From Abel Tomlinson:
The Big Lie about Ukraine-Russia war
being “Unprovoked”
1. Professor John Mearsheimer.
Published in academic journal Foreign Affairs.
2. Caitlin Johnstone
Editor. Mronline.org (2-7-23).
U.S. officials were told
that pushing for Ukrainian membership in NATO would not only increase the
chance of Russian meddling in the country but also risked destabilising the
divided nation.
Video: Why is Ukraine the West's Fault?
Featuring Professor John Mearsheimer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4
28,031,716 views
UnCommon Core: The Causes and
Consequences of the Ukraine Crisis John J. Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison
Distinguished Service Professor in Political Science and Co-director of the
Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, assesses
the causes of the present Ukraine crisis, the best way to end it, and its
consequences for all of the main actors. A key assumption is that in order to
come up with the optimum plan for ending the crisis, it is essential to know
what caused the crisis. Regarding the all-important question of causes, the key
issue is whether Russia or the West bears primary responsibility.
Why the Ukraine
Crisis Is the West’s Fault
The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin
John J. Mearsheimer
Foreign Affairs
Vol. 93, No. 5 (SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER
2014), pp.
77-84, 85-89 (13 pages)
Published By:
Council on Foreign Relations
Open Free Full Text
PDF article here:
https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Why-the-Ukraine-Crisis-Is.pdf
Also, available at
these links with subscription:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24483306
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2014-08-18/why-ukraine-crisis-west-s-fault
Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in
Ukraine
For years, the political scientist has
claimed that Putin’s aggression toward Ukraine is caused by Western
intervention. Have recent events changed his mind?
“He is not going to
conquer all of Ukraine,” Mearsheimer says, of Putin. “It would be a blunder of
colossal proportions to try to do that.”Photograph by Adam Berry /
Getty
The political scientist John Mearsheimer has been one of
the most famous critics of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold
War. Perhaps best known for the book he wrote with Stephen Walt, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign
Policy,” Mearsheimer is a proponent of great-power
politics—a school of realist international relations that assumes that, in a
self-interested attempt to preserve national security, states will preëmptively
act in anticipation of adversaries. For years, Mearsheimer has argued that the
U.S., in pushing to expand nato eastward and establishing friendly
relations with Ukraine, has increased the likelihood of war between nuclear-armed powers and laid
the groundwork for Vladimir
Putin’s aggressive position toward Ukraine. Indeed, in
2014, after Russia annexed Crimea, Mearsheimer wrote that “the United States
and its European allies share most of the responsibility for this crisis.”
[Support The New Yorker’s award-winning
journalism. Subscribe today »]
The current invasion of Ukraine has
renewed several long-standing debates about the relationship between the U.S.
and Russia. Although many critics of Putin have argued that he would pursue an
aggressive foreign policy in former Soviet Republics regardless of Western
involvement, Mearsheimer maintains his position that the U.S. is at fault for
provoking him. I recently spoke with Mearsheimer by phone. During our
conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed
whether the current war could have been prevented, whether it makes sense to
think of Russia as an imperial power, and Putin’s ultimate plans for Ukraine.
Looking at the situation now with Russia and Ukraine, how
do you think the world got here?
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I think all the trouble in this case really started in
April, 2008, at the nato Summit in Bucharest, where afterward nato issued
a statement that said Ukraine and Georgia would become part of nato. The
Russians made it unequivocally clear at the time that they viewed this as an
existential threat, and they drew a line in the sand. Nevertheless, what has
happened with the passage of time is that we have moved forward to include
Ukraine in the West to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. Of
course, this includes more than just nato expansion. nato expansion
is the heart of the strategy, but it includes E.U. expansion as well, and it
includes turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy, and, from a Russian
perspective, this is an existential threat.
You said that it’s about “turning Ukraine into a
pro-American liberal democracy.” I don’t put much trust or much faith in
America “turning” places into liberal democracies. What if Ukraine, the people
of Ukraine, want to live in a pro-American liberal democracy?
If Ukraine becomes a pro-American liberal democracy, and a
member of nato,
and a member of the E.U., the Russians will consider that categorically
unacceptable. If there were no nato expansion and no E.U. expansion, and
Ukraine just became a liberal democracy and was friendly with the United States
and the West more generally, it could probably get away with that. You want to
understand that there is a three-prong strategy at play here: E.U. expansion, nato expansion,
and turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy.
You keep saying “turning Ukraine into a liberal democracy,”
and it seems like that’s an issue for the Ukrainians to decide. nato can decide whom it admits, but we saw in 2014 that it
appeared as if many Ukrainians wanted to be considered part of Europe. It would
seem like almost some sort of imperialism to tell them that they can’t be a
liberal democracy.
It’s not imperialism; this is great-power politics. When
you’re a country like Ukraine and you live next door to a great power like
Russia, you have to pay careful attention to what the Russians think, because
if you take a stick and you poke them in the eye, they’re going to retaliate.
States in the Western hemisphere understand this full well with regard to the
United States.
The Monroe Doctrine, essentially.
Of course. There’s no country in the Western hemisphere
that we will allow to invite a distant, great power to bring military forces
into that country.
Right, but saying that America will not allow countries in
the Western hemisphere, most of them democracies, to decide what kind of
foreign policy they have—you can say that’s good or bad, but that is
imperialism, right? We’re essentially saying that we have some sort of say over
how democratic countries run their business.
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We do have that say, and, in fact, we overthrew
democratically elected leaders in the Western hemisphere during the Cold War
because we were unhappy with their policies. This is the way great powers
behave.
Of course we did, but I’m wondering if we should be
behaving that way. When we’re thinking about foreign policies, should we be
thinking about trying to create a world where neither the U.S. nor Russia is
behaving that way?
That’s not the way the world works. When you try to create
a world that looks like that, you end up with the disastrous policies that the
United States pursued during the unipolar moment. We went around the world
trying to create liberal democracies. Our main focus, of course, was in the
greater Middle East, and you know how well that worked out. Not very well.
I think it would be difficult to say that America’s policy
in the Middle East in the past seventy-five years since the end of the Second
World War, or in the past thirty years since the end of the Cold War, has been
to create liberal democracies in the Middle East.
I think that’s what the Bush Doctrine was about during the
unipolar moment.
In Iraq. But not in the Palestinian territories, or Saudi
Arabia, or Egypt, or anywhere else, right?
No—well, not in Saudi Arabia and not in Egypt. To start
with, the Bush Doctrine basically said that if we could create a liberal
democracy in Iraq, it would have a domino effect, and countries such as Syria,
Iran, and eventually Saudi Arabia and Egypt would turn into democracies. That
was the basic philosophy behind the Bush Doctrine. The Bush Doctrine was not
just designed to turn Iraq into a democracy. We had a much grander scheme in
mind.
We can debate how much the people who were in charge in the
Bush Administration really wanted to turn the Middle East into a bunch of
democracies, and really thought that was going to happen. My sense was that
there was not a lot of actual enthusiasm about turning Saudi Arabia into a
democracy.
Well, I think focussing on Saudi Arabia is taking the easy
case from your perspective. That was the most difficult case from America’s
perspective, because Saudi Arabia has so much leverage over us because of oil,
and it’s certainly not a democracy. But the Bush Doctrine, if you go look at
what we said at the time, was predicated on the belief that we could
democratize the greater Middle East. It might not happen overnight, but it
would eventually happen.
I guess my point would be actions speak louder than words,
and, whatever Bush’s flowery speeches said, I don’t feel like the policy of the
United States at any point in its recent history has been to try and insure
liberal democracies around the world.
There’s a big difference between how the United States
behaved during the unipolar moment and how it’s behaved in the course of its
history. I agree with you when you talk about American foreign policy in the
course of its broader history, but the unipolar moment was a very special time.
I believe that during the unipolar moment, we were deeply committed to
spreading democracy.
With Ukraine, it’s very important to understand that, up
until 2014, we did not envision nato expansion and E.U. expansion as a policy
that was aimed at containing Russia. Nobody seriously thought that Russia was a
threat before February 22, 2014. nato expansion, E.U. expansion, and turning
Ukraine and Georgia and other countries into liberal democracies were all about
creating a giant zone of peace that spread all over Europe and included Eastern
Europe and Western Europe. It was not aimed at containing Russia. What happened
is that this major crisis broke out, and we had to assign blame, and of course
we were never going to blame ourselves. We were going to blame the Russians. So
we invented this story that Russia was bent on aggression in Eastern Europe.
Putin is interested in creating a greater Russia, or maybe even re-creating the
Soviet Union.
Let’s turn to that time and the annexation of Crimea. I was
reading an old article where you wrote, “According to the prevailing wisdom in
the West, the Ukraine Crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian
aggression. Russian president Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea
out of a longstanding desire to resuscitate the Soviet Empire, and he may
eventually go after the rest of Ukraine as well as other countries in Eastern
Europe.” And then you say, “But this account is wrong.” Does anything that’s
happened in the last couple weeks make you think that account was closer to the
truth than you might have thought?
Oh, I think I was right. I think the evidence is clear that
we did not think he was an aggressor before February 22, 2014. This is a story
that we invented so that we could blame him. My argument is that the West,
especially the United States, is principally responsible for this disaster. But
no American policymaker, and hardly anywhere in the American foreign-policy
establishment, is going to want to acknowledge that line of argument, and they
will say that the Russians are responsible.
You mean because the Russians did the annexation and the
invasion?
Yes.
I was interested in that article because you say the idea
that Putin may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other
countries in Eastern Europe, is wrong. Given that he seems to be going after
the rest of Ukraine now, do you think in hindsight that that argument is
perhaps more true, even if we didn’t know it at the time?
It’s hard to say whether he’s going to go after the rest of
Ukraine because—I don’t mean to nitpick here but—that implies that he wants to
conquer all of Ukraine, and then he will turn to the Baltic states, and his aim
is to create a greater Russia or the reincarnation of the Soviet Union. I don’t
see evidence at this point that that is true. It’s difficult to tell, looking
at the maps of the ongoing conflict, exactly what he’s up to. It seems quite
clear to me that he is going to take the Donbass and that the Donbass is going
to be either two independent states or one big independent state, but beyond
that it’s not clear what he’s going to do. I mean, it does seem apparent that
he’s not touching western Ukraine.
His bombs are touching it, right?
But that’s not the key issue. The key issue is: What
territory do you conquer, and what territory do you hold onto? I was talking to
somebody the other day about what’s going to happen with these forces that are
coming out of Crimea, and the person told me that he thought they would turn
west and take Odessa. I was talking to somebody else more recently who said
that that’s not going to happen. Do I know what’s going to happen? No, none of
us know what’s going to happen.
You don’t think he has designs on Kyiv?
No, I don’t think he has designs on Kyiv. I think he’s
interested in taking at least the Donbass, and maybe some more territory and
eastern Ukraine, and, number two, he wants to install in Kyiv a pro-Russian
government, a government that is attuned to Moscow’s interests.
I thought you said that he was not interested in taking
Kyiv.
No, he’s interested in taking Kyiv for the purpose of
regime change. O.K.?
As opposed to what?
As opposed to permanently conquering Kyiv.
It would be a Russian-friendly government that he would
presumably have some say over, right?
Yes, exactly. But it’s important to understand that it is
fundamentally different from conquering and holding onto Kyiv. Do you
understand what I’m saying?
We could all think of imperial possessions whereby a sort
of figurehead was put on the throne, even if the homeland was actually
controlling what was going on there, right? We’d still say that those places
had been conquered, right?
I have problems with your use of the word “imperial.” I
don’t know anybody who talks about this whole problem in terms of imperialism.
This is great-power politics, and what the Russians want is a regime in Kyiv
that is attuned to Russian interests. It may be ultimately that the Russians
would be willing to live with a neutral Ukraine, and that it won’t be necessary
for Moscow to have any meaningful control over the government in Kyiv. It may
be that they just want a regime that is neutral and not pro-American.
When you said that no one’s talking about this as
imperialism, in Putin’s speeches he specifically refers to the “territory of
the former Russian Empire,” which he laments losing. So it seems like he’s
talking about it.
I think that’s wrong, because I think you’re quoting the
first half of the sentence, as most people in the West do. He said, “Whoever
does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart.” And then he said, “Whoever wants
it back has no brain.”
He’s also saying that Ukraine is essentially a made-up
nation, while he seems to be invading it, no?
O.K., but put those two things together and tell me what
that means. I’m just not too sure. He does believe it’s a made-up nation. I
would note to him, all nations are made up. Any student of nationalism can tell
you that. We invent these concepts of national identity. They’re filled with
all sorts of myths. So he’s correct about Ukraine, just like he’s correct about
the United States or Germany. The much more important point is: he understands
that he cannot conquer Ukraine and integrate it into a greater Russia or into a
reincarnation of the former Soviet Union. He can’t do that. What he’s doing in
Ukraine is fundamentally different. He is obviously lopping off some territory.
He’s going to take some territory away from Ukraine, in addition to what
happened with Crimea, in 2014. Furthermore, he is definitely interested in
regime change. Beyond that, it’s hard to say exactly what this will all lead
to, except for the fact that he is not going to conquer all of Ukraine. It
would be a blunder of colossal proportions to try to do that.
