaries,”46 which they indeed may have been seeing how the investigation of same has been an obvious cover-up.47

Upon the government’s collapse, the extreme right took over crucial government positions, as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting described:

“The new deputy prime minister, Oleksandr Sych, is from Svoboda; National Security Secretary Andriy Parubiy is a co-founder of the neo-Nazi Social-National Party, Svoboda’s earlier incarnation; the deputy secretary for National Security is Dmytro Yarosh, the head of Right Sector. Chief prosecutor Oleh Makhnitsky is another Svoboda member, as are the ministers for Agriculture and Ecology. In short, if the prospect of fascists taking power again in Europe worries you, you should be very worried about Ukraine.”48

Even Voice of America mentioned Right Sector fascists being legitimized and recruited into the “new” National Guard of Ukraine.49 Uncharacteristically, for the US propaganda outlet, the report included the concerns of the residents of the east. “These people are terrorists. They should be in court, not given guns,” and “several said the National Guard was an illegal formation set up by a government that had usurped power by force.”

All true, but this didn’t stop the Obama administration from sending another $19 million of US taxpayer money to arm and train the Right Sector National Guard50 and another $8 million for a Ukraine border security force.51 Additionally, the California National Guard was shipped to Ukraine to train these same neo-nazi fighters, in a move that should cause some concern to the American public, whose last experiences with Naziism played out somewhat differently. The CIA’s relationship with Nazis, post WW2 however, was much more cozy.52 The US employment of “1,000” German Nazis was indeed reported by the NY Times — fifty years late — and long after the news could have any real world impact.

Some news coverage has concerned the Ukrainian “Azov Battalion,” due to its many recent atrocities.53 This group is headed by a zealous neo-nazi named Andriy Biletsky. The insignia of the battalion is a German SS symbol, and swastikas are common in the unit. Biletsky has said, “The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival… a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”54

The Untermenschen or “sub-human” meme, once very popular in the Third Reich, was also included in one of Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s speeches. The junta’s Prime Minister said,

“They lost their lives because they defended men and women, children and the elderly who found themselves in a situation facing a threat to be killed by invaders and sponsored by them subhumans. First, we will commemorate the heroes by wiping out those who killed them and then by cleaning our land from the evil.”55 (emphasis added)

Such incitement to genocide did not go unnoticed by the residents of the east nor by the Russians. The conflict turned murderous on May 2nd of 2014 in Odessa. The NY Times coverage made no attempt to place the blame for the dozens of killings nor even on whom had started the fires in the trade union hall.56 The BBC blatantly mis-attributed photographs of police provocateurs, labeling them “pro-Russian activists” without any legitimate investigation.57 Western news universally got the story wrong, uncurious as to who specifically started the violence and how they were able to brandish firearms while intermingling with the police as well as hiding behind a wall of officers.58

But numerous photographs and video evidence of the street battles and mass murder spree of May 2nd are available online for the more curious readers. Central to the violence was a group of about thirty plain-clothed individuals seen coordinating with the local police commander, identified as “deputy commander Dmitry Fucheji,” an agent of the Ukraine Interior Ministry.59 This group is distinct and identifiable due to the red electrical tape armbands they all wore that day. Russian news, of course, did not fail to notice the coordinated provocation, where these individuals with red electrical tape arm bands attacked the visiting Football crowd with firearms from behind a wall of police, thus initiating the violence.60 Victims — actual pro-Russian separatist protesters camped out at the trade union building — were later murdered inside the union hall by gunshots, stabbings and strangulation. Their bodies were burned to hide evidence of this terrorism.61

The NY Times has been particularly egregious in promoting Kyiv’s questionable propaganda, often on the front page. On April 14th Obama’s white house admitted that the CIA was advising the Kyiv junta.62 By April 20th, the Times had photos allegedly showing Russian military officers operating in Ukraine. Suspicious photographs of rebel fighters appeared, only to be retracted two days later.63 The photographer was contacted, and his images were used without permission; these were taken inside Ukraine, not in Russia as fraudulently claimed by the Kyiv intelligence. The Times’ web page of that story makes no mention of the retraction to this day and still functions as live propaganda.64 The photos were, as expected, “endorsed by the Obama administration.” The retraction, which appeared on page “A9” and nowhere near the front page, all but conceded the entire story was an outright fraud. The Times’ fealty to the Obama administration was strikingly obvious as the editors backpedaled over each individual photograph. For example: “But the dispute over the group photograph cast a cloud over one particularly vivid and highly publicized piece of evidence.” They did not mean “evidence” of official fraud and war propaganda, but the photos equally served to expose those purposes as well.

