We are pleased to bring you this fresh interview with Jacques Baud, in which we cover what is now happening in the geopolitical struggle that is the Ukraine-Russia war. As always, Mr. Baud brings deep insight and clear analysis to the conversation.

The Postil (TP): You have just published your latest book on the war in Ukraine—Operation Z, published by Max Milo. Please tell us a little about it—what led you to write this book and what do you wish to convey to readers?

Jacques Baud (JB): The aim of this book is to show how the misinformation propagated by our media has contributed to push Ukraine in the wrong direction. I wrote it under the motto “from the way we understand crises derives the way we solve them.”

By hiding many aspects of this conflict, the Western media has presented us with a caricatural and artificial image of the situation, which has resulted in the polarization of minds. This has led to a widespread mindset that makes any attempt to negotiate virtually impossible.

The one-sided and biased representation provided by mainstream media is not intended to help us solve the problem, but to promote hatred of Russia. Thus, the exclusion of disabled athletes, cats, even Russian trees from competitions, the dismissal of conductors, the de-platforming of Russian artists, such as Dostoyevsky, or even the renaming of paintings aims at excluding the Russian population from society! In France, bank accounts of individuals with Russian-sounding names were even blocked. Social networks Facebook and Twitter have systematically blocked the disclosure of Ukrainian crimes under the pretext of “hate speech” but allow the call for violence against Russians.

None of these actions had any effect on the conflict, except to stimulate hatred and violence against the Russians in our countries. This manipulation is so bad that we would rather see Ukrainians die than to seek a diplomatic solution. As Republican Senator Lindsey Graham recently said, it is a matter of letting the Ukrainians fight to the last man.

It is commonly assumed that journalists work according to standards of quality and ethics to inform us in the most honest way possible. These standards are set by the Munich Charter of 1971. While writing my book I found out that no French-speaking mainstream media in Europe respects this charter as far as Russia and China are concerned. In fact, they shamelessly support an immoral policy towards Ukraine, described by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, president of Mexico, as “We provide the weapons, you provide the corpses!”

To highlight this misinformation, I wanted to show that information allowing to provide a realistic picture of the situation was available as early as February, but that our media did not relay it to the public. My goal was to show this contradiction.

In order to avoid becoming a propagandist myself in favor of one side or the other, I have relied exclusively on Western, Ukrainian (from Kiev) and Russian opposition sources. I have not taken any information from the Russian media.

TP: It is commonly said in the West that this war has “proven” that the Russian army is feeble and that its equipment is useless. Are these assertions true?

JB: No. After more than six months of war, it can be said that the Russian army is effective and efficient, and that the quality of its command & control far exceeds what we see in the West. But our perception is influenced by a reporting that is focused on the Ukrainian side, and by distortions of reality.

Firstly, there is the reality on the ground. It should be remembered that what the media call “Russians” is in fact a Russian-speaking coalition, composed of professional Russian fighters and soldiers of the popular militias of Donbass. The operations in the Donbass are mainly carried out by these militias, who fight on “their” terrain, in towns and villages they know and where they have friends and family. They are therefore advancing cautiously for themselves, but also to avoid civilian casualties. Thus, despite the claims of western propaganda, the coalition enjoys a very good popular support in the areas it occupies.

Then, just looking at a map, you can see that the Donbass is a region with a lot of built-up and inhabited areas, which means an advantage for the defender and a reduced speed of progress for the attacker in all circumstances.

Secondly, there is the way our media portray the evolution of the conflict. Ukraine is a huge country and small-scale maps hardly show the differences from one day to another. Moreover, each side has its own perception of the progress of the enemy. If we take the example of the situation on March 25, 2022, we can see that the map of the French daily newspaper Ouest-France (a) shows almost no advance of Russia, as does the Swiss RTS site (b). The map of the Russian website RIAFAN (c) may be propaganda, but if we compare it with the map of the [French Military Intelligence Directorate](https://www.defense.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/ministere-armees/Situation Ukraine au 25 mars.pdf) (DRM) (d), we see that the Russian media is probably closer to the truth. All these maps were published on the same day, but the French newspaper and the Swiss state media did not choose to use the DRM map and preferred to use a Ukrainian map. This illustrates that our media work like propaganda outlets.

Figure 1 – Comparison of the maps presented in our media on 25 March 2022. It is this way of presenting the Russian offensive that has led to the assertion that the Russian army is weak. It also shows that the information provided by the Russian media seems closer to reality than that given by Ukraine.

Thirdly, our “experts” have themselves determined the objectives of the Russian offensive. By claiming that Russia wanted to take over Ukraine and its resources, to take over Kiev in two days, etc., our experts have literally invented and attributed to the Russians objectives that Putin never mentioned. In May 2022, Claude Wild, the Swiss ambassador in Kiev, declared on RTS that the Russians had “lost the battle for Kiev.” But in reality, there was never a “battle for Kiev.” It is obviously easy to claim that the Russians did not reach their objectives—if they never tried to reach them!

Fourthly, the West and Ukraine have created a misleading picture of their adversary. In France, Switzerland and Belgium, none of the military experts on television have any knowledge of military operations and how the Russians conduct theirs. Their “expertise” comes from the rumours from the war in Afghanistan or Syria, which are often merely Western propaganda. These experts have literally falsified the presentation of Russian operations.

Thus, the objectives announced as early as February 24 by Russia were the “demilitarization” and “denazification” of the threat to the populations of Donbass. These objectives are related to the neutralization of capabilities, not the seizure of land or resources. To put it bluntly, in theory, to achieve their goals the Russians do not need to advance—it would be enough if Ukrainians themselves would come and get killed.

In other words, our politicians and media have pushed Ukraine to defend the terrain like in France during the First World War. They pushed Ukrainian troops to defend every square meter of ground in “last stand” situations. Ironically, the West has only made the Russians’ job easier.

In fact, as with the war on terror, Westerners see the enemy as they would like him to be, not as he is. As Sun Tzu said 2,500 years ago, this is the best recipe for losing a war.

One example is the so-called “hybrid war” that Russia is allegedly waging against the West. In June 2014, as the West tried to explain Russia’s (imaginary) intervention in the Donbass conflict, Russia expert Mark Galeotti “revealed” the existence of a doctrine that would illustrate the Russian concept of hybrid warfare. Known as the “Gerasimov Doctrine,” it has never really been defined by the West as to what it consists of and how it could ensure military success. But it is used to explain how Russia wages war in Donbass without sending troops there and why Ukraine consistently loses its battles against the rebels. In 2018, realizing that he was wrong, Galeotti apologized—courageously and intelligently—in an article titled, “I’m Sorry for Creating the Gerasimov Doctrine” published in Foreign Policy magazine.

Despite this, and without knowing what it meant, our media and politicians continued to pretend that Russia was waging a hybrid war against Ukraine and the West. In other words, we imagined a type of war that does not exist and we prepared Ukraine for it. This is also what explains the challenge for Ukraine to have a coherent strategy to counter Russian operations.

The West does not want to see the situation as it really is. The Russian-speaking coalition has launched its offensive with an overall strength inferior to that of the Ukrainians in a ratio of 1-2:1. To be successful when you are outnumbered, you must create local and temporary superiorities by quickly moving your forces on the battlefield.

This is what the Russians call “operational art” (operativnoe iskoustvo). This notion is poorly understood in the West. The term “operational” used in NATO has two translations in Russian: “operative” (which refers to a command level) and “operational” (which defines a condition). It is the art of maneuvering military formations, much like a chess game, in order to defeat a superior opponent.

For example, the operation around Kiev was not intended to “deceive” the Ukrainians (and the West) about their intentions, but to force the Ukrainian army to keep large forces around the capital and thus “pin them down.” In technical terms, this is what is called a “shaping operation.” Contrary to the analysis of some “experts,” it was not a “deception operation,” which would have been conceived very differently and would have involved much larger forces. The aim was to prevent a reinforcement of the main body of the Ukrainian forces in the Donbass.

The main lesson of this war at this stage confirms what we know since the Second World War: the Russians master the operational art.

TP: Questions about Russia’s military raises the obvious question—how good is Ukraine’s military today? And more importantly, why do we not hear so much about the Ukrainian army?

JB: The Ukrainian servicemen are certainly brave soldiers who perform their duty conscientiously and courageously. But my personal experience shows that in almost every crisis, the problem is at the head. The inability to understand the opponent and his logic and to have a clear picture of the actual situation is the main reason for failures.

Since the beginning of the Russian offensive, we can distinguish two ways of conducting the war. On the Ukrainian side, the war is waged in the political and informational spaces, while on the Russian side the war is waged in the physical and operational space. The two sides are not fighting in the same spaces. This is a situation that I described in 2003 in my book, La guerre asymétrique ou la défaite du vainqueur (Asymmetric War, or the Defeat of the Winner). The trouble is that at the end of the day, the reality of the terrain prevails.

On the Russian side, decisions are made by the military, while on the Ukrainian side, Zelensky is omnipresent and the central element in the conduct of the war. He makes operational decisions, apparently often against the military’s advice. This explains the rising tensions between Zelensky and the military. According to Ukrainian media, Zelensky could dismiss General Valery Zoluzhny by appointing him Minister of Defence.

The Ukrainian army has been extensively trained by American, British and Canadian officers since 2014. The trouble is that for over 20 years, Westerners have been fighting armed groups and scattered adversaries and engaged entire armies against individuals. They fight wars at the tactical level and somehow have lost the ability to fight at the strategic and operative levels. This explains partly why Ukraine is waging its war at this level.

But there is a more conceptual dimension. Zelensky and the West see war as a numerical and technological balance of forces. This is why, since 2014, the Ukrainians have never tried to seduce the rebels and they now think that the solution will come from the weapons supplied by the West. The West provided Ukraine with a few dozen M777 guns and HIMARS and MLRS missile launchers, while Ukraine had several thousand equivalent artillery pieces in February. The Russian concept of “correlation of forces,” takes into account many more factors and is more holistic than the Western approach. That is why the Russians are winning.

To comply with ill-considered policies, our media have constructed a virtual reality that gives Russia the bad role. For those who observe the course of the crisis carefully, we could almost say they presented Russia as a “mirror image” of the situation in Ukraine. Thus, when the talk about Ukrainian losses began, Western communication turned to Russian losses (with figures given by Ukraine).

The so-called “counter-offensives” proclaimed by Ukraine and the West in Kharkov and Kherson in April-May were merely “counter-attacks.” The difference between the two is that counter-offensive is an operational notion, while counter-attack is a tactical notion, which is much more limited in scope. These counterattacks were possible because the density of Russian troops in these sectors was then 1 Battle Group (BTG) per 20 km of front. By comparison, in the Donbass sector, which was the primary focus, the Russian coalition had 1-3 BTG per km. As for the great August offensive on Kherson, which was supposed to take over the south of the country, it seems to have been nothing but a myth to maintain Western support.

Today, we see that the claimed Ukrainian successes were in fact failures. The human and material losses that were attributed to Russia were in fact more in line with those of Ukraine. In mid-June, David Arakhamia, Zelensky’s chief negotiator and close adviser, spoke of 200 to 500 deaths per day, and he mentioned casualties (dead, wounded, captured, deserters) of 1,000 men per day. If we add to this the renewed demands for arms by Zelensky, we can see that the idea of a victory for Ukraine appears quite an illusion.

Because Russia’s economy was thought to be comparable to Italy’s, it was assumed that it would be equally vulnerable. Thus, the West—and the Ukrainians—thought that economic sanctions and political isolation of Russia would quickly cause its collapse, without passing through a military defeat. Indeed, this is what we understand from the interview of Oleksei Arestovich, Zelensky’s advisor and spokesman, in March 2019. This also explains why Zelensky did not sound the alarm in early 2022, as he says in his interview with the Washington Post. I think he knew that Russia would respond to the offensive Ukraine was preparing in the Donbass (which is why the bulk of his troops were in that area) and thought that sanctions would quickly lead to Russia’s collapse and defeat. This is what Bruno Le Maire, the French Minister of the Economy, had “predicted.” Clearly, the Westerners have made decisions without knowing their opponent.

As Arestovich said, the idea was that the defeat of Russia would be Ukraine’s entry ticket to NATO. So, the Ukrainians were pushed to prepare an offensive in the Donbass in order to make Russia react, and thus obtain an easy defeat through devastating sanctions. This is cynical and shows how much the West—led by the Americans—has misused Ukraine for its own objectives.

The result is that the Ukrainians did not seek Ukraine’s victory, but Russia’s defeat. This is very different and explains the Western narrative from the first days of the Russian offensive, which prophesied this defeat.

But the reality is that the sanctions did not work as expected, and Ukraine found itself dragged into combats that it had provoked, but for which it was not prepared to fight for so long.

This is why, from the outset, the Western narrative presented a mismatch between media reported and the reality on the ground. This had a perverse effect: it encouraged Ukraine to repeat its mistakes and prevented it from improving its conduct of operations. Under the pretext of fighting Vladimir Putin, we pushed Ukraine to sacrifice thousands of human lives unnecessarily.

From the beginning, it was obvious that the Ukrainians were consistently repeating their mistakes (and even the same mistakes as in 2014-2015), and soldiers were dying on the battlefield. For his part, Volodymyr Zelensky called for more and more sanctions, including the most absurd ones, because he was led to believe that they were decisive.

I am not the only one to have noticed these mistakes, and Western countries could certainly have stopped this disaster. But their leaders, excited by the (fanciful) reports of Russian losses and thinking they were paving the way for regime change, added sanctions to sanctions, turning down any possibility of negotiation. As the French Minister of Economy Bruno Le Maire said, the objective was to provoke the collapse of the Russian economy and make the Russian people suffer. This is a form of state terrorism: the idea is to make the population suffer in order to push it into revolting against its leaders (here, Putin). I am not making this up. This mechanism is detailed by Richard Nephew, head of sanctions at the State Department under Obama and currently Coordinator on Global Anti-Corruption, in his book entitled, The Art of Sanctions. Ironically, this is exactly the same logic that the Islamic State invoked to explain its attacks in France in 2015-2016. France probably does not encourage terrorism—but it does practice it.

The mainstream media do not present the war as it is, but as they would like it to be. This is pure wishful thinking. The apparent public support for the Ukrainian authorities, despite huge losses (some mention 70,000-80,000 fatalities), is achieved by banning the opposition, a ruthless hunt for officials who disagree with the government line, and “mirror” propaganda that attributes to the Russians the same failures as the Ukrainians. All this with the conscious support of the West.

TP: What should we make of the explosion at the Saki airbase in the Crimea?

JB: I do not know the details of the current security situation in Crimea. . We know that before February there were cells of volunteer fighters of Praviy Sektor (a neo-Nazi militia) in Crimea, ready to carry out terrorist-type attacks. Have these cells been neutralized? I don’t know; but one can assume so, since there is apparently very little sabotage activity in Crimea. Having said that, let us not forget that Ukrainians and Russians have lived together for many decades and there are certainly pro-Kiev individuals in the areas taken by the Russians. It is therefore realistic to think that there could be sleeper cells in these areas.

More likely it is a campaign conducted by the Ukrainian security service (SBU) in the territories occupied by the Russian-speaking coalition. This is a terrorist campaign targeting pro-Russian Ukrainian personalities and officials. It follows major changes in the leadership of the SBU, in Kiev, and in the regions, including Lvov, Ternopol since July. It is probably in the context of this same campaign that Darya Dugina was assassinated on August 21. The objective of this new campaign could be to convey the illusion that there is an ongoing resistance in the areas taken by the Russians and thus revive Western aid, which is starting to fatigue.

These sabotage activities do not really have an operational impact and seem more related to a psychological operation. It may be that these are actions like the one on Snake Island at the beginning of May, intended to demonstrate to the international public that Ukraine is acting.

What the incidents in Crimea indirectly show is that the popular resistance claimed by the West in February does not exist. It is most likely the action of Ukrainian and Western (probably British) clandestine operatives. Beyond the tactical actions, this shows the inability of the Ukrainians to activate a significant resistance movement in the areas seized by the Russian-speaking coalition.

TP: Zelensky has famously said, “Crimea is Ukrainian and we will never give it up.” Is this rhetoric, or is there a plan to attack Crimea? Are there Ukrainian operatives inside Crimea?

JB: First of all, Zelensky changes his opinion very often. In March 2022, he made a proposal to Russia, stating that he was ready to discuss a recognition of Russian sovereignty over the peninsula. It was upon the intervention of the European Union and Boris Johnson on 2 April and on 9 April that he withdrew his proposal, despite Russia’s favorable interest.

It is necessary to recall some historical facts. The cession of Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 was never formally validated by the parliaments of the USSR, Russia and Ukraine during the communist era. Moreover, the Crimean people agreed to be subject to the authority of Moscow and no longer of Kiev as early as January 1991. In other words, Crimea was independent from Kiev even before Ukraine became independent from Moscow in December 1991.

In July, Aleksei Reznikov, the Ukrainian Minister of Defense, spoke loudly of a major counter-offensive on Kherson involving one million men to restore Ukraine’s territorial integrity. In reality, Ukraine has not managed to gather the troops, armor and air cover needed for this far-fetched offensive. Sabotage actions in Crimea may be a substitute for this “counter-offensive.” They seem to be more of a communication exercise than a real military action. These actions seem to be aimed rather at reassuring Western countries which are questioning the relevance of their unconditional support to Ukraine.

TP: Would you tell us about the situation around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear facility?

JB: In Energodar, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant (ZNPP), has been the target of several attacks by artillery, which Ukrainians and Russians attribute to the opposing side.

What we know is that the Russian coalition forces have occupied the ZNPP site since the beginning of March. The objective at that time was to secure the ZNPP quickly, in order to prevent it from being caught up in the fighting and thus avoid a nuclear incident. The Ukrainian personnel who were in charge of it have remained on site and continue to work under the supervision of the Ukrainian company Energoatom and the Ukrainian nuclear safety agency (SNRIU). There is therefore no fighting around the plant.

It is hard to see why the Russians would shell a nuclear plant that is under their control. This allegation is even more peculiar since the Ukrainians themselves state that there are Russian troops in the premises of the site. According to a French “expert,” the Russians would attack the power plant they control to cut off the electricity flowing to Ukraine. Not only would there be simpler ways to cut off the electricity to Ukraine (a switch, perhaps?), but Russia has not stopped the electricity supply to the Ukrainians since March. Moreover, I remind you that Russia has not stopped the flow of natural gas to Ukraine and has continued to pay Ukraine the transit fees for gas to Europe. It is Zelensky who decided to shut down the Soyuz pipeline in May.

Moreover, it should be remembered that the Russians are in an area where the population is generally favorable to them and it is hard to understand why they would take the risk of a nuclear contamination of the region.

In reality, the Ukrainians have more credible motives than the Russians that may explain such attacks against the ZNPP. , which are not mutually exclusive: an alternative to the big counter-offensive on Kherson, which they are not able to implement, and to prevent the planned referendums in the region. Further, Zelensky’s calls for demilitarizing the area of the power plant and even returning it to Ukraine would be a political and operational success for him. One might even imagine that they seek to deliberately provoke a nuclear incident in order to create a “no man’s land” and thus render the area unusable for the Russians.

By bombing the plant, Ukraine could also be trying to pressure the West to intervene in the conflict, under the pretext that Russia is seeking to disconnect the plant from the Ukrainian power grid before the fall. This suicidal behavior—as stated by UN Secretary General António Guterres—would be in line with the war waged by Ukraine since 2014.

There is strong evidence that the attacks on Energodar are Ukrainian. The fragments of projectiles fired at the site from the other side of the Dnieper are of Western origin. It seems that they come from British BRIMSTONE missiles, which are precision missiles, whose use is monitored by the British. Apparently, the West is aware of the Ukrainian attacks on the ZNPP. This might explain why Ukraine is not very supportive of an international commission of inquiry and why Western countries are putting unrealistic conditions for sending investigators from the IAEA, an agency that has not shown much integrity so far.

TP: It is reported that Zelensky is freeing criminals to fight in this war? Does this mean that Ukraine’s army is not as strong as commonly assumed?

JB: Zelensky faces the same problem as the authorities that emerged from Euromaidan in 2014. At that time, the military did not want to fight because they did not want to confront their Russian-speaking compatriots. According to a report by the British Home Office, reservists overwhelmingly refuse to attend recruitment sessions . In October-November 2017, 70% of conscripts do not show up for recall . Suicide has become a problem. According to the chief Ukrainian military prosecutor Anatoly Matios, after four years of war in the Donbass, 615 servicemen had committed suicide. Desertions have increased and reached up to 30% of the forces in certain operational areas, often in favor of the rebels.

For this reason, it became necessary to integrate more motivated, highly politicized, ultra-nationalistic and fanatical fighters into the armed forces to fight in the Donbass. Many of them are neo-Nazis. It is to eliminate these fanatical fighters that Vladimir Putin has mentioned the objective of “denazification.”

Today, the problem is slightly different. The Russians have attacked Ukraine and the Ukrainian soldiers are not a priori opposed to fighting them. But they realize that the orders they receive are not consistent with the situation on the battlefield. They understood that the decisions affecting them are not linked to military factors, but to political considerations. Ukrainian units are mutinying en masse and are increasingly refusing to fight. They say they feel abandoned by their commanders and that they are given missions without the necessary resources to execute them.

That’s why it becomes necessary to send men who are ready for anything. Because they are condemned, they can be kept under pressure. This is the same principle as Marshal Konstantin Rokossovki, who was sentenced to death by Stalin, but was released from prison in 1941 to fight against the Germans. His death sentence was lifted only after Stalin’s death in 1956.

In order to overshadow the use of criminals in the armed forces, the Russians are accused of doing the same thing. The Ukrainians and the Westerners consistently use “mirror” propaganda. As in all recent conflicts, Western influence has not led to a moralization of the conflict.

TP: Everyone speaks of how corrupt Putin is? But what about Zelensky? Is he the “heroic saint” that we are all told to admire?

JB: In October 2021, the Pandora Papers showed that Ukraine and Zelensky were the most corrupt in Europe and practiced tax evasion on a large scale. Interestingly, these documents were apparently published with the help of an American intelligence agency, and Vladimir Putin is not mentioned. More precisely, the documents mention individuals ” associated ” with him, who are said to have links with undisclosed assets, which could belong to a woman, who is believed to have had a child with him.

Yet, when our media are reporting on these documents, they routinely put a picture of Vladimir Putin, but not of Volodymyr Zelensky.

Figure 2 – Although he is not mentioned in the Pandora Papers, Vladimir Putin is consistently associated with them. Whereas Volodymyr Zelensky is never mentioned in our media, even though he is widely implicated.

I am not in a position to assess how corrupt Zelensky is. But there is no doubt that the Ukrainian society and its governance are. I contributed modestly to a NATO “Building Integrity” program in Ukraine and discovered that none of the contributing countries had any illusions about its effectiveness, and all saw the program as a kind of “window dressing” to justify Western support.

It is unlikely that the billions paid by the West to Ukraine will reach the Ukrainian people. A recent CBS News report stated that only 30-40% of the weapons supplied by the West make it to the battlefield. The rest enriches mafias and other corrupt people. Apparently, some high-tech Western weapons have been sold to the Russians, such as the French CAESAR system and presumably the American HIMARS. The CBS News report was censored to avoid undermining Western aid, but the fact remains that the US refused to supply MQ-1C drones to Ukraine for this reason.

Ukraine is a rich country, yet today it is the only country in the former USSR with a lower GDP than it had at the collapse of the Soviet Union. The problem is therefore not Zelensky himself, but the whole system, which is deeply corrupted, and which the West maintains for the sole purpose of fighting Russia.

Zelensky was elected in April 2019 on the program of reaching an agreement with Russia. But nobody let him carry out his program. The Germans and the French deliberately prevented him from implementing the Minsk agreements. The transcript of the telephone conversation of 20 February 2022 between Emmanuel Macron and Vladimir Putin shows that France deliberately kept Ukraine away from the solution. Moreover, in Ukraine, far right and neo-Nazi political forces have publicly threatened him with death. Dmitry Yarosh, commander of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, declared in May 2019 that Zelensky would be hanged if he carried out his program. In other words, Zelensky is trapped between his idea of reaching an agreement with Russia and the demands of the West. Moreover, the West realizes that its strategy of war through sanctions has failed. As the economic and social problems increase, the West will find it harder to back down without losing face. A way out for Britain, the US, the EU, or France would be to remove Zelensky. That is why, with the deteriorating situation in Ukraine, I think Zelensky starts to realize that his life is threatened.

At the end of the day, Zelensky is a poor guy, because his best enemies are those on whom he depends: the Western world.

TP: There are many videos (gruesome ones) on social media of Ukrainian soldiers engaging in serious war crimes? Why is there a “blind spot” in the West for such atrocities?

JB: First of all, we must be clear: in every war, every belligerent commit war crimes. Military personnel who deliberately commit such crimes dishonor their uniform and must be punished.

The problem arises when war crimes are part of a plan or result from orders given by the higher command. This was the case when the Netherlands let its military allow the Srebrenica massacre in 1995; the torture in Afghanistan by Canadian and British troops, not to mention the countless violations of international humanitarian law by the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo and elsewhere with the complicity of Poland, Lithuania or Estonia. If these are Western values, then Ukraine is in the right school.

In Ukraine, political crime has become commonplace, with the complicity of the West. Thus, those who are in favor of a negotiation are eliminated. This is the case of Denis Kireyev, one of the Ukrainian negotiators, assassinated on March 5 by the Ukrainian security service (SBU) because he was considered too favorable to Russia and as a traitor. The same thing happened to Dmitry Demyanenko, an officer of the SBU, who was assassinated on March 10, also because he was too favorable to an agreement with Russia. Remember that this is a country that considers that receiving or giving Russian humanitarian aid is “collaborationism.”

On 16 March 2022, a journalist on TV channel Ukraine 24 referred to the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann and called for the massacre of Russian-speaking children. On 21 March, the military doctor Gennadiy Druzenko declared on the same channel that he had ordered his doctors to castrate Russian prisoners of war. On social networks, these statements quickly became propaganda for the Russians and the two Ukrainians apologized for having said so, but not for the substance. Ukrainian crimes were beginning to be revealed on social networks, and on 27 March Zelensky feared that this would jeopardize Western support. This was followed—rather opportunely—by the Bucha massacre on 3 April, the circumstances of which remain unclear.

Britain, which then had the chairmanship of the UN Security Council, refused three times the Russian request to set up an international commission of enquiry into the crimes of Bucha. Ukrainian socialist MP Ilya Kiva revealed on Telegram that the Bucha tragedy was planned by the British MI6 special services and implemented by the SBU.

The fundamental problem is that the Ukrainians have replaced the “operational art” with brutality. Since 2014, in order to fight the autonomists, the Ukrainian government has never tried to apply strategies based on “hearts & minds,” which the British used in the 1950s-1960s in South-East Asia, which were much less brutal but much more effective and long-lasting. Kiev preferred to conduct an Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) in the Donbass and to use the same strategies as the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan. Fighting terrorists authorizes all kinds of brutality. It is the lack of a holistic approach to the conflict that led to the failure of the West in Afghanistan, Iraq and Mali.

Counter-Insurgency Operation (COIN) requires a more sophisticated and holistic approach. But NATO is incapable of developing such strategies as I have seen first-hand in Afghanistan. The war in Donbass has been brutal for 8 years and has resulted in the death of 10,000 Ukrainian citizens plus 4,000 Ukrainian military personnel. By comparison, in 30 years, the conflict in Northern Ireland resulted in 3,700 deaths. To justify this brutality, the Ukrainians had to invent the myth of a Russian intervention in Donbass.