I assume that you think if he were to try to do that, that
would change your analysis of what we’ve witnessed.
Absolutely. My argument is that he’s not going to re-create
the Soviet Union or try to build a greater Russia, that he’s not interested in
conquering and integrating Ukraine into Russia. It’s very important to
understand that we invented this story that Putin is highly aggressive and he’s
principally responsible for this crisis in Ukraine. The argument that the
foreign-policy establishment in the United States, and in the West more
generally, has invented revolves around the claim that he is interested in creating
a greater Russia or a reincarnation of the former Soviet Union. There are
people who believe that when he is finished conquering Ukraine, he will turn to
the Baltic states. He’s not going to turn to the Baltic states. First of all,
the Baltic states are members of nato and—
Is that a good thing?
No.
You’re saying that he’s not going to invade them in part
because they’re part of nato, but they shouldn’t be part of nato.
Yes, but those are two very different issues. I’m not sure
why you’re connecting them. Whether I think they should be part of nato is
independent of whether they are part of nato. They are part of nato. They have
an Article 5 guarantee—that’s all that matters. Furthermore, he’s never shown
any evidence that he’s interested in conquering the Baltic states. Indeed, he’s
never shown any evidence that he’s interested in conquering Ukraine.
It seems to me that if he wants to bring back anything,
it’s the Russian Empire that predates the Soviet Union. He seems very critical
of the Soviet Union, correct?
Well, I don’t know if he’s critical.
He said it in his big essay that he wrote last year, and he said in a recent
speech that he essentially blames Soviet policies for allowing a degree of
autonomy for Soviet Republics, such as Ukraine.
But he also said, as I read to you before, “Whoever does
not miss the Soviet Union has no heart.” That’s somewhat at odds with what you
just said. I mean, he’s in effect saying that he misses the Soviet Union,
right? That’s what he’s saying. What we’re talking about here is his foreign
policy. The question you have to ask yourself is whether or not you think that
this is a country that has the capability to do that. You realize that this is
a country that has a G.N.P. that’s smaller than Texas.
Countries try to do things that they don’t have the
capabilities for all the time. You could have said to me, “Who thinks that
America could get the Iraqi power system working quickly? We have all these
problems in America.” And you would’ve been correct. But we still thought we
could do it, and we still tried to do it, and we failed, right? America
couldn’t do what it wanted during Vietnam, which I’m sure you would say is a
reason not to fight these various wars—and I would agree—but that doesn’t mean
that we were correct or rational about our capabilities.
I’m talking about the raw-power potential of Russia—the
amount of economic might it has. Military might is built on economic might. You
need an economic foundation to build a really powerful military. To go out and
conquer countries like Ukraine and the Baltic states and to re-create the
former Soviet Union or re-create the former Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe
would require a massive army, and that would require an economic foundation
that contemporary Russia does not come close to having. There is no reason to
fear that Russia is going to be a regional hegemony in Europe. Russia is not a
serious threat to the United States. We do face a serious threat in the
international system. We face a peer competitor. And that’s China. Our policy
in Eastern Europe is undermining our ability to deal with the most dangerous
threat that we face today.
What do you think our policy should be in Ukraine right
now, and what do you worry that we’re doing that’s going to undermine our China
policy?
We should be pivoting out of Europe to deal with China in a
laser-like fashion, number one. And, number two, we should be working overtime
to create friendly relations with the Russians. The Russians are part of our
balancing coalition against China. If you live in a world where there are three
great powers—China, Russia, and the United States—and one of those great
powers, China, is a peer competitor, what you want to do if you’re the United
States is have Russia on your side of the ledger. Instead, what we have done
with our foolish policies in Eastern Europe is drive the Russians into the arms
of the Chinese. This is a violation of Balance of Power Politics 101.
I went back and I reread your article about the Israel lobby in the London Review of Books, from 2006. You were talking about the Palestinian issue,
and you said something that I very much agree with, which is: “There is a moral
dimension here as well. Thanks to the lobby of the United States it has become
the de facto enabler of Israeli occupation in the occupied territories, making
it complicit in the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians.” I was cheered
to read that because I know you think of yourself as a tough, crusty old guy
who doesn’t talk about morality, but it seemed to me you were suggesting that
there was a moral dimension here. I’m curious what you think, if any, of the
moral dimension to what’s going on in Ukraine right now.
I think there is a strategic and a moral dimension involved
with almost every issue in international politics. I think that sometimes those
moral and strategic dimensions line up with each other. In other words, if
you’re fighting against Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945, you know the rest of
the story. There are other occasions where those arrows point in opposite
directions, where doing what is strategically right is morally wrong. I think
if you join an alliance with the Soviet Union to fight against Nazi Germany, it
is a strategically wise policy, but it is a morally wrong policy. But you do it
because you have no choice for strategic reasons. In other words, what I’m
saying to you, Isaac, is that when push comes to shove, strategic
considerations overwhelm moral considerations. In an ideal world, it would be
wonderful if the Ukrainians were free to choose their own political system and
to choose their own foreign policy.
But in the real world, that is not feasible. The Ukrainians
have a vested interest in paying serious attention to what the Russians want
from them. They run a grave risk if they alienate the Russians in a fundamental
way. If Russia thinks that Ukraine presents an existential threat to Russia
because it is aligning with the United States and its West European allies,
this is going to cause an enormous amount of damage to Ukraine. That of course
is exactly what’s happening now. So my argument is: the strategically wise
strategy for Ukraine is to break off its close relations with the West,
especially with the United States, and try to accommodate the Russians. If
there had been no decision to move nato eastward to include Ukraine, Crimea and
the Donbass would be part of Ukraine today, and there would be no war in
Ukraine.
That advice seems a bit implausible now. Is there still
time, despite what we’re seeing from the ground, for Ukraine to appease Russia
somehow?
I think there’s a serious possibility that the Ukrainians
can work out some sort of modus vivendi with the Russians. And the reason is
that the Russians are now discovering that occupying Ukraine and trying to run
Ukraine’s politics is asking for big trouble.
So you are saying occupying Ukraine is going to be a tough
slog?
Absolutely, and that’s why I said to you that I did not
think the Russians would occupy Ukraine in the long term. But, just to be very
clear, I did say they’re going to take at least the Donbass, and hopefully not
more of the easternmost part of Ukraine. I think the Russians are too smart to
get involved in an occupation of Ukraine.
AMERICAN EMPIRE, COMMENTARY, NATO, NUCLEAR WEAPONS, RUSSIA, UKRAINE
Caitlin
Johnstone: Fable of ‘Unprovoked’ War Blocks Peace
October 2, 2022
As long as the fact this war was provoked remains unacknowledged
by the side that provoked it, the sane path of detente will look like reckless
appeasement and nuclear brinkmanship will look like sanity.
Biden and Zelensky, November 2021. (President of
Ukraine/Wikimedia Commons)
By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com
Vladimir
Putin has approved the annexation of
four territories in eastern Ukraine, whose addition to the Russian Federation
now await authorization from Russia’s other branches of government.
The Zelensky government
responded to the move by applying to join NATO, only to be immediately shut down by U.S. and NATO officials.
Can’t have sacrificial pawns trying to rise above their station on the grand
chessboard, after all.
But the empire’s proxy war
against Russia continues, and the Ukrainian government has announced its
intentions to drive out Russia from all of the Ukrainian territories it has
claimed as its own.
“For our plans, [Russia’s
annexation] doesn’t matter,” Zelensky advisor Mykhailo Podolyak told Politico,
adding that Ukraine will “protect our land using all our forces” and “should
liberate all its territories.”
The plan to reclaim
territories annexed by Russia will according to Zelensky also include Crimea,
which was annexed in 2014.
All this talk about
preparing a massive western-backed counter-offensive to recapture annexed
territories from Russia — whose ranks are being reinforced with an additional 300,000 reservists —
comes as Putin suggests that
nuclear weapons may be used to protect what Moscow considers parts of Russia.
Russia, like the United States, is one of the nuclear-armed nations without
a No First Use policy.
So we appear to be on a
collision course toward a massive escalation between two nuclear-armed powers.
The more things escalate the more likely it is that a nuclear weapon may be
used, either deliberately or as a result of miscommunication or malfunction
as nearly happened many times during
the last cold war.
Once one nuke is used the
odds go up astronomically that a great many more will immediately follow, with
variables on this outcome including the location where it detonates and how
cool all the relevant heads happen to be at that particular historic moment.
It is therefore no
exaggeration to say that the human species has a vested interest in
de-escalation and detente right away.
Avoiding nuclear war is the
single most important agenda in the entire world, without exception. It is the
single most important agenda that has ever existed in all of history.
But whenever you advocate
for this supremely important agenda in any kind of public forum, you get a
bunch of brainwashed empire automatons bleating about “appeasement” and
accusing you of supporting a monstrous madman. And they do this because that’s
what they were trained to do.
As Noam Chomsky has
been pointing out repeatedly, the political/media
class have been continually indoctrinating the public with the completely false narrative that
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked”.
Every time the war comes up
the imperial spinmeisters utter that slogan, in much the same way Michael
Jackson had a quota for
how often MTV hosts were obligated to refer to him as “The King of Pop Michael
Jackson” when his name was mentioned.
But what does it mean if
the war is “unprovoked”? It means Putin didn’t invade Ukraine because of
anything the western empire was doing, so it couldn’t have been prevented by
the western empire behaving less aggressively on Russia’s borders.
It means Putin necessarily
invaded because he is some kind of evil lunatic who
loves to commit war crimes, or a megalomaniacal tyrant who wants to conquer the
world because he hates freedom and democracy. Which means he will keep
attacking and invading other countries unless he can be stopped.
Which means the only answer
to the Putin problem is more war.
This is why empire
apologists get angry at those who advocate the only sane and rational position
toward nuclear brinkmanship by calling for de-escalation and detente. It’s
because they’ve been aggressively indoctrinated into the belief that war is the
only answer.
The moronic narrative that
the invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked” poses a massive obstacle to peace,
because if Putin is just attacking and invading countries solely because he’s
crazy and evil it means detente is impossible and he won’t stop until he’s
decisively crushed.
If it’s accepted that the
U.S. empire has played no role in provoking Putin’s actions, that means there’s
nothing the empire could do to make continued Russian aggression less likely
apart from regime change, or at least severely crippling and punishing Russia
militarily.
As long as the fact that
this war was provoked remains unacknowledged by the side that provoked it, the
sane path of de-escalation and detente will look like reckless appeasement of
an irrational madman, and aggressive escalations of nuclear brinkmanship will
look like sanity.
The absurd position that
Putin is an irrational actor with some kind of weird sexual fetish for war
crimes is a one-way ticket to endlessly escalating war and eventual nuclear
annihilation, because it leaves you with no options but continually
intensifying military confrontation.
The claim that peace is
impossible and Putin must be crushed imperils the whole world. Even to deliver
total victory in Ukraine (pushing Russia back to pre-2014 borders) could easily
end up costing millions of lives and trillions of dollars and exponentially
increase the risk of nuclear war, with no guarantee of success at all.
But even if you did push
Putin all the way out of Ukraine, what then? He’ll still be a crazy madman who
wants to invade countries because he’s evil and hates freedom.
The internal logic of your
narrative says the attacks on Russia must continue until you get regime change.
There’s no stopping point on your line of thinking until there’s a direct hot
confrontation between nuclear superpowers.
Be an adult and engage your
critical thinking. Does a madman who goes around invading countries solely
because he’s evil and hates freedom sound like a real-life human being to you?
Or does it sound made up?
Like something you’d see in
a Hollywood movie? Like something that was concocted by people responsible
for controlling the dominant narratives of
our society and funneled into your mind using
media?
Marvel supervillains have
more depth and complexity than the one-dimensional characters the imperial spin
machine concocts to represent its official enemies. Thanos was a more
believable character with more understandable and nuanced motivations than the
propaganda machine’s fictional representation of Putin.
That representation has
been overlaid on top of the actual government official who you might not
necessarily agree with, but can definitely understand and engage in diplomacy
and negotiation.
People who believe the
empire’s narratives about its official enemies have fewer critical thinking
skills than your average Marvel movie viewer. Think. Be a grown up and think.
Someone’s benefitting from
the aggressively promulgated narrative that peace is impossible and war is the
only solution. And that someone isn’t you.
This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com and re-published
with permission.
The views expressed are
solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium
News.
MARCH 4, 2022
Calling Russia’s
Attack ‘Unprovoked’ Lets US Off the Hook
BRYCE GREENE Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)
Click Link for Source & Important Relevant Images: https://fair.org/home/calling-russias-attack-unprovoked-lets-us-off-the-hook/
Many governments
and media figures are rightly condemning Russian President Vladimir Putin’s
attack on Ukraine as an act of aggression and a violation of international law.
But in his first speech about the invasion, on February 24, US President Joe
Biden also called the invasion “unprovoked.”