Even National Geographic was fear mongering that Vladimir Putin would “invade” Ukraine65 as of May 2nd as dozens of peaceful ethnic Russian protesters were massacred by extreme right fascist rioters in Odessa. The impression in western media was that the events in Ukraine were somehow, vaguely orchestrated by the Russians, without any actual evidence of such required. Putin, who clearly had no desire to “invade” Donbass, responded on May 7th by asking that the independence referendum be postponed as well as by pulling Russian troops back away from the border in an effort to defuse tensions.66 This is hardly the hallmark of a resurgent “empire,” a bogus claim that continues to live on. The Donetsk and Luhansk Ukrainian separatists ignored Putin’s warnings and held the referenda anyway, even though Russia’s military protection was now in question.

On May 11th the two provinces voted overwhelmingly for independence, not to join the Russian federation. These autonomy votes signaled a breaking away from the illegitimate coup d’etat regime of Kyiv, not of a Russian-orchestrated territory annexation. The Kyiv junta’s response to the democratic process was to fire mortars and gunshots at Slavyansk on the eve the of the vote.67 The people of the two regions were undeterred though. Donetsk voted “89.07%” for independence and Luhansk “96.2%.”68

The invasion came swiftly, not from Russia though, but from the Ukraine military units, many of them now staffed by neo-nazi fanatics and directed by the unabashed neo-nazi head of Right Sector: Dmytro Yarosh. Punitive military actions against the populations of Donetsk and Luhansk included artillery bombings, fire bombing, aerial bombs, small arms fire, kidnappings, and torture. The UN totals as of September 16th, and already outdated, were that 3,517 were killed and almost 9,000 wounded.69

As for Russia’s alleged “invasion” of Ukraine this must go down in the books as the oddest military incursion in history. Rather than moving infantry, tanks, rocket launchers and aircraft into the allegedly occupied territory, Russia has remained within its own border. Such an odd “invasion” when the two Russian-friendly provinces could easily have been taken and secured within a day, in the real world, the one seldom seen in US op-ed pages. Instead Putin’s Russia has respected the referenda of the people of the two provinces and has not attempted to annex the territory.

Beyond mischaracterizations and beyond misattribution, the big one, the Big Lie to date of the Ukraine disaster has been the western news coverage of the shooting down of the Malaysian passenger plane, MH-17. News services could be expected to be taken in by a staged provocation, but the refusal to investigate nor to present all of the evidence, including evidence of Kyiv’s glaring fraud and continued lies rises to the level of deliberate, knowing propaganda.

Two very different accounts of the commercial plane’s shoot down have been presented to the world, while most western audiences have only heard one of these scenarios, the weaker one from the Kyiv junta (and partners). However, the scenario with the evidence to back it up was presented by the Russian military immediately after the crash of MH-17, and it directly refutes and debunks some of Kyiv’s claims.70

Russia showed in reconnaissance photos that the Kyiv government forces had recently placed several BUK M1 surface to air missile launchers at the edge of the separatist-controlled area, even though their separatist opponents had no planes at all.

Additionally, two radar monitoring stations in Russia recorded a fighter plane, presumed to be model SU-25, rapidly approach and intercept the airliner at a distance of “3 to 5 kilometers,” well within range to engage and shoot down the defenseless commercial jet. Eyewitnesses on the ground confirmed the presence of a fighter jet flying beside and beneath the exploding airliner. BBC censored a video report from its own Ukraine correspondent, Olga Ivshina, showing local eyewitnesses confirming the military jet: “‘And there was another aircraft, a military one, beside it [the Malaysian plane]. Everybody saw it’ … A second witness to the crash said, ‘It was flying under it [the Malaysian plane], we could see it. It was going underneath the civilian one.’”71 Kyiv junta officials have therefore directly lied about the presence of this military aircraft right up to the office and person of President Poroshenko.72

Forensic evidence of the airliner showed numerous holes consistent with the 30mm nose cannon of an SU-25, which the Russians tested for comparison sake.73 The first Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) monitor on the scene, Canadian Michael Bociurkiw, confirmed the damage pattern of “almost machine-gun like holes.”74 The Russian Union of Engineers presented a case that the Malaysian jet was first attacked at the cockpit with cannon fire, killing the pilots and preventing them from radioing what was happening.75 The SU-25 can carry air to air missiles capable of finishing off the civilian plane, and within 5km, the capability is “guaranteed.”76

Kyiv responded to the MH-17 disaster by repeatedly shelling the crash site, in an apparent effort to destroy or taint evidence and to dissuade investigators.

