ria.ru |MOSCOW, May 17 - RIA Novosti.More than 15,000 Ukrainian soldiers and mercenaries ended up in a cauldron near Severodonetsk and Lisichansk in the Luhansk People's Republic, Vitaly Kiselyov, Assistant Minister of the Interior of the LPR,saidon Channel One.
"There will be 15-16 thousand in full," he said, answering the host's question whether "a huge group of nationalists from the Armed Forces of Ukraine" really turned out to be in the cauldron in the areas of these cities.
WaPo | Ending
one of the most dramatic battles of the Ukraine war, hundreds of
Ukrainian fighters, many seriously wounded, gave up their weeks-long defense
of a besieged steel plant in the strategic port city of Mariupol on
Monday and were taken to Russian-controlled territory, while hundreds
more remained trapped in the plant Tuesday as delicate negotiations
continued.
“Ukraine
needs Ukrainian heroes alive,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his
nightly address, as the delicate operation took place. “We hope that we
will be able to save the lives of our guys. Among them are the
seriously wounded. They are being provided with medical aid.”
Russia’s
Defense Ministry portrayed the exit of 264 Ukrainian soldiers from the
Azovstal steel plant as a surrender and a Russian victory. To Ukrainian
officials, the fighters were heroes whose desperate last stand changed
the course of the war, by tying up Russian forces for weeks in the
battle for Mariupol, preventing them from sweeping across southern
Ukraine.
Russia
won effective control of Mariupol weeks ago, securing a crucial land
bridge from Russia to Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula it annexed in
2014. But fate of fighters trapped in tunnels under the steel plant
became a desperate symbol of Ukrainians’ will to fight and die for their
land, a key factor in Ukraine’s military successes against Russia’s
larger, more powerful army.
Mariupol’s Azovstal Iron and Steel Works and its network of underground tunnels served as a shelter and final foothold for hundreds of Ukrainian fighters, including many from the controversial far-right Azov Regiment, as well as trapped civilians.
They
were holed up in the facility for weeks under an intense Russian
assault, before all women, children and elderly people were evacuated
under an agreement earlier this month. Those who made it to safety described a brutal siege in cold and fetid bunkers, where they lived without sunlight as food and water supplies dwindled.
natyliesbaldwin |This is the second part of a three-part series on ‘the Blob’ that runs American foreign policy. Read part one here.
WASHINGTON – The Russian war on Ukraine has seen ‘the Blob’ reassert
itself with a vengeance in the 11 weeks since Russia announced the
commencement of hostilities on February 24.
This article will examine the forces shaping President Joe Biden’s
approach to the Ukraine crisis, and then move on to explore the state of
foreign policy debate, or lack thereof, within Biden’s Democratic
Party.
Former high-ranking military officials, intelligence analysts and
diplomats who served at various points during the Clinton, Bush, Obama
and Trump administrations paint a picture in recent conversations with
Asia Times of the likely policy options being presented to President
Biden as he faces the gravest crisis on the European continent since the
Second World War.
The past month has seen the Biden administration, by fits and starts
and then seemingly all at once, adopt a militarized, hardline approach
toward Russia, declaring Ukraine’s “victory” over Russia as the only
acceptable outcome.
While Biden remains steadfast in assuring the public that there will
be no “boots on the ground,” in point of fact, current and former
officials have suggested that US paramilitaries are indeed on the
ground, with military assistance being coordinated by the new appointee
to the Biden National Security Council, retired US Army Lieutenant
General Terry Wolff.
According to retired US Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served
as secretary of state Colin Powell’s chief of staff, the
administration is planning for a protracted conflict in Ukraine.
Wilkerson says “they are extremely desirous of a protracted conflict
because they want to effect regime change in Moscow, destabilize Russia
and then take on China. That is their long-term geopolitical strategy.”
It is helpful here to take a moment to describe the prevailing mindset of the top national security officials closest to Biden.
At the very beginning of Biden’s term, a message was sent loud and
clear to both supporters and critics in Washington that it would
not tolerate any deviations from the establishment orthodoxy and that
the perspective and expertise of outsiders were not welcome.
No fierce challenger of the establishment, Rojansky had been a
fixture in track-two level talks between American and Russian political
scientists and former government officials.Russia expert Matthew
Rojansky’s views are unwanted by the Biden administration. Image:
Twitter / Bucknell University
Yet when news leaked that Rojansky was under consideration for an
appointment to Biden’s National Security Council (NSC), the knives came
out and the Democratic hawks made Rojansky their prey. The appointment
was torpedoed – and quickly.
Rojansky is now head of a US-Russia-focused non-profit, far from the
corridors of power. That’s worrying because, outside of Central
Intelligence Agency director William Burns, deep expertise on Russia is
thin on the ground in the Biden administration, according to former and
current officials who spoke to Asia Times.