It’s a word that
has been echoed repeatedly across the media
ecosystem. “Putin’s forces entered Ukraine’s second-largest city on the fourth
day of the unprovoked invasion,” Axios (2/27/22) reported; “Russia’s
unprovoked invasion of Ukraine entered its second week Friday,” said CNBC (3/4/22). Vox (3/1/22) wrote of “Putin’s decision
to launch an unprovoked and unnecessary war with the second-largest country in
Europe.”
The “unprovoked”
descriptor obscures a long history of provocative behavior from the United
States in regards to Ukraine. This history is important to understanding how we
got here, and what degree of responsibility the US bears for the current attack
on Ukraine.
Ignoring expert
advice
The story starts
at the end of the Cold War, when the US was the only global hegemon. As part of
the deal that finalized the reunification of Germany, the US promised Russia
that NATO would not expand “one inch
eastward.” Despite this, it wasn’t long before talk of expansion began
to circulate among policy makers.
In 1997, dozens of
foreign policy veterans (including former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and
former CIA Director Stansfield Turner) sent a joint letter to then-President Bill
Clinton calling “the current US-led effort to expand NATO…a policy error of
historic proportions.” They predicted:
In Russia, NATO expansion, which
continues to be opposed across the entire political spectrum, will strengthen
the nondemocratic opposition, undercut those who favor reform and cooperation
with the West [and] bring the Russians to question the entire post-Cold War
settlement.
New York Times columnist Thomas
Friedman (5/2/98) in 1998 asked famed
diplomat George Kennan—architect of the US Cold War
strategy of containment—about NATO expansion. Kennan’s response:
I think it is the beginning
of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely
and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no
reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.
Of course there is going to
be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we
always told you that is how the Russians are—but this is just wrong.
Despite these
warnings, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were added to NATO in 1999,
with Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia
following in 2004.
US planners were
warned again in 2008 by US Ambassador to Moscow William Burns (now director of
the CIA under Joe Biden). WikiLeaks leaked a cable from Burns titled “Nyet
Means Nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement Redlines” that included another prophetic
warning worth quoting in full (emphasis added):
Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO
aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious
concerns about the consequences for stability in the region.
Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s
influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled
consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests.
Experts tell us that Russia
is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO
membership, with much of the ethnic Russian community against membership,
could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war.
In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene;
a decision Russia does not want to have to face.
A de facto NATO
ally
But the US has
pushed Russia to make such a decision. Though European countries are divided
about whether or not Ukraine should join, many in the NATO camp have been
adamant about maintaining the alliance’s “open door policy.” Even as US
planners were warning of a Russian invasion, NATO Secretary General Jens
Stoltenberg reiterated NATO’s 2008 plans to integrate Ukraine into the alliance
(New York Times, 12/16/21). The Biden administration
has taken a more roundabout approach, supporting in the abstract “Kyiv’s
right to choose its own security arrangements and alliances.” But the
implication is obvious.
Even without
officially being in NATO, Ukraine has become a de facto NATO ally—and Russia
has paid close attention to these developments. In a December 2021 speech to his top military
officials, Putin expressed his concerns:
Over the past few years,
military contingents of NATO countries have been almost constantly present on
Ukrainian territory under the pretext of exercises. The Ukrainian troop control
system has already been integrated into NATO. This means that NATO headquarters
can issue direct commands to the Ukrainian armed forces, even to their separate
units and squads….
Kiev has long proclaimed a
strategic course on joining NATO. Indeed, each country is entitled to pick its
own security system and enter into military alliances. There would be no
problem with that, if it were not for one “but.” International documents
expressly stipulate the principle of equal and indivisible security, which
includes obligations not to strengthen one’s own security at the expense of the
security of other states….
In other words, the choice
of pathways towards ensuring security should not pose a threat to other states,
whereas Ukraine joining NATO is a direct threat to Russia’s security.
In an explainer
piece, the New York Times (2/24/22) centered NATO expansion as
a root cause of the war. Unfortunately, the Times omitted the
critical context of NATO’s pledge not to expand, and the subsequent abandonment
of that promise. This is an important context to understand the Russian view of
US policies, especially so given the ample warnings from US diplomats and
foreign policy experts.
The Maidan Coup of
2014
A major turning
point in the US/Ukraine/Russia relationship was the 2014 violent and
unconstitutional ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych, elected in 2010 in a
vote heavily split between eastern and
western Ukraine. His ouster came after months of protests led in part by far-right
extremists (FAIR.org, 3/7/14). Weeks before his ouster,
an unknown party leaked a phone call between US officials
discussing who should and shouldn’t be part of the new government, and finding
ways to “seal the deal.” After the ouster, a politician the officials
designated as “the guy” even became prime minister.
The US involvement
was part of a campaign aimed at exploiting the divisions in Ukrainian society
to push the country into the US sphere of influence, pulling it out of the
Russian sphere (FAIR.org, 1/28/22). In the aftermath of the
overthrow, Russia illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine, in part to secure a
major naval base from the new Ukrainian
government.
The New
York Times (2/24/22) and Washington
Post (2/28/22) both omitted the role the
US played in these events. In US media, this critical moment in history is
completely cleansed of US influence, erasing a critical step on the road to the
current war.
Keeping civil war
alive
In another
response to the overthrow, an uprising in Ukraine’s Donbas region grew into a
rebel movement that declared independence from Ukraine and announced the
formation of their own republics. The resulting civil war claimed thousands of
lives, but was largely paused in 2015 with a ceasefire agreement known as
the Minsk II accords.
The deal, agreed
to by Ukraine, Russia and other European countries, was designed to grant some
form of autonomy to the breakaway regions in exchange for reintegrating them
into the Ukrainian state. Unfortunately, the Ukrainian government refused to
implement the autonomy provision of the accords. Anatol Lieven, a researcher
with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote in The
Nation (11/15/21):
The main reason for this
refusal, apart from a general commitment to retain centralized power in Kiev,
has been the belief that permanent autonomy for the Donbas would prevent
Ukraine from joining NATO and the European Union, as the region could use its
constitutional position within Ukraine to block membership.
Ukraine opted
instead to prolong the Donbas conflict, and there was never significant
pressure from the West to alter course. Though there were brief reports of the accords’
revival as recently as late January, Ukrainian security chief Oleksiy
Danilov warned the West not to
pressure Ukraine to implement the peace deal. “The fulfillment of the Minsk agreement
means the country’s destruction,” he said (AP, 1/31/22). Danilov claimed that even
when the agreement was signed eight years ago, “it was already clear for
all rational people that it’s impossible to implement.”
Lieven notes that
the depth of Russian commitment has yet to be fully tested, but Putin has supported the Minsk accords, refraining
from officially recognizing the Donbas republics until last week.
The New
York Times (2/8/22) explainer on the Minsk
accords blamed their failure on a disagreement between Ukraine and Russia over
their implementation. This is inadequate to explain the failure of the
agreements, however, given that Russia cannot affect Ukrainian parliamentary
procedure. The Times quietly acknowledged that the law meant
to define special status in the Donbas had been “shelved” by the
Ukranians, indicating that the country had stopped trying to solve the
issue in favor of a stalemate.
There was no
mention of the comments from a top Ukrainian official openly denouncing the
peace accords. Nor was it acknowledged that the US could have used its
influence to push Ukraine to solve the issue, but refrained from doing so.
Ukrainian missile
crisis
One
under-discussed aspect of this crisis is the role of US missiles stationed in
NATO countries. Many media outlets have claimed that Putin is Hitler-like (Washington
Post, 2/24/22; Boston Globe, 2/24/22), hellbent on reconquering
old Soviet states to “recreat[e] the Russian empire with himself as the Tsar,”
as Clinton State Department official Strobe Talbot told Politico (2/25/22).
Pundits try to
psychoanalyze Putin, asking “What is motivating him?” and answering by citing his televised
speech on February 21 that recounted the history of Ukraine’s relationship with
Russia.
This speech has
been widely characterized as a call to reestablish the Soviet empire and a
challenge to Ukraine’s right to exist as a sovereign nation. Corporate media
ignore other public statements Putin has made in recent months. For example, at
an expanded meeting of the Defense Ministry Board, Putin elaborated on what he considered
to be the main military threat from US/NATO expansion to Ukraine:
It is extremely alarming
that elements of the US global defense system are being deployed near Russia.
The Mk 41 launchers, which are located in Romania and are to be deployed in
Poland, are adapted for launching the Tomahawk strike missiles. If this
infrastructure continues to move forward, and if US and NATO missile systems
are deployed in Ukraine, their flight time to Moscow will be only 7–10 minutes,
or even five minutes for hypersonic systems. This is a huge challenge for us,
for our security.
The United States does not
possess hypersonic weapons yet, but we know when they will have it…. They will
supply hypersonic weapons to Ukraine and then use them as cover…to arm
extremists from a neighbouring state and incite them against certain regions of
the Russian Federation, such as Crimea, when they think circumstances are
favorable.
Do they really think we do
not see these threats? Or do they think that we will just stand idly watching
threats to Russia emerge? This is the problem: We simply have no room to
retreat.
Having these
missiles so close to Russia—weapons that Russia (and China) see as part of a
plan to give the United States the capacity to launch a nuclear
first-strike without retaliation—seriously challenges the cold war
deterrent of Mutually Assured Destruction, and more closely resembles a gun
pointed at the Russian head for the remainder of the nuclear age. Would this be
acceptable to any country?
Media refuse to
present this crucial question to their audiences, instead couching Putin’s
motives in purely aggressive terms.
Refusal to
de-escalate
By December 2021,
US intelligence agencies were sounding the alarm that Russia was amassing
troops at the Ukrainian border and planning to attack. Yet Putin was very clear about a path to
deescalation: He called on the West to halt NATO expansion, negotiate Ukrainian
neutrality in the East/West rivalry, remove US nuclear weapons from non
proliferating countries, and remove missiles, troops and bases near Russia.
These are demands the US would surely have made were it in Russia’s position.
Unfortunately, the
US refused to negotiate on Russia’s core concerns. The US offered some serious
steps towards a larger arms control arrangement (Antiwar.com, 2/2/22)—something the Russians
acknowledged and appreciated—but ignored issues of NATO’s
military activity in Ukraine, and the deployment of nuclear weapons in Eastern
Europe (Antiwar.com, 2/17/22).
On NATO expansion,
the State Department continued to insist that they would not
compromise NATO’s open door policy—in other words, it asserted the right to
expand NATO and to ignore Russia’s red line.
While the US
has signaled that it would approve
of an informal agreement to keep Ukraine from joining the alliance for a period
of time, this clearly was not going to be enough for Russia, which still
remembers the last broken agreement.
Instead of
addressing Russian concerns about Ukraine’s NATO relationship, the US instead
chose to pour hundreds of
millions of dollars of weapons into Ukraine, exacerbating Putin’s expressed
concerns. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy didn’t help matters by suggesting that Ukraine might
begin a nuclear weapons program at the height of the tensions.
After Putin
announced his recognition of the breakaway republics, Secretary of State Antony
Blinken canceled talks with Putin, and began
the process of implementing sanctions on Russia—all before Russian soldiers had
set foot into Ukraine.
Had the US been
genuinely interested in avoiding war, it would have taken every opportunity to
de-escalate the situation. Instead, it did the opposite nearly every step of
the way.
In its explainer
piece, the Washington Post (2/28/22) downplayed the significance
of the US’s rejection of Russia’s core concerns, writing: “Russia has said that
it wants guarantees Ukraine will be barred from joining NATO—a non-starter for
the Western alliance, which maintains an open-door policy.” NATO’s open door
policy is simply accepted as an immutable policy that Putin just needs to deal
with. This very assumption, so key to the Ukraine crisis, goes unchallenged in
the US media ecosystem.
‘The strategic
case for risking war’
It’s impossible to
say for sure why the Biden administration took an approach that increased the
likelihood of war, but one Wall Street Journal piece from last
month may offer some insight.
The Journal (12/22/21) published an op-ed from
John Deni, a researcher at the Atlantic Council, a think tank funded by the US and allied
governments that serves as NATO’s de facto brain trust. The piece was
provocatively headlined “The Strategic Case for Risking War in Ukraine.” Deni’s
argument was that the West should refuse to negotiate with Russia, because
either potential outcome would be beneficial to US interests.
If Putin backed
down without a deal, it would be a major embarrassment. He would lose face and
stature, domestically and on the world stage.
But Putin going to
war would also be good for the US, the Journal op-ed argued.
Firstly, it would give NATO more legitimacy by “forg[ing] an even
stronger anti-Russian consensus across Europe.” Secondly, a major attack would
trigger “another round of more debilitating economic sanctions,” weakening the
Russian economy and its ability to compete with the US for global influence.
Thirdly, an invasion is “likely to spawn a guerrilla war” that would “sap the
strength and morale of Russia’s military while undercutting Mr. Putin’s
domestic popularity and reducing Russia’s soft power globally.”
In short, we have
part of the NATO brain trust advocating risking Ukrainian civilians as pawns in
the US’s quest to strengthen its position around the world.