“There is no access to the site. A battle is raging on two kilometers from the site, with a Ukrainian unit fighting right on the debris of the plane,” said Andrei Purgin, First Deputy Prime Minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. Mr. Purgin accused the government in Kiev of deliberately attacking and shelling the crash site to destroy all the evidence and prevent a thorough investigation.”77

The Russians directly confronted US claims that they had satellite evidence establishing the cause of the Malaysian shoot down.78 The alleged satellite photographs from the US have never been shown, and instead remain unsubstantiated insinuations.

The lead investigator of the MH-17 disaster, Dutch official Fred Westerbeke has vocally complained that the so-called “evidence” talked about in the media has not been given to his investigation. Insinuating a cover-up, Westerbeke said, “We are not certain whether we already have everything or if there are more — information that is possibly even more specific. In any case, what we do have is insufficient for drawing any conclusions.” Westerbeke has refused to rule out the Russian scenario, as of October 27th.79

What sold the idea, to the western public, that the separatist rebels shot down the Malaysian airliner was apparently a PSYOP, a military false-information ploy that turns out to be a crude audio forgery. Of course it is posted to the NY Times website,80 and the audio clip was presented uncritically to the world without the proper expert analysis to determine if it was indeed genuine or not. The local rebel commander can be heard saying, “We have just shot down a plane.” This sounds convincing, on its face, even to other separatist fighters who believed it to be true on July 17th.

Only, the commander, Igor Bezler explained that the recorded conversation was “about a Ukrainian attack aircraft shot down by the militia above Yenakiyevo a day before the Malaysian airliner crash.” Indeed an SU-25 was reported shot down on July 16th, while the Kyiv junta tried to blame this event on Russian military aircraft without providing any supporting evidence.81

Expert audio analysis of the alleged “intercepts” concluded that “it was made up of numerous unrelated recordings.”82 A Russian team of experts led by Nikolai Popov found, “This audio recording is not an integral file and is made up of several fragments.”

…three audio fragments, in which … Igor Bezler talks about a plane shot down by the fighters, does not say anything about the type of the plane… the town of Yenakiyevo is clearly heard in the tape. However, the town is located about 100 km (60 miles) from the settlement of Snezhnoye where the Malaysian Boeing-777 airliner crashed. The tape’s second fragment consists of three pieces but was presented as a single audio recording… spectral and time analysis has showed that the dialog was cut into pieces and then assembled. Short pauses in the tape are very indicative: the audio file has preserved time marks which show that the dialog was assembled from various episodes.

This challenge to the evidence has been on the table since July, and yet has gone unanswered by western media and intelligence, as if it is unimportant to prove responsibility for the crash. The lead investigator, Westerbeke, commented, “But if we in fact do want to try the perpetrators in court, then we will need evidence and more than a recorded phone call from the Internet or photos from the crash site.” His investigation has found the evidence less than compelling, and the case remains open.

Supporting the thesis of this paper, Westerbeke also commented on the low quality of the news coverage: “If you read the newspapers, though, they suggest it has always been obvious what happened to the airplane and who is responsible.” His own investigation, to its credit, has jumped to no such speculative conclusions.

In the end the Ukraine skirmish is as much about an economic and political attack on rival Russia as it is about expanding NATO toward Russia’s borders and securing the resource-rich coal and gas fields of Donbass for western corporations such as Chevron and Royal Dutch Shell.83 It is certainly not about democracy, as the installing of fascist parties in Kyiv and the denouncing of actual democratic elections in the disputed provinces demonstrate. Building up Vladimir Putin into some boogeyman serves to frighten the tiny eastern European republics, thus increasing the likelihood of their also joining NATO and clamoring for protection from the big bad Russians. That the entire conflict was cooked up by western schemers, who dangled tens of billions of dollars in front of the neo-nazi Ukrainian coup leaders,84 seems to have been overlooked by many. The western “free” press has discredited itself time and again by hiding numerous inconvenient facts from readers and unleashing a storm of anti-Russian propaganda that bears little resemblance to the facts on the ground.