But if Russia expertise is lacking, what the vast majority of Biden’s foreign policy appointments do have are deep connections to
the reflexively hawkish and dominant wing of the Democratic foreign
policy establishment, and that, in part, explains the trajectory of the
administration’s policy in Ukraine.
The evolution of Biden’s policy was described to this correspondent
by former ambassador Chas Freeman, now a senior fellow at the Watson
Institute at Brown University who remains deeply engaged in the foreign
policy debate in Washington. Freeman said: “It took about eight weeks
for the administration, in the person of NSC Advisor [Jake] Sullivan, to
enunciate war aims for the proxy war.
“At the outset of its response to the Russian invasion, the
administration was careful to limit possible provocation of the
Russians. But, not having seen direct retaliation from Moscow, it has
become progressively less cautious.
“This lack of caution is aided by the fact that it is Ukrainians, not
Americans, who are dying and by the success of pro-Ukrainian propaganda
and the effective Western ban on contradictory information from
non-Ukrainian sources. There is a risk that the administration will
inhale its own propaganda and underestimate the risks it is taking,”
said Freeman.
George Beebe, former head of Russia analysis at the CIA and a senior
member of the intelligence service who served on the national security
staff of vice president Dick Cheney, agrees.
“It seems to me that the United States and NATO are experiencing the
phenomenon of the appetite growing with eating. We didn’t expect the
Ukrainians to be as successful as they proved to be,” Beebe said.
Beebe, now the director of the grand strategy program at the Quincy
Institute, continued: “A good part of the credit goes to the Ukrainians
themselves, their leadership, their courage and fighting against the
Russians. A good part of it comes from our own support for them, the
intelligence and military assistance that we’ve provided that they’ve
used very effectively.
“But I think that has produced battlefield successes that go well
beyond anything that the US government expected when Putin launched this
invasion. As a result, we started to think, ‘Hey, maybe we can win
this.’”Ukrainian soldiers use a launcher with US-made Javelin missiles
during military exercises in Donetsk region, Ukraine, on December 23,
2021. Photo: Ukrainian Defense Ministry Press Service
“Our eyes, “ says Beebe, “have grown bigger. You walk around here in
Washington and there are very few people that are worried that we might
get into an escalation spiral that we can’t control. Seems to me that
much of Congress is worried that they might be accused of not doing enough to
support Ukraine, not of doing too much that tips us over the edge here
into a very dangerous situation. So I think it is fair to say that we
are in a much more dangerous situation right now from the point of view
of escalation than we’ve been in my lifetime.”
Freeman observes that as a result of the war fever enveloping
Washington, “It is now taboo in the United States to inquire into the
origins of the war, to suggest that Western policy had any role in
provoking it, or that there has been or is any basis for Russia’s
security concerns.”
unz | Scott Ritter(5:20 mark)– “The idea that the Ukrainian military
has been eliminated as an effective fighting force is a flawed concept,
and unless Russia broadens its special military operation– probably to
the point of changing it form a special military operation to a war
which includes the totality of Ukrainian battle-space–(then) this is a
conflict that is dangerously close to becoming unwinnable by Russia
which means that while they can complete their objectives in the east
with 200,000 troops, they aren’t able to prevent Ukraine from rearming
and reequipping when Ukraine is being provided with tens of billions of
dollars of equipment by NATO —Whenever you provide your enemy with “safe space” to rebuild military capability, you’re never going to win. …
Yes,
Russia is winning in the east which is what they said their objective
was all along. And they are accomplishing that. That is the special
Military Operation. But now we’re talking about “war”, and I don’t think Russia has made that transition yet. This
is a defacto proxy war between the west and Russia using Ukrainian
forces as NATO’s sword. The object of this is to “bleed Russia dry”. And
if Russia doesn’t change the dynamic, Russia will be bled dry.”
Zelensky has indicated that he’s willing to mobilize a million people,
at a time when the west is ready to provide the funding and equipment to
turn those million men into a real military threat.
So, I see what has been happening in the last few weeks as being decisive.
The
military aid the west is providing is changing the dynamic and if
Russia doesn’t find a way to address this meaningfully, and to eliminate
it as a military capability… then the conflict will never end.” (“Saturday Morning Live with Scott Ritter and Ray McGovern, You Tube)
consortiumnews |It
was — literally — a made-for-television moment. A former U.S. Navy
chief petty officer turned cable news pundit, dressed in a fresh
out-of-the-box camouflage uniform replete with body armor and magazine
pouches, wearing matching camouflage helmet and gloves, and cradling an
automatic rifle, stared into the camera and announced “I am here to help this country [Ukraine] fight what is essentially a war of extermination.”