‘Something even
worse than war’
A New York
Times op-ed (2/3/22) by Ivan Krastev of Vienna’s
Institute of Human Sciences likewise suggested that a Russian invasion of Ukraine
wouldn’t be the worst outcome:
A Russian incursion into
Ukraine could, in a perverse way, save the current European order. NATO would
have no choice but to respond assertively, bringing in stiff sanctions and
acting in decisive unity. By hardening the conflict, Mr. Putin could cohere his
opponents.
The op-ed was
headlined “Europe Thinks Putin Is Planning Something Even Worse Than War”—that
something being “a new European security architecture that recognizes Russia’s
sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space.”
It is impossible
to know for sure whether the Biden administration shared this sense that there
would be an upside to a Russian invasion, but the incentives are clear, and
much of what these op-eds predicted is coming to pass.
None of this is to
say that Putin’s invasion is justified—FAIR resolutely condemns the invasion as
illegal and ruinous—but calling it “unprovoked” distracts attention from the
US’s own contribution to this disastrous outcome. The US ignored warnings from
both Russian and US officials that a major conflagration could erupt if the US
continued its path, and it shouldn’t be surprising that one eventually did.
Now, as the world
once again inches toward the brink of nuclear omnicide, it is more important
than ever for Western audiences to understand and challenge their own
government’s role in dragging us all to this point.
Featured
image: Wikimedia map of NATO expansion since
1949 (creator:Patrickneil).
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Who’s Telling the ‘Big Lie’ on Ukraine?
September 2, 2014
Exclusive: Official
Washington draws the Ukraine crisis in black-and-white
colors with Russian President Putin the bad guy and the U.S.-backed
leaders in Kiev the good guys. But the reality is much more nuanced, with the
American people consistently misled on key facts, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
If you wonder how the world could stumble into World War III
much as it did into World War I a century ago all you need to do is look at the
madness that has enveloped virtually the entire U.S. political/media structure
over Ukraine where a false narrative of white hats vs. black hats took hold
early and has proved impervious to facts or reason.
The original lie behind Official Washington’s latest “group
think” was that Russian President Vladimir Putin instigated the crisis in
Ukraine as part of some diabolical scheme to reclaim the territory of the
defunct Soviet Union, including Estonia and other Baltic states. Though not a
shred of U.S. intelligence supported this scenario, all the “smart people” of
Washington just “knew” it to be true.
Russian President Vladimir Putin addresses a
crowd on May 9, 2014, celebrating the 69th anniversary of victory over Nazi
Germany and the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Crimean port city of
Sevastopol from the Nazis. (Russian government photo)
Yet, the once-acknowledged though soon forgotten reality
was that the crisis was provoked last year by the European Union proposing an
association agreement with Ukraine while U.S. neocons and other hawkish
politicos and pundits envisioned using the Ukraine gambit as a way to undermine
Putin inside Russia.
The plan was even announced by U.S. neocons such as National
Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman who took to the op-ed page of
the Washington Post nearly a year ago to call Ukraine “the biggest prize” and
an important interim step toward eventually toppling Putin in Russia.
Gershman, whose NED is funded by the U.S. Congress, wrote: “Ukraine’s
choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian
imperialism that Putin represents. Russians, too, face a choice, and
Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within
Russia itself.”
In other words, from the start, Putin was the target of the
Ukraine initiative, not the instigator. But even if you choose to ignore
Gershman’s clear intent, you would have to concoct a bizarre conspiracy theory
to support the conventional wisdom about Putin’s grand plan.
To believe that Putin was indeed the mastermind of the
crisis, you would have to think that he somehow arranged to have the
EU offer the association agreement last year, then got the International
Monetary Fund to attach such draconian “reforms” that Ukrainian President
Viktor Yanukovych backed away from the deal.
Then, Putin had to organize mass demonstrations at Kiev’s Maidan
square against Yanukovych while readying neo-Nazi militias to act as the muscle
to finally overthrow the elected president and replace him with a regime
dominated by far-right Ukrainian nationalists and U.S.-favored technocrats.
Next, Putin had to get the new government to take provocative actions against
ethnic Russians in the east, including threatening to outlaw Russian as an
official language.
And throw into this storyline that Putin all the while was
acting like he was trying to help Yanukovych defuse the crisis and even
acquiesced to Yanukovych agreeing on Feb. 21 to accept an agreement brokered by
three European countries calling for early Ukrainian elections that could vote
him out of office. Instead, Putin was supposedly ordering neo-Nazi
militias to oust Yanukovych in a Feb. 22 putsch, all the better to create the
current crisis.
While such a fanciful scenario would make the most extreme
conspiracy theorist blush, this narrative was embraced by prominent U.S.
politicians, including ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and
“journalists” from the New York Times to CNN. They all agreed that
Putin was a madman on a mission of unchecked aggression against his neighbors
with the goal of reconstituting the Russian Empire. Clinton even compared
him to Adolf Hitler.
This founding false narrative was then embroidered by a
consistent pattern of distorted U.S. reporting as the crisis unfolded.
Indeed, for the past eight months, we have seen arguably the most one-sided
coverage of a major international crisis in memory, although there were other
crazed MSM stampedes, such as Iraq’s non-existent WMD in 2002-03, Iran’s
supposed nuclear bomb project for most of the past decade, Libya’s
“humanitarian crisis” of 2011, and Syria’s sarin gas attack in 2013.
But the hysteria over Ukraine with U.S. officials and
editorialists now trying to rally a NATO military response to Russia’s alleged
“invasion” of Ukraine raises the prospect of a nuclear confrontation that could
end all life on the planet.
The ‘Big Lie’ of the ‘Big Lie’
This madness reached new heights with a Sept. 1
editorial in the neoconservative Washington Post,
which led many of the earlier misguided stampedes and was famously wrong
in asserting that Iraq’s
concealment of WMD was a “flat fact.” In its
new editorial, the Post reprised many of the key elements of the false Ukraine
narrative in the Orwellian context of accusing Russia of deceiving its own
people.
The “through-the-looking-glass” quality of the Post’s editorial
was to tell the “Big Lie” while accusing Putin of telling the “Big Lie.” The
editorial began with the original myth about the aggression waged by Putin
whose “bitter resentment at the Soviet empire’s collapse metastasized into
seething Russian nationalism.
“In prosecuting his widening war in Ukraine, he has also
resurrected the tyranny of the Big Lie, using state-controlled media to twist
the truth so grotesquely that most Russians are in the dark, or profoundly
misinformed, about events in their neighbor to the west.
“In support of those Russian-sponsored militias in eastern Ukraine,
now backed by growing ranks of Russian troops and weapons, Moscow has created a
fantasy that plays on Russian victimization. By this rendering, the forces
backing Ukraine’s government in Kiev are fascists and neo-Nazis, a portrayal
that Mr. Putin
personally advanced on Friday, when he likened the
Ukrainian army’s attempts to regain its own territory to the Nazi siege of
Leningrad in World War II, an appeal meant to inflame Russians’ already
overheated nationalist emotions.”
The Post continued: “Against the extensive propaganda
instruments available to Mr. Putin’s authoritarian regime, the West can promote
a fair and factual version of events, but there’s little it can do to make
ordinary Russians believe it. Even in a country with relatively unfettered
access to the Internet, the monopolistic power of state-controlled media is a
potent weapon in the hands of a tyrant.
“Mr. Putin’s Big Lie shows why it is important to support a free
press where it still exists and outlets like Radio Free Europe that bring the
truth to people who need it.”
Yet the truth is that the U.S. mainstream news media’s
distortion of the Ukraine crisis is something that a real
totalitarian could only dream about. Virtually absent from major U.S. news
outlets across the political spectrum has been any significant effort to tell
the other side of the story or to point out the many times when the West’s
“fair and factual version of events” has been false or deceptive, starting with
the issue of who started this crisis.
Blinded to Neo-Nazis
In another example, the Post and other mainstream U.S. outlets
have ridiculed the idea that neo-Nazis played any significant role in
the putsch that ousted Yanukovych on Feb. 22 or in the Kiev regime’s
brutal offensive against the ethnic Russians of eastern Ukraine.
However, occasionally, the inconvenient truth has slipped
through. For instance, shortly after the February coup, the BBC described how
the neo-Nazis spearheaded the violent seizure of government buildings to drive
Yanukovych from power and were then rewarded with four ministries in the regime
that was cobbled together in the coup’s aftermath.
When ethnic Russians in the south and east resisted the edicts
from the new powers in Kiev, some neo-Nazi militias were incorporated into the
National Guard and dispatched to the front lines as storm troopers eager to
fight and kill people whom some considered “Untermenschen” or sub-human.
Even the New York Times, which has been among the most egregious
violators of journalistic ethics in covering the Ukraine crisis, took note of
Kiev’s neo-Nazi militias carrying Nazi banners while leading attacks on
eastern cities albeit with this embarrassing reality consigned to the last
three paragraphs of a long Times story on a different topic. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “NYT Discovers
Ukraine’s Neo-Nazis at War.”]
Later, the conservative London Telegraph wrote a much more
detailed story about how the Kiev regime had consciously recruited these
dedicated storm troopers, who carried the Wolfsangel symbol favored by
Hitler’s SS, to lead street fighting in eastern cities that were first softened
up by army artillery. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ignoring
Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers.”]
You might think that unleashing Nazi storm troopers on a
European population for the first time since World War II would be a big story
given how much coverage is given to far less significant eruptions of neo-Nazi
sentiment in Europe but this ugly reality in Ukraine disappeared quickly into
the U.S. media’s memory hole. It didn’t fit the preferred good guy/bad guy
narrative, with the Kiev regime the good guys and Putin the bad guy.
Now, the Washington Post has gone a step further dismissing
Putin’s reference to the nasty violence inflicted by Kiev’s neo-Nazi battalions
as part of Putin’s “Big Lie.” The Post is telling its readers that any
reference to these neo-Nazis is just a “fantasy.”
Even more disturbing, the mainstream U.S. news media and
Washington’s entire political class continue to ignore the Kiev government’s
killing of thousands of ethnic Russians, including children and other
non-combatants. The “responsibility to protect” crowd has suddenly lost its
voice. Or, all the deaths are somehow blamed on Putin for supposedly having
provoked the Ukraine crisis in the first place.
A Mysterious ‘Invasion’
And now there’s the curious case of Russia’s alleged “invasion”
of Ukraine, another alarmist claim trumpeted by the Kiev regime and echoed by
NATO hardliners and the MSM.
While I’m told that Russia did provide some light weapons to the
rebels early in the struggle so they could defend themselves and their territory
and a number of Russian nationalists have crossed the border to join the
fight the claims of an overt “invasion” with tanks, artillery and truck convoys
have been backed up by scant intelligence.
One former U.S. intelligence official who has examined the
evidence said the intelligence to support the claims of a significant Russian
invasion amounted to “virtually nothing.” Instead, it appears that the ethnic
Russian rebels may have evolved into a more effective fighting force than many
in the West thought. They are, after all, fighting on their home turf for their
futures.
Concerned about the latest rush to judgment about the
“invasion,” the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of
former U.S. intelligence officials and analysts, took the unusual step of
sending a memo to
German Chancellor Angela Merkel warning her of a possible replay of the false
claims that led to the Iraq War.
“You need to know,” the group wrote, “that accusations of a
major Russian ‘invasion’ of Ukraine appear not to be supported by reliable
intelligence. Rather, the ‘intelligence’ seems to be of the same dubious,
politically ‘fixed’ kind used 12 years ago to ‘justify’ the U.S.-led attack on
Iraq.”
But these doubts and concerns are not reflected in the Post’s
editorial or other MSM accounts of the dangerous Ukraine crisis. Indeed,
Americans who rely on these powerful news outlets for their information are as
sheltered from reality as anyone living in a totalitarian society.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many
of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either
in print here or as
an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). For a
limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and
its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy
includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this
offer, click here.
JOHN PILGER: Silencing the lambs — how
propaganda works
By John Pilger | 11
September 2022, 8:00am | 23 comments
|
https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/john-pilger-silencing-the-lambs--how-propaganda-works,16753
For decades, propaganda has steered
the course of the mass media's narrative, dominated by the needs of state and
corporate power. John Pilger explains
that nothing has changed in today's world.
IN THE 1970s, I met one of Hitler’s leading propagandists, Leni Riefenstahl, whose epic
films glorified the Nazis. We happened to be staying at the same lodge in
Kenya, where she was on a photography assignment, having escaped the fate of
other friends of the Fuhrer.
She told me that the “patriotic
messages” of her films were dependent not on “orders from above” but on
what she called the “submissive
void” of the German public.
Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? I
asked. “Yes, especially
them,” she said.
I think of this as I look around at the propaganda now consuming
Western societies.
Of course, we are very different from Germany in the 1930s. We
live in information societies. We are globalists. We have never been more
aware, more in touch, better connected.
Are we? Or do we live in a Media Society where brainwashing is
insidious and relentless, and perception is filtered according to the needs and
lies of state and corporate power?
The United States dominates the Western world’s media. All but
one of the top ten media companies are based in North America. The internet and
social media – Google, Twitter, Facebook – are mostly American-owned and
controlled.