The problem is that the philosophy of the new Maidan leaders was to have a racially pure Ukraine. In other words, the unity of the Ukrainian people was not to be achieved through the integration of communities, but through the exclusion of communities of “inferior races.” An idea that would no doubt have pleased the grandfathers of Ursula von der Leyen and Chrystia Freeland! This explains why Ukrainians have little empathy for the country’s Russian, Magyar and Romanian-speaking minorities. This in turn explains why Hungary and Romania do not want their territories to be used for the supply of arms to Ukraine.

This is why shooting at their own citizens to intimidate them is not a problem for the Ukrainians. This explains the spraying of thousands of PFM-1 (“butterfly”) anti-personnel mines, which look like toys, on the Russian-speaking city of Donetsk in July 2022. This type of mine is used by a defender, not an attacker in its main area of operation. Moreover, in this area, the Donbass militias are fighting “at home,” with populations they know personally.

I think that war crimes have been committed on both sides, but that their media coverage has been very different. Our media have reported extensively about crimes (true or false) attributed to Russia. On the other hand, they have been extremely silent about Ukrainian crimes. We do not know the whole truth about the Bucha massacre, but the available evidence supports the hypothesis that Ukraine staged the event to cover up its own crimes. By keeping these crimes quiet, our media have been complicit with them and have created a sense of impunity that has encouraged the Ukrainians to commit further crimes.

TP: Latvia wants the West (America) to designate Russia a “terrorist state.” What do you make of this? Does this mean that the war is actually over, and Russia has won?

JB: The Estonian and Latvian demands are in response to Zelensky’s call to designate Russia as a terrorist state. Interestingly, they come at the same time a Ukrainian terrorist campaign is being unleashed in Crimea, the occupied zone of Ukraine and the rest of Russian territory. It is also interesting that Estonia was apparently complicit in the attack on Darya Dugina in August 2022.

It seems that Ukrainians communicate in a mirror image of the crimes they commit or the problems they have, in order to hide them. For example, in late May 2022, as the Azovstal surrender in Mariupol showed neo-Nazi fighters, they began to allege that there are neo-Nazis in the Russian army. In August 2022, when Kiev was carrying out actions of a terrorist nature against the Energodar power plant in Crimea and on Russian territory, Zelensky called for Russia to be considered a terrorist state.

In fact, Zelensky continues to believe that he can only solve his problem by defeating Russia and that this defeat depends on sanctions against Russia. Declaring Russia a terrorist state would lead to further isolation. That is why he is making this appeal. This shows that the label “terrorist” is more political than operational, and that those who make such proposals do not have a very clear vision of the problem. The problem is that it has implications for international relations. This is why the US State Department is concerned that Zelensky’s request will be implemented by Congress.

TP: One of the sadder outcomes of this Ukraine-Russia conflict is how the West has shown the worst of itself. Where do you think we will go from here? More of the same, or will there be changes that will have to be made in regards to NATO, neutral countries which are no longer neutral, and the way the West seeks to “govern” the world?

JB: This crisis reveals several things. First, that NATO and the European Union are only instruments of US foreign policy. These institutions no longer act in the interests of their members, but in the interests of the US. The sanctions adopted under American pressure are backfiring on Europe, which is the big loser in this whole crisis: it suffers its own sanctions and has to deal with the tensions resulting from its own decisions.

The decisions taken by Western governments reveal a generation of leaders who are young and inexperienced (such as Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin); ignorant, yet thinking they are smart (such as French President Emmanuel Macron); doctrinaire (such as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen); and fanatical (such as the leaders of the Baltic States). They all share some of the same weaknesses, not least of which is their inability to manage a complex crisis.

When the head is unable to understand the complexity of a crisis, we respond with guts and dogmatism. This is what we see happening in Europe. The Eastern European countries, especially the Baltic States and Poland, have shown themselves to be loyal servants of American policy. They have also shown immature, confrontational, and short-sighted governance. These are countries that have never integrated Western values, that continue to celebrate the forces of the Third Reich and discriminate against their own Russian-speaking population.

I am not even mentioning the European Union, which has been vehemently opposed to any diplomatic solution and has only added fuel to the fire.

The more you are involved in a conflict, the more you are involved in its outcome. If you win, all is well. But if the conflict is a failure, you will bear the burden. This is what has happened to the United States in recent conflicts and what is happening in Ukraine. The defeat of Ukraine is becoming the defeat of the West.

Another big loser in this conflict is clearly Switzerland. Its neutral status has suddenly lost all credibility. Early August, Switzerland and Ukraine concluded an agreement that would allow the Swiss embassy in Moscow to offer protection to Ukrainian citizens in Russia. However, in order to enter into force, it has to be recognized by Russia. Quite logically, Russia refused and declared that “Switzerland had unfortunately lost its status as a neutral state and could not act as an intermediary or representative.”

This is a very serious development because neutrality is not simply a unilateral declaration. It must be accepted and recognized by all to be effective. Yet Switzerland not only aligned itself with the Western countries but was even more extreme than them. It can be said that in a few weeks, Switzerland has ruined a policy that has been recognized for almost 170 years. This is a problem for Switzerland, but it may also be a problem for other countries. A neutral state can offer a way out of a crisis. Today, Western countries are looking for a way out that would allow them to get closer to Russia in the perspective of an energy crisis without losing face. Turkey has taken on this role, but it is limited, as it is part of NATO.

Figure 3 – Countries and organizations that applied sanctions to Russia. Although Switzerland is a neutral country, it stands on the first place. According to own sources, this was done under pressure and blackmail from the United States. Nevertheless, this is a severe blow to the very principle of neutrality that will have consequences in other future conflicts.

The West has created an Iron Curtain 2.0 that will affect international relations for years to come. The West’s lack of strategic vision is astonishing. While NATO is aligning itself with US foreign policy and reorienting itself towards China, Western strategy has only strengthened the Moscow-Beijing axis.

TP: What do you think this war ultimately means for Europe, the US and China?

JB: In order to answer this question, we first must answer another question: “Why is this conflict more condemnable and sanctionable than previous conflicts started by the West?”

After the disasters of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Mali, the rest of the world expected the West to help resolve this crisis with common sense. The West responded in exactly the opposite way to these expectations. Not only has no one been able to explain why this conflict was more reprehensible than previous ones, but the difference in treatment between Russia and the United States has shown that more importance is attached to the aggressor than to the victims. Efforts to bring about the collapse of Russia contrast with the total impunity of countries that have lied to the UN Security Council, practiced torture, caused the deaths of over a million people and created 37 million refugees.

This difference in treatment went unnoticed in the West. But the “rest of the world” has understood that we have moved from a “law-based international order” to a “rules-based international order” determined by the West.

On a more material level, the confiscation of Venezuelan gold by the British in 2020, of Afghanistan’s sovereign funds in 2021, and then of Russia’s sovereign funds in 2022 by the US, has raised the mistrust of the West’s allies. This shows that the non-Western world is no longer protected by law and depends on the goodwill of the West.

This conflict is probably the starting point for a new world order. The world is not going to change all at once, but the conflict has raised the attention of the rest of the world. For when we say that the “international community” condemns Russia, we are in fact talking about 18% of the world’s population.

Some actors traditionally close to the West are gradually moving away from it. On 15 July 2022, Joe Biden visited Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) with two objectives: to prevent Saudi Arabia from moving closer to Russia and China, and to ask him to increase its oil production. But four days earlier, MbS made an official request to become a member of the BRICS, and a week later, on 21 July, MbS called Vladimir Putin to confirm that he would stand by the OPEC+ decision. In other words: no oil production increase. It was a slap in the face of the West and of its most powerful representative.

Saudi Arabia has now decided to accept Chinese currency as payment for its oil. This is a major event, which tends to indicate a loss of confidence in the dollar. The consequences are potentially huge. The petrodollar was established by the US in the 1970s to finance its deficit. By forcing other countries to buy dollars, it allows the US to print dollars without being caught in an inflationary loop. Thanks to the petrodollar, the US economy—which is essentially a consumer economy—is supported by the economies of other countries around the world. The demise of the petrodollar could have disastrous consequences for the US economy, as former Republican Senator Ron Paul puts it.

In addition, the sanctions have brought China and Russia, both targeted by the West, closer together. This has accelerated the formation of a Eurasian bloc and strengthened the position of both countries in the world. India, which the US has scorned as a “second-class” partner of the “Quad,” has moved closer to Russia and China, despite disputes with the latter.

Today, China is the main provider of infrastructure in the Third World. In particular, its way of interacting with African countries is more in line with the expectations of these countries. Collaboration with former colonial powers such as France and American imperialist paternalism are no longer welcome. For example, the Central African Republic and Mali have asked France to leave their countries and have turned to Russia.

At the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit, the US proudly announced a $150 million contribution to “strengthen its position in the broader geopolitical competition with China.” But in November 2021, President Xi Jinping offered $1.5 billion to the same countries to fight the pandemic and promote economic recovery. By using its money to wage war, the US has no money left to forge and consolidate alliances.

The West’s loss of influence stems from the fact that it continues to treat the “rest of the world” like “little children” and neglects the usefulness of good diplomacy.

The war in Ukraine is not the trigger for these phenomena, which started a few years ago, but it is most certainly an eye-opener and accelerator.

TP: The western media has been pushing that Putin may be seriously ill. If Putin suddenly dies, would this make any difference at all to the war?

JB: It seems that Vladimir Putin is a unique medical case in the world: he has stomach cancer, leukemia, an unknown but incurable and terminal phase disease, and is reportedly already dead. Yet in July 2022, at the Aspen Security Forum, CIA Director William Burns said that Putin was “too healthy” and that there was “no information to suggest that he is in poor health.” This shows how those who claim to be journalists work!

This is wishful thinking and, on the higher end of the spectrum, it echoes the calls for terrorism and the physical elimination of Vladimir Putin.

The West has personalized Russian politics through Putin, because he is the one who promoted the reconstruction of Russia after the Yeltsin years. Americans like to be champions when there are no competitors and see others as enemies. This is the case with Germany, Europe, Russia and China.

But our “experts” know little about Russian politics. For in reality, Vladimir Putin is more of a “dove” in the Russian political landscape. Given the climate that we have created with Russia, it would not be impossible that his disappearance would lead to the emergence of more aggressive forces. We should not forget that countries like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland or Georgia have never developed European democratic values. They still have discriminatory policies towards their ethnic Russians that are far from European values, and they behave like immature agents provocateurs. I think that if Putin were to disappear for some reason, the conflicts with these countries would take on a new dimension.

TP: How unified is Russia presently? Has the war created a more serious opposition than what previously existed within Russia?

JB: No, on the contrary. The American and European leaders have a poor understanding of their enemy: the Russian people are very patriotic and cohesive. Western obsession to ” punish ” the Russian people has only brought them closer to their leaders. In fact, by seeking to divide Russian society in an effort to overthrow the government, Western sanctions—including the dumbest ones—have confirmed what the Kremlin has been saying for years: that the West has a profound hatred of Russians. What was once said to be a lie is now confirmed in Russian opinion. The consequence is that the people’s trust in the government has grown stronger.

The approval ratings given by the Levada Centre (considered by the Russian authorities as a “foreign agent”) show that public opinion has tightened around Vladimir Putin and the Russian government. In January 2022, Vladimir Putin’s approval rating was 69% and the government’s was 53%. Today, Putin’s approval rating has been stable at around 83% since March, and the government’s is at 71%. In January, 29% did not approve of Vladimir Putin’s decisions, in July it was only 15%.

According to the Levada Centre, even the Russian operation in Ukraine enjoys a majority of favorable opinions. In March, 81% of Russians were in favor of the operation; this figure dropped to 74%, probably due to the impact of sanctions at the end of March, and then it went back up. In July 2022, the operation had 76% popular support.

Figure 4 – Not all Russians support the special operation in Ukraine, but three quarters of the population do. Ukrainian war crimes, Western sanctions and the good management of the economy by the Russian authorities explain this support. [Source]

The problem is that our journalists have neither culture nor journalistic discipline and they replace them with their own beliefs. It is a form of conspiracy that aims to create a false reality based on what one believes and not on the facts. For example, few know (or want to know) that Aleksey Navalny said he would not return Crimea to Ukraine. The West’s actions have completely wiped out the opposition, not because of “Putin’s repression,” but because in Russia, resistance to foreign interference and the West’s deep contempt for Russians is a bipartisan cause. Exactly like the hatred of Russians in the West. This is why personalities like Aleksey Navalny, who never had a very high popularity, have completely disappeared from the popular media landscape.

Moreover, even if the sanctions have had a negative impact on the Russian economy, the way the government has handled things since 2014 shows a great mastery of economic mechanisms and a great realism in assessing the situation. There is a rise in prices in Russia, but it is much lower than in Europe, and while Western economies are raising their key interest rates, Russia is lowering its own.

The Russian journalist Marina Ovsyannikova has been exemplified as an expression of the opposition in Russia. Her case is interesting because, as usual, we do not say everything.

On 14 March 2022, she provoked international applause by interrupting the Russian First Channel news program with a poster calling for ending the war in Ukraine. She was arrested and fined $280.

In May, the German newspaper Die Welt offered her a job in Germany, but in Berlin, pro-Ukrainian activists demonstrated to get the newspaper to end its collaboration with her. The media outlet Politico even suggested that she might be an agent of the Kremlin!

As a result, in June 2022, she left Germany to live in Odessa, her hometown. But instead of being grateful, the Ukrainians put her on the Mirotvorets blacklist where she is accused of treason, “participation in the Kremlin’s special information and propaganda operations” and “complicity with the invaders.”

The Mirotvorets website is a “hit list” for politicians, journalists or personalities who do not share the opinion of the Ukrainian government. Several of the people on the list have been murdered. In October 2019, the UN requested the closure of the site, but this was refused by the Rada. It should be noted that none of our mainstream media has condemned this practice, which is very far from the values they claim to defend. In other words, our media support these practices that used to be attributed to South American regimes.

Figure 5 – Darya Dugina marked as “Liquidated.”

Ovsyannikova then returned to Russia, where she demonstrated against the war, calling Putin a “killer,” and was arrested by the police and placed under house arrest for three months. At this point, our media protested.

It is worth noting that Russian journalist Darya Dugina, the victim of a bomb attack in Moscow on 21 August 2022, was on the Mirotvorets list and her file was marked “liquidated.” Of course, no Western media mentioned that she was targeted by the Mirotvorets website, which is considered to be linked to the SBU, as this would tend to support Russia’s accusations.

German journalist Alina Lipp, whose revelations about Ukrainian and Western crimes in the Donbass are disturbing, has been placed on the website Mirotvorets. Moreover, Alina Lipp was sentenced in absentia to three years in prison by a German court for claiming that Russian troops had “liberated” areas in Ukraine and thus “glorified criminal activities.” As can be seen, the German authorities are functioning like the neo-Nazi elements in Ukraine. Today’s politicians are a credit to their grandparents!

One can conclude that even if there are some people who oppose the war, Russian public opinion is overwhelmingly behind its government. Western sanctions have only strengthened the credibility of the Russian president.

Ultimately, my point is not to take the same approach as our media and replace the hatred of Russia with that of Ukraine. On the contrary, it is to show that the world is not either black or white and that Western countries have taken the situation too far. Those who are compassionate about Ukraine should have pushed our governments to implement the agreed political solutions in 2014 and 2015. They haven’t done anything and are now pushing Ukraine to fight. But we are no longer in 2021. Today, we have to accept the consequences of our non-decisions and help Ukraine to recover. But this must not be done at the expense of its Russian-speaking population, as we have done until now, but with the Russian-speaking people, in an inclusive manner. If I look at the media in France, Switzerland and Belgium, we are still very far from the goal.

TP: Thank you so very much, Mr. Baud, for this most enlightening discussion.

There can be few leaders whose reputation at home differs so widely from his reputation abroad as the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev, who died on Monday aged 91. Hailed as a hero in the West for ending the Cold War, liberating the people of Eastern Europe, and bringing democracy and freedom to the nations of the former Soviet Union, he is reviled in Russia as a man who inherited a superpower and then destroyed it, leaving it dismembered and impoverished.

Of peasant stock, Gorbachev grew up in the Stavropol region of Southern Russia and aged only 17 won the Order of the Red Banner of Labour for his success in harvesting grain with his father. A clever and hard working student, he won a place at Moscow State University where he studied law before taking up a career in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). He then rose rapidly up the party’s ranks until in 1985 he assumed the position of General Secretary and as such become the Soviet Union’s de facto leader.

In all these ways, he was a typical party functionary. He differed, though, from the generation of leaders who had gone before him, all of whom had had direct experience of the revolutions of 1917 and of the Second World War. Gorbachev was one of those who were called “Children of the Twentieth Party Congress”—that is to say, communists whose view of the world was shaped by the party congress of 1956 at which Nikita Khrushchev delivered his famous ‘Secret Speech’ denouncing Stalin.

The Children of the Twentieth Party Congress believed in communism—in state control of the means of production, in central economic planning, in the social guarantees granted by the Soviet constitution, in the Soviet Union as a genuine ‘brotherhood of nations,’ and so on. But at the same time, they felt that the system was not living up to its promise. They believed that Stalinism had over-centralized and over-bureaucratized Soviet society, stifling initiative, breeding corruption, and creating a severe disconnect between the claims of Soviet propaganda and the realities on the ground. The solution, they felt, was to return to “Leninist norms,” whatever those might be, and thereby put the USSR back on track to a bright communist future.

On reaching the pinnacle of Soviet power, Gorbachev thus sought not to dismantle the system but to make it function more efficiently. As he told the 27th Congress of the CPSU in 1986, “Our goal is to realize the full potential of socialism. Those in the West who expect us to renounce socialism will be disappointed. We’re not going to give up on socialism. On the contrary, we need more socialism.”

Gorbachev’s problem was that he had very little idea how to do this as well as a faulty understanding of the underlying causes of the USSR’s social and economic difficulties.

In particular, Gorbachev’s grasp of economics was sketchy. He firmly believed in the communist economic model, writing in his 1987 book Perestroika that “Socialism and public ownership, on which it is based, hold out virtually unlimited possibilities for progressive economic processes.” He was therefore unwilling to touch the fundamentals of the Soviet system – state ownership and central planning. Instead, he tinkered with the economy by attempting to meld state planning with certain attributes of free markets in accordance with the ideas of what was called “market socialism.” In this, state ownership and the plan were retained, but enterprises gained more autonomy to determine production and were allowed to keep and reinvest some of their profits.

Market socialism proved a disaster. Instead of making enterprises more efficient, the introduction of market elements simply undermined the few advantages that planning provided. Given the failure of this policy, there were two options left: give up and go back, or press on and move towards a free market economy, or at least some sort of mixed market system. Gorbachev did neither. Going backwards would have been an admission of failure. Moving forward was ideologically beyond him. Instead, he dithered while the economy gradually collapsed around him.

As this happened, Gorbachev looked for someone to blame and his gaze fell upon conservative members of the CPSU, who he believed were deliberately sabotaging his reforms. In typical Russian fashion, his solution to this was to centralize authority in his own hands. This he did by stripping the CPSU of its power and concentrating it in a newly created executive position, that of President of the USSR, a position that Gorbachev then occupied.

Arguably, Gorbachev’s attacks on the party made things worse rather than better, for the party was the primary mechanism that kept the Soviet system functioning more or less smoothly. The more Gorbachev bypassed and undermined the party, the more authority it lost, the less people did as the plan demanded, and the more the system unraveled into anarchy.

In all this, Gorbachev revealed a considerable naivety. To accompany political and economic reform, which went by the name perestroika, he declared a need for more openness (glasnost). Censorship was relaxed and eventually abolished. It would appear that Gorbachev sincerely believed that if given their freedom, the Soviet people would use it in a constructive way, helpfully pointing out problems so that they could be addressed, but not challenging the authorities in the process. This is not what happened. Instead of constructive suggestions, the Soviet people used their new found freedom to publish revelations of the past crimes of the communist state, to attack the country’s leaders, and to demand ever more radical change. The more people learnt about their country’s past and about enormous social problems it was experiencing in the present, the more the system lost its legitimacy. Rather than strengthening the state, glasnost fatally weakened it.

Another failing was that Gorbachev totally misread the mood of many of the minority nationalities within the Soviet Union. In a 1987 speech marking the 70th anniversary of the October Revolution, he declared the nationalities problem “solved.” Nothing was further from the truth. Soviet peoples used the freedom Gorbachev gave them to demand more national autonomy and in the case of the three Baltic states to demand independence. In other cases, minority nationalities sought to increase their own power and territory at the expense of other minorities. Visiting Armenia following a devastating earthquake in December 1988, Gorbachev was shocked to find that locals wanted to speak not about the earthquake but about the status of the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh (under Azeri control, but claimed by the Armenians). By the time Gorbachev woke up to the seriousness of the Soviet Union’s ethno-national problems it was too late. As central authority collapsed, local elites decided that the best way of preserving their authority was to leap on the nationalist bandwagon. The rest, as they say, is history.

In the eyes of Westerners, Gorbachev’s greatest achievement was to bring an end to the Cold War. The Soviet leader believed that successful reform at home was impossible as long as the USSR was locked in an existential geopolitical struggle with the West. It was therefore necessary to make peace. To this end, he made it clear that the Soviet army would not intervene to prop up the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, each of which fell in turn in rapid succession in 1989. Beyond that, Gorbachev agreed to accept German reunification and to withdraw the Soviet army from Eastern Europe. With this, Soviet-Western relations quickly changed from mutual hostility to something akin to friendship.

More than anything else, this explains the adulation Gorbachev received in the West. Many Russians, though, view the matter very differently, asking themselves what Gorbachev got in exchange for surrendering the Soviet’s empire in Eastern Europe. Most importantly, they note that he failed to get a written guarantee that NATO would not expand eastwards. Historians disagree as to whether NATO leaders gave verbal promises in this regard, but it is certain that nothing was ever put on paper. Rarely has somebody given up so much and got so little in return. The sense of bitterness that resulted has soured Russian-Western relations ever since.

Here again, Gorbachev’s naivety reveals itself. Gorbachev spoke of “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals,” and commented that “Europe is our common home.” But his vision was never that the Soviet Union, or later Russia, should be reduced to a subordinate status within a Europe dominated by NATO. Rather, he envisioned NATO and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact disappearing and being replaced by a new security architecture in which the Soviet Union and Western states would be equal partners. Gorbachev seems to have imagined that if the Soviets dismantled their Cold War infrastructure, the West would do the same. But the West never had any intention of doing such a thing. In the eyes of Gorbachev’s Russian critics, he was, simply put, a dupe.

Mikhail Gorbachev meant well. An idealist, he believed in communism’s humanist potential. Realizing that communism’s practice fell short of its promise, he sought to do something about it. In the process, he unleashed hidden forces that destroyed the system he hoped to revive. For better or for worse, we are still living with the consequences today.

Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. He is the author of numerous works on Russian and Soviet history, including Russian Conservatism, published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2019.

When I received a call this morning from Turkish public television TRT asking that I comment on the death of Mikhail Gorbachev in a live broadcast, the first thought which came to mind was the ironic remark of Soviet intellectuals on the place of leading personalities in history:  “there is nothing as changeable and unpredictable as the past.”

Of course, this notion is applicable everywhere, not just to Soviet history and personalities. Indeed, history is always being reinterpreted in light of current developments. As I commented in my interview, the achievements and failures of Gorbachev in power must now be reevaluated in light of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, which is the largest and most dangerous military conflict on the European continent since 1945.

This war follows directly from the break-up of the Soviet Union, which Gorbachev failed to prevent, though he did his best. Indeed, in the spring of 1991 he oversaw a referendum on the issue and won support from the population for continuation of the USSR. However, his playing off the right and left forces within the Politburo and within the Party at large over a number of years, the deceptions he practiced to get his way, finally caught up with him and laid the way in the summer of 1991 for the Putsch by rightists intent on restoring Soviet orthodoxy, which in turn so weakened Gorbachev that he was easily pushed aside by Boris Yeltsin. Destruction of the Union was Yeltsin’s instrument for achieving the complete removal of Gorbachev from power and setting out on a course of economic reform and de-Communization that was anathema to the leaders of the more conservative Soviet republics.

As we now know, the break-up of the USSR released pent-up animosities within and between the successor states, which had in each substantial ethnic minorities, in particular Russian-speakers, who numbered more than 25 million outside the boundaries of the Russian Federation in 1991. This was the largest such dispossessed ethnic community from the disintegration of empire in history, and its existence did not augur well for tranquility in Eurasia, from the Baltics, to the Caucasus, to Central Asia.

The collapse of the Soviet Union also touched off a very unhealthy wave of national excitement in the United States. It was now the sole surviving superpower, unchecked by any rivals. Fueled by hubris, Washington elites set course on remaking the world through a succession of military interventions and full-fledged wars abroad that has gone on for close to 30 years.  Failures in these military missions led to ever greater concern to “contain” any and all possible competitors on the world stage.  In practice, this meant containment first and foremost of Russia as it recovered economically and politically in the first decade of the new millennium. And this, expressed in terms of NATO expansion, is what brought us to the present conflict over Ukraine.

In that regard, I direct attention to Gorbachev’s greatest failure which resulted not from the conspiracies of his compatriots but from his own peculiar naivete in his dealings with the United States, meaning with Reagan, with Bush and their minions. The man who had shown such cunning in outfoxing his Politburo colleagues was completely outfoxed by his American and European interlocutors.  Had he been more cautious to protect Soviet-Russian interests, he would have demanded and likely received much better terms of compensation for the withdrawal of Soviet forces from all of Eastern Europe and disbanding the Warsaw Pact. Had he been less gullible and more realistic, he would have demanded  written treaties setting in concrete the prohibition of NATO expansion to the East and, or, he would have left Soviet garrisons in each of these states to ensure compliance. As it was, the Americans who gave him verbal assurances knew full well that they were meaningless and were perplexed at the Kremlin’s failure to defend strategic national interests.

These are the sins which patriotic Russians hold against Gorbachev today, even as they acknowledge his astonishing feats in freeing Soviet citizens from the totalitarian yoke of the past through glasnost and perestroika.

Of course, it is an open question whether a democratic Soviet Union could have long survived. The economy was hopelessly mismanaged and the entire legacy of Soviet legislation rendered it virtually impossible to escape from violence or the threat of violence to make things work.  This is a point over which historical debate will continue for many decades to come.

For today’s interview, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVz4QGouoFQ

The Reasons For And Dangers Behind The War In Ukraine

The war in the Ukraine continues but the propaganda hysteria around it seems to have calmed down a bit as reality is setting in.

This gives room from more sane voices to be heard by the public. I will start with the Russian ones.

The Russian ambassador to the U.S., Anatoly Antonov, was interviewed by Newsweek. He explained Russia's political and judicial reasoning behind the war:

"The special operation in Ukraine is the result of the unwillingness of the Kiev regime to stop the genocide of Russians by fulfilling its obligations under the international commitments," Antonov told Newsweek. "The desire of the NATO member states to use the territory of a neighboring state to establish a foothold in the struggle against Russia is also obvious."
...
To Russia, Antonov said that the [Maidan] revolution was a "bloody coup d'état instigated by the West" in which "ultranationalist ideas came to power in Kiev." He said that policies viewed by Moscow as hostile such as the removal of Russian as a national language and the rehabilitation of nationalist Ukrainian figures such as Stepan Bandera, who collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II, had "taken root in Ukraine under external administration."
...
Antonov argued that it was the "nationalist frenzy and revanchist sentiments of the Kiev regime" that resulted in the effective death of the Minsk deals as Ukraine chose "the path of rapid militarization" with help from abroad.

"The NATO member countries have commenced a military exploration of Ukraine," Antonov said. "It was flooded with Western weaponry while President Vladimir Zelensky announced Kiev's plans to acquire nuclear weapons which would threaten not only neighboring countries, but also the entire world."
...
"In this context, Russia had no other choice but to recognize the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics," Antonov said. "Then, in accordance with Chapter VII, Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, with the authorization of the Federation Council of Russia and in execution of the Treaties of Friendship and Mutual Assistance with the Donetsk People's Republic and the Lugansk People's Republic, President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin made a decision to begin a special military operation."