With
a Ukrainian flag on his left shoulder, and a U.S. flag emblazoned on
his body armor, the man, Malcolm Nance, declared that “This is an
existential war, and Russia has brought it to these people and is mass
murdering civilians.”
A day before, Nance had tweeted a black-and-white photograph of himself, similarly clad, announcing “I’m DONE talking.”
Nance spent 20 years in the U.S. Navy as a cryptologic technician, interpretive (CTI),
specializing in the Arabic language, and has turned his career into a
thing of legend, so much so that when he speaks of his journey from news
desk to Ukraine, it almost sounds convincing.
“Ukraine announced that there was an international force on Feb. 27,” Nance told one reporter,
“and
I started looking into it on Feb. 28 … I called the Ukrainian embassy
in Washington, and I said: ‘Hey, I want an appointment.’ They were a
little slow, so I just went down there and put in my application. The
guy asked if I had combat experience and I said ‘Yep.’ Then he looked at
my application and said, ‘You’re on the team.’”
Just like that.
But
the hype doesn’t match the reality. Although he sports a combat action
ribbon on the lapel of his coat jacket (when not attired in full combat regalia), Nance has never actually participated in ground combat operations, according to a serviceman who served with him. His “combat” experience was limited to providing linguistic support onboard a U.S. Navy ship off the coast of Beirut in 1983. Important work, but not combat.
Despite
this resume enhancement, Nance was — according to Nance — a natural for
recruitment by Ukraine. In the days before the Russian invasion, Nance
was in Ukraine, reporting for MSNBC.
But being Malcolm Nance, he claimed to be doing so much more. “I spent a month in Ukraine,” Nance recalled,
“driving around, mapping out the Russian order of battle, driving up
and down the highways and analyzing where the invasion routes would come
and go. So I knew the country backward and forwards by the time of the
invasion.”
(It
might be time to remind the reader that Nance’s Navy specialism in
Arabic gave him neither the training nor the experience to conduct the
kind of battlefield intelligence preparation that he described.)
The
Ukrainians know this. So why would they take on a 61-year old Arabic
linguist whose physical presence on any battlefield would be seen as a
detriment?
sonar21 | If you want to know how the war is going in Ukraine, you only needed
to take note of one piece of “news” today–Secretary of Defense Lloyd
Austin called his Russian counterpart:
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin spoke with his Russian counterpart for the first time since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Pentagon announced on Friday.
The
call lasted approximately an hour and was at the request of Austin, who
used the first call between the two in 84 days to urge Defense Minister
Sergei Shoigu to implement an “immediate ceasefire,” according to a
brief readout of the call. The two last spoke on February 18, a week
before Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine.
CNN
If Russia was losing or completely stuck in Ukraine, one would expect
that Sergei Shoigu would be the guy calling Austin and begging for
mercy. Well, that is not what happened. It was Austin that placed the
call, apparently unconcerned about his recent public call to weaken
Russia. Why would Austin urge Shoigu to implement an “immediate
ceasefire” if Russia was getting its ass kicked? Russia getting whipped
by Ukraine is exactly what Austin has called for. Remember?
“We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine. . .”
If Russia is on the ropes, why call off the beating? You call off the
fight when its your guy getting pummeled. The Russian offensive in the
Donbass has ramped up significantly in the last week and it is carving
up entrenched Ukrainian units with no hope of being reinforced or
rescued by a counter-offensive.
The situation in Mariupol is returning to normal and Russia controls
the city. The Russians are restoring electrical and water services and
providing food to the population.
Ukrainian counter-attack reaches Russian border and threatens to break Donbas supply line.
LIE–The Ukrainians have not reached the Russian border and at least
one Russian Battalion Tactical Group has crossed the Severs Donetsk
river and are expanding their position south toward Kharkiv. But this is
a sideshow. The area is isolated and there is only one significant road
running from Kharkiv to Belgorod in Russia.
DOUBLE LIE–There is zero threat to the “DONBAS SUPPLY LINE.” Those
lines are south and east of Kharkiv. Just look at the map–the Donbas
with the city of Luhansk is prominently displayed. Kharkiv is 230 miles
northwest of Luhansk.
The map does get two things right–the Russia has taken Avdiivka and
has surrounded Ukrainian troops at Severodonetsk. It is because of the
progress Russia is making in the Donetsk that Lloyd Austin called Sergei
Shoigu to beg for some mercy. I suspect that General Shoigu told
Austin, идите стучите по песку (which is Russian for “go pound sand.”)