Of course numerous Russian individuals have flocked to help defend the two breakaway provinces from Kyiv’s military assault. Just as citizens of “Ireland, Italy, Greece and Scandinavia” have flocked to the white supremacist Azov Battalion85 to wage all-out war on the Donbass. More than one million refugees have fled from this brutal onslaught initiated by Kyiv. More than 800,000 escaped to Russia86 after the genocidal pronouncements of Kyiv junta officials, who speak of “subhumans” and extermination campaigns. The defense of the region has given Vladimir Putin and the Russian state ample cause to consider the western-concocted principle of a “Responsibility to Protect.”

Cal wrote:

I’ll add that the video’s theory that Russia wants to take over Ukraine to protect its borders from invasion sounds ridiculous because Russia is a nuclear power.

Yeah, that sounds like an atavistic reason, at best. That kind of explanation may be lurking somewhere in Russia’s subconscious, but that’s not the reason for the invasion. I tried to  edit the post to say that the best part was in the second half of the video, (and to edit the link so that the video starts at the beginning), but I made that post with a Chromebook, and it frequently gets tangled up on this forum and spins out. I’m not sure why. My land computer never does, and it’s only this site that spins out my Chromebook.

Anyway, here’s TL;DR or (TL;DW) summary of the video:

Moscow sits in the middle of the North European plain, a flat expanse of land that extends in a funnel shape from the Netherlands in the west to the Ural Mountains in the east, leaving no defensible geographic features anywhere near Moscow.

The Warsaw Pact used to act as buffer states between Germany and Russia, but NATO has been expanding east, and already shares borders with Russia in the Baltic states. If Ukraine joined NATO, the sheer length of the border would make Russia’s western flank indefensible. Furthermore, it would place NATO within 300 km of the Volgograd through which the Volga River passes, and by which Russia brings up much of its oil and gas supply. Volgograd is, of course, Stalingrad, where Germany attacked in WWII precisely for the purpose of pinching off those supplies. For this reason, Russia prefers Ukraine to be a vassal state, or at the very least, independent.

But more significant is the oil and gas reserves. Russia is basically a petro-state, producing the 2nd-most oil in the world, ahead of even Saudi Arabia. 50% of Russia’s government spending comes from oil/gas, and a full 30% of its GDP. The USSR delivered gas/oil to Europe through pipelines that run through the Ukraine. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Ukraine has been charging Russia billions of dollars each year to continue using them, and Russia has been building alternate pipelines (including the Nord Stream 1 and 2).

Moreover, Ukraine itself has massive reserves which are largely undeveloped, though Shell, Exxon, etc. are interested in building the infrastructure necessary to extract it. If Ukraine were to tap into its vast supply of natural gas, it would challenge Russia as a supplier, and Russia’s income, power, and influence would be sharply curtailed. This is also why Russia annexed Crimea, and all its substantial reserves.

Meanwhile, Putin’s negotiating position is that the west agrees that NATO withdraw all armed forces from eastern Europe back to its pre-expansion positions, and that NATO freeze its alliance as is, with no expansion in the future, including Ukraine.

Billy_T wrote:

Zooey, You did the legwork, and it couldn’t have been easy. But it’s too much for me to sift through, and the formatting here isn’t cooperating with your efforts. It’s not really readable for me. Could you distill it down to an essence or two? Your own take from those articles?

I don’t know what is happening with formatting. It’s been since the board got upgraded. I don’t think it likes live links in text that’s copied from html. I don’t know, though. All those articles got caught up, and zn had to do something so they even showed up, but he can’t do anything about the embedded code. Or something. Still figuring it out.

Anyway…I don’t know what to make of it. I said this earlier, and I still stand by it, but I have a lot of questions, like “wtf is Putin hoping to accomplish?” Among others.

So as far as I can gather, Ukraine is an inherently unstable country with a Russian-speaking eastern side, and a western side that speaks something else. They’ve had a series of corrupt, authoritarian grifters run the country as it vacillates between between pro-Russian and pro-western sympathies, and when the people started protesting against the corruption in 2014, the movement was co-opted by nazi sympathizers who took control. The US seems to have taken advantage of the situation since the Nazis are pro-EU, so they’ve been assisted financially by the US, presumably for the usual Empire reasons. Meanwhile, the US has broken its promises not to expand NATO, squashed a pipeline deal between Russia and Germany, and I can’t think of one good reason why Russia should be content with these developments.