"Its aim is to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine in order to reduce military threats posed by the Western states that are trying to use the fraternal Ukrainian people in the struggle against the Russians," he added.

Sergey Karaganov is a high level Russian political scientist and commentator who is also a presidential advisor in Moscow. He was interviewed (in English) by the Italian Corriere Della Sera

Sergey Karaganov: «We are at war with the West. The European security order is illegitimate»

An excerpt:

How can an attack be justified on such grounds?

«For 25 years people like myself have said that NATO expansion would lead to war. Putin said several times that if it came to Ukraine becoming a member of NATO, there would be no Ukraine anymore. In Bucharest in 2008 there was a plan of quick accession of Ukraine and Georgia to NATO. It was blocked by the efforts of Germany and France, but since that time Ukraine has been integrated into NATO. It was pumped up by weaponry and its troops were trained by NATO, their army getting stronger and stronger day by day. In addition we saw a very rapid increase of neo-Nazi sentiment especially among the military, the society and the ruling elite. It was clear that Ukraine had become something like Germany around 1936-1937. The war was inevitable, they were a spearhead of NATO. We made the very hard decision to strike first, before the threat becomes deadlier».

I recommend to read the whole Karaganov interview to better understand the Russian thinking.

"It was clear that Ukraine had become something like Germany around 1936-1937," said Karaganov. The 'western' public has difficulties to understand that. But it is the prevailing Russian view and when analyzing the developments in the Ukraine over the last years with Russian history in mind one can easily come to the same conclusion.

It is also what the Canadian Russia expert Patrick Armstrong had mentioned as the most important item after he had read Putin's speeches at the start of the war:

Had I been at home I would have read Putin’s speech earlier and understood sooner. What he is talking about is what the Soviet Union tried to do from 1933 onwards: namely to stop Hitler before he got started. This time Russia is able to do it by itself. In other words, Putin feels that he is making a pre-emptive attack to stop June 1941. This is very serious indeed and indicates that the Russians are going to keep going until they feel that they can safely stop.

The Russian view is not really that far fetched.

Here is a recent news agency video of officials of the Ukrainian Security Service SBU in front of a destroyed house seemingly praying with a priest for the deceased.

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Note the fascist Right Sector patch the official carries on his arm and back. The SBU has become a kind of Gestapo tasked with eliminating opposition elements in Ukraine. The UN's OHCHR, the OSCE, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International have all reported about the SBU's many crimes.

There is also an 'SS Galizien' patch on the officers back which refers to the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) which fought with Nazi-Germany against the Soviet Union. Like many other SS division the 1st Galician was involved in serious war-crimes but later mostly whitewashed. After the war many of its surviving officers fled to Canada and to the United States.

The offspring of those officers and other immigrants from the Ukraine played a noticeable role in lobbying for the war.

That has been successful as the U.S. had chosen to support extreme elements in Ukraine in opposition to peace. This has, as Aaron Maté writes, moved president Zelensky from an election campaign position of finding peace with Russia to becoming a war maniac:

On a warm October day in 2019, the eminent Russia studies professor Stephen F. Cohen and I sat down in Manhattan for what would be our last in-person interview (Cohen passed away in September 2020 at the age of 81).
...
"Zelensky ran as a peace candidate," Cohen explained. "He won an enormous mandate to make peace. So, that means he has to negotiate with Vladimir Putin." But there was a major obstacle. Ukrainian fascists, Cohen warned, "have said that they will remove and kill Zelensky if he continues along this line of negotiating with Putin… His life is being threatened literally by a quasi-fascist movement in Ukraine."

Peace could only come, Cohen stressed, on one condition. "[Zelensky] can’t go forward with full peace negotiations with Russia, with Putin, unless America has his back," he said. "Maybe that won’t be enough, but unless the White House encourages this diplomacy, Zelensky has no chance of negotiating an end to the war. So the stakes are enormously high."
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Although Trump's impeachment failed to remove him from office, it succeeded in cementing the proxy war aims of its chief proponents: rather than support Zelensky's peace mandate, Ukraine would instead be used to "fight Russia over there."

I had earlier quoted an interview with Dmytro Yarosh, then the leader of the fascist Right Sector, who just a week after Zelenski had become president threatened him with death should he try to make peace with the eastern Ukrainian rebels. Yarosh later became an advisor to the chief general staff of the Ukrainian military. He is the main person behind the ongoing nazification of the Ukrainian military.

As ambassador Antonov has said the war in Ukraine is not only about the Ukraine.

Richard Falk, Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, is correctly pointing out the two levels of the war we see:

It is not that the empathy for Ukraine or support for Zelensky’s national resistance is misplaced, but that it has the appearance of being geopolitically orchestrated and manipulated in ways that other desperate national situations were not, and thus gives rise to suspicions about other, darker motives.

This is worrisome because these magnified concerns have acted as a principal way that the NATO West has gone out of its way to make the Ukrainian War about more than Ukraine. The wider war is best understood as occurring on two levels: a traditional war between the invading forces of Russia and the resisting forces of Ukraine as intertwined with an encompassing geopolitical war between the US and Russia. It is the prosecution of this latter war that presents the more profound danger to world peace, a danger that has been largely obscured or assessed as a mere extension of the Russia/Ukraine confrontation.
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If this two-level perception is correctly analyzed in its appreciation of the different actors with contradictory priorities, then it becomes crucial to understand that in the geopolitical war the US is the aggressor as much as in the traditional war on the ground Russia is the aggressor.

Falk concurs with professor John Mearsheimer who fears that the larger U.S. Russia conflict hidden behind the war in Ukraine may lead to widening of the conflict into a potential nuclear war.

Summarizing Mearsheimer's recent talk with Katrina vanden Heuvel and ambassador James Matlock, the former CIA analyst Ray McGovern writes:

Speaking at an April 7 webinar, Mearsheimer was, true to form, "offensively realistic". He explained: (1) the root cause lies in the April 2008 NATO summit Declaration that Ukraine (and Georgia) "will become members of NATO"; and (2) that Russia sees this as an "existential threat" and therefore "must win" this one.

For President Joe Biden and the Democrats, even though Ukraine poses zero strategic threat to the U.S., a Russian "win" would be, politically, a "devastating defeat", says Mearsheimer. In that sense, the conflict is a "must-win" for the US as well. Underscoring the obvious, he noted it is impossible for both sides to "win" – at least not in current circumstances.
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Noting that US academics and policy makers don’t believe NATO’s designs on Ukraine represent an existential threat to Russia, Mearsheimer is as blunt as his courteous mien permits. "What people in Washington believe is irrelevant. What matters is what Russia believes." He rejects the "mainstream" view that Putin’s Russia is motivated by expansionist aims, and asks the savants in Washington to put concrete evidence behind their claims. Moreover, "There is no evidence in what Putin has said that he wants to make Ukraine part of Russia," Mearsheimer adds.

Towards the end of a talk with Gonzalo Lira former Marine officer and UN Inspector Scott Ritter disputes the potential for escalation. The Pentagon, he says, knows the real situation on the ground and that the Ukrainian army will lose the war. Neither NATO, nor the U.S. nor single countries like Poland have their forces configured in a way that would allow them to successfully wage war against Russia. They would need more time to get ready than Russia will need to win the war in Ukraine.

Ritter predicts that the Pentagon will overrule any escalation the Ukraine warmongers in the State Department and National Security Council may plan and that those responsible for the current mess, Victoria Nuland, Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, will get silenced or removed after the midterms.

I hope he is right.

Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine has been presented to us, in the West, as unprovoked and unjustified. We have not been told about Russia’s legitimate security concerns in the face of NATO expansionism. Nor has Ukraine’s significant Nazi problem been honestly reported, with some Western propagandist even promoting them.

The Russian government claims that its recognition and defence of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR) are born from “compassion” for the people who have been under siege for eight years. However, Russia also needs the new republics as satellite states, providing a foothold for its own national security as it opposes NATO’s advance.

It should be noted that Russia’s military actions, in trying to oust Nazis from their strongholds in Mariupol, Kharkiv and elsewhere, has led to the near destruction of many cities and towns in Eastern Ukraine. As of the 19th March the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCR) estimate that 847 civilians were killed in three weeks, primarily as a result of shelling.

The OHCR noted that the “actual figures are considerably higher” but could not be verified. Credible eye witness reports and video evidence indicate that the Nazis in Mariupol and other besieged areas had stopped civilians leaving through humanitarian corridors opened by Russia. There are many reports of Nazi (Asov) atrocities, including the murder of fleeing civilians.

NATO has courted Ukraine as a future alliance member for decades, taking firm steps to admit Ukraine along the way. This has never been acceptable to Russia, whose national security concerns have been consistently ignored.

Only days prior to the Russian attack, the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, delivered a speech at the Munich Security Conference threatening Russia, not only with a nuclear armed Ukraine, but a NATO nuclear power on Russia’s south-western border.

Ukraine is a pinch-point for Russia’s natural gas trade with the European Union. The purpose of the Nord Stream pipelines, constructed in partnership with Germany, was to circumnavigate that problem. It raised the potential for greater EU independence from the US and, with an EU commitment to defence union, presented a possible threat to the US dominance of NATO.

Consequently, the US applied unrelenting pressure on the EU, including enforcing sanctions on German companies, to halt the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. In response to Russia’s official recognition of the DPR & LPR, German Chancellor Olaf Sholtz immediately announced that Germany would not certify Nord Stream 2 for operational use. Russia began it’s military operation in Ukraine three days later.

Please read Parts 1-3 of this series for an exploration of the evidence informing this analysis. This provides us with what we might call the “official-unofficial” explanation for Russia’s aggression. It is an appraisal founded upon the established, accepted concept of international relations.

However, any such investigation is necessarily incomplete. It fails even to describe the globalist forces that are both ripping Ukraine apart and propelling Russia to act. We will explore these in Parts 5 – 6.

Before we do it is important to appreciate just how far we, as supposed democratic societies, have strayed from democratic ideals. This can be understood if we consider the extreme propaganda and censorship our governments are using, hobbling our ability to discern reality.

The Propaganda Environment

There is little chance that the issues we have already discussed will receive fair coverage in the Western mainstream media (MSM) and none at all that it will cover what we are about to consider. The West’s propaganda, in a rapidly evolving conflict, has at times been absurd.

Immediately following the launch of Russia’s military operation the Western MSM reported the unbelievable bravery of the Ukrainian border guards defending Snake Island in the Black Sea. They stated that 13 died in their valiant defence against a Russian “air and sea bombardment.” Ukrainian President Zelenskyy said he would award the guards posthumous medals for gallantry. It soon emerged that this was a fabrication. None of them died and Russia took the Island without harming anyone.

The MSM reported that Russian forces deliberately targeted a Mosque in Mariupol where civilian woman and children were said to be sheltering. The Turkish media later revealed that the Mosque had not been struck by anything.

The BBC were among a wide number of Western MSM outlets that reported an alleged Russian airstrike on a maternity hospital in Mariupol. This apparent outrage, deliberately targeting pregnant women and their babies, led the BBC to report the comments of the Deputy Mayor who said:

We don’t understand how it’s possible in modern life to bomb a children’s hospital. People cannot believe that it’s true.

Indeed not, because there is considerable evidence to suggest it isn’t. When the claimed airstrike occurred the Russian state officials engaged in some ham-fisted disinformation themselves, alleging that the whole thing was staged using “crisis actors.” They also noted that the hospital had been occupied by the Ukrainian forces, thus presumably making it a military target and undermining their own propaganda.

A subsequent account from the most famous eyewitness, Mariana Vishegirskaya, who Associated Press (AP) publicised as the face of the alleged Russian war-crime, paints a very different picture. There were certainly explosions but no evidence of an airstrike, as no one heard or saw any planes. The hospital had been occupied by the Asov regiment three days earlier. Tellingly, Mariana stated that the Asov Nazis wouldn’t allow people to leave the city through the humanitarian corridors agreed by Russia.

There have been widespread Western reports of destruction of Mariupol and other cities by Russian forces. However, civilian witness testimony from Mariupol notes that Ukrainian forces also shelled Mariupol, causing much of the destruction. Mariupol civilians reported that Ukrainian forces placed their defences in civilian areas, occupied their homes and other municipal locations including kindergartens, hospitals and office buildings, and even blew up buildings with tanks.

Even the Western MSM acknowledged that the Ukrainian military (including the Nazis) were effectively using the civilian population as a human shields by placing their assets in civilian areas. The Washington Post noted:

Increasingly, Ukrainians are confronting an uncomfortable truth: [. . .] Virtually every neighbourhood in most cities has become militarized, some more than others, making them potential targets for Russian forces trying to take out Ukrainian defenses.

French Military – Map 27th of March 2022

Analysis by French military observers clearly showed that Russia had secured significant military control in eastern and north-eastern Ukraine. On March 29th 2022, during ongoing peace talks between the Russian and Ukrainian authorities in Turkey, Russia announced that it would withdraw its forces from around Kyiv as a sign of “good faith.”

A few days later video evidence emerged from town of Bucha, lying west of Kyiv, appearing to show the aftermath of a Russian war-crime. The horrific footage showed apparent carnage in the body strewn streets of Bucha. The Ukrainian government blamed this butchery on the retreating Russian forces. The Western MSM immediately reported everything that they were told, accusing Russia of the Bucha massacre.

There were some suspicious anomalies in the footage that required explanation. An unusually high percentage of the bodies were lying face down, ruling out identification, and there was an inexplicable lack of blood or other signs of obvious injury on the corpses. Most of the corpses appeared with hands bound behind their backs and many were wearing the white arm bands which Russia gave to civilians in order for them not to be confused with combatants.

In one of the four main videos, unquestioningly accepted as evidence of the Russian atrocity, an alleged corpse appears to get to its feet, observed in the wing mirror of one of the filming vehicles. It is possible that mirror distortion accounts for this. However, these unexplained inconsistencies weren’t the primary reason to doubt the Western MSM’s account.

The Mayor of Bucha gave a video interview which aired on April 1st where he appeared happy, praising the Ukrainian forces for the liberation of the town. He noted that the Russian forces had vacated Bucha prior to March 31st. As of the 31st there were no Russian troops left in Bucha. The Mayor said:

March 31st will go down in the history of our settlement, the entire territorial community as a day of liberation from the Russian orcs [. . .] a great victory in the Kyiv region.

Reporting his statement, the local media claimed that Russian forces had left unexploded mines in a local factory. Neither the Mayor nor the local news reports said anything about a massacre. Two days later Reuters reported the same mayor, Anatoly Fidoruk, this time alleging that Russia had engaged in the mass slaughter of civilians. Something he was either unaware of or forgot to mention two days earlier.

This unfathomable oversight by the entire population of Bucha, none of whom posted anything on social media even hinting at the supposed mass slaughter during the Russian occupation, casts significant doubt upon the story presented by the Western MSM. The “Bucha-Live” Telegram channel didn’t mention the massacre until the story broke internationally.

Initially it was reported across the West that 400 bodies were scattered throughout the streets and basements of Bucha. We know that Russian forces completed their withdrawal on the 30th of March. Yet the Western reports of the killing spree didn’t emerge for a further four days.

Following the agreed Russian exit, on the 31st of March it was reported in Ukraine that the first Ukrainian forces to enter Bucha were Ukrainian special forces (the SAFARIS.) They posted a video of their operation on the 1st of April. One body was observed in the video, no executions sites or any evidence of mass killings were filmed.

These “specialist units” were said to be tasked with clearing Bucha of “saboteurs and accomplices of Russian forces.” Again there was no mention of any massacre in the further reports published on the 2nd of April.

On the same day, the 2nd of April, the New York Times reported:

Ukrainian soldiers from the Azov battalion walked through the remnants of a Russian military convoy in the recently liberated town of Bucha. [. . .] For the past five weeks, photographers with The New York Times and other news organizations throughout Ukraine have chronicled the invasion.

Yet none of these reporters or photographers “chronicled” the Bucha massacre that allegedly occurred at least three days before they arrived in the town. The New York Times (NYT) then tried to double-down on their incomprehensible failure to spot the biggest story in the World, by changing it. They published purported US satelite images that allegedly pinpointed the position of the bodies. The NYT claimed they had lain there for more than three weeks.

It seems extremely unlikely that this story is true. The bodies had supposedly been lying in the streets, undisturbed for three weeks, and yet there was no sign of decomposition. The NYT article implied that neither human nor animal activity had disturbed the location of a single body for the best part of a month. It also required readers to believe that US officials and military personnel knowingly ignored an alleged Russian massacre, without saying a word, not just for 4 days but for weeks.

Regardless of which version of the story people may choose to believe, there is another incongruous aspect. The Russian military, having committed a war-crime either four days or more than three weeks earlier, left the scene without trying to hide any of the evidence. If the NYT’s second version of events is to be believed, they also exposed their own troops to the severe risk of disease for practically the entire period of their occupation of Bucha.

While there is no evidence that the Asov Nazis staged the alleged bloodbath, circumstantial evidence suggests that possibility. It is notable that no one reported the massacre prior to their arrival in Bucha.

On the 3rd April the world was suddenly regaled with fresh tales of Russian barbarity. It would be good to know what happened to the suspected “saboteurs and accomplices of Russian forces” that were “cleared” from Bucha by SAFARI and Asov troops.

Russian military actions have included heavy bombardment of cities like Mariupol and Kharkiv. There is no doubt that they have killed many Ukrainian citizens. However, if we discard the NYT’s rather silly claims, unless Russia commanders lost control of their troops in Bucha, the indiscriminate slaughter of unarmed civilians, following an agreed withdrawal and their identification as non-combatants, makes no sense either from a military or propaganda perspective.

It served only to undermine the peace negotiations. As we will discuss in Part 5, prolonging the conflict is in the US-led NATO alliance’s interests, not Russia’s.

This does not rule out the possibility that Russian troops were responsible, but further investigation is certainly necessary. This appeared to be the position of the Russian government who, having strenuously denied the Bucha allegations, requested an emergency session of the UN Security Council (UNSC) to discuss the matter. For some reason, the UK government blocked Russia’s request.

Initially it appeared that the US-led NATO alliance were less eager to discuss the evidence. However, acting as the president nation of the Security Council, the UK’s UN ambassador, Barbara Woodward, then announced that the UK would convene a session to discuss Bucha on the 5th. Woodward changed the story yet again. This time 800 people had been murdered.

Prior to examining any of the evidence, and relying solely upon videos provided by the Ukrainians, Woodward stated that the footage was evidence of war-crimes. This had in no way been established. No one knew what they were evidence of. Woodward clearly implicated Russia and predetermined the outcome of the discussions, so there wasn’t really any point in holding them.

This illustrates the problem we have discussed previously. The institutions, mechanisms and rulings that combine to form so-called international law are worthless. There is no justice to be found anywhere within a system that is shaped by nothing but hard-nosed realpolitik. It is just another weapon to be used in a global power struggle. International law, as it stands, is no law at all.

The US Bio-lab Conspiracy Theory

Initially the Western MSM furiously denied Russian reports of US controlled bio-labs and chemical warfare research facilities discovered in Ukraine. They said that this was part of an elaborate plot by Russia to stage a biological “false-flag” attack, to be blamed on the Kyiv government by Putin.

The presence of the labs was then ostensibly admitted by the US Under Secretary for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, in a Senate committee hearing. The 2005 signed treaty between the US Department of Defense (DoD) and the Ukrainian Ministry of Health, establishing the labs, is a public document. These are, or were, US funded labs conducting secret experiments. The 2005 treaty decrees:

Information marked or designated by the U.S. Department of Defense as “sensitive” should be withheld from public disclosure by the Government of Ukraine.

These labs were managed by the DoD’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). Obviously a partnership between a US defence agency and a Ukrainian public health agency appears, on its face, to be an unusual arrangement. The DTRA’s own training material states that they are “a combat support agency.” They add that their role includes:

Developing, testing and fielding [using] offensive and defensive technologies

Other documents have exposed years of U.S. led biological and chemical warfare experiments on Ukrainian soldiers. Yet we are supposed to believe that US and Ukrainian documents, statements confirming the presence of the labs, their funding, their clandestine nature and the objectives of the Pentagon directorate overseeing them, is somehow evidence of Russian “disinformation.”

Perhaps so, but Occam’s Razor would suggest a different conclusion: the Russian’s have exposed US funded Ukrainian bio-labs engaged in secret bio-weapons research. If this claim by Russia is true then the US and Ukraine have broken so-called international law. Not that it matters.

As we have already discussed, Nazis control Ukrainian national security infrastructure and, as we will discuss, The US-led NATO alliance have a history of working with Nazis to run false-flag terrorist attacks in Europe. If the unthinkable happens and there is a biological or chemical weapons attack in Ukraine, which is then automatically blamed upon Russia, all of us should insist upon a thorough investigation before we believe anything we are told about it.

In a fairly typical example of the Western MSM response to this evidence, the UK based Guardian published How ‘Ukrainian bioweapons labs’ myth went from QAnon fringe to Fox News. Alleging the claims were Russian disinformation, or part of “far-right” conspiracy theories, the Guardian opined:

The Russian propaganda machine is so engaged in sowing disinformation [. . .] The conspiracy theory began in seeming obscurity. [. . .] [T]his theory was just a remix of an allegation that Moscow has made for years. [. . .] This disinformation laid the groundwork for the QAnon-linked conspiracy theory about Ukrainian bio-labs.

It may be the case that the evidence substantiating the presence of US funded illegal weapons programs in Ukraine (and elsewhere) is all just the product of Russian disinformation or so-called “conspiracy theory.” However, the only way to find out is to examine that evidence and investigate it further.

Nuland Acknowledges Presence of Labs

The Guardian chose not to report any of the facts we have just discussed. Instead it dismissed all of it as a Russian “propaganda effort.” In an attempt to deal with all of the documents, freely available in the public domain, the Guardian added:

The very core of the story is true: the Department of Defense funds biological research and laboratories in Ukraine. [. . .] Washington insists that it does not fund biological weapons research anywhere.

That was enough for the Guardian to conclude its investigation and claim that the whole story was just Russian nonsense. Sadly, this is the standard of journalism that epitomises the Western “free press.” Simply repeating a denial from the Pentagon is not journalism and nor is failing to honestly report the facts to your readers while covering them up with a slew of unsubstantiated allegations and innuendo.

Certainly China weren’t convinced by the Guardian’s argument. Seemingly taking a more deliberative approach, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, Zhao Lijian, said:

[W]e call on relevant sides to ensure the safety of these labs. The US, in particular, as the party that knows the labs the best, should disclose specific information as soon as possible, including which viruses are stored and what research has been conducted. [. . .] The US has 336 biological labs in 30 countries under its control. [. . .] What is the true intention of the US? [. . .] [T]he US has kept stonewalling, and even dismissing the international community’s doubts as spreading disinformation. Besides, the US has been standing alone in obstructing the establishment of a Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) verification mechanism and refusing verification of its biological facilities [. . .] This has led to deeper concern of the international community. Once again we urge the US to give a full account of its biological military activities at home and abroad and subject itself to multilateral verification.

The US has declined to engage with the any UN-led BWC verification mechanism. For example, the US government blocked attempts to establish one in 2001. The US has continued to delay the development of an independent, UN oversight for more than 20 years. Rather than allow international investigators to rule out the existence of the suspected US bio-weapons programme, the US has established its own verification process and has found itself to be in full compliance:

There are processes and controls within the U.S. Executive Branch [. . .] that operate to ensure that plans and programs under those departments’ and agencies’ purview remain consistent with U.S. international obligations. [. . .] All U.S. activities during the reporting period were consistent with the obligations set forth in the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). [. . .] Russian accusations are groundless.

While this public statement is more than enough to convince the “journalists” at the Guardian, it is perhaps understandable that the international community, outside of the US-led NATO alliance, still has its doubts. The US government’s behaviour is suspicious, to say the least.

In an amusing irony, the Guardian stated that the Russian news agency, Tass, was “a mouthpiece for the Kremlin.” It’s true, Tass often is a mouthpiece for the Kremlin, just as the Guardian is often a mouthpiece for the White House, Brussels and Downing Street.

The propaganda in the Western MSM, spread by the likes of the CNN, CBC, the BBC, the Times and the Guardian, is just as thick as anything disseminated by Pravda or the Xinhua News Agency. The key advantage the Western MSM had previously enjoyed, over its Eastern propaganda counterparts, was that western populations were “educated” to believe they had a free and pluralistic media. However, that advantage is diminishing rapidly.

The frankly bizarre attempt by Western leaders, and their MSM propagandists, to turn Russia’s probable exposure of US bio-labs into a suggested Russian plot to justify a false-flag attack, was encapsulated by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Speaking to Sky News on 10th March he said:

The stuff that you’re hearing about chemical weapons, this is straight out of their [Russia’s] playbook.

Johnson’s claim followed a previous statement by UK Defence Minister Ben Wallace who said that he was seeing “elements of the Russian playbook;” Jens Stoltenberg, the General Secretary of NATO, also preceded Johnson’s comment by saying that he too could “foresee the playbook of Russia;” Josep Borrel, the EU’s High Representative (effectively the EU Defence Minister), similarly preempted Johnson by noting that developments in the Ukraine were part of “the Kremlin’s playbook.”

These remarkably similar comments indicate a coordinated, scripted narrative. It could be a coincidence, but there are other reasons why we might suspect that Western politicians are working to a pre-approved script.

The Rapid Response Mechanism & the Trusted News Initiative

The rhetoric about Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, pouring out of the western establishment, is a product of the G7’s (including the EU) Rapid Response Mechanism (RRM). It is designed to ensure that designated hostile state and non-state “actors” face a rapid and unified response. The purpose of the RRM was outlined in the 2018 Charlevoix G7 Summit Communique:

“We commit to take concerted action in responding to foreign actors who seek to undermine our democratic societies [. . .] We recognize that such threats, particularly those originating from state actors, are not just threats to G7 nations, but to international peace and security and the rules-based international order.”

Announcing the RRM, the UK Government added:

Hostile state activity will be met with a rapid and unified G7 response. [. . .] The move will also see hostile states publicly ‘called out’ for their egregious behaviour – with coordinated international attribution of cyber and other attacks.

The purpose of the RRM is to defend the current, US-led international rules-based order (IRBO). It has nothing to do with protecting democracy. Quite the opposite, the RRM works to undermine democratic principles.

The RRM is an agreement to respond to global events with a fixed narrative designed to promote the interests of the G7’s unipolar world order. Through the RRM, Western governments attribute blame to state or non-state actors and, where there is insufficient evidence to support their proclamations, they work with their MSM “partners” to produce the necessary propaganda and disinformation.

Commercial media is owned by a small handful of global corporations. For example, a 2021 report from the Media Reform Coalition found that just three companies (News UK, the Daily Mail Group and Reach) owned and controlled 90% of the UK national newspaper and 80% of the online news market. Similarly, the US media landscape is controlled by just five media corporations. Often local and state news readers, across the US, deliver the same, single script, word for word.

In 2019 The UK’s state broadcaster, the BBC, launched the Trusted News Initiative (TNI). This represented a further consolidation of Western media. The BBC joined AP, AFP, CBC/Radio-Canada, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Financial Times, First Draft, Google/YouTube, The Hindu, The Nation Media Group, Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, Reuters, Twitter and The Washington Post to form the TNI.

The TNI demands that readers and audiences trust its members. They say that they are “a unique global partnership” and that their role is to “tackle the harmful spread of disinformation.” The TNI have essentially claimed to be the arbiters of all truth. Were he alive today, George Orwell would almost certainly have called them the “Ministry of Truth.”

The TNI is a partnership between the Western MSM and the social media giants whose aim is to remove free speech and silence dissent. They state:

The partnership focuses on moments of potential jeopardy. [. . .] Partners alert each other to high risk disinformation so that content can be reviewed promptly by platforms, whilst publishers ensure they don’t unwittingly share dangerous falsehoods.