One more observation regarding the supposed defeat of the Russians
north of Kharkiv on the border of Russia. The people writing on this
cannot even get their facts straight about the size of a Russian
Battalion Tactical Group aka BTG. Here are three different “experts”
with their numbers:
Each Russian Battalion (BTG) tactical group has around 700-900 soldiers (Justin Bronk)
According to the DOD on 18 April there are almost a dozen BTGs in Mariupol. As each BTG has about 200 infantry, then 11 x 200 gives us 2,200 infantry. (Christopher Lawrence, Dupuy Institute)
A Russian battalion tactical group consists of about 1,000 troops. (Associated Press)
The western media has been crowing about the mighty Ukrainians wiping
out a Russian BTG. Yet no photos of Russian medical units recovering
the dead and wounded from the battle site have been published on
Ukrainian or Russian sites. But let us assume the claim is true–the
Ukrainians reportedly ambushed and defeated one BTG. It is meaningless
as far as the progress of the Russian war effort is concerned. If the
Russians were concerned about the battle over a pontoon bridge they
would have deployed fixed wing and rotary wing support aircraft armed
with rockets and delivered an artillery barrage on the attacking
Ukrainians. That apparently did not happen either.
mtracey | Two advocacy organizations in particular devoted huge amounts of resources
to documenting the purported rise of Nazism during this period. If you
read an article over the past several years which purported to announce
that Nazism, “white nationalism,” and similar tendencies were ascendant,
there’s a good chance the basis for the article’s claims was sourced
either to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) or the Southern Poverty Law
Center (SPLC). “Neo-Nazi Groups Explode Under Trump,” read one
representative Daily Beast
headline from 2018, citing a report produced by the SPLC. In denouncing
Trump for having “flirted with the deepest racists and Nazis,” Charles
Blow of the New York Times
cited a report from the ADL which claimed that “anti-semitic incidents
in the United States surged 57 percent in 2017.” And 2017, as Blow
shrewdly reasoned, “was of course the first year of the Trump
administration.” The methodology of such “reports” is hardly ever
scrutinized with any degree of precision; organizations like the SPLC
and ADL are largely just assumed by journalists to possess
unchallengeable empirical authority. On the rare occasions when someone
in the media does think to dig deeper into the genesis of these groups’ oddly precise statistical figures, doubts as to their veracity sometimes arise.
After
having spent such enormous effort warning Americans that their country
was being overwhelmed by Nazis, you’d have thought it would be a
no-brainer for these groups to spring immediately into action last month
and sound the alarms again. Because another “incident” took place that
was right up their alley: an honest-to-god pro-Nazi rally. In the middle
of New York City. Thanks to footage
captured by journalist Elad Eliahu, we know that on April 23 in
Downtown Manhattan, a group of rally-goers gathered to chant — with
total, uninhibited exuberance — “Azov! Azov! Azov!”
Eliahu told me the rally was organized by a group called “Razom for
Ukraine,” which has held regular protest actions in the city since the
war began, including to demand a No Fly Zone. But on this occasion, they were focused on rapturous praise for “Azov.”
In case you still need a primer on what “Azov” refers to, you may want to consult The Nation
magazine, which has been unique among US left-liberal media over the
last several years in still allowing a modicum of countervailing
thought. And so The Nation is one of the vanishingly few outlets that continues to plainly describe Azov — i.e., the Battalion of the Ukraine military currently fighting in the war — as an “outright Neo-Nazi group.”
The bluntness of The Nation’s
description stands in stark contrast to what the vast majority of US
media consumers have recently been told about said group. Elsewhere,
Americans are being instructed to actively root for the righteous
battlefield victory of Azov — particularly in the city of Mariupol,
where the fighters have been under sustained siege by Russia. It’s easy
for the untrained eye to miss, but US journalists — including the top
Ukraine war correspondent for TIME magazine — have taken to characterizing these Azov fighters merely as Mariupol’s brave “defenders.”
Which is a term that coincidentally obscures the fighters’ ideological
composition. Thanks to most US and “Western” media coverage, this
foreign battalion comprised of “outright Nazis” has become primarily
known as valorous warriors for “democracy.”
Tune into NPR or the BBC, and you will similarly hear the “defenders” euphemism used in reports about Mariupol. Naturally, this is also the preferred nomenclature of the “Kyiv Independent,” the newly-formed English-language media outlet whose sudden emergence owes
to an emergency infusion of funds late last year from the European
Union’s equivalent of the National Endowment for Democracy. Relentlessly
touted by “Western” media as an authoritative source for
news-on-the-ground from Ukraine, the outlet has also enjoyed massive
algorithmic amplification by Twitter — with it seldom ever noted that
their chief “defense reporter” publicly proclaimed himself a “brother in arms” with Azov.