ZN says that isn’t quite right, and I haven’t read his Vox article yet. I dunno. I resisted reading anything about this at all until this morning because it’s the same old shite anyway, innit? Powerful people are bastards, and none of them are any good.

I recommend the Jacobin article. Hit the link and avoid the format hell.

https://jacobinmag.com/2022/02/maidan-protests-neo-nazis-russia-nato-crimea

This doesn’t seem right.

Graphic ⚠️

A Russian tank swerves & runs over civilian car.

Peacekeepers my ass.
This is sheer cruelty. pic.twitter.com/JMMgTobm9X

— Ann is still European 🌍Stand with Ukraine 🌻🇺🇦 (@56blackcat) February 25, 2022

Why Biden didn’t negotiate seriously with Putin

The two themes that let the Blob carry the day

A couple of decades from now, someone reading an account of the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war—if that’s what the Ukraine crisis turns into, as it seems to be doing—may have this thought:

Wait, let me get this straight. So the leaders of the big NATO countries didn’t especially want Ukraine to join NATO? And agreeing to not let Ukraine join NATO—agreeing to not do what they didn’t want to do anyway—might have kept Russia from invading Ukraine? But they didn’t do that? And doing that wasn’t even seriously discussed? Like, virtually no influential American commentators argued that doing this would make sense? How could that be?

Good question! Regular readers of this newsletter may expect me to answer it by launching immediately into an indictment of “the Blob” (the foreign policy establishment) and lamenting the Blob’s lack of “cognitive empathy” (understanding how your adversary, or anyone else, views the world).

Well, you’re wrong about the “immediately” part. Those themes will surface soon enough, but first I’d like to turn your attention to two other themes. These are themes whose promulgation (yes, by the Blob) has stifled serious discussion of how to prevent war in Ukraine (yes, in part by impeding cognitive empathy).

Both are hardy perennials—themes that, over the years, have done untold damage to peacemaking efforts. Maybe if we ponder how little sense they made this time around, we’ll be less likely to fall for them next time around.

1. The Munich theme.

Last week Ukrainian President Zelinsky delivered a speech at the Munich Security Conference in which he complained that NATO hadn’t set a firm timetable for admitting Ukraine. His talk generated this headline in the British tabloid the Daily Mail: “Ukraine’s president condemns Western ‘appeasement’ of Putin in blistering address in MUNICH…”

Yes, the headline had “Munich” in all caps: MUNICH. That was a helpful reminder that, in foreign policy circles, the word  “appeasement” is almost always a reference to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s infamous performance at his 1938 meeting with Adolf Hitler in Munich. With Germany having massed troops along Czechoslovakia’s border, Chamberlain made concessions to prevent an invasion and then emerged from the meeting declaring that there would be “peace for our time.” Which was off by about six years and 60 million bodies.

Ever since then, people who advocate making concessions that could reduce the chances of war have been accused of favoring “appeasement” and have been sternly warned not to repeat the mistakes of MUNICH. No doubt President Biden was aware that he’d have been deluged with that word had he broached the possibility of granting Putin his main wish by ruling out the admission of Ukraine to NATO. (Commentators were sending Munich warnings as early as November and December in response to a different rumored concession.)

The Munich comparison shouldn’t be casually dismissed. For one thing, it’s always regrettable to make concessions to someone who is threatening to invade a country. You’d rather not reward that kind of behavior. Still, paying that price is, I think, the only important parallel between the Munich case and the Ukraine case. And there are at least two big differences between the two cases.

Munich-Ukraine Difference #1: At Munich, with Hitler threatening to invade and seize a chunk of territory, Chamberlain agreed to let him have the chunk of territory he was threatening to seize. Britain and France strongarmed Czechoslovakia into giving Hitler the Sudetenland, a German-speaking part of the country. In contrast, the idea behind the NATO-Ukraine concession would have been to keep Putin from seizing the territory he was threatening to seize.

There’s been a lot of talk—from administration officials and others—about how excluding Ukraine from NATO would somehow violate Ukraine’s “sovereign right” to decide which alliances it joins. That’s nonsense. Ukraine has no more of a sovereign right to join NATO than I have to join the Council on Foreign Relations. International alliances, like organizations at the heart of the Blob, get to choose their members.

In short: Chamberlain replaced one kind of violation of Czechoslovakia’s sovereignty—losing territory via invasion—with what was, in effect, another kind: losing territory without the invasion. No one was asking Biden to do that with Ukraine. We’ve been asking him to prevent a violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty (losing territory via invasion) by doing something that violates no one’s sovereignty.