In July 2020, the UK government’s Select Committee for Culture Media and Sport noted:

Resources developed by public service broadcasters such as the Trusted News Initiative show huge potential as a framework in which public and private sector can come together to ensure verified, quality news provision. [. . .] The Government and online harms regulator should use the TNI to ‘join up’ approaches to public media literacy and benefit from shared learning regarding misinformation and disinformation. It should do this in a way that respects the independence from Government.

The TNI has no independence from government. All of its leading members are partner organisations of government.

The TNI: Neither trustworthy nor independent

The BBC are funded by the UK government and receives further money, for its international charity BBC Media Action, directly from the UK, US, Swedish, Canadian, Norwegian, EU governments and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Google, another TNI core member, was a start up funded by the CIA’s venture capital company In-Q-tel and is a UK government precurement partner. Another, Microsoft, proudly announces how it is a “partner with government,” helping them to protect democracy .

Reuters has a long history of working directly with institutions of the state. For example, during the 1960’s and 70’s it was paid to spread anti-Soviet propaganda by the UK government. The Washington Post is owned by Geoff Bazos (Nash Holdings) and his AWS (Amazon Web Services) competency partnership works with governments around the world.

The RRM denies the most essential of all democratic principles, namely questioning government authority. There is no room in the RRM for the foundational democratic conventions of free speech and expression. It is an anti-democratic project and a commitment, by G7 and EU governments, to destroy democracy and establish totalitarian rule.

Totalitarianism can be defined as:

A political system in which those in power have complete control and do not allow people freedom to oppose them.

The RRM and the TNI are totalitarian. Combined with censorship legislation, the existence of this nexus demontrates that the G7 political establishment is pursuing policies of intolerance and despotism. It is opposed to democratic accountability.

The TNI are providing the “verified, quality news provision” that supports Rapid Response Mechanism declarations. When Russia stated that “denazification” was one of the goals of its military operation, the UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, called Russia’s claim a “grotesque lie;” US President Joe Biden said, in regard to the same, that “it’s a lie” and Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, again in reference to Russian denazification claims, said “it’s a lie.”

The RRM narrative was set. Russia’s stated concerns were totally groundless and nothing more than an excuse for unprovoked, naked aggression. Therefore, it was the role of the TNI to push this disinformation. This necessitated the whitewashing the Nazis and the downplaying their control of the of Ukraine’s national security.

Among many examples of the TNI doing precisely this, the Financial Times (FT) published Don’t Confuse Patriotism With Naziasm: Ukraine’s Asov Forces Face Scrutiny. The FT claimed that the Azov Regiment were a “diverse” crowd who had gone “mainstream.” Engaging in Holocaust revisionism, the FT added that Stepan Bandera was a “nationalist figure” who had only been “accused” of collaborating with Nazis.

The BBC depolyed the baseless argument that Nazi influence was impossible without electoral success. They highlighted that the election of a Jewish President was “proof” that the Ukrainian Nazis had no power. The BBC then wheeled out some “experts” who were willing to claim that the Nazis were an inconsequential minority within the Ukrainian military and that their ideology had been “watered down” by new recruits.

Fellow TNI founding member, the Guardian, produced Is There Any Justification for Putin’s War? They also exploited the Nazis lack of electoral success, in a country that voted for a Jewish President, to deny that they had any real power. The Guardian added commentary suggesting that the Nazis were suffering from a reputation problem and that the OUM and UPA were simply “nationalists” who came to be “seen as aligned with the Nazis.”

In order to “protect democracy,” other founding members of the TNI are seemingly happy to promote Nazis. Meta (formerly Facebook) banned the Azov Regiment from their platform in 2019 because they are Nazis who publicly incite appalling crimes, such as genocide, on social media. However Meta has now changed its policy to allow its users to show their support for Nazis. Meta condones calls for violence against Russians, including advocating assassination of Russian officials and promoting the killing of Russian soldiers.

While Google, another TNI founder, have censored leading scientists and doctors for questioning COVID-19 policies, Nazis are welcome to host their propaganda channels on YouTube. The Asov Regiments, who murder Ukrainian citizens and use them as human shields, can post as many videos as they like.

This is not to suggest that lawful content, that does not directly incite a crime, should be censored. It merely illustrates that the founding members of the TNI are hypocrites who have no moral compass. The TNI is a propaganda and surveillance cartel whose role is to sell Rapid Response Mechanism “truth” to Western populations. It is undeserving of anyone’s “trust.”

Rampant Censorship And the End of Representative Democracy

Democracy is the best form of government ever devised. Unfortunately, it is not a system of government any of us are familiar with. The word “democracy” (demokratia) derives from “demos” (people) and “kratos” (power). Literally translated as “people power,” democracy means government by trial by jury.

Instead we have something else called “representative democracy,” which is not democracy at all. Representative democracy is a so-called “democratic system” where the people are permitted, by the state, to select their political leaders once every 4 or 5 years.

In the intervening period this tiny group of “special people” exercise executive power and rule over everyone else. This is called an oligarchy and it is the antithesis of democracy. However, as the vast majority call this oligarchical system “democracy” that is how we shall reference it here.

People in the West have been told to believe in, what they call, democracy and have consequently become attached to the idea. The Western oligarchy supposedly maintains some foundational principles which are, in and of themselves, valuable and worth protecting. These are often referred to as democratic ideals.

Democratic ideals have been shaped over thousands of years by political leaders and philosophers. The British sociologist T. H. Marshall, in his 1949 essay Citizenship and Social Class, described democratic ideals as a functioning system of civil, political and social rights.

Civil rights include the right to individual freedom (liberty), exercised through freedom of speech, of thought and faith, etc; political rights enable all the opportunity to participate in and exercise political power, from standing for election to universal suffrage, and social rights afford every citizen basic economic security (welfare) and opportunities (healthcare, employment and education).

To erode any of these rights is to undermine representative democracy (nominally democracy). Both the Western hegemony and the Eurasian alliance between Russia and China, which we will cover in some depth, lay claim to models of democracy.

Neither practice democracy in any recognisable form. Both operate oligarchical political structures and both rule be force. Neither have any commitment to democratic ideals.

Russia is a representative democracy of sorts, but it is certainly not a democracy. In 2019 the Russian state Duma passed its initial “disrespect” and “fake-news” laws. This legislation means that Russians could face a large fine or up to 15 days in prison for showing “blatant disrespect” to the Russian state or its leaders. The “fake-news” laws empower the Roskomnadzor (the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media) to act as Russia’s “Ministry of Truth.”

These anti-democratic censorship laws, information control systems and suppression of Russian’s inalienable rights to free speech and expression, have progressed. The 2020 law, effectively outlawing public dissent against Russia’s draconian COVID-19 measures and, more recently, the 2022 law silencing opposition to Russia’s military actions in Ukraine, are typical examples.

The Russian government’s opposition to free speech, freedom of thought and expression includes the blocking of social media companies and the expulsion of foreign journalists. It’s harsh penalties, of up to 15 years in prison for inconvenient journalists, effectively made it impossible for many foreign new outlets to operate in Russia.

In one of the most stunning examples of rank hypocrisy written in recent years, the NYT wrote that Russia had taken censorship to “new extremes.” Perhaps Russian government disdain for democratic ideals could be considered “extreme,” but it is no more so than the equal disregard exhibited by western governments.

Through the totalitarian RRM and TNI the West operates a propaganda operation unparalleled in human history. While the Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea and other tyrannies have deployed overwhelming propaganda campaigns, nothing compares to the scale of the RRM/TNI. It is trans-continental, covers print, broadcast and online media and is led by private corporations, working in collaboration with government, who exercise their control through the Global Public-Private Partnership (G3P).

Censorship in the West is just as severe, if not more so, than anything seen in Russia. In 2021 the US Department of State shut down a number of US-based middle-eastern news outlets. Emphasising the propaganda strangle hold, in response to this attack upon the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution by the US government, the US so-called free press didn’t even mention the constitutional implications.

In 2017, to be able to continue its broadcasting and online publishing operation in the US, serving a Russian community of around 3 million US citizens, the Russian Media outlet RT was compelled to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). In March 2022 US and Canadian cable providers effectively banned Russian media in their respective countries.

Mel Dawes

The censorship in Europe, in both the EU and especially in the UK, is even more oppressive. The EU has banned a number of Russian outlets outright. They are also surging ahead with their plans to censor the Internet. The Digital Services Act (DSA) will see the EU work with their social media “partners” to remove whatever Brussels’ bureaucrats identify as “disinformation.”

The most anti-democratic countries among the former western liberal democracies is the UK. It has gone further than any other to create a dictatorship.

Having already passed legislation to give itself unlimited authority to commit any crime, the UK government is pushing through with laws to end the right of protest, it is removing the defence of “in the national interests” from whistleblowers and investigative journalists, and it is planning a new Bill of Rights that will enshrine the authority of the state over and above everything else, including citizen’s inalienable rights.

Like the EU the UK has banned Russian media. Justifying the decision the chief executive of the Ofcom (the UK’s broadcast regulator) Dame Melanie Dawes, said:

Freedom of expression is something we guard fiercely in this country [. . .] [W]e have today found that RT is not fit and proper to hold a licence in the UK. As a result we have revoked RT’s UK broadcasting licence.

Vacuous platitudes from the nobility are meaningless. This becomes even more evident when we consider the UK government’s plan to completely shut down freedom of speech online.

Ofcom has been appointed as the regulator for the UK’s Internet under the imminent Online Safety Act. It is nothing less than a government plan to control our ability to communicate and freely share information and ideas online. The UK state’s equivocation about protecting freedom of speech is a damnable lie.

The Western political establishment has no intention to uphold democratic ideals. Freedom of speech and expression, and the liberty that representative democracy is supposedly based upon, means nothing to the ruling class. It is no longer convenient and now they are simply casting it aside.

Representative democracy is itself a sham, but at least there was some vague promise to uphold democratic ideals. We, in the West, can now put aside any lingering, childish notion that we live in democratic societies.

The Ukrainian government have not only banned all Russian media but also outlawed political parties. Ukraine is no democracy either. The absurd suggestion, propagated by the likes of Ursula Von der Leyen, that the West is defending democracy from autocracy, is pure disinformation. There is no such thing as democracy to be found in any nation-state.

We are seeing a struggle for supremacy between global power blocs in Ukraine. The political structure they each hope to rule is a single, cohesive system of global governance. No matter who wins, it’s implementation is assured, unless we act on a population wide scale to stop it.

Ukraine is the current focal point for this struggle. World War III started in 2001 and 2030 is the first waypoint along the path to true global governance.

The West is exploiting the conflict to deliberately speed up the planned destruction of its own economy, a process that began in earnest with the policy response to the pseudopandemic. The East is seeking to establish itself as the driver for the New World Order.

The globalist forces overseeing this struggle care little for the outcome. What matters is that the war is fought, because it is the conflict itself that will deliver the global governance they desire. It is this global confrontation that we will explore in Part 5.

This article is a follow-up to :

1. "Russia wants to force the US to respect the UN Charter," January 4, 2022.
2. "Washington pursues RAND plan in Kazakhstan, then Transnistria," January 11, 2022.
3. "Washington refuses to hear Russia and China," January 18, 2022.
4. "Washington and London, deafened", February 1, 2022.
5. "Washington and London try to preserve their domination over Europe", February 8, 2022.
6. “Two interpretations of the Ukrainian affair”, 16 February 2022.
7. “Washington sounds the alarm, while its allies withdraw”, 22 February 2022.
8. “Russia declares war on the Straussians”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 5 March 2022.
9. "A gang of drug addicts and neo-nazis”, 5 March 2022.
   10 “Israel stunned by Ukrainian neo-Nazis”, 8 March 2022.
10. "Ukraine: the great manipulation", March 22, 2022.

Russia’s military operations in Ukraine have been going on for more than a month and Nato’s propaganda operations for a month and a half.

As always, the war propaganda of the Anglo-Saxons is coordinated from London. Since the First World War, the British have acquired an unparalleled know-how. In 1914, they had managed to convince their own population that the German army had carried out mass rapes in Belgium and that it was the duty of every Briton to come to the rescue of these poor women. It was a cleaner version of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s attempt to compete with the British colonial empire. At the end of the conflict, the British population demanded that the victims be compensated. A census was taken and it was found that the facts had been extraordinarily exaggerated.

President Zelensky declared war on Russia by ordering the Banderist troops incorporated into his army to attack Russian citizens in the Donbass from February 17. Then he waved the red rag in front of the political leaders of NATO member countries and declared that he was going to acquire the atomic bomb in violation of international treaties.

This time, in 2022, the British managed to convince the Europeans that on February 24 the Russians had attacked Ukraine to invade and annex it. Moscow was trying to reconstitute the Soviet Union and was preparing to attack all its former possessions in succession. This version is more honorable for the West than evoking the "Thucydides trap" - I will come back to this -. In reality, Kiev’s troops attacked their own population in Donbass on the afternoon of February 17. Then Ukraine waved a red rag in front of the Russian bull with President Zelenski’s speech to the political and military leaders of Nato gathered in Munich, during which he announced that his country was going to acquire nuclear weapons to protect itself from Russia.

Don’t believe me? Here are the OSCE readings from the Donbass border. There had been no fighting for months, but the observers of the neutral organization observed 1,400 explosions per day as of the afternoon of February 17. Immediately, the rebel provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk, which still considered themselves Ukrainian but claimed autonomy within Ukraine, moved more than 100,000 civilians to protect them. Most retreated to the interior of Donbass, others fled to Russia.

Number of explosions recorded in Donbass (February 14-22, 2022)

Source: OSCE SMM Daily Report

In 2014 and 2015, when a civil war had pitted Kiev against Donestk and Lugansk, the material and human damage was only a matter of Ukraine’s internal affairs. However, in the course of time, almost the entire Ukrainian population of Donbass considered emigrating and acquired dual Russian citizenship. Therefore, Kiev’s attack on the population of Donbass on February 17 was an attack on Ukrainian-Russian citizens. Moscow came to their rescue, in an emergency, from February 24.

The chronology is indisputable. It was not Moscow that wanted this war, but Kiev, despite the predictable price it would have to pay. President Zelensky deliberately put his people in danger and bears sole responsibility for what they are enduring today.

Why did he do this? Since the beginning of his term, Volodymyr Zelensky has continued the support of the Ukrainian state, which began with his predecessor Petro Poroshenko, for the embezzlement of funds by his American sponsors and for the extremists in his country, the Banderists. President Putin called the former "a bunch of drug addicts" and the latter "a bunch of neo-Nazis" [[1](#nb1 "See the ninth article in this series: "A bunch of drug addicts and (...)")]. Not only did Volodymyr Zelensky publicly declare that he did not want to solve the conflict in Donbass by implementing the Minsk Agreements, but he banned his fellow citizens from speaking Russian in schools and administrations and, worse, signed a racial law on July 1, 2021, de facto excluding Ukrainians claiming their Slavic origin from the enjoyment of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.

The Russian army first invaded Ukrainian territory, not from the Donbass, but from Belarus and Crimea. It destroyed all Ukrainian military installations used by Nato for years and fought the Bandit regiments. It is now dedicated to annihilating them in the east of the country. The propagandists in London and their almost 150 communication agencies around the world assure us that, pushed back by the glorious Ukrainian Resistance, the defeated Russian army has given up its initial goal of taking Kiev. However, never, absolutely never, did President Putin say that Russia would take Kiev, overthrow the elected President Zelensky and occupy his country. On the contrary, he has always said that his war aims were to denazify Ukraine and eliminate foreign (NATO) weapons stockpiles. This is exactly what he is doing.

The Ukrainian population is suffering. We are discovering that war is cruel, that it always kills innocent people. Today we are overwhelmed by our emotions and, as we ignore the Ukrainian attack of February 17, we blame the Russians, whom we wrongly call "aggressors". We do not feel the same compassion for the victims of the simultaneous war in Yemen, its 200,000 dead, including 85,000 children, who died of hunger. But it is true that the Yemenis are, in the eyes of the West, "only Arabs".

The fact of suffering should not be interpreted a priori as proof that one is right. Criminals suffer like the innocent.

The Ukrainian delegation to the International Court of Justice succeeded in obtaining not a judgment on the merits, but an order for a provisional measure against Russia.

How is such manipulation of the court possible? [[2](#nb2 ""Allegation of genocide under the Convention on the Prevention and (...)")] Ukraine referred to the fact that President Putin, during his speech on the Russian military operation, said that the people of Donbass were victims of "genocide". She therefore denied this "genocide" and accused Russia of having used this argument improperly. In international law, the word "genocide" no longer refers to the eradication of an ethnic group, but to a massacre ordered by a government. Over the past eight years, between 13,000 and 22,000 civilians have been killed in the Donbass, depending on whether one refers to Ukrainian or Russian government statistics. Russia, which had sent its plea in writing, argues that it is not relying on the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, but on Article 51 of the UN Charter, which authorizes war in self-defence, as President Putin had explicitly stated in his speech. The Tribunal did not attempt to verify anything. It stuck to the Ukrainian denial. It therefore concluded that Russia had improperly used the Convention as an argument. Moreover, as Russia did not consider it necessary to be physically represented at the Court, the Court used its absence to impose an aberrant provisional measure. Russia, sure of its good right, refused to comply and is demanding a judgment on the merits, which will not be given before the end of September.

All this being said, we can only understand the duplicity of the West if we put the events in their context. For a decade, American political scientists have been telling us that the rise of Russia and China will lead to an inevitable war. The political scientist Graham Allison created the concept of the "Thucydides trap" [[3](#nb3 ""The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?", Graham T. (...)")]. He was referring to the Peloponnesian wars that opposed Sparta and Athens in the fourth century BC.. The strategist and historian Thucydides analyzed that the wars had become inevitable when Sparta, which dominated Greece, realized that Athens was conquering an empire and could replace its hegemony. The analogy is telling, but false: while Sparta and Athens were close Greek cities, the United States, Russia and China do not have the same culture.

China, for example, rejects President Biden’s proposal for trade competition. Instead, it has the opposite tradition of "win-win". In doing so, it is not referring to mutually beneficial trade contracts, but to its history. The "Middle Kingdom" has an extremely large population. The emperor was forced to delegate his authority to the maximum. Even today China is the most decentralized country in the world. When he issued a decree, it had practical consequences in some provinces, but not in all. The emperor therefore had to make sure that each local governor would not consider his decree irrelevant and forget his authority. He then offered compensation to those who were not affected by the decree so that they would still feel subject to his authority.

Since the beginning of the Ukrainian crisis, China has not only taken a non-aligned position, but has protected its Russian ally in the UN Security Council. The United States has wrongly feared that Beijing would send weapons to Moscow. This has never been the case, although there is logistical assistance in the form of prepared meals for the soldiers, for example. China is watching how things are going and deducing how they will go when it tries to get the rebel province of Taiwan back. Beijing has kindly declined Washington’s offers. It is thinking in the long term and knows from experience that if it allows Russia to be destroyed, it will once again be plundered by the West. Its salvation is only possible with Russia, even if it must one day challenge it in Siberia.

Let’s go back to Thucydides’ trap. Russia knows that the United States wants to erase it from the scene. It anticipates a possible invasion/destruction. But its territory is immense and its population insufficiently large. It cannot defend its overly large borders. Since the 19th century, it has imagined defending itself by hiding from its adversaries. When Napoleon, then Hitler, attacked her, she moved her population further and further east. And it burned its own cities before the invader arrived. The latter found himself unable to supply his troops. He had to face the winter without means and, finally, retreat. This "scorched earth" strategy only worked because neither Napoleon nor Hitler had logistical bases nearby. Modern Russia knows that it cannot survive if US weapons are stored in Central and Eastern Europe. That is why, at the end of the Soviet Union, Russia demanded that NATO never expand eastward. French President François Mitterrand and German Chancellor Helmut Köhl, who knew history, demanded that the West make this commitment. At the time of German reunification, they drafted and signed a treaty guaranteeing that Nato would never cross the Oder-Neisse line, the German-Polish border.

Russia set this commitment in stone in 1999 and in 2010 with the OSCE declarations in Istanbul and Astana. But the United States violated it in 1999 (accession of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland to Nato), in 2004 (Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia), in 2009 (Albania and Croatia), in 2017 (Montenegro), and again in 2020 (Northern Macedonia). The problem is not that all these states have allied themselves with Washington, but that they have stored U.S. weapons at home. No one is criticizing these states for choosing their allies, but Moscow is blaming them for serving as a rear base for the Pentagon in preparation for an attack by Russia.

Victoria Nuland did not know Leo Strauss personally, but was trained in his thinking by her husband, Robert Kagan. Together they founded the Project for a New American Century, the think tank that called for a Pearl Harbor-like catastrophe in order to impose their policies. The attacks of September 11, 2001 were a "divine surprise" for them. Like the war in Ukraine, these despicable attacks did not shake the US power, but on the contrary allowed it to last.

In October 2021, the Straussian Victoria Nuland [4], the State Department’s number 2, came to Moscow to urge Russia to accept the deployment of US weapons in Central and Eastern Europe. She promised that Washington would invest in Russia in return. Then she threatened Russia if it did not accept her offer and concluded that he would have President Putin tried before an international tribunal. Moscow responded with a proposal for a treaty guaranteeing peace on the basis of respect for the United Nations Charter on December 17. This is what has caused the current storm. Respecting the Charter, which is based on the principle of the equality and sovereignty of states, implies reforming NATO, whose operation is based on a hierarchy among its members. Caught in the "Thucydides trap", the United States then fomented the current war in Ukraine.

If we admit that their goal is to remove Russia from the international scene, the way the Anglo-Saxons react to the Ukrainian crisis becomes clear. They are not trying to push back the Russian army militarily, nor to embarrass the Russian government, but to wipe out all traces of Russian culture in the West. And secondly, they are trying to weaken the European Union.

They started with the freezing of the assets of Russian oligarchs in the West, a measure that was applauded by the Russian population, which considers them illegitimate beneficiaries of the plundering of the USSR. Then they imposed on Western companies to stop their activities with Russia. Finally, they continued by cutting off Russian banks’ access to Western banks (the SWIFT system). However, if these financial measures were disastrous for Russian banks (but not for the Russian government), the measures against companies working in Russia are on the contrary favorable to Russia which recovers their investments at lower costs. Moreover, the Moscow Stock Exchange, which had been closed from February 25 (the day after the Russian response) to March 24, recorded an increase as soon as it reopened. The RTS index fell by 4.26% on the first day, but it measures mainly speculative stocks, while the IMOEX index, which measures national economic activity, rose by 4.43%. The real losers of the Western measures are the members of the European Union who had the stupidity to take them.

Paul Wolfowitz was introduced to the thought of Leo Strauss by his philosophy professor, Alan Bloom. He later became a student of the master, working directly with him at the University of Chicago. Leo Strauss had convinced him that Jews should not expect anything from democracies. In order not to endure another Shoah, they must build their own Reich. It is better to be on the side of the handle than of the axe.

Already in 1991, the Straussian Paul Wolfowitz wrote in an official report that the USA should prevent a power from developing to the point of competing with it. At the time, the USSR was in tatters. So he named the European Union as the potential rival to be destroyed [[5](#nb5 "This document was revealed in "US Strategy Plan Calls For Insuring No (...)")]. This is exactly what he did in 2003, when, as number 2 in the Pentagon, he forbade Germany and France to participate in the reconstruction of Iraq [6]. This is also what Victoria Nuland talked about in 2014 when she instructed her US ambassador in Kiev to "fuck the European Union" (sic) [7].

The European Union has now been ordered to stop its imports of Russian hydrocarbons. If it complies with this injunction, Germany will be ruined and with it the whole Union. This will not be collateral damage, but the fruit of structured thinking, clearly expressed for thirty years.

The most important thing for Washington is to exclude Russia from all international organizations. It has already managed, in 2014, to exclude it from the G8. The pretext was not the independence of Crimea (which it had been demanding since the dissolution of the USSR, several months before Ukraine thought of its own independence), but its membership in the Russian Federation. Ukraine’s alleged aggression provides a pretext for excluding it from the G20. China immediately pointed out that no one could be excluded from an informal forum without a constitution. However, President Biden returned to the charge on March 24 and 25 in Europe.

Washington is increasing its contacts to exclude Russia from the World Trade Organization. In any case, the principles of the WTO are being undermined by the unilateral "sanctions" implemented by the West. Such a decision would be detrimental to both sides. This is where the writings of Paul Wolfowitz come into play. He wrote in 1991 that Washington should not seek to be the best at what it does, but to be the first in relation to others. This implies, he noted, that in order to maintain its hegemony, the United States should not hesitate to hurt itself, if it does much more to others. We will all pay the price for this way of thinking.

The most important thing for the Straussians is to exclude Russia from the United Nations. This is not possible if one respects the UN Charter, but Washington will not bother with it there any more than elsewhere. It has already contacted every member state of the UN with a few exceptions. The Anglo-Saxon propaganda has already succeeded in making them believe that a member of the Security Council has embarked on a war of conquest against one of its neighbors. If Washington succeeds in convening a special UN General Assembly and changing the statutes, it will succeed.

A kind of hysteria has taken hold of the West. Everything Russian is being hunted down without thinking about its links with the Ukrainian crisis. Russian artists are forbidden to perform even if they are known to be opposed to President Putin. Here a university bans the study of the anti-Soviet hero Solzhenitsyn from their curriculum, there another bans the writer of debate and free will Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) who opposed the tsarist regime. Here a conductor is deprogrammed because he is Russian and there Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) is removed from the repertoire. Everything Russian must disappear from our consciousness, just as the Roman Empire razed Carthage and methodically destroyed all traces of its existence, to the point that today we know little about this civilization.

On March 21, President Biden made no secret of the fact. In front of an audience of business leaders, he said, "This is the moment when things change. There is going to be a New World Order and we have to lead it. And we have to unite the rest of the free world to do it" [8]. This new order [[9](#nb9 "« Histoire du "Nouvel ordre mondial" », par Pierre Hillard, Réseau Voltaire, (...)")] should cut the world into two hermetic blocks; a cut such as we have never known, without comparison with the Iron Curtain of the Cold War. Some states, such as Poland, believe that they can lose a lot like the others, but also gain a little. Thus, General Waldemar Skrzypczak has just demanded that the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad become Polish [10]. Indeed, after the world has been cut off, how will Moscow be able to communicate with this territory?

Very occasionally, a single anecdote can almost completely summate a moment in history. And this one - did it: In 2005, Zbig Brzezinski, the architect of Afghanistan as quagmire to the Soviet Union, and the author of The Grand Chessboard (which embedded the Mackinder dictum of ‘he who controls the Asian heartland controls the world’ - into US foreign policy), sat in Washington with Alexander Dugin, the advocate for a ‘heartland’ cultural and geo-political renaissance.

Zbig had already written in his book that, absent Ukraine, Russia would never become the heartland power – but with it, Russia can and would. The meeting, had been set with a photo-prop of a chessboard placed between Zbig and Dugin (to promote Zbig’s book).
This arrangement with a chessboard prompted the latter to ask whether Zbig considered Chess to be a game meant for two:

“No, Zbig shot back: It is a game for one. Once a chess piece is moved; you turn the board around, and you move the other side’s chess pieces. There is ‘no other’ in this game”, Brzezinski insisted.

Of course, the single-handed chess game was implicit in Mackinder’s doctrine: ‘he who controls the heartland’ dictum was a message to the Anglo powers to never allow a united heartland. (This, of course, precisely what is evolving at every moment).
And on Monday, Biden channelled Brzezinski out loud (whilst addressing the Business Roundtable in the US): The remarks came toward the end of his brief speech where he talked about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and America’s economic future:

“I think this presents us with some significant opportunities to make some real changes. You know, we are at an inflection point, I believe, in the world economy: [and] not just the world economy - in the world [which] occurs every three or four generations. As one of my, as the one of the top military people said to me in a secure meeting the other day, 60 million people died between 1900 and 1946; and since then we established a liberal world order and that hadn’t happened in a long while. A lot of people died, but nowhere near the chaos. And now’s the time when things are shifting. We’re going, there’s gonna be a new world order out there; and we’ve got to lead it and we’ve got to unite the rest of the free world in doing it.”