Despite
his public admission of affiliation with what most reasonable observers
used to uncontroversially classify as a Neo-Nazi regiment, millions of
Americans have been fed
a regular supply of “journalism” from this person, Illia Ponomarenko,
who appears to function as Azov’s main English-speaking PR operative.
But he’s far from alone: a whole roster of newly-minted social media stars regularly heap praise
on Azov fighters for “sacrificing their lives for democracy.” By sheer
coincidence, these superstars also frequently tend to be affiliated with
US-based think tanks funded by the weapons-manufacturing industry.
Do
you think if NPR or BBC listeners were clearly informed that the
“defenders” of Mariupol were in fact “outright Neo-Nazis,” they might
have a slightly different reaction to the news segments extolling their
bravery? Especially if they can recall earlier NPR or BBC segments, such as those which warned listeners to be petrified of Trump-backed “Nazis” taking over the US? Alas, we can only speculate.
Now,
one might reasonably ask: isn’t this whole “Nazi” angle a bit
overblown? After all, in the US, that label gets blithely slapped onto
anyone who’s slightly more right-wing than Mitt Romney. And it’s not an
unfair point. The elasticity of the term “Nazi” has become so
preposterous, and it was deployed so indiscriminately during the era of
Trump, that one could be forgiven for having an urge to immediately
eye-roll whenever they hear it uttered.
Here’s the point, though:
in a prior political context, the purported existence of Nazis was
supposed to prompt an earnest outpouring of shock, horror, and
counter-Nazi mobilization. But in the current political context, the
existence of Nazis is supposed to be carefully ignored — in service what
is now the superseding imperative, namely to “Stand with Ukraine.”
munkdebates | Be it resolved, ending the world’s
worst geopolitical crisis in a generation starts with acknowledging
Russia’s security interests.
By any measure, the Russian
invasion of Ukraine represents a profound security risk for the world.
It raises fundamental issues about the basic principles that underwrite
the current international order and it threatens the specter of an
entrenched, high-risk Great Power conflict. How is this fast-evolving
crisis best addressed? Does it demand a resolute and relentless push by
the West to punish, isolate and degrade Putin’s Russia economically,
politically and militarily? Or is a solution to be found in
acknowledging Russia’s security needs and finding ways to mutually
de-escalate the war, sooner not later? Which of these different
strategies stand the best chance of success? And how ultimately is this
conflict best resolved?
Janice Gross Stein, the Founding Director of the
Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of
Toronto, will moderate the panel discussion portion of the debate.
The debate video is available to our Curator and Supporter Members. To view the video, log-in to your member account and go Russia-Ukraine War Debate pagehere.
Summary: Michael McFaul was in Toronto yesterday for the Munk Debate: Russia-Ukraine War,
with Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer v Michael McFaul, Radosław
Sikorski, the resolution being debated was Yay/Nay "ending the world's
worst geo-political crisis starts with acknowledging Russia’s security
interests", For those who don't follow the Munk debates, about 4 yrs ago
there was a similar debate with Stephen Cohen where the Munk debates
reversed the results when they came out "wrong". Anyhow the Munk
debates made sure to pepper the results well in advance this time with
an 63% nay vote (ok, well if your not willing to acknowledge Russia's
security interests to stop a war, that can ONLY mean you want to
continue the war in the hopes of "winning" the war against Russia).
Anyhow, I bring this up because McFaul was a hysterical mess during
the debate, talking over the other debaters, interrupting them,
shouting, at one point he even said that YES, US diplomats lie to other
nations (ok Michael, then why the hell should Russia believe YOU when
you give these worthless security assurances!) McFaul looks like he
realizes that the US's ambitions in Ukraine are collapsing and he's
hoping for a miracle to save them. But listening to these people (even
Mearsheimer) makes it obvious how out of touch all of them are with the
global situation. Globalism is dead, Russia will never reintegrate with
the West, the theft of the 300 billion dollars, will not be forgiven or
forgotten, what most people dont remember is that this is the 2nd time
in 100 yrs where the West has seized Russia's foreign reserves, they did
it before after the Russian Revolution and it took more than 60 yrs
before Russia was willing to trust the West with their money again. How
long will it take this time, 80 yrs, 100yrs? But listening to these
"experts" they talk as if once Russia is expelled from Ukraine and Putin
is removed from power, Russia will beg to be integrated into the West.
No, Russia and the West have undergone a bitter divorce and never again
the twain shall meet.
WaPo | But
Massie — an engineer who graduated with several degrees from M.I.T. and
became an inventor who still holds a number of patents — has devoted
time and energy to honing his America First views during five terms in
the House.
“I’m
further, I think, than he is on the issue of NATO. He demanded that the
partners pay their share. I would withdraw us from NATO,” Massie
explained of his and Trump’s views toward the critical alliance. “It’s a
Cold War relic. Our involvement should have ceased when the [Berlin]
wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed.”