Munich-Ukraine Difference #2: At Munich, the guy on the other side of the table was Adolf Hitler. And here’s something to keep in mind about Hitler: He was crazy.

I don’t just mean he considered it totally OK to murder millions of people because of their ethnicity. That’s a kind of craziness, but the more relevant kind, for present purposes, is that he suffered from delusions that led him to repeatedly take existential risks. His declaring war on Russia in 1941, which sealed Germany’s fate, is the most famous example, but other examples had surfaced long before he was Germany’s leader. In 1923, he was lucky to get through his failed “Beer Hall Putsch” wounded and jailed rather than dead.

Putin has never—not in his ascent to Russia’s leadership and not in his subsequent foreign policy—shown the kind of casualness with risk that Hitler showed again and again. So there’s no reason to believe Putin would have followed a negotiated deal with the kind of expansionist rampage that ensued in the aftermath of Chamberlain’s deal—when Hitler, within a year, annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia and invaded Poland. (Hitler was surprised that the Poland invasion led France and Britain to declare war on Germany; risk assessment just wasn’t his strong suit.)

Besides, since any deal with Putin would have made continued adherence to the NATO-Ukraine concession contingent on Russia’s continued compliance with the deal, this “concession” could be easily reclaimed if Putin violated the deal. A promise not to expand NATO is easy to revoke; letting Hitler’s troops occupy part of Czechoslovakia wasn’t.

2. The ‘Putin can’t be reasoned with’ theme.

Depicting Putin as crazy or irrational or unfathomably strange is a common theme in the Blobosphere (and it of course works in synergy with the Munich theme, since it locates Putin’s tactical psychology in the general vicinity of Hitler’s tactical psychology).

For example, in January influential Blobster Michael McFaul, the former US Ambassador to Russia who is MSNBC’s go-to Russia expert, explained in the Washington Post why there was no point in offering Putin things like a freeze on NATO expansion: “If Putin thought like us, maybe some of these proposals might work. Putin does not think like us. He has his own analytic framework, his own ideas and his own ideology—only some of which comport with Western rational realism.”

Also in January, international relations scholar Tom Nichols wrote in the Atlantic that Putin “simply does not share a common frame of reference about the world with his opponents in the West.” Rather, “deep in the dark recesses of Putin’s psyche,” there are such things as an “emotional and visceral attachment to Ukraine” so strong as to give the West “limited sway in the situation that is now unfolding.” Hence the title and subtitle of Nichols’s piece: “Only Putin Knows What Happens Next: He alone can make the choice to bring Europe back from the brink of a major war.” And hence Nichols’s take on why Putin was massing more and more troops on Ukraine’s border: “No one really knows why Putin is doing this.”

Not everyone would see the Ukraine crisis as a perplexing product of Putin’s eccentricities. Consider the current CIA director, William Burns. Back in 2008, the year George W. Bush fatefully badgered reluctant European leaders into pledging future NATO membership to Ukraine, Burns sent a memo to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that included this warning:

Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.

Burns added that it was “hard to overstate the strategic consequences” of offering Ukraine NATO membership—a move that, he predicted, would “create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.”

So Burns predicted 12 years ago that pretty much the entire Russian national security establishment would be inclined to make trouble in Ukraine if we offered NATO membership to Ukraine—yet now that we’ve promised NATO membership to Ukraine and Putin is indeed making trouble in Ukraine, people like McFaul and Nichols say the explanation must lie somewhere in the murky depths of Putin’s peculiar psychology.

I’m not saying Putin’s calculations are purely about Russian national security. Obviously, Putin is a politician, and he responds to domestic political forces as well as geopolitical ones. But in the domestic realm, too, his pattern of responses is intelligible as the product of a rational mind.

For example: If enough Russians feel their country is being disrespected by the West, Putin can win points by standing up to the West. And, to put a finer point on it: If Russians hear that the pro-Western Ukrainian government is shrinking the Russian language’s role in public schools and closing Russian-language media outlets—both of which the Ukrainian government has done—then standing up to Ukraine could become an especially popular way to stand up to the West. A recent New York Times piece about Putin noted “the nationalist firebrands on prime-time talk shows and in Parliament who have been urging him for years to annex more of Ukraine.”