Again there is no ‘other’ at the board. When the moves are made, the board is turned through 180º, to play from the other side.

The point here is that the carefully deliberated counter-attack on this Brzezinski zeitgeist was formally launched in Beijing with the joint-declaration that neither Russia nor China accept for America to play chess alone with no others at the board. This represents the defining issue of this coming era: The opening-up of geo-politics. It is one for which the excluded ‘others’ are prepared to go to war (they see no choice).

A second chess-player has stepped forward and insists to play: (Russia). A third stands ready: (China). Others are silently lining up to witness how the first engagement in this geo-political war fares. It seems from Biden’s comments on Monday that the US intends to use sanctions, and the full unprecedent extent of US treasury measures, against Brzezinski dissidents. Russia is to be made an example of that which awaits any challengers, demanding a seat at the board.

But this approach is fundamentally flawed. It stems from Kissinger’s celebrated dictum that ‘he who controls money controls the world’. But it was wrong from the ‘get go’: It was always ‘who controls food; energy (human as well as fossil) and money can control the world. But Kissinger just ignored the first two required conditions - and the last has imprinted itself on the Washington mental circuits.

And here is paradox: When Brzezinski wrote his book, it was a very different era. Today, whilst, Europe and the US never have been more closely aligned. The ‘West’ paradoxically, has also never been more alone. Opposition to Russia may have seemed at the outset, a slam dunk global unifier. That world opinion would so robustly oppose Moscow’s attack - that even China would pay a high political price for failing to jump onto the anti-Russia bandwagon. But that is not how it is working out.

“While the US rhetoric pillories Russia for “war crimes” and the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, et al”, former Indian Ambassador, Bhadrakumar notes, “the world capitals view this as a confrontation between America and Russia. Outside of the western camp, the world community refuses to impose sanctions against Russia or even to demonise that country”.

The Islamabad Declaration issued on Wednesday after the 45th meeting of the foreign ministers of the fifty-seven member Organisation of Islamic Conference refused to endorse sanctions against Russia…Not a single country in the African continent and West Asian, Central Asia, South and Southeast Asian region has imposed sanctions against Russia”.

There may well be a further factor at play here: For, when these latter states hear phrases such as the ‘Ukrainians, through their heroism, have won the right to enter our “club of values”’, they scent a whiff of debilitated ‘white’ Europe clutching at the life-rafts.

The reality is that the sanctions to which Biden refered in his speech have already failed. Russia has not defaulted; the Moscow stock exchange is open; the Rouble is on the rebound; the current account is in rude good health and Russia is selling energy at windfall prices (even after discount).
In short, trade will be diverted – not destroyed (the benefit of being an exporter of goods almost fully produced locally – i.e. a fortress economy)
The second oddity in this Biden approach is that: whilst Clausewitzian doctrine (to which Russia broadly adheres) argues for the dismantling of ‘the enemy’s centre of gravity, to achieve victory’ – in this case presumably, the western control of the global reserve currency and payments systems. Today, rather, it is Europe and the US that have been dismantling it themselves: and further locking themselves into soaring inflation and contracting economic activity, in some unexplained fit of moral masochism.

As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard notes, “What is clear is that western sanctions policy is the worst of all worlds. We are suffering an energy shock that is further inflating Russia’s war-fighting revenues…There is a pervasive fear of a gilets jaunes uprising across Europe, a suspicion that a fickle public will not tolerate the cost-of-living shock once the horrors of Ukraine lose their novelty on TV screens”.

Again, perhaps we can attribute this paradoxical behaviour to Kissinger’s obsession with the power of money, and his forgetfulness of other major factors.

All of this has led to a certain unease creeping into the corridors of power in some NATO capitals over the course that this Ukraine conflict is running: NATO will not intervene. It will not implement a no-fly zone - and has pointedly ignored Zelensky’s plea for additional military equipment. Ostensibly, this reflects the ‘selfless’ gesture by the West to avoid a nuclear war. In reality, the development of new weaponry – too - can transform geopolitics in a moment (the Kinzhal bunker-buster). Simply, across the board, NATO cannot prevail against Russia in Ukraine.
For now, it seems the Pentagon has – for now – won, in the war with State department, and has begun the process of ‘correcting the narrative’:
Contrast these two US narratives:

(State Department): Monday signalled that US is discouraging Zelensky from making concessions to Russia in return for a ceasefire. The spokesman “made it very clear that he is open to a diplomatic solution that does not compromise the core principles at the heart of the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine. When asked to elaborate on his point, Price said that the war is “bigger” than Russia and Ukraine. “The key point is that there are principles that are at stake here that have universal applicability everywhere”. Price said Putin was trying to violate “core principles”.

(Pentagon): “drops two truth bombs” in its battle with State and Congress to prevent confrontation with Russia: “Russia’s conduct in the brutal war tells a different story than the widely accepted view that Putin is intent on demolishing Ukraine and inflicting maximum civilian damage—and it reveals the Russian leader’s strategic balancing act,” reported Newsweek in an article entitled, “Putin’s Bombers Could Devastate Ukraine But He’s Holding Back. Here’s Why.”

One - quotes an unnamed analyst at the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) saying, “The heart of Kyiv has barely been touched. And almost all of the long-range strikes have been aimed at military targets. A retired U.S. Air Force officer now working as an analyst for a Pentagon contractor, added: “We need to understand Russia’s actual conduct. If we merely convince ourselves that Russia is bombing indiscriminately, or [that] it is failing to inflict more harm because its personnel are not up to the task or because it is technically inept, then we are not seeing the real conflict”
The second - directly undermines Biden’s dramatic warning about a false flag chemical attack. Reuters reported: “The United States has not yet seen any concrete indications of an imminent Russian chemical or biological weapons attack in Ukraine but is closely monitoring streams of intelligence for them, a senior US defence official said.”

Biden is positioned in the Middle: saying ‘Putin’s a war criminal’; but also that there will be no NATO fight with Russia: “The only end game now,” a senior administration official was heard to say at a private event earlier this month, “is the end of Putin regime. Until then, all the time Putin stays, [Russia] will be a pariah state that will never be welcomed back into the community of nations. China has made a huge error in thinking Putin will get away with it”.

There it is – The Bottom Line: allow the carnage in Ukraine to continue; sit back and watch the ‘heroic Ukrainians bleed Russia dry’; do enough to sustain the conflict; but not enough to escalate it - and play it as the heroic struggle for democracy – in order to satisfy public opinion.
The point is that it isn’t working out that way. Putin may surprise all in DC by exiting Ukraine, when the military operation is complete. (When Putin speaks of Ukraine, by the way, he usually discounts the western part added on by Stalin - as Ukrainian).

And it isn’t working out with China. Blinken said in justification of new sanctions imposed on China last week: "We are committed to defending human rights around the world and will continue to use all diplomatic and economic measures to promote accountability."

The problem here is that the sanctions were imposed because China had failed to repudiate Putin. Just that. The language of accountability and (of atonement) used however, can be understood only as an expression of woke contemporary culture. It is enough to present some aspect of Chinese culture as politically incorrect (as racist, repressive, misogynist, supremacist or offensive ), and immediately it becomes politically incorrect. And that means that any aspect of it can be adduced at will by the Administration - as meriting sanctioning.

The Problem again reverts to the cultural refusal accept ‘others’ at the board. Everything is contested and potentially incorrect or offensive, or both — Ukraine is under attack from Russia, racism is immoral and Black Lives Matter, and the science of Covid is, while evolving, still recognizable as science – “I’m not willing to “both-sides” any of that – is the western politically-correct refrain. This cultural identity politics however has almost zero traction beyond US and West Europe.

What can China do; but shrug at such nonsense.

Biden in his speech to the Roundtable forestaged for his audience a New World Order – he suggested that a Great Re-set is coming.
Maybe so. But maybe also, a ‘Re-set Reckoning’ is on the cards: One that will return many things to that which, until relatively recently, had actually worked. Politics and geo-politics is metamorphosing - in every moment.

The war in Ukraine is only a bloody pretext, devised by Washington, to exclude Russia from all international organizations, weaken the European Union and, ultimately, preserve Anglo-American domination over the entire West. Don’t be fooled!

I wish to talk to you not about the war in Ukraine, but about the New World Order that the United States is organizing right before your eyes – but without your realizing it – while this war in Ukraine is taking place. ‎

First of all, you should know that since mid-February, the media have been relaying a completely distorted narrative because they do not report all the facts, but only those messages that NATO wants to convey. Since mid-February we have all been “one-eyed”, only seeing half the picture and, consequently, we make the mistake of thinking that we can interpret it. ‎

The second thing you must bear in mind is that your emotions are being manipulated. Every day we are shown Ukrainians who suffer – indeed, it is horrible and we must help them, it is a human obligation to do so. But their suffering does not prove them right. Suffering and being right are two different things. ‎

With that said, let’s get down to the facts. ‎

This war did not start on 24 February with the Russian intervention, but several days earlier, on 18 February, with the intervention of the United States, an intervention that no one has ever told you about. ‎

On 18 February, according to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) - comprising 57 participating states, it was created during the cold war and all European states are members, as well as non-European states, such as the United States: its neutrality is indisputable! - although there had been no fighting in Ukraine, on 18 February fighting resumed between the Ukrainian provinces of Donbass and the rest of Donbass. ‎

The OSCE does not say that the Ukrainian army was responsible, but it could only be the Ukrainian army. The shelling of the Ukrainian population of Donbass began on 18 February. 1,400 shells rained down on the population that day ... 1,400 shells! ‎

A war was started on 18 February! And in a few hours, two days at the most, about 100,000 Ukrainians from Donbass fled from the front line. They retreated to the countryside or crossed over into Russia. All Russia did was to respond to that attack.

But the attack didn’t end there. The Ukrainians acted like someone waving a red flag in front of a bull. The next day, on 19 February, at the Security Conference that brings together political leaders from NATO member countries every year in Munich, President Zelensky announced that he wanted to acquire the atomic bomb enabling him to threaten Russia. ‎

Seen from Moscow: Ukraine engages in war against Russia and announces that it is going to obtain the atomic bomb.

It was clear that there would be a Russian response. Russia had to protect its citizens and you should know that the civil war in Ukraine started in 2014… it is a civil war we are talking about because Ukrainians are pitted against other Ukrainians! And in the past 8 years that war has left, according to the Kiev government, at least 13,000 dead, at least 13,000 dead!... all civilians, in addition to a thousand soldiers, again according to Kiev. ‎

According to the Russian government, which conducted an official investigation on the ground, the number of dead civilians is not 13,000 but 22,000! Whatever the case, the Donbass has been witness to a butchery that doesn’t seem to dismay anyone. ‎

Now back to what I was saying.

For the past 8 years, Russia has granted Russian citizenship to almost the entire population of the Ukrainian Donbass, who since childhood speaks Russian on a daily basis, a population that has now been prohibited by the Kiev government from speaking Russian in schools and public administrations, although this was always authorized in the past. Therefore, on 24 February, the Moscow government stepped in to support this population militarily. ‎

But what us most important is to understand the context. ‎

Why did the United States arm Kiev to attack Donbass? ‎

It’s very simple. For ten years, the domination of the United States has been threatened by the rise of Russia and China. ‎

On Voltaire Network we have argued for a long time that the first military power is no longer the United States but Russia. ‎

This has been an absolutely irrefutable fact since 2018, but the United States refuses to admit it, despite the fact that, on the battlefield – mainly in Syria – it was demonstrable that the Russian army is tactically superior to the military forces sponsored by the United States. ‎

Their technologies cannot be compared. That of the United States dates back 30 years. It is completely obsolete. ‎

The Russians have completely revamped their army and replaced their personnel. The army they had inherited from the Soviet Union frankly consisted of … a gang of alcoholics. Today it is made up of young people, with very good training, with experience in real war situations, taking on jihadists ... jihadist armies! In Syria. ‎

In economic terms, China has long surpassed the United States, which is now only a consumer, not a manufacturer. ‎

Feeling threatened, the United States has itself explained what it calls "the Thucydides trap". Thucydides is an ancient Greek historian who described the confrontation between Sparta and Athens. Sparta dominated all of Greece, but Athens, which was inferior, began to develop an empire abroad, so that Athens had an economic influence that Sparta no longer had, and war between the two cities became inevitable. ‎

US political scientists have been telling us for ten years now that a war between the United States on one side and Russia and China on the other side was going to become inevitable. In the Pentagon there are even people who assert that this war should already have broken out and that it had been planned for 2015.

Over the past few years, the United States has positioned troops and weapons throughout central and eastern Europe. It has done so in violation, firstly, of the German reunification treaty and, secondly, of the Istanbul and Astana declarations adopted within the OSCE. ‎

Let’s fully understand! Russia is a huge country, with the largest land area in the world. To defend itself… Russia must be able to defend its borders, but it does not have enough troops for that. In that sense, it is a small town in a huge country. So to defend itself, Russia uses the scorched earth technique. If an invader penetrates her territory, Russia pulls back her population from the border as far as possible – inside her huge territory – and burns down her own cities so that the invader cannot subsist there. Therefore, the invaders have to take with them everything they need if they want to continue advancing. It is an impossible logistical challenge to solve. Napoleon and Hitler failed at it. ‎

To overcome this problem, the United States has been sending troops and weapons to Central and Eastern Europe.

Russia responded:
"You cannot do that, in light of what you signed at the time of the German reunification. You have no right to extend NATO to the East."

But the United States went ahead anyway… on several occasions. ‎

Russia does not dispute the right of Central and Eastern European countries to ally themselves with the United States. It is their prerogative. It is the right of each State. Russia doesn’t dispute it in the case of Ukraine either. ‎

What she challenges is Ukraine’s right to host US military bases, which is an entirely different matter.

In a similar context, General Charles de Gaulle as President of France decided to remove NATO troops from French territory – there used to be American bases in France which are no longer there. But that did not prevent General de Gaulle from maintaining an alliance with the United States. France has always been a signatory to the North Atlantic Treaty. But she wasn’t always a member of NATO’s Integrated Military Command Structure. The French armed forces were not always under the command of an American general, as they are today. ‎

Let’s go back to what I was saying about Russia and China. ‎

Their culture is fundamentally different from the Anglo-Saxon culture. The Chinese, for example, explain that they do not want to compete with the United States. They are not interested in that! They are not ‎competing!‎

‎The Chinese say: "We want a relationship in which everyone wins (“win win”).”‎

It does not involve commercial competition, nor does it mean that each side, when signing a contract, will have a vested interest in that contract. Nothing of the sort! It is in reference to Chinese ‎history.‎

China is, above all, a country with a gigantic population ... gigantic! The emperor of China was not in a position to know what were the concerns of certain groups of individuals at the opposite end of the country and left the administration of the territory in the hands of regional governors. ‎

This is how it still works in China! The government in Beijing is oblivious to what is happening in the different regions. There is considerable decentralization. No country is more decentralized than China!‎

But when the emperor issued a decree, he had to make sure that each of the regional governors would grasp the importance of what was at stake. Because if the governor considered that it was not relevant to his province, he would stop paying attention to other decrees, thus failing to recognize the authority of the emperor. Therefore, when the emperor decreed something which could not be applied in one or more provinces, he would grant something extra to the governor of that province so that he would continue to respect the imperial authority. ‎

I am explaining all this because what Russia and China want to create is a multipolar world, a world where there is no power that decides for the others, but where each power decides for itself. ‎

And what Washington wants to do is, on the contrary, preserve the predominance of the United States over the world so that it alone can decide and no one else. ‎

What is the United States doing in the midst of a conflict of its own making in Ukraine? ‎

It is dividing the world in two. It is ejecting Russia from all intergovernmental organizations. It will start with the World Trade Organization [WTO] and end with the United Nations Organization [UN]. Of course, the UN statutes do not allow this, but the United States does not care and will try through thick and thin to achieve its goal. ‎

That process began by explaining that trade with Russia had to end. Stopping trade with Russia! For example, [French car manufacturer] Renault has just decided to shut its factory in Moscow. ‎

But Renault had already closed down its factories in Iran, when it was pressured to do so, and it was an economic catastrophe, an economic catastrophe for Renault. But the United States couldn’t care less! What it wants is for the European Union to undergo an economic shock so that the European Union will be forced to accept US domination. ‎

Paul Wolfowitz had explained it very clearly 30 years ago, in 1991. That “Straussian” [disciple of the philosopher Leo Strauss], who later became the Pentagon’s number two official, explained that the true enemy of the United States – at that time Russia and China posed no real threat – was the European Union and that the European Union had to be prevented from becoming politically and economically independent. ‎

Over time, the European Union developed economically a little, but not much, while Russia and China expanded exponentially. So the United States now wants to erase the very existence of Russia – and very soon that of China – from our field of consciousness and downgrade the European Union. ‎

Just look at the consequences of all the economic and financial sanctions already adopted! They are not “against Russia”. They are directed against the European Union. ‎

The Moscow Stock Exchange closed on 25 February – the day following Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. It reopened yesterday, 24 March, and so now we know how the Russian economy has reacted to these sanctions. What can be seen is that all foreign service activities collapsed, especially all Russian international banks. ‎

But production activities in Russia, on the contrary, developed! ‎

In other words, yesterday the Moscow Stock Exchange did not collapse. On the contrary! It was up by 4.5% [1]. That is no small thing!

The United States will not be satisfied with excluding Russia from international organizations. What it wants is to delete her from our minds! ‎

Notice. They expelled all the oligarchs who were staying on the French Riviera. What relationship did they have with Vladimir Putin, who hates them all? None! But they don’t want any Russian patrons on the beaches in the south of France. That’s all!‎

I am not defending those people. They don’t interest me in the least. But they are unconnected with what is happening. What they are doing to them is illegitimate. ‎

And it will not stop there. Then will come the suppression of all references to Russian culture in the West. Note that they are already banning Russian orchestra conductors … who had no ties whatsoever with the government! And might even be against what Vladimir Putin is doing! But that does not matter! And they are prevented from giving concerts. ‎

Leading universities in the United States have recently prohibited the study of Solzhenitsyn, [Russian writer] who was hailed as a hero against the Soviet Union. The same applies to the work of Dostoevsky, a writer of the Tsarist era! ‎

An exclusively Western, new world order is being established. Above all, don’t be taken in! ‎

We have to remain human beings. We have to remain friends with the Russians and the Chinese. ‎

Don’t think that the Chinese are going to stand for it. They know very well that this begins with Russia now but that they will be next. ‎

Yesterday, at NATO, the request was made for Russia to be excluded from the WTO, the International Trade Organization. But already two days earlier, China had put its foot down, saying that nothing could legitimize such a measure. ‎

The Chinese know that they themselves will be the target of Western imperialism after the Russians. History has already taught them the lesson and they will not allow that to happen again. ‎

So keep all the friends that you may have in Russia and China. ‎

See you soon. ‎

Diabolic methods of propaganda and perception management are at work now that have no precedent. This is war waged in a new way — against domestic populations as well as those declared as enemies.

The news reports come in daily from Moscow, Kiev and the Western capitals: how many dead since Russia began its intervention in Ukraine on Feb. 24, how many injured, how many hungry or cold, how many displaced. We do not know the true count of casualties and the extent of the suffering and ought not pretend we do: This is the reality of war, each side having its version of unfolding events.

My inclination is to add the deaths in Ukraine these past two weeks to the 14,000 dead and the 1.5 million displaced since 2014, when the regime in Kiev began shelling its own citizens in the eastern provinces — this because the people of Donetsk and Lugansk rejected the U.S.­–cultivated coup that deposed their elected president. This simple math gives us a better idea of how many Ukrainians are worthy of our mourning.

As we mourn, it is time to consider the wider consequences of this conflict, for Ukrainians are not alone among its victims. Who else has suffered? What else has been damaged? This war is of a kind humanity has never before known. What are its costs?

Among paying-attention people it is increasingly plain that Washington’s intent in provoking Moscow’s intervention is, and probably has been from the first, to instigate a long-running conflict that bogs down Russian forces and leaves Ukrainians to wage an insurgency that cannot possibly succeed.

Is there another way to explain the many billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and matériel the U.S. and its European allies now pour into Ukraine? If the Ukrainians cannot win — a universally acknowledged reality — what is the purpose here?

Whether this strategy goes as Washington wants, or if Russian forces get their work done and withdraw to avoid a classic quagmire, remains to be seen. But as Dave DeCamp noted in Antiwar.comlast Friday, there is no sign whatsoever that the Biden administration plans any further diplomatic contacts with the Kremlin.

The implication here should be evident. The U.S. strategy effectively requires the destruction of Ukraine in the service of America’s imperial ambitions. If this thought seems extreme, brief reference to the fates of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria will provide all the compelling context one may need.

Brzezinski’s Plan in 1979

Jan. 1, 1987: Mujahideen in Kunar, Afghanistan. (erwinlux, Flickr, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

To an extent I find surprising given it calamitous consequences, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s plan in 1979 to arm the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets remains the more or less unaltered template.

President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser saw nothing wrong with getting into bed with what became Al–Qaeda. Now it is the Nazis militias that infest Ukraine’s National Guard that the U.S. arms and trains.

If the record is anything to go by, this conflict could well destroy what remains of Ukraine as a nation. In the worst outcome, little will remain of its social fabric, its public spaces, its roads, bridges, schools, municipal institutions. This destruction has already begun.

Here is what I do not want Americans to miss: We are destroying ourselves and what hope we may have to restore ourselves to decency as we watch the regime governing us destroy another nation in our name. This destruction, too, has already begun.

Many people of many different ages have remarked in recent days that they cannot recall in their lifetimes a more pervasive, suffocating barrage of propaganda than what has engulfed us since the months that preceded Russia’s intervention. In my case it has come to supersede the worst of what I remember from the Cold War decades.

You asked for a robust anti-war movement in America, you got demonstrations calling for World War 3. https://t.co/Gjk3TuUcen

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) March 7, 2022

In January 2021, NATO published the final draft of a lengthy study it called Cognitive Warfare. Its intent is to explore the potential for manipulating minds—those of others, our own—beyond anything heretofore even attempted. “The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century,” the document asserts. “Humans are the contested domain. Cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon.”

In a subsection headed “The vulnerabilities of the human brain,” the report has this to say:

“In particular, the brain:

• is unable to distinct [sic] whether information is right or wrong:
• is led to believe statements or messages it has already heard as true, even though these may be false;
• accepts statements as true, if backed by evidence, with no regards to [sic] the authenticity of that evidence.“

And this, which I find especially fiendish:

“At the political and strategic level, it would be wrong to underestimate the impact of emotions…. Emotions—hope, fear, humiliation—shape the world and international relations with the echo-chamber effect of social media.“

No, we’re not in Kansas anymore. Cognitive Warfare is a window onto diabolic methods of propaganda and perception management that have no precedent. This is war waged in a new way — against domestic populations as well as those declared as enemies.

And we have just had a taste of what it will be like as these techniques, well-grounded in cutting-edge science, are elaborated. Yet more disturbing to me than the cold prose of the report is the astonishing extent to which it proves out. Cognitive warfare, whether or not the NATO report is now the propagandists’ handbook, works, and it is working now on most Americans.

(NATO)

This is what I mean when I say we, too, are the victims of this war.

Last week the conductor of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, Valery Gergiev, was sacked for refusing to condemn Vladimir Putin. The same thing then happened to Anna Netrebko. The Metropolitan Opera in New York fired its star soprano for the same reason: She preferred to say nothing about the Russian president.

There is no bottom to this. Last Friday Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Senator, openly called for Putin’s assassination. Michael McFaul, briefly Barack Obama’s ambassador to Russia and the king of nitwittery, asserts that all Russians who don’t openly protest Russia’s intervention in Ukraine are to be punished for it. In the idiotic file, the International Federation of Felines has barred imports of Russian cats.

Here is the entry on this list of preposterous assertions that got me out of my chair in a rage last Thursday: The International Paralympic Committee banned Russian and Belarusian athletes—why the Belarusians, for heaven’s sake?—from the winter Paralympics that commenced the following day in Beijing. We’re now down to persecuting people whose hearts and souls are abler than their limbs?

The committee made it plain it acted in response to international pressure. I wonder whose that might be.

What Has Become of Us

U.S. military assistance arriving in Ukraine, Feb, 10. (U.S. Embassy Kyiv Ukraine)

Look at what has become of us. Most Americans seem to approve of these things, or at least are unstirred to object. We have lost all sense of decency, of ordinary morality, of proportion. Can anyone listen to the din of the past couple of weeks without wondering if we have made of ourselves a nation of grotesques?

It is common to observe that in war the enemy is always dehumanized. We are now face to face with another reality: Those who dehumanize others dehumanize themselves more profoundly.

“Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the affective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason’s having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish fantasies. That is to say, a sort of collective possession results which rapidly develops into a psychic epidemic.”

That is a snippet from a book by C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self, that a friend just sent. When our feelings get the better of us, we can no longer think or talk usefully to one another: This is the Swiss psychoanalyst’s point in simple terms.

The other day PBS Newshour ran an interview with one Artem Semenikhin, in which the small-town mayor was lionized for standing up to Russian soldiers. In the background, as the ever-alert Alan MacLeod points out, was a portrait of Stepan Bandera, the savage Russophobe, anti–Semite, and leader of Ukrainian Nazis.

PBS Newshour interviews the Mayor of Konotop, Artem Semenikhin, presenting him as a hero for killing Russian invaders.
However, despite his Zoom blur effect, you can clearly still see that behind him is a portrait of Nazi leader and Holocaust perpetrator Stepan Bandera.
pic.twitter.com/KNwCuFeCkO
— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) March 4, 2022

What did PBS do about this careless oversight? It blurred the Bandera portrait and broadcast the interview with its Ukrainian hero. American journalism at its zenith.

It strikes me as the perfect metaphor for what has happened to our reasoning faculties — or, better put, what we have allowed to be done to them. Factual realities that lie beyond dispute, if inconvenient, are blurred out of the movie we think we’re watching.

It is the same with any genuine understanding of the Russian intervention. I have four words for what we need to read this crisis: history, chronology, context, and responsibility. Since none of these serves our cognitive warriors’ purpose, we are invited to blot them out. And once again: With dreadful fidelity to those actively manipulating our perceptions, we do so.

Context, the worst of us assert, is some idea those awful Russians came up with. We take no interest whatsoever in how the world may look from anyone else’s perspective. Who in hell, please tell me, thinks this is a good way to live?

I have rendered a pencil-sketch of a nation falling apart as it takes another one apart. A nation this far into one of Jung’s “collective possessions” cannot possibly do well. As is always the case (a thought that came to me as I studied the Japanese nationalists of the 1930s), the victimizers are victims, too.

If we are to find our way out of this funhouse, we will have to do one thing before any other: We will have to learn to speak in a clear, new language so that we can name things as they are instead of blurring them as PBS did that Bandera portrait.

And we must start with one word. Unless we can learn to call America an empire, we will stumble in the funhouse dark until it becomes so unfun we can no longer bear our own self-deceptions.

I see in here a virtue in this large, complicated moment. Between Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, which I count regrettable but necessary, and the joint statement Putin made with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Feb. 4, we are all called upon either to recognize the United States for what it has become, an empire violently defending itself against history itself, or accept our fate among the victims of this empire.

Clarity: It is always a fine thing, whatever the difficulties it brings.

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.

Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine has been reported by the Western establishment and its mainstream media (MSM) as an unprovoked act of naked aggression. Writing in The New York Times the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said:

Never in my life have I seen an international crisis where the dividing line between right and wrong has been so stark.