He
would have preemptively surrendered portions of eastern Ukraine to
Russia in a manner that would have “avoided tens of thousands of people
dying,” because this is how he sees the war ending anyway.
“A
fractured Ukraine, with the Eastern portion of it being a satellite or
more government, more deferential to Putin, and the Western part of it
more deferential to Europe or the United States,” Massie said.
These
views are anathema to traditional Republican hawks as well as Democrats
in line with Biden, who push for a vigorous foreign policy that works
to unify allies, particularly in Europe.
“Both
Democrats and Republicans have at different times in history had a more
isolationist, nativist wing,” said Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), chairman
of the House Armed Services Committee. “Right now, it’s the Republicans
who are highest on that. They’re playing a very isolationist card.”
“Honestly
there is an isolationist wing within the party that’s traditionally
been there,” said Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), ranking member of the
House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Smith
takes a more optimistic outlook, focusing on how more than 70 percent
of House Republicans supported the latest Ukraine aid package and that
on other votes, Massie and Greene have had few allies.
“Pretty
much everybody else understands that this isn’t just about Ukraine. It
is about our security and peace and stability in the world. So thus far
the Republican Party is still there,” Smith said.
McCaul
has actually been pleasantly surprised that the anti-Ukraine faction
has not grown larger, something he attributes to the success on the
ground of Ukrainian troops and the atrocities committed by Putin’s
troops.
“I was really worried, interestingly, earlier on about how this was going to trend,” McCaul said Friday.
thenation |Late last month, the Joe Biden administration publicly confirmed that a “Disinformation Governing Board” working group had been created within the Department of Homeland Security. The news prompted a flood of concern about the impact of such an Orwellian organ on America.
But there’s no need to engage in hypotheticals to understand the
dangers. One has to only consider the past of Nina Jankowicz, the head
of the new disinformation board.
Jankowicz’s experience as a disinformation warrior includes her
work with StopFake, a US government-funded “anti-disinformation”
organization founded in March 2014 and lauded as a model of how to combat Kremlin lies.
Four years later, StopFake began aggressively whitewashing two
Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups with a long track record of violence,
including war crimes.
If the Biden administration is serious about combating threats such
as white supremacy, perhaps it should first reflect on the old Roman question: Who will guard the guardians?
StopFake was founded right after Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan uprising
ousted the country’s president and swept a new, US-backed government
into power. Formed by professors and students from the Kyiv Mohyla Journalism School,
StopFake presented itself as a plucky, grassroots group wielding hard
facts and semi-permanent smirks as it shredded Russian propaganda. It
gained notoriety by producing slick videos hosted by dynamic
disinformation warriors debunking the Moscow lies of the day.
Western reporters—and checkbooks—were paying attention. Shortly after
its creation, StopFake began receiving funding from Western
governments, including the National Endowment for Democracy—an
organization mainly funded by the US Congress—and the British embassy in Ukraine. It was also supported by George Soros’s Open Society Foundation. (StopFake has run numerous episodes that cover Soros but fail to disclose this potential conflict of interest—a violation of basic tenets of journalism.)
Among StopFake’s hosts was Jankowicz,
a graduate of Bryn Mawr and the Georgetown School of Foreign Service
who was already part of the burgeoning disinformation warrior industry
while in Ukraine as a Fulbright Clinton Public Policy Fellow. On January
29, 2017, she hosted StopFake Episode 117, whose lead story dealt with a perennial obsession of Russian propaganda: Ukraine’s volunteer battalions.
These are the dozens of paramilitaries formed in 2014 to fight
against Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine’s Donbas region. From the
beginning, Moscow focused on the violent and far-right nature of many of
these units.
At the time of Jankowicz’s piece, the Russian press was bristling
at Kyiv’s creating a new holiday to honor military volunteers—Moscow
commentators depicted this as a celebration of far-right butchers.
Jankowicz offered an emphatically different take.
“Volunteer battalions organized throughout the country and they
supported weak Ukrainian armed forces and prevented further Russian
separatist encroachment. Today the volunteer battalions are part of the
official Ukrainian armed forces, overseen by the Defense and Interior
Ministries,” she said in her StopFake debunking segment.
cynthiachung |“By destroying communism in his [Hitler’s] country, he had barred
its road to Western Europe…Germany therefore could rightly be regarded
as a bulwark of the West against communism.” (1)
–
The Earl of Halifax, aka Lord Halifax (British Ambassador to the U.S.
1940-1946, Secretary of State for British Foreign Affairs 1938-1940,
Viceroy and Governor-General of India 1926-1931)
Everyone is aware
of the Iron Curtain speech delivered by Winston Churchill, who was no
longer British Prime Minister by then, on March 5, 1946.