In my lifetime, the United States has overthrown or attempted to
overthrow more than 50 governments, mostly democracies. It has interfered in
democratic elections in 30 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30
countries, most of them poor and defenceless. It has attempted to murder the
leaders of 50 countries. It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20
countries.
The extent and scale of this carnage is largely unreported and
unrecognised; those responsible continue to dominate Anglo-American political
life.
In the years before he died in 2008, the playwright Harold Pinter made
two extraordinary speeches, which broke a silence:
U.S. foreign
policy could be best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I'll kick your head
in. It is as simple and as crude as that.
What is
interesting about it is that it’s so incredibly successful. It possesses the
structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which
are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful
propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the
means to get away with it, and they do.
In accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pinter said this:
“The crimes
of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but
very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to
America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide
while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty,
highly successful act of hypnosis.”
Pinter was a friend of mine and possibly the last great
political sage — that is, before dissenting politics were gentrified. I asked
him if the “hypnosis” he referred to was the “submissive void” described by
Leni Riefenstahl.
“It’s the same,” he replied. “It means the brainwashing is so thorough we
are programmed to swallow a pack of lies. If we don’t recognise propaganda, we
may accept it as normal and believe it. That’s the submissive void.”
In our systems of corporate democracy, war is an economic
necessity, the perfect marriage of public subsidy and private profit: socialism
for the rich, capitalism for the poor. The day after 9/11, the stock
prices of the war industry soared. More bloodshed was coming, which is great for
business.
Today, the most profitable wars have their own brand. They are
called “forever wars”:
Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and now Ukraine. All are based on a
pack of lies.
Iraq is the most infamous, with its weapons of mass destruction that
didn’t exist. NATO’s
destruction of Libya in 2011 was justified by a massacre in
Benghazi that didn’t happen. Afghanistan was a convenient revenge war for 9/11,
which had nothing to do with the people of Afghanistan.
Today, the news from Afghanistan is how evil the Taliban is —
not that U.S. President Joe Biden’s theft of $7 billion of the country’s bank
reserves is causing widespread suffering. Recently, National Public Radio in
Washington devoted two hours to Afghanistan — and 30 seconds to its starving
people.
At its summit in
Madrid in June, NATO, which is controlled by the United States, adopted a
strategy document that militarises the European continent and escalates the
prospect of war with Russia and China. It proposes multi-domain warfighting
against nuclear-armed peer competitors. In other words, nuclear war.
It says:
‘NATO’s
enlargement has been a historic success.’
I read that in disbelief.
A measure of this “historic success” is the war in Ukraine, news
of which is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion and
omission. I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket
propaganda.
In February, Russia invaded Ukraine as a response to almost
eight years of killing and criminal destruction in the Russian-speaking region
of Donbas on
their border.
In 2014, the United States had sponsored a coup in Kyiv that
got rid of Ukraine’s democratically elected, Russian-friendly president and
installed a successor whom the Americans made clear was their man.
In recent years, American “defender” missiles have been installed
in eastern Europe, Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic, almost certainly
aimed at Russia, accompanied by false assurances all the way back to former
White House Chief of Staff James Baker’s “promise” to Gorbachev in
February 1990 that NATO would never expand beyond Germany.
Ukraine is the frontline. NATO has effectively reached the very
borderland through which Hitler’s army stormed in 1941, leaving more than 23
million dead in the Soviet Union.
Last December,
Russia proposed a far-reaching security plan for Europe. This was dismissed,
derided or suppressed in the Western media. Who read its step-by-step proposals?
On 24 February, Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelenskyy threatened to develop nuclear weapons unless
America armed and protected Ukraine. This was the final straw.
On the same day, Russia invaded — according to the Western
media, an unprovoked act of congenital infamy. The history, the lies, the peace
proposals, the solemn agreements on Donbas at Minsk counted for nothing.
On 25 April, the U.S. Defence Secretary, General Lloyd Austin, flew into
Kyiv and confirmed that America’s aim was to destroy the Russian Federation —
the word he used was “weaken”. America had got the war it
wanted, waged by an American bankrolled and armed proxy and expendable pawn.
Almost none of this was explained to Western audiences.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wanton and inexcusable. It is a
crime to invade a sovereign country. There are no “buts” — except one.
When did the present war in Ukraine begin and who started it?
According to the United Nations, between 2014 and this year, some 14,000 people have
been killed in the Kyiv regime’s civil war on the Donbas. Many of the attacks
were carried out by neo-Nazis.
Watch an ITV news
report from May 2014, by the veteran reporter James Mates, who is
shelled, along with civilians in the city of Mariupol, by Ukraine’s Azov (neo-Nazi)
battalion.
In the same month, dozens of Russian-speaking people were burned
alive or suffocated in a trade union building in Odessa besieged by fascist
thugs, the followers of the Nazi collaborator and anti-Semitic fanatic Stepan Bandera. The New York Times called the
thugs ‘nationalists’.
‘The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment,’ said Andreiy
Biletsky, founder of the Azov Battalion, ‘is to lead the White Races of the world in
a final crusade for their survival, a crusade against the Semite-led
Untermenschen’.
Since February, a campaign of self-appointed “news monitors”
(mostly funded by the Americans and British with links to governments) has
sought to maintain the absurdity that Ukraine’s neo-Nazis don’t exist.
Airbrushing, a term once associated with Stalin’s purges, has
become a tool of mainstream journalism.
In less than a decade, a “good” China has been airbrushed and a
“bad” China has replaced it: from the world’s workshop to a budding new Satan.
Much of this propaganda originates in the U.S. and is
transmitted through proxies and “think tanks” such as the notorious Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the voice
of the arms industry, and by zealous journalists such as Peter Hartcher of
the Sydney Morning
Herald, who labelled those spreading Chinese
influence as ‘rats, flies,
mosquitoes and sparrows’ and called for these ‘pests’ to be ‘eradicated’.
News about China in the West is almost entirely about the threat
from Beijing. Airbrushed are the 400 American military bases that surround most
of China, an armed necklace that reaches from Australia to the Pacific and
Southeast Asia, Japan and Korea. The Japanese island of Okinawa and the Korean
island of Jeju are loaded guns aimed point blank at the industrial heart of
China. A Pentagon official described this as a “noose”.
Palestine has been misreported for as long as I can remember. To
the BBC, there is
the “conflict” of “two narratives”. The longest, most brutal, lawless military
occupation in modern times is unmentionable.
The stricken people of Yemen barely exist. They are media
unpeople. While the Saudis rain down their American cluster bombs with British
advisors working alongside the Saudi targeting officers, more than half a
million children face starvation.
This brainwashing by omission has a long history. The slaughter
of the First World War was suppressed by reporters who were knighted for their
compliance and confessed in their memoirs. In 1917, the editor of the Manchester
Guardian, CP Scott, confided to Prime Minister Lloyd George: “If people really knew [the
truth], the war would be stopped
tomorrow, but they don’t know and can’t know.”
The refusal to see people and events as those in other countries
see them is a media virus in the West, as debilitating as COVID-19. It is as if
we see the world through a one-way mirror, in which “we” are moral and benign
and “they” are not. It is a profoundly imperial view.
The history that is a living presence in China and Russia is
rarely explained and rarely understood. Russian President Vladimir Putin is
Adolf Hitler. Chinese President Xi Jinping is Fu Manchu. Epic
achievements, such as the eradication of abject poverty in China, are barely
known. How perverse and squalid this is.
When will we allow ourselves to understand? Training journalists
factory-style is not the answer. Neither is the wondrous digital tool, which is
a means, not an end, like the one-finger typewriter and the linotype machine.
In recent years, some of the best journalists have been eased
out of the mainstream. “Defenestrated” is the word used. The spaces once open
to mavericks, to journalists who went against the grain, truth-tellers, have
closed.
The case of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is the
most shocking. When Julian and WikiLeaks could
win readers and prizes for The
Guardian, the New
York Times and other self-important “papers of record”, he was
celebrated.
When the dark state objected and demanded the destruction of
hard drives and the assassination of Julian’s character, he was made a public
enemy. Vice President Biden called him a “hi-tech terrorist”. Hillary Clinton asked: “Can’t we just drone this guy?”
The ensuing campaign of abuse and vilification against Julian
Assange – the UN Rapporteur on Torture called it “mobbing” – brought the liberal
press to its lowest ebb. We know who they are. I think of them as collaborators:
as Vichy journalists.
When will real journalists stand up? An inspirational samizdat already
exists on the internet: Consortium News, founded by
the great reporter Robert Parry, Max Blumenthal’s Grayzone, Mint Press News, Media Lens, Declassified UK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, CounterPunch, Independent Australia, the work of Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone and
others who will forgive me for not mentioning them here.
And when will writers stand up, as they did against the rise of
fascism in the 1930s? When will filmmakers stand up, as they did against the
Cold War in the 1940s? When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation
ago?
Having soaked for 82 years in a deep bath of righteousness that
is the official version of the last world war, isn’t it time those who are
meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the
propaganda? The urgency is greater than ever.
John Pilger is a
regular contributor to Independent Australia and a distinguished
journalist and filmmaker. You can follow John on Twitter @JohnPilger.
This article is more than 8 years old
In Ukraine, the US is dragging us towards war with Russia
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/13/ukraine-us-war-russia-john-pilger
Washington's
role in Ukraine, and its backing for the regime's neo-Nazis, has huge
implications for the rest of the world
A
pro-Russian activist with a shell casing and a US-made meal pack that fell from
a Ukrainian army APC in an attack on a roadblock on 3 May in Andreevka,
Ukraine. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty
Tue 13 May 2014 15.30 EDT
Why do we tolerate
the threat of another world war in our name? Why do we allow lies
that justify this risk? The scale of our indoctrination, wrote Harold Pinter, is a "brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of
hypnosis", as if the truth "never happened even while it was
happening".
Every year
the American historian William Blum publishes
his "updated summary of the record of US foreign policy" which shows
that, since 1945, the US has tried to overthrow more than 50 governments, many
of them democratically elected; grossly interfered in elections in 30
countries; bombed the civilian populations of 30 countries; used chemical and
biological weapons; and attempted to assassinate foreign leaders.
In many
cases Britain has been a collaborator. The degree of human suffering, let alone
criminality, is little acknowledged in the west, despite the presence of the
world's most advanced communications and nominally most free journalism. That
the most numerous victims of terrorism – "our" terrorism – are
Muslims, is unsayable. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured
as a weapon of Anglo-American policy (Operation
Cyclone in Afghanistan) is suppressed. In April the US state
department noted that, following Nato's campaign in 2011, "Libya has become a terrorist safe haven".
The name of
"our" enemy has changed over the years, from communism to Islamism,
but generally it is any society independent of western power and occupying
strategically useful or resource-rich territory, or merely offering an
alternative to US domination. The leaders of these obstructive nations are
usually violently shoved aside, such as the democrats Muhammad Mossedeq in Iran, Arbenz in
Guatemala and Salvador Allende in Chile, or they
are murdered like Patrice Lumumba in the
Democratic Republic of Congo. All are subjected to a western media campaign of
vilification – think Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, now Vladimir Putin.
Washington's
role in Ukraine is
different only in its implications for the rest of us. For the first time since
the Reagan years, the US is threatening to take the world to war. With eastern
Europe and the Balkans now military outposts of Nato, the last "buffer
state" bordering Russia – Ukraine – is being torn apart by fascist forces
unleashed by the US and the EU. We in the west are now backing neo-Nazis in a
country where Ukrainian Nazis backed Hitler.
Having
masterminded the coup in February against the democratically elected government
in Kiev, Washington's planned seizure of Russia's historic, legitimate
warm-water naval base in Crimea failed. The Russians defended themselves, as
they have done against every threat and invasion from the west for almost a
century.
But Nato's
military encirclement has accelerated, along with US-orchestrated attacks on
ethnic Russians in Ukraine. If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid,
his pre-ordained "pariah" role will justify a Nato-run guerrilla war
that is likely to spill into Russia itself.
Instead,
Putin has confounded the war party by seeking an accommodation with Washington
and the EU, by withdrawing Russian troops from the Ukrainian border and urging
ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine to abandon the weekend's provocative referendum. These
Russian-speaking and bilingual people – a third of Ukraine's population – have
long sought a democratic federation that reflects the country's ethnic
diversity and is both autonomous of Kiev and independent of Moscow. Most are
neither "separatists" nor "rebels", as the western media
calls them, but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland.
Like the
ruins of Iraq and Afghanistan, Ukraine has been turned into a CIA theme park –
run personally by CIA director John Brennan in Kiev, with dozens of
"special units" from the CIA and FBI setting up a "security
structure" that oversees savage attacks on those who opposed the February
coup. Watch the videos, read the eye-witness reports from the massacre in
Odessa this month. Bussed fascist thugs burned the trade union headquarters, killing 41
people trapped inside. Watch the police standing by.