This story has been presented to us in order to maintain our trust in the institutions of our government. The Russian people have been given a different story, but for the same reason.

As discussed in Part 1, what we are told about the social, political and ethnic tensions in Ukraine by the Western hegemony isn’t accurate. This article will explore the wider geopolitical context within which Russia’s military action military action can be at least understood, even if we regard then as illegitimate.

Some of the terms used in this article, such as “Euromaidan coup,” directly contradict the Western MSM narrative. Please read Part 1 to familiarise yourself with some of the historical background and the named individuals and organisations.

Only Fools Rush In

In the West, the public is expected to accept the given narrativ without question. Anyone who challenges it is accused of being a Putin apologist or a far-right conspiracy theorist. Most Brits appear to have gone along with Johnson’s proffered fairy tale. This is unfortunate, because the reality is far more complex than he would have us believe.

To see celebrities and social media influencers uniformly demonstrating their compassion for the Ukrainian people is touching. But when reports of these virtue-signalling displays are used as propaganda to convince the public that they, too, should jump on the West-approved bandwagon, swaths of the population are at risk of forming a potentially dangerous opinion based upon nothing but pretension.

Currently the UK government, with celebrity assistance, is encouraging us to welcome Ukrainian refugees with open arms via its Homes For Ukraine scheme. The government has said that the Ukrainian applicants “will be vetted and will undergo security checks.”

Most of the people applying for refugee status will be in desperate need, and we certainly should do everything we can to assist them. However, there is also good reason for very careful vetting and security checks.

Stephen Fry has “open arms”

Ukraine does have a Nazi problem, and it is the Nazis who have most to fear from the Russian forces. In 2013, five days after his arrival in the UK, Ukrainian Nazi Pavlo Lapshyn murdered by an 82-year-old man before embarking upon a bombing campaign of British mosques. It was only thanks to sheer luck that he didn’t murder many more British people.

Lapshyn is only one man out of approximately 44 million people living in Ukraine. Unfortunately, he is also one among hundreds of thousands who share his extremist views. Then there’s the small minority of Ukrainians—which can nonetheless be measured in the millions—who have a degree of sympathy with those views.

For reasons we will discuss in Part 4, the UK government’s commitment to security checks is highly questionable. We are being asked to trust the UK government, but doing so is unwise, given its record. Of course we should act compassionately and help suffering people, but only fools rush in.

For those who believe the propaganda of the Western establishment, Russian president Vladimir Putin is a comic book villain whose evil intentions will stop at nothing short of creating a new Russian empire. The West’s propagandists depict Ukraine as the victim of Putin’s allegedly insane bloodlust and portray Russian military actions as unjustified and unlawful.

Swallowing their story leads us to believe that the US-led NATO alliance and the Kyiv government are the defenders of democracy. Russian actions, perceived as an attack on Ukrainian democracy, are therefore an assault upon the principle of democracy. This view is essentially the single version of the truth being peddled in the West.

The alternative view of Putin as some sort of bogatyr (heroic warrior) is equally callow. It wrongly assumes that Putin embodies Russia, thus ignoring a nation of 146 million people and the globalist forces that maintain Putin’s power for their benefit.

Initially, currently, and most acutely, it is the people in Ukraine who suffer as a result of this conflict. Ultimately however, we all will.

NATO Expansionism

When the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, listed Russia’s claimed reasons for the invasion of Ukraine, he stressed NATO expansionism. Russia has repeatedly warned that Ukrainian membership in NATO, which would almost certainly see US troops and offensive weapons deployed on Russia’s southwestern border, was a redline that Russia would not allow NATO to cross. Putin said:

I spoke about our biggest concerns and worries, and about the fundamental threats which irresponsible Western politicians created for Russia consistently, rudely and unceremoniously from year to year. I am referring to the eastward expansion of NATO, which is moving its military infrastructure ever closer to the Russian border. [. . .] [T]he North Atlantic alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns. Its military machine is moving and, as I said, is approaching our very border.

Russia has warned repeatedly that it would “react” if Ukraine joined NATO. As yet, Ukraine has not done so. Russia’s attack is preemptive, and, despite Putin’s claimed “compassion” for the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DPR & LPR), Russia’s primary concern is for its own security and that of its ruling class. Even prior to Russian recognition, the DPR and LPR were de jure Russian satellite states and pawns in a greater game seemingly played out between Russia and NATO.

Equally, there has been a genuine humanitarian crisis in the DPR and LPR for eight years. Russia’s military operation has come as a relief to the people of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. Regrettably, Russia has also escalated the conflict beyond Donbas borders, killing more innocent people.

In February 1990, during the “perestroika” reformation of the USSR, then-US Secretary of State James Baker met with the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. He famously gave Russia assurances that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.” At the time, that meant no eastward expansion—except for by Turkey—in mainland Europe beyond Germany’s border.

Baker’s words weren’t the only reassurances the Russians received. In 1990, then-West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher gave a keynote speech with regard to German reunification, during which he said:

[T]he changes in Eastern Europe and the German unification process must not lead to an ‘impairment of Soviet security interests.’ Therefore, NATO should rule out an ‘expansion of its territory towards the east, i.e. moving it closer to the Soviet borders.’

Prior to signing the Two-Plus-Four Treaty reunifying Germany, the Russians sought and were given explicit commitments regarding NATO expansionism. In the rounds of diplomacy leading up to the agreement, Russia was offered assurances by political leaders from the US, France, the UK, Germany and other NATO aligned states. Russia agreed to German reunification only after German Chancellor Helmut Kohl convinced Gorbachev that NATO would not expand toward Russian borders.

This was an opportunity for the US, Europe and Russia to capitalise on the new, relatively open and transparent (glasnost) USSR as it transitioned to become the Russian Federation. In retrospect, it is now clear that the US-led NATO alliance took a triumphalist view. It embraced its own unipolar world order as the bipolar Cold War order evaporated.

From 1991 onwards NATO completely ignored both the assurances it had given and Russia’s security concerns. It systematically rolled eastward, and by 2005 Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria had become members of NATO.

In 2007, in response to NATO’s obvious expansionism, Vladimir Putin delivered a cutting speech at the Munich Security Conference:

[W]hat is a unipolar world? However one might embellish this term, at the end of the day it refers to one type of situation, namely one centre of authority, one centre of force, one centre of decision-making. It is world in which there is one master, one sovereign. [. . .] And this certainly has nothing in common with democracy. [. . .] I consider that the unipolar model is not only unacceptable but also impossible in today’s world. [. . .] [T]he model itself is flawed because at its basis there is and can be no moral foundations for modern civilisation. [. . .] We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. [. . .] [F]irst and foremost the United States has overstepped its national borders in every way. [. . .] [O]f course this is extremely dangerous. It results in the fact that no one feels safe. I want to emphasise this – no one feels safe! [. . .] I understood that the use of force can only be legitimate when the decision is taken by NATO, the EU, or the UN. [. . .] [W]e have different points of view. [. . .] The use of force can only be considered legitimate if the decision is sanctioned by the UN. And we do not need to substitute NATO or the EU for the UN. [. . .] I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. [. . .] [W]e have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? [. . .] I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: “the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee”. Where are these guarantees?

In response, the NATO Council, as if to validate everything Putin said, issued a statement at the 2008 NATO Bucharest Summit. Clause 23 of the statement read:

NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.

In the decade-long lead-up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, NATO had been pushing for Ukrainian membership. Indeed, in 2018 NATO added Ukraine to its list of so-called aspiring nations. In 2019, then-President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko signed a constitutional amendment committing Ukraine to membership in both the EU and NATO. This was swiftly followed in 2020 with the decision by NATO and Ukraine to enhance their partnership.

The current invasion of Ukraine by Russia has been presented by Western governments to their respective electorates in disingenuous and puerile terms. The West’s narrative was encapsulated by Johnson in his New York Times piece:

This is not a NATO conflict, and it will not become one. [. . .] The truth is that Ukraine had no serious prospect of NATO membership in the near future. [. . .] I and many other Western leaders have spoken to Mr. Putin to understand his perspective. [. . .] It is now clear diplomacy never had a chance. [. . .] Mr. Putin is attempting the destruction of the very foundation of international relations and the United Nations Charter: the right of nations to decide their own future, free from aggression and fear of invasion.

Contrary to Johnson’s deception, NATO and its member states have not only enticed, cajoled and encouraged Ukraine’s “aspirations” to join, they have taken firm steps to make it a reality. They did so in the certain knowledge that Russia could never countenance the move. This fact in no way excuses Russia’s actions, but it goes some way in explaining them.

From an official military perspective, NATO has seemingly abandoned Ukraine to its fate. We will discuss in Part 4 why what NATO is doing is not quite as it seems.

Thus far, NATO has ruled out any attempt to establish a no-fly zone (NFZ). As pointed out by 80 foreign policy experts who have written to advise the Biden administration, any attempt to impose an NFZ would necessitate NATO or US forces shooting down Russian military planes. This would almost certainly trigger a global war.

It is mind-blowing that this letter was written in response to a similar endeavour from 27 foreign policy experts who advocated the physically impossible concept of a “limited” NFZ. Judging the risk to be worth it, they suggested the West should call Russia’s bluff. This pro- NFZ lobby has close financial ties to the military-industrial complex. What these lunatics imagine they will spend their money on in the smouldering rubble of a post-nuclear holocaust is difficult to say.

Johnson’s point that the Ukraine has the right to determine its own future with regard to NATO membership is childish—and, from an international law perspective, wrong. Nation-states are not free to do whatever they like if their actions threaten the security of neighbouring states.

Article 2.3 of the United Nation’s Charter states:

All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.

With NATO membership distinctly possible, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, speaking at the 2022 Munich Security Conference just before the Russian invasion, said:

Ukraine has received security guarantees for abandoning the world’s third nuclear capability. We don’t have that weapon. We also have no security. [. . .] Therefore, we have something. The right to demand a shift from a policy of appeasement to ensuring security and peace guarantees. Since 2014, Ukraine has tried three times to convene consultations with the guarantor states of the Budapest Memorandum. [. . .] I am initiating consultations in the framework of the Budapest Memorandum. [. . .] If they do not happen again or their results do not guarantee security for our country, Ukraine will have every right to believe that the Budapest Memorandum is not working and all the package decisions of 1994 are in doubt.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy

The 1994 Budapest Memorandum was a security assurance given to the Ukraine (and others) by the existing nuclear powers, including the Russian Federation, that their integrity and sovereignty would not be threatened in exchange for them giving up their nuclear arsenals. In Ukraine’s case, theirs was potentially the third largest in the world as they were left with more than 2000 strategic nuclear warheads after the dissolution of the USSR.

Zelenskyy was claiming that Russia had already breached the Budapest Memorandum when it “annexed” Crimea and supported the separatists in the Donbas. Therefore, he was threatening Russia, not only with a nuclear armed Ukraine, but a nuclear armed NATO power on its border.

Regardless of the intricacies of the Budapest deal, this was a clear threat to Russian security and an obvious provocation. One has to ask why Zelenskyy thought this wise.

Ukraine and Russia had been in international dispute for at least eight years but realistically for more than thirty. From both the Russian and the Ukrainian side, the manner of that dispute had consistently endangered international peace and security. Zelesnkyy’s threat appeared to take that risk to a new level.

In addition, NATO member states have been in dispute with Russia since 1991. Their total disregard for Russia’s security concerns also endangered international peace. Moreover, NATO expansionism was not in keeping with the principles of the UN Charter.

The Secretary-General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, has unequivocally condemned the Russian invasion. This appears to be a reflection of the UN’s partisan bias toward the US-led NATO military alliance and the EU rather than any genuine attempt to faithfully interpret the UN Charter. Guterres said:

The use of force by one country against another is the repudiation of the principles that every country has committed to uphold. This applies to the present military offensive. It is wrong. It is against the Charter. It is unacceptable.

Yet when the US decided it had the right to launch preemptive wars in the “war on terror,” the UN did not condemn that claim of right. For example, when the US-led coalition launched a “preemptive” invasion of Iraq in March 2003, in contravention of the UN Charter, the UN said little and did nothing.

In 2004, then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan acknowledged that the invasion and subsequent war in Iraq was illegal. Yet the UN has consistently ignored Article 39 of the UN Charter that would allow it to rule on the legality of the Iraq war. No one has ever imposed sanctions on the US or its allies for the war crimes they have committed.

Who Cares About International Law?

Lex iniusta non est lex is a fundamental principle of law. Translation: unjust law is not law. If we are going to suffer the violence of governments, then the concept of international law is certainly welcome. Unfortunately, that’s all it is: a concept.

The UN’s formal and public condemnation of preemptive wars is reserved for the actions of some nations but not others. Consequently, international law, partly encapsulated by the UN Charter, is practically meaningless.

Because it is applied neither equally nor reasonably, it has become little more than a big stick, currently in the hands the Western-led international rules-based order, used to beat opponents. This is what happens when juries are excluded from alleged justice. There is no “law.”

Prior to the Secretary-General’s statement, the globalist foreign policy think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, had already ruled that Russia’s military action in Ukraine violates international law. The CFR pointed out that the action contravenes Article 2.4 of the United Nations Charter, which states:

All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

Russia has certainly breached Article 2.4. Its war in Ukraine is therefore “illegal.”

However, Article 1.1 of the UN Charter also places an onus on the UN “to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace.” Persistent NATO expansionism and the threat of a NATO nuclear power on Russia’s border are breaches of the peace and a direct threat, from a Russian perspective. The UN has done nothing either to prevent or remove this threat.

US President Joseph Biden, upon announcing sanctions in response to Russia’s military action, said:

Who in the Lord’s name does Putin think gives him the right to declare new so-called countries on territory that belonged to his neighbours? This is a flagrant violation of international law, and it demands a firm response from the international community.

But Russia did not “declare” DPR and LPR territorial legitimacy. Biden was deceiving his international audience.

In his speech on the 21st February, Putin said that the Russian Federation had decided to “immediately recognize the independence and sovereignty of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic.” Under international law, recognition is distinct from declaration.

Vladimir Putin

There are two schools of legal thought on statehood. The “constitutive” approach suggests that a state can only be a state if it is recognised as such by other sovereign nations. In that case, with Russian recognition, the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR) are now “legal” states.

However, the “declaratory” notion of a state usually takes precedence in international law. It defines a state as any autonomous territory that meets the criteria necessary for the formation of said state.

As defined by the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of a State, a sovereign state must have a population, a defined territory and a government able to engage in dialogue with other states. This makes the state a “sole person” in international law, and its existence is independent of recognition by other states. Such a state has the right to defend itself, irrespective of recognition.

On 7th April 2014 the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) declared itself a state. Its territory, within the Donetsk Oblast, extends for just under 9,000 square kilometres. Its capital is Donetsk. At the time, its population was approximately 2.4 million. The Donetsk People’s Militia is the military force that defends it. In 2018 the people of the DPR elected Denis Pushilin as the DPR’s head of state and 100 delegates were elected to form a government in the People’s Council in Donetsk.

Similarly, the Luhansk (or Lugansk) People’s Republic (LPR) consists of 17 administrative regions and encompasses just under 8,400 square kilometres inside the Luhansk Oblast. Its capital is Luhansk (Lugansk), and in 2014 the population was approximately 1.6 million. Leonid Pasechnik is the head of state, and 50 delegates form the government of the People’s Council in Luhansk.

Following the LPR independence referendum, held on 11th May 2014, Pasechik and the People’s Council were subsequently elected to form a government in November 2018. The Luhansk Peoples Militia defends the LPR.

Today approximately 1 million people have fled the region to escape the war. As a result, the combined population of both oblasts is probably closer to 5 million, down from 6.2 million. The populations of the DPR and LPR combined represent a percentage of the total population of the Donbas.

Recognition of a nation-state is ostensibly a political act that clarifies the official view of the nation-state (or nation-states) that are conferring that recognition. In this case, Russia was stating to the international community that it supported the right to independence of the DPR and LPR. Both new states have met the criteria for recognition under international law. Of course, the decision to not recognise them is equally a political act.

In 1992, the United States and the European Community “recognised” the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina without declaring Bosnia-Herzegovina an independent state. What followed was US—and later NATO—bombing as well as the training, arming and equipping of Islamist extremists—all part of a concerted effort to balkanise the entire European region previously called Yugoslavia.

Similarly, Russia acknowledges the independence of the new unitary republics of DPR and LPR but has not declared them independent states. Following recognition of their status, Russia launched a military attack on Ukraine. Truth be told, neither the Russian nor the US/NATO actions show any particular respect for international law.

Biden’s words were nothing more than propaganda. His legal interpretation was, at best, incomplete. So was Putin’s when he claimed that Russian military action was in keeping with Article 51 of the UN Charter, which states:

Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.

An armed attack had not been launched against Russia, and the DPR and LPR are not members of the United Nations. Putin’s citation of Article 51 doesn’t legitimise Russian military actions under international law. So what?

Claims and counterclaims concerning international law are merely attempts by global military powers to gain public support for their wars. Combined with propaganda and censorship, these claims convince some of the people some of the time.

The supposedly binding bilateral agreements between nation-states, the UN Charter, and the decisions of international courts and treaties form so-called international law. Unless this alleged “law” is applied equally and fairly, it is not law.

Nation-states like the US, UK, EU member states and Russia use international law merely as weapon of convenience to justify the killing and maiming of human beings or to berate other states when carnage doesn’t suit their objectives. This is the reality of nominal “international law.” It is no law at all.

Exactly the same can be said for the “morality” on display from most of those who now pontificate about welcoming Ukrainian refugees “with open arms.” This appears to be due either to ignorance or acceptance of the unconscionable concept of moral relativism.

While they proudly signal their moral virtue in regard to Ukraine they have said nothing about the horror that continues to unfold in Yemen, which is wholeheartedly backed by the US-led western alliance they continue to support. Just as law applied unfairly is no law at all, so morality that chooses a cause, while ignoring suffering elsewhere, has no value at all.

Gas, Gas, Gas

When Barack Obama became the 44th US President in 2009, Russia had been using its economic influence as the world’s largest crude oil and second largest dry gas producer to push back against NATO expansionism. Ukraine was the main transit hub for Russian gas pipelines to Europe, but it was politically unstable.

The political divisions in Ukraine, broadly pro-EU and anti-Russian on one side and pro-Russian and anti-EU on the other, became the focus of a tug of war for European influence between the US and Russia. The Obama administration wanted to maintain the transatlantic alliance, affording U.S. dominance and NATO cohesion in Europe, while Putin’s clique aimed to enhance Russian control of the European energy market to strengthen Russian security and weaken NATO.

For its part, the EU hierarchy was eager to establish its bloc as an independent military superpower. The 2007 Treaty of Lisbon came into force in December 2009, effectively creating the European Union and its Common Security and Defence Policy. The EU were then able pursue military defence union, potentially undermining US control and bolstering the EU’s hold on NATO.

Russia openly declared its support for Yanukovich in the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election. Its access to the Ukrainian pipelines and retention of its Sevastopol naval base were crucial to its—and, to a large extent, the EU’s—interests. In exchange for below- market, subsidised Russian gas, the Yanukovich government extended Russia’s Sevastopol lease until 2042, resulting in physical fights breaking out in the Verkhovna Rada.

In 2011, Russia and Germany opened the first Nord Stream gas pipeline, which runs under the Baltic Sea and supplies Russian gas to Germany. Nord Stream 1 runs from Vyborg to Greifswald. The proposed Nord Stream 2 will run from Ust-Luga. The purpose of Nord Stream pipelines was to enable Russia to sell much cheaper gas to the EU, via Germany, while eliminating both the EU’s and Russia’s 80% reliance upon the precarious Ukrainian pipelines. For obvious reasons, this aim had wide support among other EU member states.

The Nord Stream pipelines were not in the interest of the US, however. Consequently, its foreign policy objectives were to stop Nord Stream 2 (which would double the pipelines’ gas flow to Europe from Russia) and install a Ukrainian government amenable to Washington’s demands.

If the US could break the EU’s blossoming trade relationship with Russia, it would not only secure US dominance over Europe, both in economic and collective defence terms, but would also open up the EU market to the US’ pricier Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) exports—an added bonus.

Initially, the US feted the Yanukovich government in hopes of convincing Ukraine to join NATO and the EU. Then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was dispatched to Kyiv, where she held discussions with Yanukovich. Among her comments:

We discussed ways that Ukraine and the United States can deepen and expand our strategic partnership. [. . .] [We hope] Ukraine will pursue close, constructive relationships with the United States and countries of the European Union. [. . .] We discussed energy reform and its potential to transform Ukraine into an energy producer and becoming more energy efficient. [. . .] We also discussed the importance of protecting Ukraine’s democracy. [. . .] [W]e thank Ukraine and the Ukrainian people for your important contributions to NATO and other international security operations.

The diplomacy failed. Despite fluffy rhetoric about “protecting Ukraine’s democracy,” the US turned to distinctly undemocratic methods when it decided to back a Ukrainian coup. In order to achieve this goal, the US empowered the darkest forces in Ukrainian politics: the neo-Nazis.

Something we will explore in Part 3: Ukraine War! What is It Good For? The Ukrainian Nazi Agenda

Please Note: The PDF (Book) will be available following publication of Part 4

This website is merely a daily diary of announced NATO activities. Visit the site and scroll down to appreciate the amazing number of war preparations every day, year after year.

Russia’s goal is not to destroy Ukraine—this could be accomplished at any time. Rather, the goal of Russia is to destroy NATO by exposing its impotence, writes Scott Ritter.

High-water monument at Gettysburg National Military Park. (Veggies /Wikimedia Commons)

By Scott Ritter
Special to Consortium News

In the quiet fields outside the sleepy college town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, sits a bronze monument, in the form of an open book. Known as the “High-Water Mark of the Rebellion” monument, it contains the identities of the various military formations that, in the afternoon of July 3, 1863, fought a life and death struggle on and around the soil where the monument is set.

Here, some 12,500 men under the command of Confederate Lieutenant General James Longstreet, formed into three divisions, and launched a frontal assault on some 10,000 entrenched Union troops commanded by Major General Winfield Scott Hancock.

While around 1,500 confederates managed to pierce the Union line, they were quickly surrounded and compelled to either surrender or die. It is at this point on the battlefield that the “High-Water” monument is located, commemorating what has become to be known as “Pickett’s Charge,” named after one of the division commanders who participated in the battle.

The Confederate Army was able to withdraw from the Gettysburg battlefield in good order to continue to fight for nearly two more years, before surrendering. But it never recovered from the disaster that was Pickett’s Charge. It was truly the High-Water Mark of the Rebellion.

A Messy History

Students of history might be experiencing what Yogi Berra once famously called “Déjà vu all over again” when examining the frenetic activities undertaken by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) today, as it responds to what it alleges is a provocative Russian military buildup along the Russian-Ukrainian border.

The Trans-Atlantic alliance is a strange amalgam of political, economic, and military belief systems cloaking a mass of 30 nations who manage the day-to-day activities of their organization through a consensus-based, collective decision-making process that is as unwieldy as it is inefficient.

Originally formed as a collective of 12 nations united by the desire, as the first secretary-general of NATO, Lord Ismay, once quipped, “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”, the Trans-Atlantic alliance was, first and foremost, a club comprised of nations which had two things in common—a shared belief in the primacy of democratic governance, and a desire to be protected under the umbrella of American military power.

Signing of Washington Treaty that established NATO, April 1949. (NATO)

Early on the alliance witnessed a period of expansion, as it grew to 16 nations following the admittance of Turkey, Greece, Spain, and Portugal. These 16 nations served as the foundation of NATO throughout the Cold War, united in their determination to stand up to any potential Soviet aggression targeting the territory of western Europe.

NATO was always, from a political standpoint, a mess. Strong pro-communist movements in France and Italy led to the unseemly situation where the intelligence services of an allied nation, the United States, were engaged in manipulating the domestic political affairs of two ostensible allies to keep the communists out of power.

West Germany carried out its own unilateral Ostpolitik, seeking better relations with Soviet-occupied East Germany, much to the consternation of the United States. France, offended by what it (rightly) believed to be the dominance of the United States in the military command structure of the alliance, withdrew its military from NATO command authority. And Turkey and Greece were engaged in their own regional Cold War which, in 1974, went hot over the island of Cyprus.

The glue that held the alliance together was the collective defense provisions of Article 5 of the NATO Charter, which provides that if a NATO Ally is the victim of an armed attack, each and every other member of the Alliance will consider this act of violence as an armed attack against all members and will take the actions it deems necessary to assist the Ally attacked.

For much of the Cold War, the NATO alliance was configured militarily so that there was little doubt as to what actions would be taken, with a standing NATO army deployed in West Germany in constant combat readiness, prepared to repel any attack by the Soviet Army and its Warsaw Pact allies. Likewise, NATO maintained significant air and naval forces deployed in the Mediterranean Sea ready to confront any Soviet aggression there. These forces were anchored by a massive standing U.S. military presence comprising hundreds of thousands of troops, tens of thousands of armored vehicles, thousands of combat aircraft, and hundreds of naval vessels.

This full-time presence of concentrated combat-ready military power, prepared as it was to fight at the drop of a hat, gave the Article 5 obligation far more gravitas than it perhaps deserved. The reality of Article 5 is such that, upon its invocation, Allies can provide any form of assistance they deem necessary to respond to a situation based upon the circumstances.

While this assistance is taken forward in concert with other Allies, it is not necessarily military in nature and depends on the material resources of each country. In short, Article 5 leaves to the judgement of each individual member country to determine how and what it would contribute in the case of its invocation.

With the end of the Cold War in 1990-91 came the dismantlement of this full-time combat-ready military force. The unified nature of the NATO military component that existed in the 1980’s ceased to exist barely ten years later, with each member state carrying out its own demobilization and restructuring based upon domestic political requirements, and not the requirements of the alliance.

NATO Goes on Offense

The former military headquarters in Belgrade, bombed intensively by Nato 10 years ago. (Dennis Jarvis/Wikimedia)

During this time NATO also watched its long-held mantra of being a purely defensive alliance fall to the side as it engaged in offensive military operations on the soil of the former Republic of Yugoslavia, and non-member, and a offensive bombing campaign against Serbia, despite Serbia not having attacked any NATO member.

This deconstruction of NATO’s military capabilities and status as an exclusively defensive organization took place hand in glove with a decision by NATO to expand its membership to include the former members of the Warsaw Pact, beginning with the accession of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999. The enlargement of NATO was seen as achieving two objectives—from the NATO perspective, it brought most of Europe together into a single collective of allied parties who, because of their membership, would contribute to the overall stability of Europe.

But there was another perspective at play, that being that of the U.S.. While NATO responded to the U.S. invoking of Article 5 after the 9/11 attacks, providing airborne surveillance aircraft for North American patrols and naval forces in the Mediterranean Sea, several core members, led by Germany and France, balked at becoming involved in the post-9/11 military misadventures of the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This prompted then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to make a quip denigrating “Old Europe” at the expense of “New Europe.” The continued expansion of NATO eastwards, absorbing all of the former nations of the Warsaw Pact along with three former Soviet Republics in the Baltics not only pushed NATO’s geopolitical center of gravity further east, but also put NATO on a collision course with Russia, whose opinion most NATO members had conditioned themselves to ignore.

NATO went on to provide military and police training support to Iraq in 2004, following that nation’s defeat at the hands of a military coalition which included the U.S., U.K., and Poland providing combat troops, and Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands providing political support.

Likewise, NATO contributed significant military forces to reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. These troops operated under Article 4 authorities after the U.S. brought the Afghan situation post-9/11 to the attention of the general membership, which voted to authorize member states to deploy to Afghanistan in support of U.S. reconstruction and nation-building operations.

In 2011, NATO engaged in offensive military operations in Libya, part of a larger political campaign to remove the Libyan leader, Muammar Qaddafi, from power.