However,
it is not Churchill who is the originator of the phrase, but rather Nazi
German Foreign Minister Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk who made a
speech in Berlin on May 3, 1945, which was reported in the London Times
and the New York Times on May 8, 1945.
In the speech, Krosigk uses the Nazi-coined propaganda phrase “Iron
Curtain,” which was used in precisely the same context by Churchill less
than one year later.
Following this German speech, only three
days after the German surrender, Churchill wrote a letter to Truman, to
express his concern about the future of Europe and to say that an “Iron
Curtain” had come down. (2)
This sharing of policy between Nazi Germany and England should not come as a complete surprise.
Richard Cottrell writes in “Gladio: NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe”:
“After
NATO was established in April 1949, the secret armies gradually came
under the direct control of the new military alliance. NATO carefully
established departments of clandestine warfare which managed the secret
armies and allocated their tasks. Only a few trustworthy intimates were
to know of their existence. As each secret unit was eventually exposed,
the name Gladio came to be applied to all of them.”
However,
the expected Soviet invasion never occurred. And thus, these secret
armies found another purpose, they were to be used against the people.
The
desire was that by staging false-flag operations that were blamed on
communists, this would in turn invoke panic and revulsion and would send
voters flocking to the welcoming arms of a secure Right-wing
government.
Richard Cottrell writes:
“Bands
of secret soldiers and their cohorts were ordered to shoot, bomb, maim
and kill their own citizens. The United States forbade any sovereign
European states to seat communist ministers in government. All movements
of the Left fell under suspicion as cloaks for Moscow.”
Italy, who had the largest and most powerful communist party in Europe, would be first on the list.
The
Communist Party of Italy, admired for leading the fight against
Mussolini, was expected to win in Italy’s first post-war election in
June 1946. This, of course, was considered intolerable under the Iron
Curtain diktat.
Investigative journalist Christopher Simpson
writes in his book “Blowback,” how a substantial part of the funding for
the opposition to the Communist Party of Italy, which was the Christian
Democratic Party, came from captured Nazi assets, (largely held by the
Americans). This intervention tipped the balance in favour of Italy’s
Christian Democratic Party, which hid thousands of fascists in its
ranks.
The Christian Democratic Party would be the dominating
party in Italy for five decades, during the Operation Gladio years,
until it was dissolved in 1994.
In order to ensure that no further
communist support were to arise in Italy, Operation Gladio, with
knowledge and support by the CIA, MI6 and European intelligence
agencies, led a campaign of brutal violence against Italians that
stretched the better part of two decades known as the “years of lead,”
the anni di piombo.
cynthiachung | In July 1944 Mykola Lebed helped form the Supreme Ukrainian
Liberation Council (UHVR), which would claim to represent the Ukrainian
nation and served as an underground government in the Carpathian
mountains, in opposition to the Ukrainian SSR. The dominant political
party in UHVR was the Bandera group and the UPA, which from that point
on served as the army of UHVR and continued to fight the Soviets until
1956.
A feud erupted in 1947 between Bandera and Stetsko on one
side for an independent Ukraine under a single party led by Bandera
himself vs. Lebed and Father Ivan Hrynioch (chief of the UHVR Political
Section) who were against Bandera being head of state.
At an
August 1948 Congress of the OUN Foreign Section, Bandera (who still
controlled 80% of the UHVR) expelled the Hrynioch-Lebed group. He
claimed exclusive authority on the Ukrainian national movement and
continued terror tactics against anti-Banderist Ukrainian leaders in
Western Europe and maneuvered for control of Ukrainian émigré
organizations. (10) However, Lebed who had become close with the
Americans at that point was recognized, along with Hrynioch as the
official UHVR representation abroad.
With the war lost, Lebed
adopted a strategy similar to that of Reinhard Gehlen – he contacted the
Allies after escaping Rome in 1945 with a trove of names and contacts
of anti-Soviets located in western Ukraine and in displaced persons
camps in Germany. This made him attractive to the U.S. Army’s
Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) despite their above admission in their
1947 report.
In late 1947, Lebed who it was feared would be
assassinated by the Soviets in Rome, was smuggled along with his family
by the CIC to Munich, Germany in December 1947 for his safety.
Norman J.W. Goda writes (11):
“By
late 1947, Lebed had thoroughly sanitized his prewar and wartime
activities for American consumption. In his own rendition, he had been a
victim of the Poles, the Soviets, and the Germans – he would carry the
Gestapo “wanted” poster for the rest of his life to prove his anti-Nazi
credentials…He also published a 126-page booklet on the UPA, which
chronicled the heroic struggle of Ukrainians against both Nazis and
Bolsheviks, while calling for an independent, greater Ukraine that would
represent the human ideals of free speech and free faith. The UPA,
according to the booklet, never collaborated with the Nazis, nor is
there any mention of the slaughter of Galician Jews or Poles in the
book. The CIC considered the booklet to be the ‘complete background on the subject.’