A doctor
described trying to rescue people, "but I was stopped by pro-Ukrainian
Nazi radicals. One of them pushed me away rudely, promising that soon me and
other Jews of Odessa are going to meet the same fate. What occurred yesterday
didn't even take place during the fascist occupation in my town in world war
two. I wonder, why the whole world is keeping silent." [see footnote]
Russian-speaking
Ukrainians are fighting for survival. When Putin announced the withdrawal of
Russian troops from the border, the Kiev junta's defence secretary, Andriy
Parubiy – a founding member of the fascist Svoboda party – boasted that attacks
on "insurgents" would continue. In Orwellian style, propaganda in the
west has inverted this to Moscow "trying
to orchestrate conflict and provocation",
according to William Hague. His cynicism is matched by Obama's grotesque
congratulations to the coup junta on its "remarkable restraint" after
the Odessa massacre. The junta, says Obama, is "duly elected".
As Henry Kissinger once said: "It
is not a matter of what is true that counts, but what is perceived to be
true."
In the US
media the Odessa atrocity has been played down as "murky" and a
"tragedy" in which "nationalists" (neo-Nazis) attacked
"separatists" (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a
federal Ukraine). Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal damned the victims –
"Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government
Says". Propaganda in Germany has been pure cold war, with the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung warning its readers of Russia's "undeclared
war". For the Germans, it is a poignant irony that Putin is the only
leader to condemn the rise of fascism in 21st-century Europe.
A popular
truism is that "the world changed" following 9/11. But what has
changed? According to the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a silent
coup has taken place in Washington and rampant militarism now rules. The
Pentagon currently runs "special operations" – secret wars – in 124 countries.
At home, rising poverty and a loss of liberty are the historic corollary of a
perpetual war state. Add the risk of nuclear war, and the question is: why do
we tolerate this?
The following footnote
was appended on 16 May 2014: The quotation from a doctor who says he was
"stopped by pro-Ukrainian Nazi radicals" was from an account on a
Facebook page that has subsequently been removed.
Documentary Video:
Ukraine on Fire - Oliver Stone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwZApPCFXIc
· Ukraine.
Across its eastern border is Russia and to its west-Europe. For centuries, it
has been at the center of a tug-of-war between powers seeking to control its
rich lands and access to the Black Sea. 2014's Maidan Massacre triggered a
bloody uprising that ousted president Viktor Yanukovych and painted Russia as
the perpetrator by Western media. But was it? "Ukraine on Fire" by
Igor Lopatonok provides a historical perspective for the deep divisions in the
region which lead to the 2004 Orange Revolution, 2014 uprisings, and the
violent overthrow of democratically elected Yanukovych. Covered by Western
media as a people's revolution, it was in fact a coup d'état scripted and
staged by nationalist groups and the U.S. State Department. Investigative
journalist Robert Parry reveals how U.S.-funded political NGOs and media
companies have emerged since the 80s replacing the CIA in promoting America's
geopolitical agenda abroad.
Documentary: "Ukraine - The Masks of the
revolution" by Paul Moreira, English Subs
https://vimeo.com/163237577
A Look at Ukraine’s Dark Side
February 7, 2016
Exclusive: Americans
have been carefully shielded from the ugly underbelly of Ukraine’s Maidan
uprising in 2014 that overthrew the elected president and installed a
U.S.-backed, fiercely anti-Russian regime which has unleashed armed neo-Nazis.
But a French documentary has dared to expose this grim reality, as Gilbert
Doctorow describes.
By Gilbert Doctorow
A new French documentary depicts a long-denied truth that
Ukraine is in the grip of extreme right-wing nationalists who seek to impose
what the British scholar Richard Sakwa has called a monist view of nationhood,
one which does not accept minorities or heterogeneity. Rainbow politics is not
what the Maidan uprising was all about.
Like the Communism which held power in Ukraine before 1992, this
new extreme nationalism can impose its will only by violence or the threat of
violence. It is by definition the antithesis of European values of tolerance
and multiculturalism.
Sen. John McCain appearing with Ukrainian
rightists of the Svoboda party at a pre-coup rally in Kiev.
This intimidation is what Paul Moreira’s Canal+ documentary,
“Ukraine: The Masks of Revolution,” shows us graphically, frame by frame. That
this repression happens to take place under an ideology that incorporates
elements of fascism if not Nazism is incidental but not decisive to the power
of the documentary. [Click here for
the documentary in French; here for a
segment with English subtitles.]
But what Moreira shows as surprising as the contents may be to a
Western audience actually represents very basic journalism, reporting on events
that are quite well known inside Ukraine even as this dark underbelly of the
Maidan “revolution” has been hidden from most Europeans and Americans.
Moreira is a professional documentary filmmaker, not an area
specialist. He has done films in many countries including Iraq, Israel, Burma
and Argentina. He says at the start of this Canal+ documentary that he was
drawn to the subject of Ukraine’s Maidan uprising because he “felt sympathy for
these people who demonstrated day after day on the streets in winter
conditions.
“They wanted to join Europe, to move away from Russia. They
wanted the corrupt President [Viktor] Yanukovych to leave. They hoped for more
justice, fewer inequalities. But I was struck by one thing the images of the
American diplomat [Victoria] Nuland on Maidan distributing bread. The Free
World, its cameras, sided with the insurgents.”
There were also the discordant images of neo-Nazi symbols and
flags. To assess the post-Maidan Ukraine, Moreira decided to go see for
himself.
The documentary draws upon his interviews with leaders of the
rightist paramilitary groups and extreme nationalist politicians as well as
other Ukrainians on both sides of the conflict. He shows the attacks on police
by Maidan street fighters before Yanukovych’s overthrow on Feb. 22, 2014, and
the May 2, 2014 massacre in Odessa of 46 Russian-speaking demonstrators who
opposed the new regime.
He shows a violent protest by nationalist extremists outside the
parliament in Kiev and the recent blockade by the Right Sektor militias
stopping food and other goods crossing into Crimea, which voted overwhelmingly
after the 2014 putsch to leave Ukraine and rejoin Russia. The Crimean blockade
was in violation of Ukrainian government policy but was not stopped by the Kiev
authorities.
Assistant Secretary of State for European and
Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland during a press conference at the U.S. Embassy
in Kiev, Ukraine, on Feb. 7, 2014. (U.S. State Department photo)
Secretary Nuland’s Cookies
During the course of the film, Moreira intersperses footage of
the controlling hand of U.S. officials both before and after the February 2014
coup. Twice we see Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Nuland
handing out cookies on the Maidan to encourage the demonstrators in December
2013. We see U.S politicians including Sen. John McCain with neo-Nazi Svoboda
party leader Oleh Tyahnybok on a podium in Maidan.
In another scene, Nuland testifies before Congress in May 2014
and is asked by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-California, if she knew there were
neo-Nazis in the street violence that led to Yanukovych’s removal. When Nuland
was evasive, Rohrabacher asked whether besides the popular Maidan images of
mothers and grandmothers with flowers there were very dangerous street fighters
and neo-Nazi groups.
Nuland responded, “Almost every color of Ukraine was represented
including some ugly colors.” Rohrabacher said he took that as a “yes.”
In September 2015, Moreira covered the annual Yalta European
Strategy Meeting in Kiev and tried to get impromptu interviews with prominent
Americans, such as Nuland and former CIA boss General David Petraeus, the
author of the 2007 “surge” in Iraq and currently a strong advocate for sending
offensive weapons to Ukraine.
Moreira succeeded only in getting a sound bite from retired Gen.
Stanley McChrystal, who said the task of the day was to improve the militias
and strengthen their ties to the Ukrainian government. Moreira asked McChrystal
if he knew that the paramilitaries had attacked the Verhovna Rada (Ukraine’s
parliament) the week before. With a dismissive smile before he made his
getaway, McChrystal responded, “That’s a problem”
Though Moreira’s documentary presented material that was
undeniably true much from the public record it was revelatory for many
Westerners familiar only with the pro-Maidan images and commentary carried by
the West’s mainstream news media. Because the documentary clashed with this
“conventional wisdom,” it immediately became “controversial.”
On Jan. 31, one day before the documentary appeared on Canal+,
Le Monde issued a stern rebuke under the title “Paul Moreira gives us a
distorted vision of the Ukrainian conflict.”
Benoit Vitkine, the newspaper’s reporter for Ukraine, wrote that
the extreme nationalists were only one part of the armed uprising and accused
Moreira of focusing too much on their role in the Maidan and its aftermath.
Vitkine noted that the Right’s “electoral results are laughable” and denied
that they are “the new masters of the Ukrainian streets.”
Key Nazi Role
But there is little doubt that the neo-Nazis and other extreme
nationalists played a key role in escalating the Maidan protests into the
violent uprising that drove Yanukovych from office. For instance, Andriy
Parubiy, the commandant of the Maidan “self-defense forces,” was a well-known
neo-Nazi, who founded the Social-National Party of Ukraine in 1991. The party
blended radical Ukrainian nationalism with neo-Nazi symbols. Parubiy also
formed a paramilitary spinoff, the Patriots of Ukraine, and defended the
awarding of the title, “Hero of Ukraine,” to World War II Nazi collaborator
Stepan Bandera, whose own paramilitary forces exterminated thousands of Jews
and Poles in pursuit of a racially pure Ukraine.
After the Feb. 22 coup, Parubiy was one of four far-right
Ukrainian nationalists given control of a ministry, in his case, national
security, and he integrated many of the right-wing militias into the National
Guard, sending neo-Nazi units such as the Azov Battalion into eastern Ukraine
to crush ethnic Russians who resisted the new order in Kiev.
Ukraine’s post-coup Secretary for National
Security Andriy Parubiy.
Moreira’s documentary also shows footage of right-wing
paramilitaries demonstrating aggressively in the streets outside the parliament
and scenes of their illegal blockade at the Crimean border, where they
literally did control the streets and roads.
Le Monde’s other argument about how poorly the rightists have
fared in elections misses the point about the significance of the Right’s
large-scale disruptions and violent attacks thus intimidating the parliament
and the government. But that reality is downplayed in the West.
Vitkine also accuses Moreira of omitting “the Russian
aggression” against Ukraine, which Vitkine says explains the radicalization of
part of the Ukrainian population and the decision of Kiev to arm the battalions
of right-wing volunteers. But the neo-Nazi role in the Maidan protests predated
any Russian intervention in support of the embattled ethnic Russians in eastern
Ukraine and Crimea. Russian President Vladimir Putin held a key strategy
session on how to respond to the Maidan putsch on Feb. 23, 2014, the day after
the coup. Putin and Russia were responding to what they saw as a U.S.-backed
overthrow of a democratically elected government on their border; they didn’t
instigate the crisis.
Similarly Vitkine rejects Moreira’s charge of U.S. complicity in
the rise of the neo-Nazis and Moreira’s acceptance of the Crimean referendum in
which 96 percent of the voters favored leaving Ukraine and rejoining Russia.
But the results of that referendum have been supported by polls both before and
after the referendum, including public opinion samples organized by the U.S.
government. There can be no serious doubt that the vast majority of Crimeans
wanted out of Ukraine and saw practical benefits in rejoining Russia. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “Crimeans Keep Saying No to Ukraine.”]
Bolstering Propaganda
In other words, Le Monde’s key reporter on Ukraine is attacking
Moreira from the standpoint of a narrative written in Washington that is more
propaganda than reality. In this sense, the French center left as reflected by
Le Monde is no less under the spell of neoconservative ideology than many
Democrats in the United States.
That being said, Vitkine does toss one bouquet to Moreira for
his treatment of the May 2, 2014 “events” in Odessa, the slaughter of
anti-Maidan protesters who sought safety inside the Trade Union Building, which
was then set ablaze:
“Even if he overestimates the role of Pravy [Right] Sektor and
assigns responsibility for this drama too peremptorily, the film performs a
salutary piece of work by dwelling at length on this episode from the
post-Maidan days that is often neglected.”
But Vitkine condescendingly mocks Moreira’s self-presentation as
“the white knight who is exposing past truths that have been passed over in
silence [which] just doesn’t work. This experienced documentary filmmaker has
taken up a real subject. He has chosen to ‘see for himself,’ as he tells us.
But he only saw what he wanted to see.”
Moreira’s response to Le Monde and two other critics appeared in
French on the site blogs.mediapart.fr and in English translation on the website
of newcoldwar.org. He cited the pressure from the Ukrainian authorities for
Canal+ not to air the documentary.
He also reasserted his thesis that the right-wing paramilitaries
are a great threat to Ukrainian democracy and that to deny their existence and
the danger they pose simply to avoid playing “into Russian propaganda is to
become a propagandist oneself.” Moreira accused Vitkine of “unusually violent
writing.”
After the airing of the documentary, an “Open Letter to Paul
Moreira” was published on the website of the French weekly Nouvel Observateur,
which has been described as “the French intellectuals’ parish magazine.”
Seven of the 17 journalists who signed the Open Letter work for
French state media France 24 and Radio France International. The letter starts
and ends with stinging reproaches to Moreira, but the contents in the middle
are muddled.
For instance, the letter acknowledges the reality of the central
issue raised by Moreira’s documentary: that there is a problem with
paramilitaries in Ukraine. However, like Vitkine, the authors wanted to shift
the discussion from that reality and find excuses in the war that rendered
these paramilitaries heavily armed and a danger to the country’s future, i.e.,
blaming “Russian aggression.”