A US Adjunct

(Creative Commons/Wikipedia)

By 2008 NATO had become a bloated edifice largely unrecognizable from the organization that had been created at its founding, in 1949. Its appetite for expansion knew no bounds, with membership offers being dangled before two former Soviet Republics, Georgia and Ukraine, and military engagements being initiated in North Africa and the Persian Gulf.

While the bloated organizational structure of NATO looked impressive on paper, there were two realities that no amount of puffing and posturing could obviate. First and foremost was the absolute dearth of real military power on the part of the non-U.S. NATO components. To support and sustain their respective military commitments to Afghanistan, the major NATO nations involved—Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy—were forced to cannibalize their overall military capability to surge their respective military components forward. Even then, none of these nations could accomplish their Afghan mission without the logistical support provided by the United States.

This over-reliance upon U.S. military capacity only underscored the inconvenient reality that NATO had become little more than an adjunct of U.S. foreign and national security policy. The U.S. had always played an oversized role in NATO. If this was singularly focused on preserving European security, the non-U.S. members of NATO could deceive themselves into believing that they were co-equal partners in a defensive-oriented Trans-Atlantic arrangement.

Once NATO began expanding, both in terms of membership composition and scope and scale of its non-European military commitments, it was obvious to any observer exercising a modicum of intellectual curiosity that NATO existed for the sole benefit of the United States.

Nothing drove this point home more than the humiliation NATO suffered at the hands of the U.S. when it came to the abandonment of the Afghan reconstruction mission. The decision to withdraw from Afghanistan was made unilaterally by the United States, without consultation. NATO, faced with a fait accompli, had no choice but to do as ordered, and leave Afghanistan with its tail between its legs.

The ultimate humiliation was yet to come. Nothing takes place in a vacuum, and the expansion of NATO, combined with its offensive re-orientation, drew the ire of Russia, which took extreme umbrage over the encroachment of a military alliance no longer bound by the constraints of collective self-defense, but rather imbued with a post-Cold War posture built around the notion of containing and constraining a Russia which was recovering from its post-Soviet collapse malaise and, under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, was actively restoring it position as a regional and global power.

NATO Fissures

U.S.-backed, violent coup in Ukraine, 2014. (Wikipedia)

Russia had, since 2001, been sounding a claxon call about NATO expansion and the threat it posed to Russian security interests. These calls were ignored by NATO and its U.S. masters, largely because they believed Russia to be too weak both militarily and economically.

While NATO chased post-9/11 ghosts in the Middle East and Afghanistan at the behest of its American overseer, Russia worked to reform its economy and military. In 2008 Russia defeated Georgia in a short but violent war precipitated by a Georgian military assault on the breakaway territory of South Ossetia. In 2014, Russia responded to the U.S.-orchestrated Maidan coup that ousted the democratically-elected president of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovich, by annexing Crimea and throwing its support behind pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass region of Ukraine.

The important thing to note about the current crisis in Ukraine is that while the underlying issues are solely the byproduct of NATO overreach, the timing of the crisis is based upon a Russian timetable defined by purely Russian goals and objectives. The goal of Russia is not to destroy Ukraine—this could be accomplished at any time. Rather, the goal of Russia is to destroy NATO.

This will not be accomplished through the direct use of military force, but rather the indirect threat of military action which forces NATO to react in a way which exposes the impotence of an organization which long ago lost its raison d-etre, collective defense, and instead flounders under the weight of a mission—the containment of Russia—it cannot achieve, and which its membership is not united in pursuing.

Here are a few statements of fact—the Russian military would defeat any force NATO can assemble in a stand-up conventional fight. The entire notion of collective self-defense is predicated on the ability to deter any potential adversary from considering military action against a NATO member because the outcome—the total defeat of the attacking party—was never in dispute.

While a truly defensive alliance would have the moral authority to call out the build-up of Russian military power around Ukraine as un-duly provocative, NATO has long since lost the ability to apply that label to itself with any degree of seriousness. From the standpoint of Russia, when the same “defensive” alliance which bombed its ally Belgrade and worked to overthrow the leader of Libya puts its sights on acquiring Ukraine and Georgia as members, such actions can only be viewed as aggressive, offensively oriented-measures that function as part of a broader anti-Russian campaign.

Exposing NATO

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and others representatives of NATO countries in a group photo at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, March 23, 2021. (State Department, Ron Przysucha)

By militarizing the Ukraine crisis, Russia has exposed the absolute military impotence of NATO. First and foremost, after dangling the bait of NATO membership before Ukraine for the past fourteen years, NATO was compelled to confess that it would not be able to come to the defense of Ukraine in case of any Russian military invasion because Article 5 only allowed collective defense to be invoked for NATO members, which Ukraine is not.

Moreover, the “massive” economic sanctions that NATO has promised to unleash in lieu of a military response have turned out to be as impotent as NATO’s military power. Despite what the political leadership of NATO and the United States may say to the contrary, there is no unity of purpose when it comes to imposing sanctions on Russia in the event of a military incursion into Ukraine.

In short, any sanction package that targets Russian energy and/or access to banking institutions will hurt Europe far more than Russia. While the United States continues to push for Europe, and in particular Germany, to wean itself off Russian energy supplies, the fact is there is no viable alternative to Russian energy and, moreover, Europe is increasingly recognizing that the U.S. position has less to do with European security and more to do with a play by the U.S. to grab the European market for itself.

Under normal conditions, the U.S. cannot compete with Russia in terms of price and volume when it comes to natural gas deliveries. If, through sanctions, the U.S. can cut off Europe from Russia, then the U.S. will be able to impose its own energy products on Europe at prices that otherwise would be uncompetitive.

NATO’s Realization

The individual members of NATO are beginning to awaken to the reality that their organization is little more than an impotent tool of American global hegemony. Hungary has cut its own gas deal with Russia, in defiance of U.S. directives to pull back. Croatia and Bulgaria have made it clear that they will not be deploying troops in support of NATO posturing on Ukraine.

Turkey has stated that it views the Ukraine crisis as little more than a thinly disguised effort by NATO and the U.S. to weaken Turkey by forcing it to fight Russia in the Black Sea. But perhaps the most telling moments came when the two European powerhouses of NATO, Germany, and France, were compelled to come face to face with the reality of their subservient role vis-à-vis the U.S..

When French President Emmanual Macron flew to Russia to try and negotiate a settlement to the Ukraine crisis, he was confronted with the reality that Russia won’t negotiate with France without the U.S. first expressing support for the positions being put forward by the French President. The U.S. matters; France does not.

Likewise, the German chancellor was forced to stand mutely during his visit to the White House while U.S. President Joe Biden “promised” that he would unilaterally shut down the NordStream 2 pipeline project, even though the U.S. had no role to play in the construction and administration of the pipeline. Germany, Biden was saying, is little more than a colony of the United States.

Chinese President Xi Jinping with Russian President Vladimir Putin during visit to Moscow in 2019. (Kremlin)

The final nail in the NATO coffin came on Feb. 4, when the Russian president met with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the opening of the Winter Olympics in Beijing. The two leaders issued a 5,000-plus word joint statement in which China threw its weight behind Russia’s objection to NATO expansion into Ukraine.

The Sino-Russian joint statement was a de facto declaration that neither Russia nor China would allow the U.S.-led “rules based international order” being promulgated by the Biden administration to go forward unchallenged. Instead, the two nations announced that they will be pursuing a “law based international order” which draws on the United Nations Charter for its authority, in contrast to unilateral rules which only serve the interests of the U.S. and small blocs of allied nations.

A Different World

The world has fundamentally changed. NATO literally has no relevance. Its last gesture of defiance lays in the deployment of forces into eastern Europe to bolster the defensive capabilities of that region in accordance with Article 5. The forces deployed—a few thousand American paratroopers, and a smattering of other contingents from other NATO nations—not only cannot defeat a Russian adversary, but doesn’t even provide a modicum of deterrence value should Russia be inclined to shift its sights away from Ukraine toward Poland and the Baltics.

What NATO doesn’t realize is that Russia has no intention of invading either Ukraine or eastern Europe. All Russia has done is demonstrate the empty shell that NATO has become by underscoring just how empty the Article 5 promise of collective defense truly is.

In this regard, one should view NATO’s current round of muscle flexing as the modern-day equivalent of Picket’s Charge, the high-water mark of the Trans-Atlantic alliance. In the weeks and months to come, NATO will be faced with the reality that Russia is not invading anyone, and that the muscle flexing it is currently engaged in is not only not needed, but worse, unsustainable.

The fractures exposed in NATO’s membership when it comes to Ukraine will only grow larger over time. It may take years for NATO to go away, but let no one be fooled by what is happening—NATO is finished as an alliance.

Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.

Ukraine has morphed – unexpectedly – from the Washington perspective from an ‘useful distraction’ to becoming Biden’s dilemma.

“What will we do if the West does not listen to reason?”, noted Sergei Lavrov. “Well, the President of Russia has already said ‘what’ [it will do]”. “If our attempts to come to terms on mutually acceptable principles of ensuring security in Europe fail to produce the desired result, we will take response measures. Asked directly what these measures might be, he [Putin] said: they could come in all shapes and sizes”. Russia had previously announced that absent a satisfactory western response, then Russia would lay aside the language of diplomacy – and resort to unspecified “military-technical” measures – incrementally ratchetting pain on NATO and the U.S.

It is unlikely that Moscow ever entertained any grand illusions about their ‘non-ultimatum’ ultimatum. The documents were never intended ‘to lure’ the West into ad aeternam negotiations. The point is that Moscow had already decided to break in a fundamental way with the West. What is afoot is today is the manifestation of that earlier decision.

The crux of Russia’s complaints about its eroding security have little to do with Ukraine per se but are rooted in the Washington hawks’ obsession with Russia, and their desire to cut Putin (and Russia) down to size – an aim which has been the hallmark of U.S. policy since the Yeltsin years. The Victoria Nuland clique could never accept Russia rising to become a significant power in Europe – possibly eclipsing the U.S.’ control over Europe.

If they were not intended as a basis for negotiations, what then were Russia’s treaty drafts about? It seems that they were about Russia and China coming down off the fence. This is much more important than many appreciate. It marks the beginning of a period of rising tensions (and maybe clashes), until a modified Global Order emerges.

The ‘non-ultimatums’ primarily were intended to draw out, and make explicit in the public sphere, America’s refusal to concede the validity to Moscow’s point that its own security interests are of no lesser significance than those of Ukraine and Georgia; that one state’s security interests cannot be augmented at the expense of another (i.e. the indivisibility of security).

Making this clear to all is a necessary condition for a joint Russian-China shift to co-ordinated ‘military-technical measures’. It seems that shortly after Putin returns from his consultations with President Xi in China, we may begin to see what these military-technical measures might be. The Russian calculation is that in the run-up to the November ’22 midterms, the U.S. side will be increasingly nervous and internally vulnerable. Team Biden has no convincing rejoinder to the question asked by the electorate: ‘So, what is it that you guys got right this last year?” And so Biden badly needs a distraction from his inability to give an adequate reply.

Ukraine has morphed – unexpectedly – from the Washington perspective from an ‘useful distraction’ to becoming Biden’s dilemma. Initially, a major info-war campaign on an unprecedented scale was thought to create a reason for Europe and America to impose ‘Sanctions from Hell’ that would put paid to Putin’s supposed ambitions in Europe, and beyond.

This apocalyptic sanctions ploy had its roots in the 2014 era, when the then Crimea sanctions (wrongly) were believed to be so utterly catastrophic for Russia that Putin’s future would be poised in the balance, bringing the possibility that he could be ousted by pro-western oligarchs. (Such was the mistaken analysis given to Angela Merkel by her own Intelligence Services).

It was so wrong: In 2014, Russia experienced only a mild recession (-2.2%), and in the event, its economy proved to be remarkably sanctions-proof, partly as a result of letting the Rouble ‘float’. This old meme of sanctions being the ‘neutron-bomb’ for Putin has been washed, rinsed and repeated by those (same old) Russia hawks – even though Russia’s economy is much more sanctions-proof today than it was in 2014. Thus the ‘Sanctions from Hell’ story has never held up; it is not credible.

The ‘imminent invasion’ frenzy perhaps, was thought by the hawks who seemed to have grabbed hold of the Washington ‘war narrative’, to be sufficient to goad Putin into military action – triggering these ‘Mother of all Sanctions’, or at the very least, a humiliating downsizing of the Russian forces adjacent to the Ukraine border:

Either outcome would easily have been presented as a ‘tough Biden’ successfully facing-down Putin and humiliating him. Earlier, U.S. think-tanks had rosily forecast that Putin was damned if he did; and damned if he didn’t take action over Ukraine. They were wrong. Essentially, Russia doesn’t want, or need Ukraine; there is no plan to occupy it.

It was firstly President Zelensky who unexpectedly did not co-operate with the U.S. plan. Instead of endorsing the threat of imminent Russian invasion, he claimed that invasion fears were overblown, and that the nervousness was bad for business, and the economy. Back at the time of the 2014 Maidan revolution, China had been promoting investment in Ukraine. Ditto today: Ukraine is reportedly on the brink of debt default, and has turned to China, looking for help.

This infuriated Washington: Julia Ioffe tweeted that the “White House and its Democratic allies have just about had it with President Zelensky. According to three sources in the administration and on the Hill, the Ukrainian president is by turns “annoying, infuriating, and downright counterproductive”. What is interesting is that these U.S. commentators’ principal moan was that Zelensky was not sufficiently attuned to domestic U.S. currents and narratives. There were rumours of a possible U.S.-led coup to replace Zelensky with a more compliant leader.

The invasion meme nonetheless is again being washed, rinsed and repeated: It continues life with a new allegation: this time that Russia is actively engaged in mounting a ‘false flag’ operation that would then justify a Russian invasion. This seemed so improbable that even normally compliant White House correspondents evinced utter disbelief.

And Washington’s problems just went on accumulating: the U.S.-orchestrated Security Council session was a débacle for Blinken: the ‘sanctions from hell’ have emerged as empty cymbals clashing, with fears taking hold that the sanctions would likely have hurt Europe more than hurt Russia; that they might even have provoked a global financial crisis. Reports suggest that the final nail was the Federal Reserve arguing that to expel Russia from SWIFT was a thoroughly bad idea.

And then, the second unexpected eruption for Blinken came: Europe (and NATO) far from being a resolute united front confronting Russia, clearly revealed their deep divisions.

Lavrov’s confirmation that the western responses to Moscow gave no basis for dialogue with the U.S. or NATO has an import which it seems has not been grasped. The crisis is not about Ukraine; as leading Russian journalist Dmitry Kiselyov noted: “The scale is much bigger”. It may, in the longer run, define Europe’s future as well as that of the Middle East.

It looks as if – even before the outcome of the Putin-Xi summit is known – Russia has already begun ‘coming down off the fence’, by which is meant, it is ready to dial up the pain for the U.S. and Europe slowly and deliberately on the basis that, if Russia’s concerns are ignored and dismissed, then Russia will ignore ‘yours’, too.

Russia clearly understands the geo-political and geo-economic pressure points that it controls. They can see that the U.S. does not want to raise interest rates, but has to. They can also see that they can force inflation far higher, inflicting significant economic pain. They can see that food prices are soaring, with potash from Belarus blocked, and Russia banning the export of ammonium nitrate.

The consequences for fertiliser prices – and therefore European food prices – is obvious, as is the consequence of European spot energy prices, were Russian gas to be barred from Europe. That is how economic pain works. The West slowly is discovering that that it has no pressure point versus Russia (its economy being relatively sanctions-proof), and its military is no match for that of Russia’s.

In the Middle East, a number of interesting developments have quietly taken place: Russia is mounting joint air-patrols with the Syrian Air Force over the Golan, and in the wake of Israel’s recent attacks on the port at Latakia, Russia has stationed its own forces there (meaning that Israel must stop attacking the port). Similarly, Israel recently complained to Russia that its’ blocking of the Global Positioning System (GPS) over Syria was adversely affecting Israeli commercial air traffic using Ben Gurion airport. The Russians replied, ‘Well, too bad’. And, in a forth blow to Israel, Russia has begun allowing Iranian planes carrying weapons supplies to land at the large Russian base in western Syria.

Is then, one military-technical action to block Israeli overflights of Syria? Might this also be a prelude to Russia enabling Damascus to regain control over the geographic extent of Syria – allowing the Syrian Arab Army to expel the jihadists from Idlib, and the Americans from north-east Syria, where they and their allies control Syria’s energy resources? The exodus of jihadis (some 2 million with dependents) would traumatise Turkish politics, damaging Erdogan’s re-election prospects, and terrify the Europeans with the threat of another migrant refugee crisis.

It looks like Russia has decided to come off the fence in other ways by inviting the new Iran president to Moscow and giving him full celebrity treatment: a one-to-one lunch with President Putin, plus a rare invitation to address the Russian Duma. This gesture, along with making Iran a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and the recent joint naval exercise with Iran, Russia and China in the Gulf of Oman, indicate Iran’s coming-of-age in international affairs.

Washington likes to compartmentalise its geo-political relations, believing it can be emollient in the ‘one’ compartment, but highly aggressive in an other. Clearly this no longer holds in the Russia-China axis. Iran however, is in a real way, a part of this Axis. Is it feasible now, to expect an Iranian JCPOA agreement with the U.S.? Can both Russia and China be saying – so explicitly – that the U.S. denial of any security sovereignty to either Russia or China marks the end to dialogue with the U.S., and yet expect that Iran would reach an accord precisely on such reductive terms?

Finally, what is the connection (if any), between the Houthis’ continuing attacks on the UAE, in response to the U.S. and Israel interfering directly in the Yemen war, and the Russian military-technical action project?

The port of Aden, the Bab al-Mandib Straits and Socotra Island fall neatly into a vital component of the Cold War build-up between China and the U.S. The Arab ally (in this case, the UAE) that can control this essential strait will give the U.S. leverage by which to jeopardize China’s Maritime Silk Road, and concomitantly, to weaken the East Asian Economic Community. Hence the key role of the Bab al Mandab Strait is seen by some Washington circles as the justification enough for America’s continued support for the war in Yemen.

The Houthis are giving the UAE a bitter choice: Strikes on its cities or yield up the strategic asset of Bab al-Mandab and its surrounds. Iran and China will be watching attentively. Is a new geo-strategic paradigm emerging?

Alastair CROOKE – Former British diplomat, founder and director of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum.

The release a couple of days ago on the RF Ministry of Foreign Affairs website of its draft treaties to totally revise the European security architecture¹ has been picked up by our leading mainstream media. The New York Times lost no time posting an article by its most experienced journalists covering Russia, Andrew Kramer and Steven Erlanger: “Russia Lays Out Demands for a Sweeping New Security Deal With NATO.” For its part, The Financial Times brought together its key experts Max Seddon in Moscow, Henry Foy in Brussels and Aime Williams in Washington to concoct “Russia publishes ‘red line’ security demands for Nato and US.”

Both flagships of the English language print media correctly identified the main new feature of the Russian initiative, encapsulated by the word ‘demands.” However, they did not explore the “what if” question, how and why these ‘demands’ are being presented de facto if not by name as an ‘ultimatum,’ as I consider them to be.

The newspaper articles themselves are weak tea. They summarize the points set out in the Russian draft treaties. But they are incapable of providing an interpretation of what the Russian initiative means for the immediate future of us all.

Normally they would be hand fed such analysis by the U.S. State Department and Pentagon. However, this time Washington has declined to comment, saying it is now studying the Russian treaties and will have its answer in a week or so. In the meantime, America’s reliable lap dog Jens Stoltenberg, NATO Secretary General, saw no need for reflection and flatly rejected the Russian demands as unacceptable. The ‘front line’ NATO member states in the Baltics also reflexively vetoed any talks with the Russians on these matters.

However, even the FT and NYT understand what Mr. Stoltenberg’s opinion or Estonia’s opinion is worth and held back on giving their own thumbs up or down. They both analyze the draft treaties primarily in connection with the current massing of Russian troops at the border of Ukraine. They assume that if the Russians receive no satisfaction on their demands they will use this to justify an invasion. We are told that in such an eventuality a new Cold War will set in on the Old Continent, as if that will be the end of all the fuss.

In part, the problem with these media is that their journalist and editorial teams are tone deaf as regards things Russian. They are insensitive to nuance and incapable of seeing what is new here in content and still more in the presentation of the Russian texts. In part, the weakness is attributable to the common problem of journalists: their time horizon goes back to what happened last week. They lack perspective.

In what I present below, I will attempt to address these shortcomings. I will not invoke historical time, which would possibly take us back seventy years to the start of the first Cold War or even thirty years to the end of that Cold War, but will restrict my commentary to the time surrounding the last such Russian call for treaties to regulate the security environment on the European continent, 2008 – 2009 under then President Dmitry Medvedev. That is within the time horizon of political science.

I will pay particular attention to the tone of this Russian démarche and will try to explain why the Russians have drawn their ‘red lines’ in the sand precisely now. All of this will lead to a conclusion that it is not only President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev who should be concerned about the condition of local bomb shelters, but also all of us in Brussels, Warsaw, Bucharest, etc on this side of the Atlantic, and in Washington, D.C., New York and other major centers on the American continent. We are staring down what might be called Cuban Missile Crisis Redux.

Black Sea: U.S., Ukraine to lead naval exercise with 32 nations from six continents
Rick Rozoff

The annual U.S.-led multinational naval exercise in the Black Sea, Sea Breeze, will begin on June 28 and continue until July 10. As with previous iterations this year’s exercise will be co-hosted by the U.S. and Ukraine.

Though as the name indicates primarily a series of maritime drills, Sea Breeze also includes air and land components.

Currently there are three warships from NATO nations in the Black Sea: the U.S. interceptor missile/guided-missile destroyer USS Laboon, the British destroyer HMS Defender and Dutch frigate HNLMS Evertsen. The first is part of the carrier strike group attached to the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier and the latter two to the new HMS Queen Elizabeth carrier.

As the massive Defender Europe 21 war games wrapped up this week, several components of which were held in the Black Sea, the public relations bureau of U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa and U.S. Sixth Fleet announced that this year’s Sea Breeze will include military personnel, ships, planes and equipment from the most nations ever: 32. From six continents. Participating countries are: Albania, Australia, Brazil, Britain, Bulgaria, Canada, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, France, Georgia, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Morocco, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Senegal, Spain, South Korea, Sweden, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates and the U.S. All are NATO members or partners except for Brazil and Senegal, but Brazil has been contributing to war games held by the U.S. in Africa and Europe lately and may well soon join its neighbor Colombia as a NATO partner; and Senegal, which is also now participating in the U.S./NATO African Lion military exercise, may join fellow African NATO partners Algeria, Egypt, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia.

U.S. Navy graphic

The war games will include 5,000 troops, 32 ships, 40 aircraft and 18 special operations and diving teams.

The American chargé d’affaires to Ukraine, Kristina Kvien (a graduate of the U.S. Army War College), was quoted by U.S. Navy stating: “The United States is proud to partner with Ukraine in co-hosting the multinational maritime exercise Sea Breeze, which will help enhance interoperability and capabilities among participating nations. We are committed to maintaining the safety and security of the Black Sea.”

Interoperability is a NATO catchword for military integration. This year’s maneuvers will include amphibious warfare, land warfare, air defense, special operations and anti-submarine warfare facets.

Only one of the six (recognized) nations on the Black Sea is not a NATO member (Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey) or a NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partner (Georgia and Ukraine): Russia. It is that country that troops, ships and military aircraft from 32 nations on six continents will be deployed against in a few days.

The gigantic headquarters of the largest military organization in history.

While the American hyper-power is in advanced decline and President Donald Trump has evoked a possible exit of his country from NATO, the member states are wondering about the future of the Atlantic alliance. This is why, in April, its Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, set up a Commission of Reflection, composed of 10 Atlantic personalities, to define what NATO would be in 2030.

Its objective was to redefine the alliance, as was the case in 1967, after France’s exit from the integrated command and at a time when the 20-year period during which it was not possible to leave the Treaty was about to come to an end.

At the time, the Belgian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Pierre Harmel, undertook to coordinate a very broad consultation, taking into account the French desire for national independence. Adapting to the logic of President Charles De Gaulle, he distinguished the political aspects (the Treaty) from the military aspects (the Organization).

Of course, Pierre Harmel was fundamentally committed to American domination of the "Free World”. As a Christian Democrat, he was opposed to the USSR as much for its atheism as for its collectivist principles. As such, he was involved in the Christian Leadership Movement [1] organized by the Pentagon.

The new reflection group has just submitted its report on November 25, 2020.

Contrary to expectations, it does not imagine new horizons, but calls for refocusing on what unites the member states: the "common values" defined by the founding treaty of the Alliance: "the principles of democracy, individual liberties and the rule of law. [2] In fact, the principles of democracy have just been violated in the United States by electoral fraud, while individual liberties have been restricted in each member state during the Covid-19 epidemic. As for the rule of law, it no longer exists in Turkey.

Preamble

Here, a preamble is necessary. NATO has never been an "alliance" in the sense of a free association of partners aimed at strengthening their defense. On the contrary, from its foundation, all have been forced to accept and obey an eternal military command from the United States. In practice, NATO is a foreign legion at the service of the Anglo-Saxons: the Pentagon first, Whitehall second. This blatant violation of the principle of sovereignty set out in the UN Charter has forced NATO to practice biased rhetoric.

Its noble and beautiful rhetoric should not mask its rogue management.

• During the Cold War, the Anglo-Saxons used a secret service of the Alliance to ensure that member states always accepted their command. They formed a stay-behind network, allegedly to resist a Soviet invasion. However, they used this network only to eliminate any desire for independence. They organized assassinations of leaders and provoked coups d’état among their partners. These facts are taught today in Anglo-Saxon military academies and have been studied in detail by many historians. [3]

• This system has continued since the end of the Cold War in another form. Each member state has been asked to authorize the Anglo-Saxons in writing to spy on them with the help of their own officials, as Edward Snowden revealed, and as we saw again last month in Denmark. . [4]

• Finally, the Anglo-Saxon military command does not hesitate to violate the statutes of the Alliance when it suits it. Thus, it was this command, and not the Atlantic Council which was opposed to it, who decided to bomb Libya and overthrow Muamar al-Gaddafi.

A commission under surveillance

Under these conditions, it would be naive to believe that the Reflection Commission had the freedom to think for itself.

It was chaired by Wess Mitchell, former assistant to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson for European and Eurasian Affairs;

Wess Mitchell happens to be the author of a surprising study, The Godfather Doctrine, [5] which does not appear in his biography released by NATO. He compares the three main schools of US foreign policy to the methods of the three sons of the "Godfather", Don Vito Corleone, the heroes of Mario Puzzo’s books and Francis Ford Coppola’s films. He preaches a mixture of soft and hard power, including mafia techniques.

However, how can these methods not be found in the blackmail operations that several other members of the commission have been subjected to in the past years. Warning: the elements we are going to present do not mean that some members of the commission committed very serious crimes, but that they knew about them and did not denounce them.

Take the case of Thomas de Maizière, former director of the Federal Chancellery, then German Minister of the Interior and Defense. [6] Let’s leave aside his indisputable sponsorship by US think-tanks. Before becoming Angela Merkel’s right-hand man, this illustrious personality was, among other things, Interior Minister of Saxony (2004-5), a post during which he had to deal with the "Saxon Marshland" affair (Sachsensumpf). He considered the information gathered by his office as "serious", but did not pass it on to the judiciary. It was a case of underage prostitution involving high-ranking local personalities. It resurfaced years later, when Thomas de Maizière became Minister of Defense, with the revelation of several facts that had been suppressed, the questioning of testimony, and parliamentary debates. [7].