None of this is rocket science! It’s not that hard to get at least a rough idea of the political and geopolitical factors shaping the thinking and actions of world leaders, and to then engage them accordingly. Yet our finest Blobsters, writing in our most esteemed Blob outlets—McFaul in the Washington Post, Nichols in the Atlantic—sit around scratching their heads in abject befuddlement: This Putin character is so weird that there’s no real point in seriously negotiating with him.

In defense of McFaul and Nichols—and other Blobsters who also suffer from cognitive empathy deficit—they may be victims of the cognitive bias known as attribution error. Attribution error can distort our perception of both allies and enemies. The way it works with enemies is that if they do something we consider bad, we’re inclined to attribute this behavior to their internal disposition, their basic character—not to external circumstances.

So if, say, we’re trying to explain why an enemy is threatening to invade Ukraine, we discount explanations involving political and geopolitical circumstance and embrace explanations that locate the problem in the enemy’s fundamental disposition—in his “emotional and visceral attachment to Ukraine” or, more vaguely, in a peculiar “analytical framework” that’s hard for us rational westerners to grok.

In any event, whatever the roots of cognitive empathy deficit and other unfortunate Blob-typical tendencies that have surfaced lately, the damage is done: Once again, it seems, the Blob has prevailed. Thanks to people like McFaul and Nichols, there was, so far as we can tell, no serious attempt to negotiate with Putin—to offer the kinds of concessions that lay discernibly at the core of his motivation. And now that Putin has recognized Ukraine’s breakaway republics and ordered troops into them—an act of aggression and a plain violation of international law—the political costs for Biden of making concessions will be even higher. (And the real costs of making concessions—in terms of the magnitude of wrongdoing that would now be rewarded—is higher.)

As the aggression unfolds—and possibly expands well beyond the Donbass region that comprises these two republics—expect to hear people like McFaul and Nichols claim vindication: Putin’s as bad and irrational as they said he was! You may even hear some Hitler analogies.

But remember: What we’re seeing from here on out is what Putin did after we followed the advice of McFaul and Nichols and refused to negotiate seriously with him. What we’re seeing is what happens when you don’t try “appeasement.”

Note: Obviously, we don’t know for sure what concessions might have forestalled Russian invasion. But in late January Foreign Minister Lavrov signaled that the NATO-Ukraine concession, along with concessions about missile placement in Europe, would have done the trick. Also obviously, I don’t know what the Biden administration may have offered Putin in private. It’s conceivable that they offered more than we know about. (But beware: Now that negotiations have failed, the administration may try to make its private offers to Putin sound more accommodating than they were.) In any event, this piece is only partly about what seems to have been Biden’s failure to seriously negotiate. It is also about the undeniable fact that mainstream media devoted virtually no time or space to people who were advocating serious negotiation.

I am reading around, and from what I am learning, I have to say I really don’t understand the reactions I’m seeing all over the place.

I mean…invading is bad, and killing people is bad, and I’m opposed to that.

But to see the reactions of people on Fb and T, it’s as if everyone thinks Putin has done something incomprehensibly crazy and uncalled for, and they’re SHOCKED! Weirdly, on the same day, Israel bombed the shit out of Syria, and the US bombed Somalia, and I don’t see the same sense of outrage. There was a very short piece in the NYT about the Somalia strike that contained this fun sentence:

The command said it was still trying to determine how many Shabab insurgents had been killed in the strike, but it said no civilians were believed to have been harmed.

They can’t tell how many dead people there are, but they know for sure none of them were civilians. Anyway…

So as far as I can gather, Ukraine is an inherently unstable country with a Russian-speaking eastern side, and a western side that speaks something else. They’ve had a series of corrupt, authoritarian grifters run the country as it vacillates between between pro-Russian and pro-western sympathies, and when the people started protesting against the corruption in 2014, the movement was co-opted by nazi sympathizers who took control. The US seems to have taken advantage of the situation since the Nazis are pro-EU, so they’ve been assisted financially by the US, presumably for the usual Empire reasons. Meanwhile, the US has broken its promises not to expand NATO, squashed a pipeline deal between Russia and Germany, and I can’t think of one good reason why Russia should be content with these developments.

So…world powers doing what world powers do. None of this is surprising or novel, as far as I can tell, so I don’t know why people are all changing their profiles to show solidarity with Ukraine while calling Putin an unstable madman when none of this seems very different from countless US military actions and CIA interference in sovereign countries that aren’t even right smack on our border.

Also, this new forum eats many of my posts for some reason.