Rejecting a Referendum
Like Vitkine, the authors reject the results of the Crimean
referendum, pointing to the presence of Russian troops on the peninsula. But
they themselves ignore the repeated polls and news reporting by disinterested
third parties in the past year validating the results of the 2014 referendum.
Images of dead victims from the Odessa fire on
May 2, 2014. (Photo via RT, credited to ustream channel opposition-ru)
They acknowledge that the right-wing paramilitaries were a
problem but claim they were brought under control during 2015. This is a
dubious assertion given the continuing political instability in Kiev and the
apparent extremist influence on the parliament, frustrating the government’s
efforts to implement the terms of the Minsk II accords. The authors are silent
about Moreira’s footage of the rightists’ blockade at the Crimean-Ukrainian
border.
Most emphatically, the authors reject the “theory of overthrow
of the government in February 2014 by the paramilitary groups of the extreme
right.” In doing so, these journalists claiming expert knowledge of the recent
history willfully ignore the substantial evidence indicating that the Maidan
snipers who escalated the violence on Feb. 20, 2014, were rightist false-flag
provocateurs intent on enraging both the demonstrators and the government’s
Berkut police, some of whom were also targeted and killed.
The letter writers also overlook the critical role of right-wing
leader Dmitry Yarosh and his forces in shredding the European Union’s Feb. 21,
2014 agreement with Yanukovych in which the embattled president agreed to
reduced powers and new elections.
They do salute Moreira’s coverage of the Odessa massacre, but
say vaguely it was not the only incident in Ukraine that has not been
adequately investigated. And they say that the French and international press
has covered extensively the atrocities in Ukraine, which is not a credible
claim.
We might conclude that these 17 journalists have written their
Open Letter to safeguard their jobs with the French state media and their
continued travel rights to Ukraine, which is essential to their careers. But
the story does not end there.
One of the 17 signatories, Gulliver Cragg, who works for the
France24 television channel, also published a very curious article on the
Moreira documentary in other venues. His side essay was written for the Kyiv
Post and put online by the still more dubious stopfake.org, a website devoted
to the “struggle against fake information about events in Ukraine,” especially
any evidence that puts the U.S.-backed regime in a negative light.
Cragg’s essay opens and closes with harsh words for Moreira.
However, in the middle, he has harsh words for the Ukrainian authorities, whom
he blames for creating their own public relations disasters by misguided
policies, such as: “by naming a suspected neo-Nazi, Vadim Troyan, to be police
chief in Kyiv region in Autumn 2014. Or appointing the Right Sector leader
Dmytro Yarosh an official Defence Ministry adviser.
“Or allowing the Azov battalion, now integrated into the
National Guard, to use the Wolfsangel [neo-Nazi] symbol on their logo. Or
failing, as Moreira points out in his documentary, to punish any Ukrainian
nationalists for their role in the Odessa tragedy.”
Cragg acknowledges that this might lead outsiders to conclude
that the far right has too much influence in Ukraine. Moreover, he blames
directly President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk for
simply not understanding all of this and for not changing their behavior and
appointments.
And while Cragg comes back to his conclusion that Moreira is
blowing things out of proportion, he agrees that far-right groups in Ukraine
wield influence and that their weapons are cause for concern, “a legitimate
topic for foreign reporters.”
Some Criticism of Ukraine
Cragg continues: “Ukraine’s leaders and media should engage with
this issue and encourage a national debate. How do we define far-right? Where
does patriotism end and bigotry begin? Where do we draw the line between
activist and extremist? Politicians should be addressing these questions and
speaking out against those whose views are not compatible with the European
values Ukraine claims to espouse. And, crucially, they should be heard doing so
on foreign media.”
Nazi symbols on helmets worn by members of
Ukraine’s Azov battalion. (As filmed by a Norwegian film crew and shown on
German TV)
And so, grudgingly, even some of Moreira’s critics have come out
of their crouches and put forward constructive suggestions. By prompting this,
Moreira has performed a praiseworthy service.
Yet, while the French mainstream journalists found the need to
chastise one of their own for breaking with the pro-Maidan “group think,” the
U.S. mainstream media simply continues to ignore Ukraine’s ugly realities, all
the better to fit with the State Department’s prescribed narrative.
Nothing like Moreira’s documentary has appeared on U.S.
television or in mainstream U.S. newspapers. The dark side of the Maidan and in
particular the role of neo-Nazi groups and other violent extremists in
fomenting and achieving the coup d’etat have been discussed almost exclusively
at alternative and independent outlets, mostly on the Internet.
The editorial boards of the country’s newspapers of record The
Washington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal ensured that
newspaper columns and op-ed pages set out almost exclusively Official
Washington’s narrative day after day. Opposing views were increasingly choked
off, finally getting no space whatsoever in mainstream outlets.
One of the few exceptions in print media was The Nation, where
contributing editor and Professor of Russian History emeritus at Princeton and
New York University Stephen Cohen delivered detailed critiques of the factual
and interpretational errors of the mainstream narrative.
Otherwise heterodox views became accessible only to determined
truth seekers exploring the alternative media portals. I name here in
particular one devastating critique of the one-sided mainstream narrative that
Jim Naureckas published at the media criticism
site, Fair.
Needless to say, critical views of the Maidan and its neo-Nazi
components got almost no attention in American broadcast media. No American channel
so far has shown the civic courage of a Canal+.
Ukraine’s Diversity
Much as I admire the courage and dedication of Paul Moreira to
produce such a valuable documentary focusing on very troubling aspects of the
post-Maidan political realities in Ukraine, he is an outsider to the subject
matter who has missed some very relevant facts about Ukrainian society before
his eyes. His critics have missed the same points due to their ideological
persuasions or lacking analytical skills.
The fact is that the population of Ukraine is very diverse. The
major split between native Ukrainian speakers in the West of the country and
native Russian speakers in the East of the country remains unchanged. It is
more than ironic that four of the five leaders of extremist Ukrainian
nationalists whom Moreira interviewed or otherwise featured in the documentary
were speaking native Russian. Such was the intermix of family traditions and
ethnicity in Ukraine until recently. Add to this the very many minorities of
other nationalities, including Hungarians and Romanians who are especially
numerous in territorial pockets.
The ambition of the post-Maidan government in Kiev and of the
nationalist extremists who are maintaining pressure on it through intimidation
by their paramilitaries is to forge a monist national identity. This
suppression of non-Ukrainian-ethnic minorities can be achieved only by violence
and threats of violence.
In this sense, the paramilitaries are only the tip of the
iceberg. Violence and intimidation today permeates Ukrainian society
across the whole geography of the country. It takes the form of murder of
journalist and newspaper editors. Meanwhile, there have been changes in the
status of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate as well as
to street and city names. Further demonstrating hostility toward ethnic and
political diversity, Ukraine has witnessed forcible destruction of war
memorials to the “wrong” heroes to erase the shared Russian-Ukrainian
traditions and to impose a new politically correct consciousness on a hitherto
diverse country. Had Moreira sought to document this, he would have needed
another one-hour segment or more.
Instead, Moreira focused on the existence of the aggressive
nationalist and neo-Nazi armed movements in present-day Ukraine, a reality that
his critics in France don’t deny even as they try to forgive it by alluding to
“Russian aggression” and the war in the Donbass.
Their insistence that these extremists are just a small part of
the paramilitary battalions, not to mention the general population, as revealed
by electoral results, is intentionally misleading. That point would have
relevance if Ukraine were a functioning democracy. But the ability of these
nationalist extremists to intimidate parliament and operate illegal blockades
as they do at the Crimean border proves that Ukraine is not a functioning
democracy.
Those are the essential points which emerge from the Canal+
documentary and its aftermath. For this we must express our deep appreciation
to Mr. Moreira and the management of the television channel.
Doctorow is the European
Coordinator, American Committee for East West Accord, Ltd. His latest book Does
Russia Have a Future? (August 2015) is available in paperback and e-book from
Amazon.com and affiliated websites. For donations to support the European
activities of ACEWA, write to eastwestaccord@gmail.com. © Gilbert
Doctorow, 2015
Pope Francis says Ukraine war
"perhaps somehow either provoked or not prevented"
U.S. Government Lies & Western
Media Lies about the war being “unprovoked”
U.S. Agency for International
Development
HOME » NEWS
AND INFORMATION » PRESS RELEASES » ON RUSSIA’S UNPROVOKED AND UNJUSTIFIED ATTACK
ON UKRAINE
https://www.usaid.gov/news-information/press-releases/feb-25-2022-russia-unprovoked-and-unjustified-attack-ukraine
ON RUSSIA’S UNPROVOKED AND UNJUSTIFIED ATTACK ON UKRAINE
Statement
by Administrator Samantha Power
For Immediate Release
Friday, February 25, 2022
Office of Press Relations
press@usaid.gov
The world is
now witnessing what Vladimir Putin means when he says he does not want war.
After months
of relentless diplomacy in which the United States, Ukraine and our allies
engaged with Russia in good faith to avoid further conflict, President Putin
has shown he is not interested in peace, but only in power—in invading a
neighbor in a premeditated and unprovoked attack, carving up sovereign
territory by force, and denying the Ukrainian people the right to live in peace
and and determine their own future. He has gone so far as to suggest Ukraine
has no ability to exist as a nation separate from Russia, and baselessly and
debasingly invoked claims of genocide to create a pretext for this war of
choice—a war for which Russia is entirely responsible.
As Russian
artillery fire and missiles light up the sky across Ukraine’s historic cities,
and tanks and troops illegally flood across the country’s borders, the United
States stands with the Ukrainian people, ready to support them and their
democracy and independence. And we join nations all around the world in
condemning this blatant aggression, in demanding Russia end this war, and in
enacting strong sanctions and consequences.
The U.S.
government has worked with Ukraine, its neighbors, and our humanitarian
assistance partners to prepare for the emergency that this war is now causing.
USAID has dispatched a Disaster Assistance Response Team—our nation’s finest
international emergency responders—to the region to support the Ukrainian
people as they bear the brunt of Russian aggression. We have already responded
to a range of needs in the lead-up to the invasion, from cybersecurity support
to energy security to countering disinformation as Russia attempts to disrupt
critical infrastructure and communications. And we will continue to ramp up
access to primary and trauma medical care, food, clean water, and shelter. But
despite the immense, multinational efforts to prepare for this scenario, we
know that many Ukrainians will needlessly suffer at the hands of Russian
aggression. In the coming days and weeks, we will be continually calibrating
our response in light of developments on the ground in both Ukraine and
neighboring countries.
For 30 years
now, the United States has been working to support the Ukrainian people’s dream
of a free, independent, and prosperous Ukraine. For eight years, brave
Ukrainians fought and died for that dream after Russia invaded Crimea and the
Donbas region. Today, as a result of President Putin’s flagrant disregard for
human life and Ukrainian sovereignty, many more will suffer. But the dream—and
America’s support for it—will never die.
READ MORE
Remarks
by President Biden on Russia’s Unprovoked and
Unjustified Attack on Ukraine
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/02/24/remarks-by-president-biden-on-russias-unprovoked-and-unjustified-attack-on-ukraine/
THE PRESIDENT: Sorry
to keep you waiting. Good afternoon. The Russian military has begun
a brutal assault on the people of Ukraine without provocation, without
justification, without necessity.
This is a premeditated
attack. Vladimir Putin has been planning this for months, as I’ve been —
as we’ve been saying all along. He moved more than 175,000 troops,
military equipment into positions along the Ukrainian border.
He moved blood supplies
into position and built a field hospital, which tells you all you need to know
about his intentions all along.
He rejected every
good-faith effort the United States and our Allies and partners made to address
our mutual security concerns through dialogue to avoid needless conflict and
avert human suffering.
For weeks — for weeks, we
have been warning that this would happen. And now it’s unfolding largely
as we predicted.
In the past week, we’ve
seen shelling increase in the Donbas, the region in eastern Ukraine controlled
by Russian-backed separatists.
Rus- — the Russian
government has perpetrated cyberattacks against Ukraine.
We saw a staged political
theater in Moscow — outlandish and baseless claims that Ukraine was — Ukraine
was about to invade and launch a war against Russia, that Ukraine was prepared
to use chemical weapons, that Ukraine committed a genocide — without any
evidence.
We saw a flagrant violation
of international law in attempting to unilaterally create two new so-called
republics on sovereign Ukrainian territory.
And at the very moment that
the United Nations Security Council was meeting to stand up for Ukraine’s
sovereignty to stave off invasion, Putin declared his war.
Within moments — moments,
missile strikes began to fall on historic cities across Ukraine.
Then came in the air raids,
followed by tanks and troops rolling in.
We’ve been transparent with
the world. We’ve shared declassified evidence about Russia’s plans and
cyberattacks and false pretexts so that there can be no confusion or cover-up
about what Putin was doing.
Putin is the
aggressor. Putin chose this war. And now he and his country will
bear the consequences.
Today, I’m authorizing
additional strong sanctions and new limitations on what can be exported to
Russia.
This is going to impose
severe costs on the Russian economy, both immediately and over time.