Or again the case of Hubert Védrine, former Secretary General of the Élysée (1991-95) then French Minister of Foreign Affairs (1997-2002). When he was President François Mitterrand’s closest collaborator, [8] he was trapped by NATO in a house where he went twice a month to participate in the municipal council of the small village where he was elected. Before his carefree eyes, neo-Nazi members of the NATO stay-behind network set up the largest child pornography studio in Europe. [9] The affair was hushed up. On his own initiative, the head of security at the Élysée Palace made two actors disappear, one of whom had a "heart attack”. However, the death of the second, probably murdered by an intelligence policeman who improperly came to his home to question him, did not go unnoticed and provoked a debate in Parliament. [10]

In both cases, since the truth has not been exposed, the members of the Commission are susceptible to blackmail.

A report revealing internal conflicts

The report of the Reflection Commission, entitled NATO 2030: United for a New Era, is very enlightening, more by what it should have contained, but did not say, than by what it makes explicit.

• In the first place, it insists heavily on "common values", which resonates as an accusation against the United States and Turkey. It proposes to no longer react to the shortcomings observed (which is practically impossible against Washington), but to take initiatives before these values have been violated. This is just another way of making a clean sweep of the past and demanding that it never happens again.

• It points to Russia as the only current rival and China as the next.

• It recapitulates all NATO’s operations in its geographical area and outside this area, with the exception of the destruction of Libya. One recalls that this decision was taken by the Anglo-Saxon command behind the back of the Atlantic Council. This "omission" manifests resentment.

Now, dealing with the South, the report emphasizes that when NATO’s neighbors are safer, NATO is safer; a roundabout way of rejecting the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine of systemic destruction of state structures in the "Broader Middle East" and thus questioning the destruction of Libya.

Let us recall that in 2011, at the time of this war, Muamar el-Gaddafi had become an ally of the United States. He had been congratulated by President Bush Jr., notably for having renounced nuclear power, and had agreed to entrust Mahmoud Jibril with the reorganization of his economy. However, overnight, Jibril became the leader of the opposition and NATO summoned al-Gaddafi to leave.

• On the issue of arms control, the Commission is ignoring the UN Treaty on Nuclear Disarmament, which it has strongly condemned. It refers to the work of Pierre Harmel, in 1967, and to the affirmation of the double objective of deterrence and détente. Here again, it condemns the current drift of the Organization, which is strengthening its arsenal while rejecting President Putin’s proposals on disarmament.

• On the subject of energy resources, it states as a matter of course NATO’s right to ensure its full access to hydrocarbon resources in the world regardless of the needs of other powers.

• Concerning the information war, the Commission of Reflection invites the Organization to rely on citizens. Without calling into question the call for tenders of October 15, 2020, it approves the objectives of the Riga Centre of Excellence for Strategic Communications, but challenges its methods.

• Dealing with the unity of the alliance, the Commission underlines the commitment of all to defend a member when it is attacked (Article 5). It then explains, alluding to Turkey’s behaviour, that this commitment can only be fulfilled if each member state strictly respects the ’common values’ of the Organization. Since the publication of the report, the US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, has come to tell his counterparts how badly he feels about Turkey. He thus made it possible for Ankara to be excluded from the alliance, or even a possible war against it.

Not without humour, the Commission suggested the creation of a Centre of Excellence for Democratic Resilience.

• On the subject of the functioning of the alliance, the Commission tries to prevent a new violation of the statutes of the alliance under the pretext of an emergency as was the case for the destruction of Libya. It therefore advocates consultations as far downstream as possible, notably with the European Union and partners in the Indo-Pacific zone that could join NATO.

Conclusion

Despite the pressure exerted on members of the Advisory Commission, the Commission did not evade the real problems, but refrained from making them explicit. Everyone is aware that the alliance is a tool of Anglo-Saxon domination, and those who wish to free themselves from it try to avoid being drawn into new conflicts at their own expense.

Understanding the geopolitical and psychological war against Syria.

What is the Syria war about?

Contrary to the depiction in Western media, the Syria war is not a civil war. This is because the initiators, financiers and a large part of the anti-government fighters come from abroad.

Nor is the Syria war a religious war, for Syria was and still is one of the most secular countries in the region, and the Syrian army – like its direct opponents – is itself mainly composed of Sunnis.

But the Syria war is also not a pipeline war, as some critics suspected, because the allegedly competing gas pipeline projects never existed to begin with, as even the Syrian president confirmed.

Instead, the Syria war is a war of conquest and regime change, which developed into a geopolitical proxy war between NATO states on one side – especially the US, Great Britain and France – and Russia, Iran, and China on the other side.

In fact, already since the 1940s the US has repeatedly attempted to install a pro-Western government in Syria, such as in 1949, 1956, 1957, after 1980 and after 2003, but without success so far. This makes Syria – since the fall of Libya – the last Mediterranean country independent of NATO.

Thus, in the course of the “Arab Spring” of 2011, NATO and its allies, especially Israel and the Gulf States, decided to try again. To this end, politically and economically motivated protests in Syria were leveraged and were quickly escalated into an armed conflict.

NATO’s original strategy of 2011 was based on the Afghanistan war of the 1980s and aimed at conquering Syria mainly through positively portrayed Islamist militias (so-called “rebels”). This did not succeed, however, because the militias lacked an air force and anti-aircraft missiles.

Hence from 2013 onwards, various poison gas attacks were staged in order to be able to deploy the NATO air force as part of a “humanitarian intervention” similar to the earlier wars against Libya and Yugoslavia. But this did not succeed either, mainly because Russia and China blocked a UN mandate.

As of 2014, therefore, additional but negatively portrayed Islamist militias (“terrorists”) were covertly established in Syria and Iraq via NATO partners Turkey and Jordan, secretly supplied with weapons and vehicles and indirectly financed by oil exports via the Turkish Ceyhan terminal.

ISIS: Supply and export routes through NATO partners Turkey and Jordan (ISW / Atlantic, 2015)

Media-effective atrocity propaganda and mysterious “terrorist attacks” in Europe and the US then offered the opportunity to intervene in Syria using the NATO air force even without a UN mandate – ostensibly to fight the “terrorists”, but in reality still to conquer Syria and topple its government.

This plan failed again, however, as Russia also used the presence of the “terrorists” in autumn 2015 as a justification for direct military intervention and was now able to attack both the “terrorists” and parts of NATO’s “rebels” while simultaneously securing the Syrian airspace to a large extent.

By the end of 2016, the Syrian army thus succeeded in recapturing the city of Aleppo.

From 2016 onwards, NATO therefore switched back to positively portrayed but now Kurdish-led militias (the SDF) in order to still have unassailable ground forces available and to conquer the Syrian territory held by the previously established “terrorists” before Syria and Russia could do so themselves.

This led to a kind of “race” to conquer cities such as Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor in 2017 and to a temporary division of Syria along the Euphrates river into a (largely) Syrian-controlled West and a Kurdish (or rather American) controlled East (see map below).

This move, however, brought NATO into conflict with its key member Turkey, because Turkey did not accept a Kurdish-controlled territory on its southern border. As a result, the NATO alliance became increasingly divided from 2018 onwards.

Turkey now fought the Kurds in northern Syria and at the same time supported the remaining Islamists in the north-western province of Idlib against the Syrian army, while the Americans eventually withdrew to the eastern Syrian oil fields in order to retain a political bargaining chip.

While Turkey supported Islamists in northern Syria, Israel more or less covertly supplied Islamists in southern Syria and at the same time fought Iranian and Lebanese (Hezbollah) units with cross-border air strikes, though without lasting success: the militias in southern Syria had to surrender in 2018.

Ultimately, some NATO members tried to use a confrontation between the Turkish and Syrian armies in the province of Idlib as a last option to escalate the war. In addition to the situation in Idlib, the issues of the occupied territories in the north and east of Syria remain to be resolved, too.

Russia, for its part, has tried to draw Turkey out of the NATO alliance and onto its own side as far as possible. Modern Turkey, however, is pursuing a rather far-reaching geopolitical strategy of its own, which is also increasingly clashing with Russian interests in the Middle East and Central Asia.

As part of this geopolitical strategy, Turkey in 2015 and 2020 twice used the so-called »weapon of mass migration«, which may serve to destabilize both Syria (so-called strategic depopulation) and Europe, as well as to extort financial, political or military support from the European Union.

Syria: The situation in February 2020

What role did the Western media play in this war?

The task of NATO-compliant media was to portray the war against Syria as a “civil war”, the Islamist “rebels” positively, the Islamist “terrorists” and the Syrian government negatively, the alleged “poison gas attacks” credibly and the NATO intervention consequently as legitimate.

An important tool for this media strategy were the numerous Western-sponsored “media centres”, “activist groups”, “Twitter girls”, “human rights observatories” and the like, which provided Western news agencies and media with the desired images and information.

Since 2019, NATO-compliant media moreover had to conceal or discredit various leaks and whistleblowers that began to prove the covert Western arms deliveries to the Islamist “rebels” and “terrorists” as well as the staged “poison gas attacks”.

But if even the “terrorists” in Syria were demonstrably established and equipped by NATO states, what role then did the mysterious “caliph of terror” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi play? He possibly played a role similar to that of his direct predecessor, Omar al-Baghdadi – who was a nonexistent phantom.

Thanks to new communication technologies and on-site sources, the Syria war was also the first war about which independent media could report almost in real-time and thus for the first time significantly influenced the public perception of events – a potentially historic change.

Additional Literature

• U.S. secretly backed Syrian opposition groups (WaPo, 2011)
• CIA Said to Aid in Steering Arms to Syrian Opposition (NYT, 2012)
• UN’s Del Ponte says evidence Syria rebels ‘used sarin’ (BBC, 2013)
• How The West Created the Islamic State (Counterpunch, 2014)
• ‘IS’ supply channels through Turkey (Deutsche Welle, 2014)
• EU countries purchasing oil from Islamic State (MEMO, 2014)
• Foley murder video ‘may have been staged’ (The Telegraph, 2014)
• The BBC’s Syria Documentary: Staged Events, Fake Video Footage (GRC, 2015)
• Turkish intelligence helped ship arms to Syrian Islamist rebel areas (Reuters, 2015)
• The Mystery of ISIS’ Toyota Army Solved (Journal NEO, 2015)
• How Islamic State oil flows to Israel (The New Arab, 2015)
• Israeli commandos save Islamic Militants from Syria (Daily Mail, 2015)
• ISIL weapons traced to US and Saudi Arabia (Al Jazeera, 2017)
• IS ‘apologized’ to Israel for November clash (Times of Israel, 2017)
• Very Curious Facts About ISIS The Media Ignores (Mint Press News, 2018)
• US Task Force Smoking Gun smuggles weapons to Syria (Arms Watch, 2019)
• New Leaks Provide Further Evidence Into OPCW Douma Cover Up (Antiwar, 2019)
• New Leaks Shatter OPCW’s Attacks on Douma Whistleblowers (Consortium News, 2020)
• The British government’s covert propaganda campaign in Syria (Middle East Eye, 2020)

Documentary Films

• Syria: The Last Assignment (Al Jazeera English, 50 minutes, 2014)
• 9 Days – From My Window in Aleppo (Issa Touma, 15 minutes, 2016)
• Syria War: The Veto (Vanessa Beeley and Rafiq Lutf, 75 minutes, 2019)

Additional Maps

Foreign fighters in Syria (2014)

Pentagon/CIA Arms Pipeline to Syria (Balkan Insight, 2017)

ISIS oil export routes (2015)

Syria Map (August 2016)

Read also

• The Logic of US Foreign Policy
• The American Empire and Its Media
• Propaganda in the War on Yugoslavia

Arrival at the Atlantic Council of the Supreme Commander of the United States Forces for Europe and Supreme Commander of the North Atlantic Alliance, General Tod D. Wolters (Brussels, February 12, 2020).

President Trump will spend the last year of his first term in office bringing the Boys home. All U.S. troops stationed in the broader Middle East and Africa are expected to withdraw. However, this withdrawal of troops will in no way mean the end of US governance in these regions of the world. Quite the contrary.

The Pentagon’s strategy

Since 2001 - and this is one of the main reasons for the 9/11 attacks - the United States has secretly adopted the strategy outlined by Donald Rumsfeld and Admiral Arthur Cebrowski. This strategy was mentioned in the Army Review by Colonel Ralf Peters two days after the attacks [1] and confirmed five years later by the publication of the staff map of the new Middle East [2]. It was detailed by Admiral Cebrowski’s assistant, Thomas Barnett, in a popular book The Pentagon’s New Map [3].

It is about adapting the missions of the US armies to a new form of capitalism giving primacy to Finance over Economics. The world must be divided in two. On the one hand, stable states integrated into globalization (which includes Russia and China); on the other, a vast area of exploitation of raw materials. This is why the state structures of the countries in this zone must be considerably weakened, ideally by destroying them and preventing their resurgence by all means. This "constructive chaos", as Condoleeza Rice put it, should not be confused with the homonymous rabbinic concept, even though the supporters of the theopolitics have done everything in their power to do so. It is not a question of destroying a bad order in order to rebuild a better one, but of destroying all forms of human organization in order to prevent any form of resistance and to allow transnationals to exploit this area without political constraints. It is therefore a colonial project in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the term (not to be confused with a colonization of settlement).

According to this map, taken from a Powerpoint by Thomas P. M. Barnett at a conference at the Pentagon in 2003, all state structures in the dewy zone must be destroyed.

In beginning to implement this strategy, President George Bush Jr. spoke of a "war without end. Indeed, it is no longer a question of winning wars and defeating opponents, but of making them last as long as possible, "a century" he said. In fact, this strategy has been applied in the "Broader Middle East" - an area stretching from Pakistan to Morocco and covering the entire CentCom theatre of operations and the northern part of the AfriCom theatre of operations. In the past, the IMs guaranteed US access to oil from the Persian Gulf (Carter doctrine). Today, they are present in an area four times larger and aim to overturn any form of order. The state structures of Afghanistan since 2001, Iraq since 2003, Libya since 2011, Syria since 2012 and Yemen since 2015 are no longer capable of defending their citizens. Contrary to official discourse, there has never been any question of overthrowing governments, but rather of destroying states and preventing their reconstitution. For example, the situation of the people of Afghanistan did not improve with the fall of the Taliban 19 years ago, but is getting worse and worse by the day. The only counter-example could be that of Syria, which, in accordance with its historical tradition, has kept its state despite the war, absorbed the blows, and although ruined today, has weathered the storm.

It should be noted in passing that the Pentagon has always considered Israel as a European state and not as a Middle Eastern state. It is therefore not affected by this vast upheaval.

In 2001, the enthusiastic Colonel Ralf Peters assured that ethnic cleansing "it works! "(sic), but that the laws of war forbade the USA to carry it out itself. Hence the transformation of Al-Qaeda and the creation of Daesh, which did for the Pentagon what it wanted but could not undertake publicly.

To understand the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski strategy, it should be distinguished from the "Arab Spring" operation, imagined by the British on the model of the "Great Arab Revolt". The idea was to put the Muslim Brotherhood in power, just as Lawrence of Arabia had put the Brotherhood of the Wahhabites in power in 1915.

The official, albeit not publicly assumed, objective of the U.S. General Staff: to blow up the borders of the Middle East, to destroy both enemy and friendly states, to practice ethnic cleansing.

Westerners in general have no vision of the broader Middle East as a geographical region. They know only certain countries and perceive them as isolated from each other. In this way, they convince themselves that the tragic events that these peoples are enduring are all due to special reasons, in some cases civil war, in others the overthrow of a bloodthirsty dictator. For each country, they have a well-written history of the reason for the tragedy, but they never have one to explain that the war lasts beyond that, and they certainly do not want to be asked about it. Each time, they denounce the "carelessness of the Americans" who could not end the war, forgetting that they rebuilt Germany and Japan after the Second World War. They refuse to acknowledge that for two decades the United States has been implementing a pre-stated plan at the cost of millions of lives. They therefore never see themselves as responsible for these massacres.

The United States itself denies that it is pursuing this strategy with regard to its citizens. For example, the inspector general investigating the situation in Afghanistan wrote a report lamenting the countless missed opportunities for the Pentagon to bring peace when precisely the Pentagon did not want peace.

The Russian intervention

In order to pulverize all the states of the broader Middle East, the Pentagon organized an absurd regional civil war in the manner it had invented the pointless war between Iraq and Iran (1980-88). Eventually President Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini realized that they were killing each other for nothing and made peace against the West.

This time it was the opposition between Sunnis and Shiites. On one side, Saudi Arabia and its allies, and on the other, Iran and its allies. It does not matter whether Wahhabi Saudi Arabia and Khomeini Iran fought together under NATO command during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-95), or whether many troops of the "Axis of Resistance" are not Shiite (100% of the Palestinians of Islamic Jihad, 70% of the Lebanese, 90% of the Syrians, 35% of the Iraqis and 5% of the Iranians).

No one knows why these two camps are fighting each other, but they are asked to bleed each other.

One third of the populations of the Shia Axis of Resistance are not Shia.

In any case, in 2014, the Pentagon was preparing to recognise two new states in accordance with its map of objectives: "Free Kurdistan" (fusion of the Syrian Rojava and the Kurdish Governorate of Iraq to which part of Iran and all of eastern Turkey were to be added at a later date) and "Sunnistan" (composed of the Sunni part of Iraq and eastern Syria). By destroying four states, the Pentagon paved the way for a chain reaction that would in turn destroy the entire region.

Russia then intervened militarily and enforced the borders of the Second World War. It goes without saying that these are arbitrary, stemming from the Sykes-Picot-Sazonov agreements of 1915, and sometimes difficult to bear, but changing them by blood is even less acceptable.

The Pentagon’s communication has always pretended to ignore what was at stake. Both because it does not publicly assume the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski strategy and because it equates the Crimea’s accession to the Russian Federation with a coup de force.

The moult of supporters of the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski strategy

After two years of fierce fighting against President Trump, the general officers of the Pentagon, almost all of whom were personally trained by Admiral Cebrowski, submitted to him under conditions. They agreed not to
create a terrorist state (Sunnistan or Caliphate);
change borders by force;
maintaining US troops on the battlefields of the Broader Middle East and Africa.

In exchange, they ordered their loyal prosecutor Robert Mueller, whom they had already used against Panama (1987-89), Libya (1988-92) and in the 9/11 attacks (2001), to bury his investigation into Russiagate.

Then everything unfurled as smoothly as a player piano roll.

On 27 October 2019, President Trump ordered the execution of Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the main military figure in the Sunni camp. Two months later, on January 3, 2020, he ordered the execution of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, the main military figure of the Axis of Resistance.

Having thus shown that he remained the master of the game by eliminating the most symbolic personalities of both sides, claiming it, and without incurring any significant retaliation, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo revealed the final scheme on January 19 in Cairo. He plans to pursue the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski strategy no longer with the US armies, but with those of NATO, including Israel and the Arab countries.

On the 1st of February, Turkey made its break with Russia official by assassinating four FSB officers in Idleb. Then President Erdogan went to Ukraine to chant the motto of the Banderists (the Ukrainian legionnaires of the Third Reich against the Soviets) with the Ukrainian National Guard and receive the head of the International Islamist Brigade (the anti-Russian Tatars), Mustafa Djemilev (known as "Mustafa Kırımoğlu").

The North Atlantic Council acknowledges the deployment of NATO trainers to the Broader Middle East (Brussels, 13 February 2020).

On February 12 and 13, the Defence Ministers of the Atlantic Alliance noted the inevitable withdrawal of US forces and the forthcoming dissolution of the International Coalition Against Daesh. While stressing that they were not deploying fighting troops, they agreed to send their soldiers to train those of the Arab armies, i.e. to supervise the fighting on the ground.

NATO trainers will be deployed primarily to Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and Iraq. For example:

Libya will be encircled in the west and east. The two rival governments of Fayez el-Sarraj -supported by Turkey, Qatar and already 5,000 jihadists from Syria via Tunisia- and Marshal Khalifa -supported by Egypt and the Emirates- will be able to kill each other forever. Germany, happy to regain the international role it has been deprived of since the Second World War, will play the gadfly by talking about peace to cover the moans of the dying.

Syria will be surrounded on all sides. Israel is already a de facto member of the Atlantic Alliance and bombs whoever it wants whenever it wants. Jordan is already NATO’s "best global partner". King Abdullah II came to Brussels on January 14th for lengthy talks with the Secretary General of the Alliance, Jens Stoltenberg, and attended a meeting of the Atlantic Council. Israel and Jordan already have permanent offices at Alliance Headquarters. Iraq will also receive NATO trainers, although its parliament has just voted to withdraw foreign troops. Turkey is already a member of the Alliance and controls northern Lebanon through the Jamaa Islamiya . Together, they will be able to enforce the US ’Caesar’ law forbidding any company from anywhere to help in the reconstruction of this country.

Thus, the pillaging of the wider Middle East, which began in 2001, will continue. The martyred populations of this region, whose only fault is to have been divided, will continue to suffer and die en masse. The United States will keep its soldiers at home, warm and innocent, while the Europeans will have to take responsibility for the crimes of the US generals.

According to President Trump, the Alliance could change its name to NATO-Middle East (NATO-MO/NATO-ME). Its anti-Russian function would take a back seat to its strategy of destroying the non-globalized zone.

The question arises as to how Russia and China will react to this redistribution of the cards. China needs access to raw materials from the Middle East in order to develop. It should therefore oppose this Western takeover even though its military preparation is still incomplete. On the contrary, Russia and its huge territory are self-sufficient. Moscow has no material reason to fight. The Russians may even be relieved by NATO’s new orientation. It is likely, however, that, for spiritual reasons, they will not let Syria down and may support other peoples in the wider Middle East.

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind

– Edward Gibbon

Counterfactual history is generally a waste of time because, in the end, it’s just speculation. But it’s fun and it can sometimes illuminate factual history.

For example, take the aborted Soviet-French-British alliance to stop Hitler. It came to nothing for a number of reasons but, had it happened, history would have been very different. (And – dare I say it? – probably better. And not the least of the benefits would be that we would be freed from the endless appeals to “Munich” to encourage us to stand firm and bomb the “Next Hitler”.) But I am not going to explore that counterfactual history in which the UK, USSR and France got together, Poland was convinced to let a million Soviet soldiers in and the German military, seeing the hopelessness of it all, overthrew Hitler and the future followed a different set of possibilities (Poland probably being occupied each time).

I am going to consider a counter-factual post Cold War history. Not because I believe – cynical as I have now become – that there was much of a chance of triumphalist Washington, in thrall to PNAC fantasies, allowing it to happen; I do it to illuminate some of the mess that we are in today.

After the Second World War, Stalin, either because he was a dedicated expansionist enemy of the West or because he was determined that, the next time, invaders would have to start their attack farther away from Moscow, absorbed most of the countries the Soviet Army captured/liberated. Communists – and each country had plenty – were put into power. (I invite the reader to speculate: they were absorbed but which was his true motive?) After the Washington Treaty, Moscow formed the Warsaw Treaty. But while the former was, more or less, voluntary, the latter was not and, the moment the USSR weakened, everybody wanted out. Mikhail Gorbachev, GenSek in 1985, began glasnost and perestroyka, believing that the USSR as it was had exhausted its possibilities; one thing led to another, the Berlin Wall came down, the Warsaw Treaty organisation collapsed: when the USSR’s “allies” realised the tanks weren’t coming, they jumped. The USSR itself then fell apart and a whole new world was there for the making.

This is what happened, now begins my counterfactual speculation.

The Western (=NATO) capitals – none of which had foreseen these events – get together and think about how to profit from the collapse of their enemy and how to build a more secure world. A world that is not just better for themselves but more secure for everybody because the wise people in NATO understand that they cannot be secure if their neighbours are not: they know that security is indivisible.

The wise men and women of NATO ponder – it is their world-historical moment; they will create tomorrow. Alternate futures pass before their eyes, they have the power to choose one and eliminate the others; they will pick, out of all the possibilities, the one road the world will travel. Their challenge, now that a great war has ended, is how to fashion a wise ending to the struggle. Not a triumphant ending but a wise one; not just for us but for our descendants. Not momentary but enduring; not a quick sugar hit but lasting nutrition. Many roads to failure; only a few to success.

They take their place with modesty: while, naturally believing that their “free world” system was and is preferable to Marxism-Leninism, they are wise enough and modest enough to know that reality comes in shades of grey. No triumphalism here: just the pragmatic desire to build stability and peace. No boasting: just an acknowledgement that both sides have won.

They remember other decision points when a few created the future. The French Revolutionary/Napoleonic wars killed and maimed millions and devastated and squandered wealth throughout Europe. The easy end would have been to blame France and try to squash it for all time. But the victors – Britain, Prussia, Russia and Austria – were wiser: they included France in the settlement; and their settlement avoided a great European war for a century. They knew that France would always be an important player and therefore had to be invested in the settlement. If it weren’t invested in the settlement it would be invested in breaking the settlement. It’s the essence of The Deal: everybody gets something and everybody has an interest in keeping things the way they are. When no one wants to tip it over, you have stability. The victors of 1919 forgot this principle and their settlement collapsed into an even worse war in twenty years. The victors of that war remembered the 1814 principle (partially) and integrated Germany, Italy and Japan into the winners’ circle.

The wise ones of NATO know this history; they know that the losers have to be made into winners so that the peace can have a chance of lasting; they remember the terrible example of the 1919 failure. There’s no place for boasting or triumphantasising. They bend their powerful minds in the Great Peace Conference of 1991 (counterfactual fantasy event) to calculate how to accommodate everybody’s security concerns. They know that security is indivisible: if one doesn’t feel secure then, sooner or later, no one will.

They start with two realities: 1) Moscow’s former allies – or at least their current leaders – hate and fear Moscow and 2) Moscow doesn’t trust NATO. The Wise Ones waste no time moralising, they know these are the materials with which they have to work and have to make to fit together.

Expand NATO? No, say the Wise Ones: while it will please people in Warsaw or Prague (at least until they get the bill), it will make Moscow nervous and that violates the principle of indivisible security. If making Warsaw happy makes Moscow unhappy, then, at the end of the day, they will both be unhappy and, if they’re both are unhappy, then we will all be unhappy too. Indivisibility of security is the kernel of wisdom that the Wise Ones hold to. If nobody is unhappy then everybody is happy: it’s the geopolitical version of “happy wife, happy life”.

So, the question is this: how do we make a settlement to the Cold War in which NATO, the former Warsaw Treaty, former-USSR and Moscow all feel secure at the same time? Fortunately, at this unrepeatable moment in world history, the NATO leadership is replete with wise, knowledgeable and thoughtful people, well-informed about past errors, determined to do better, with the vision, modesty and ingenuity to square the circle. (I warned you it was counterfactual). They figure it out:

1. They tell Warsaw, Prague, Kiev and the rest of them to form an alliance (Central European Treaty Organisation or some such name) grounded on NATO’s Article 5 (an attack on one is an attack on all).
2. They get a formal, signed, ceremonial declaration from NATO that, should Russia attack any member of the Central European Treaty Organisation, NATO will come to its defence.
3. They get a formal, signed, ceremonial declaration from Moscow that should NATO attack any member of the CETO, Moscow will come to its defence.

So, between NATO and Russia, there would have been a belt of neither-one-nor-the-other-but-guaranteed-by-both countries. CETO would have lots of weapons and a high degree of interoperability and command structure left over from the Soviet days; therefore they would be able to mount quite effective defences with what they already had. Their weapons, being Soviet and very rugged, would work for years to come so they wouldn’t have to spend much on their defence.

(Note that, we have, as a sort of scale model of something like this, the relationship between Malta and Italy. From 1981 Malta is officially neutral and its neutrality is guaranteed by Italy, a NATO member. The USSR recognised this neutrality soon after.)

If a CETO had been formed, guaranteed by NATO and Russia, wouldn’t everybody be 1) happier and 2) more secure?

But that didn’t happen. We all know what did: the men and women of NATO were not so wise, they missed their world-historical moment and they went for the triumphantasising quick sugar hit.

So I wish you all a happy

New Year

in which you may reflect upon what might have been

but wasn’t.