We have purposefully
designed these sanctions to maximize the long-term impact on Russia and to
minimize the impact on the United States and our Allies.
And I want to be clear: The
United States is not doing this alone. For months, we’ve been building a
coalition of partners representing well more than half of the global economy.
Twenty-seven members of the
European Union, including France, Germany, Italy — as well as the United
Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and many others — to amplify
the joint impact of our response.
I just spoke with the G7
leaders this morning, and we are in full and total agreement. We will
limit Russia’s ability to do business in Dollars, Euros, Pounds, and Yen to be
part of the global economy. We will limit their ability to do that.
We are going to stunt the ability to finance and grow Rus- — the Russian
military.
We’re going to impose major
— and we’re going to impair their ability to compete in a high-tech 21st
century economy.
We’ve already seen the
impact of our actions on Russia’s currency, the Ruble, which early today hit
its weakest level ever — ever in history. And the Russian stock market
plunged today. The Russian government’s borrowing rate spiked by over 15
percent.
In today’s actions, we have
now sanctioned Russian banks that together hold around $1 trillion in assets.
We’ve cut off Russia’s
largest bank — a bank that holds more than one third of Russia’s banking assets
by itself — cut it off from the U.S. financial system.
And today, we’re also
blocking four more major banks. That means every asset they have in
America will be frozen. This includes V.T.B., the second-largest bank in
Russia, which has $250 billion in assets.
As promised, we’re also
adding names to the list of Russian elites and their family members that are
sanctioning — that we’re sanctioning as well.
As I said on Tuesday, these
are people who personally gain from the Kremlin’s policies and they should
share in the pain. We will keep up this drumbeat of those designations
against corrupt billionaires in the days ahead.
On Tuesday, we stopped the
Russian government from raising money from U.S. or European investors.
Now, we’re going to apply
the same restrictions to Russia’s largest state-owned enterprises — companies
with assets that exceed $1.4 trillion.
Some of the most powerful
impacts of our actions will come over time as we squeeze Russia’s access to
finance and technology for strategic sectors of its economy and degrade its
industrial capacity for years to come.
Between our actions and
those of our Allies and partners, we estimate that we’ll cut off more than half
of Russia’s high-tech imports.
It will strike a blow to
their ability to continue to modernize their military. It’ll degrade
their aerospace industry, including their space program. It will hurt
their ability to build ships, reducing their ability to compete
economically. And it will be a major hit to Putin’s long-term strategic
ambitions.
And we’re preparing to do
more. In addition to the economic penalties we’re imposing, we’re also
taking steps to defend our NATO Allies, particularly in the east.
Tomorrow, NATO will convene
a summit — we’ll be there — to bring together the leaders of 30 Allied nations
and close partners to affirm our solidarity and to map out the next steps we
will take to further strengthen all aspects of our NATO Alliance.
Although we provided over
$650 million in defensive assistance to Ukraine just this year — this last
year, let me say it again: Our forces are not and will not be engaged in the
conflict with Russia in Ukraine. Our forces are not going to Europe to fight
in Ukraine but to defend our NATO Allies and reassure those Allies in the east.
As I made crystal clear,
the United States will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full force
of American power. And the good news is: NATO is more united and more
determined than ever.
There is no doubt — no
doubt that the United States and every NATO Ally will meet our Article 5
commitments, which says that an attack on one is an attack on all.
Over the past few weeks, I
ordered thousands of additional forces to Germany and Poland as part of our
commitment to NATO.
On Tuesday, in response to
Russia’s aggressive action, including its troop presence in Belarus and the
Black Sea, I’ve authorized the deployment of ground and air forces already
stationed in Europe to NATO’s eastern flank Allies: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,
Poland, and Romania.
Our Allies have also been
stepping up, adding — the other Allies, the rest of NATO — adding their own
forces and capabilities to ensure our collective defense.
And today, within hours of
Russia’s unleashing its assault, NATO came together and authorized and
activated — an activation of response plans.
This will enable NATO’s
high-readiness forces to deploy and — when and where they’re needed to protect
our NATO Allies on the eastern boundaries of Europe.
And now I’m authorizing
additional U.S. forces and capabilities to deploy to Germany as part of NATO’s
response, including some of U.S.-based forces that the Department of Defense
placed on standby weeks ago.
I’ve also spoken with Defense
Secretary Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Milley, about
preparations for additional moves should they become necessary to protect our
NATO Allies and support the greatest military Alliance in the history of the
world — NATO.
As we respond, my
administration is using the tools — every tool at our disposal to protect
American families and businesses from rising prices at the gas pump.
You know, we’re taking
active steps to bring down the costs. And American oil and gas companies
should not — should not exploit this moment to hike their prices to raise
profits.
You know, in our sanctions
package, we specifically designed to allow energy payments to continue.
We are closely monitoring
energy supplies for any disruption. We have been coordinating with major
oil producing and consuming countries toward our common interest to secure
global energy supplies.
We are actively working
with countries around the world to elevate [evaluate] a collective release from
the Strategic Petroleum Reserves of major energy-consuming countries. And
the United States will release additional barrels of oil as conditions warrant.
I know this is hard and
that Americans are already hurting. I will do everything in my power to
limit the pain the American people are feeling at the gas pump. This is
critical to me.
But this aggression cannot
go unanswered. If it did, the consequences for America would be much
worse. America stands up to bullies. We stand up for freedom.
This is who we are.
Let me also repeat the
warning I made last week: If Russia pursues cyberattacks against our companies,
our critical infrastructure, we are prepared to respond.
For months, we have been
working closely with our private — with the private sector to harden their
cyber defenses, sharpen our ability to respond to Russian cyberattacks as well.
I spoke late last night to
President Zelenskyy of Ukraine and I assured him that the United States,
together with our Allies and partners in Europe, will support the Ukrainian
people as they defend their country. We’ll provide humanitarian relief to
ease their suffering.
And in the early days of
this conflict, Russian propaganda outlets will keep trying to hide the truth
and claim success for its military operation against a made-up threat.
But history has shown time
and again how swift gains in territory eventually give way to grinding
occupations, acts of mass civil — mass civil disobedience, and strategic
dead-ends.
The next few weeks and
months will be hard on the people of Ukraine. Putin has unleashed a great
pain on them. But the Ukrainian people have known 30 years of
independence, and they have repeatedly shown that they will not tolerate anyone
who tries to take their country backwards.
This is a dangerous moment
for all of Europe, for the freedom around the world. Putin has a — has
committed an assault on the very principles that uphold global peace.
But now the entire world
sees clearly what Putin and his Kremlin — and his Kremlin allies are really all
about. This was never about genuine security concerns on their
part. It was always about naked aggression, about Putin’s desire for
empire by any means necessary — by bullying Russia’s neighbors through coercion
and corruption, by changing borders by force, and, ultimately, by choosing a
war without a cause.
Putin’s actions betray his
sinister vision for the future of our world — one where nations take what they
want by force.
But it is a vision that the
United States and freedom-loving nations everywhere will oppose with every tool
of our considerable power.
The United States and our
Allies and partners will emerge from this stronger, more united, more
determined, and more purposeful.
And Putin’s aggression
against Ukraine will end up costing Russia dearly — economically and strategically.
We will make sure of that. Putin will be a pariah on the international
stage. Any nation that countenances Russia’s naked aggression against
Ukraine will be stained by association.
When the history of this
era is written, Putin’s choice to make a totally unjustifiable war on Ukraine
will have left Russia weaker and the rest of the world stronger.
Liberty, democracy, human
dignity — these are the forces far more powerful than fear and
oppression. They cannot be extinguished by tyrants like Putin and his
armies. They cannot be erased by people — from people’s hearts and hopes
by any amount of violence and intimidation. They endure.
And in the contest between
democracy and autocracy, between sovereignty and subjugation, make no mistake:
Freedom will prevail.
God bless the people of a
free and democratic Ukraine. And may God protect our troops.
Hundreds of Mainstream Media
Reports tell the Big Lie in Unison that the War was “Unprovoked”. The following is a short, incomplete list from
CNN alone.
March 8, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news - CNN
https://www.cnn.com › ukraine-russia-putin-news-03-08-22
“Russia's unprovoked and unjustifiable war of choice against Ukraine,
enabled by the Belarusian government, is abhorrent and a flagrant breach of its
...
March 5, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news - CNN
https://www.cnn.com › ukraine-russia-putin-news-03-05-22
Ukrainian authorities have put plans to evacuate civilians from the
Mariupol region on hold, citing Russian violations of an agreed pause in fire.
September 23, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news - CNN
https://www.cnn.com › europe › live-news › russia-ukrain...
Sep 23, 2022 — “When a permanent member of the United Nations Security
Council starts an unprovoked and unjustifiable war, a war condemned by the UN
...
March 3, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news - CNN
https://www.cnn.com › ukraine-russia-putin-news-03-03-22
“Russia's premeditated and unprovoked attack on Ukraine has resulted in an
ongoing war, senseless violence, and Ukrainians forced to seek refuge in other
...
October 10, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news - CNN
https://www.cnn.com › europe › live-news › russia-ukrain...
2 days ago — 'The day war came back to all of Ukraine:' Russia's deadly
missile attacks ... “We again call on Russia to end this unprovoked aggression
...
September 7, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news - CNN
https://www.cnn.com › russia-ukraine-war-new-09-07-22
The war in Ukraine has showed the increasing threat also posed by ... blow
back against Moscow after its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine earlier this year.
September 16, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news - CNN
https://www.cnn.com › europe › live-news › russia-ukrain...
Sep 16, 2022 — Follow the latest news on Russia's war in Ukraine here and
read more ... its unprovoked, premeditated and horrifying invasion of Ukraine,
...
May 10, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news – CNN
https://www.cnn.com › europe › live-news › russia-ukrain...
Our live coverage of the war in Ukraine has moved here. ... Earlier, Yellen
said that “Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has further increased ...
March 4, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news – CNN
https://www.cnn.com › ukraine-russia-putin-news-03-04-22
China has repeatedly refused to call Russia's unprovoked military attack on
... US and NATO officials monitoring the war in Ukraine noticed a pronounced
...
June 15, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news – CNN
https://www.cnn.com › europe › live-news › russia-ukrain...
Jun 15, 2022 — Our live coverage of Russia's war in Ukraine has moved here.
... in the face of unprovoked Russian aggression,” Biden said in a statement.
April 8, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news – CNN
https://www.cnn.com › ukraine-russia-putin-news-04-08-22
Our live coverage of the war in Ukraine has moved here. ... to suffer
terribly from the Russian government's unprovoked unjustified and brutal war,”
State ...
September 23, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news - CNN International
https://edition.cnn.com › europe › live-news › russia-ukra...
Sep 23, 2022 — At least 1,300 anti-war protesters were detained across
Russia earlier ... about the "unprovoked and ongoing Russian invasion of
Ukraine and ...
August 24, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news – CNN
https://www.cnn.com › europe › live-news › russia-ukrain...
Aug 24, 2022 — Today marks six months of Russia's war in Ukraine as Kyiv
warned ... of Ukraine as it tries to defend itself against Russia's unprovoked
...
September 8, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news – CNN
https://www.cnn.com › europe › live-news › russia-ukrain...
Sep 8, 2022 — “Russia is making increasingly desperate choices to continue
its unprovoked war against Ukraine, particularly in the face of our ...
Elon Musk denies claim he spoke to Vladimir Putin ... – CNN
https://www.cnn.com › 2022/10/11 › business › elon-mus...
4 hours ago — ... the war in Ukraine and a proposed "peace plan"
to end the conflict. ... Russia started its war in Ukraine “in an unprovoked
and illegal ...
September 6, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news – CNN
https://www.cnn.com › russia-ukraine-war-new-09-06-22
Sep 6, 2022 — Follow the latest news on Russia's war in Ukraine here and
read more about ... of Russia's “unprovoked” and “unlawful” invasion of
Ukraine.
May 23, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news – CNN
https://www.cnn.com › europe › live-news › russia-ukrain...
May 23, 2022 — “The Russian brutal and unprovoked war against Ukraine has
triggered a humanitarian catastrophe. And the innocent civilians have been
killed ...
July 20, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news – CNN
https://www.cnn.com › europe › live-news › russia-ukrain...
Jul 20, 2022 — Russian forces are renewing efforts to break through
Ukrainian defenses in ... “Russia is waging a bloody and unprovoked war on
Ukraine.
June 28, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news – CNN
https://www.cnn.com › europe › live-news › russia-ukrain...
Jun 28, 2022 — Russia does not have the right to take part in discussing a
voting in regards to the war in Ukraine, which is unprovoked and simply ...
May 27, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news – CNN
https://www.cnn.com › europe › live-news › russia-ukrain...
May 27, 2022 — Our live coverage of Russia's war in Ukraine has moved here.
... integrity in the face of Russia's brutal and unprovoked war,” according to
...
May 1, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news - CNNhttps://www.cnn.com › europe ›
live-news › russia-ukrain...
Over coverage of the war in Ukraine has moved here. ... "It is just
another catastrophic effect of Putin's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine,"
Power said on ...
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