The CIC overlooked the fact that under its own watch an OUN Congress
held in September 1947 had split, thanks to Lebed’s criticism of the
creeping democratization of the OUN. This was overlooked by the CIA
which began using Lebed extensively in 1948…In June 1949…the CIA
smuggled him [Lebed] into the United States with his wife and daughter
under the legal cover of the Displaced Persons Act.” [emphasis added]
The
Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) began investigating Lebed
and in March 1950 reported to Washington that numerous Ukrainian
informants spoke of Lebed’s leading role among the “Bandera terrorists”
and that during the war the Bandersists were trained and armed by the
Gestapo and responsible for “wholesale murders of Ukrainians, Poles and
Jewish [sic]…In all these actions, Lebed was one of the most important
leaders.” (12)
In 1951, top INS officials informed the CIA of its
findings along with the comment that Lebed would likely face
deportation. The CIA responded on October 3, 1951, that all of the
charges were false and that the Gestapo “wanted” poster of Lebed proved
that he “fought with equal zeal against the Nazis and Bolsheviks.” (13)
INS officials as a result suspended the investigation on Lebed.
In
February 1952, the CIA pressed the INS to grant Lebed re-entry papers
so that he could leave and re-enter the United States at will. Argyle
Mackey, Commissioner of the INS, refused to grant this.
On May 5, 1952, Allen Dulles, then Assistant Director of the CIA wrote a letter to Mackey stating (14):
“In
connection with future Agency operations of the first importance, it is
urgently necessary that subject [Lebed] be able to travel in Western
Europe. Before [he] undertakes such travel, however, this Agency
must…assure his re-entry into the United States without investigation or
incident which would attract undue attentions to his activities.”
What was in West Germany? General Reinhard Gehlen, former chief of
the Wehrmacht Foreign Armies East military intelligence, who had been
conveniently allowed to re-enter West Germany to establish his Gehlen Organisation which would later form the Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service of West Germany) in 1956 .
Dulles
also wanted Lebed’s legal status changed to that of “permanent
resident,” under Section 8 of the CIA Act of 1949. The INS never
investigated further after Dulles’ letter and Lebed became a naturalized
U.S. citizen in March 1957.
Bandera would also be stationed in
West Germany with his family after the war, where he remained the leader
of the OUN-B and worked with several anti-communist organizations as
well as with British Intelligence. (15) At this point Bandera had become
too much of a liability and there were multiple attempts, by both the
Americans and British starting in 1953, to get Bandera to step down and
for Lebed to represent “the entire Ukrainian liberation movement in the
homeland.” Bandera refused and went rogue.
It is said that Bandera
was assassinated in 1959 by a KGB agent in Munich, however, one cannot
help but note that it was excellent timing and extremely beneficial for
the Americans that Bandera was taken out when he was, considering what
they had planned for Ukraine’s future…
Among the declassified
records are that of Hoover’s FBI, who had a small trove of captured
German General Staff documents from 1943 and 1944, which revealed German
appreciation of the UPA’s work while mentioning Lebed by name. (16) It
appears this was never shared with any agency or institution, other than
the CIA, despite requests from the INS during their investigation of
Lebed.
Interestingly, Goda writes (17):
“The full extent
of his [Lebed’s] activities as ‘Foreign Minister’ [of the UHVR] may
never become known, but FBI surveillance of him gives some idea.
Partly, Lebed lectured at prestigious universities such as Yale
on such topics as biological warfare used by the Soviet government in
the Ukraine.” [emphasis added]
The following is an
indication as to what Dulles may have been referring to as the urgent
need for Lebed’s re-entry into Western Europe.
Breitman and Goda write (18):
“By
1947 some 250,000 Ukrainians were living…in Germany, Austria, and
Italy, many of them OUN activists or sympathizers. After 1947 UPA
fighters began crossing into the U.S. zone, having reached the border on
foot through Czechoslovakia.”
However, Lebed was not only
urgently needed in Europe, but also within the United States. Once in
the United States, Lebed was selected as the CIA’s chief contact/advisor
for AERODYNAMIC.
cynthiachung | Are there real Nazis in Ukraine that are being selected, with U.S.
and possibly NATO backing, to play a political and military role? And if
so, why? What is happening to the Ukrainian people if this is in fact
the case?
What even constitutes as “Ukrainian” under an
increasingly ultra-nationalist movement? An ultra-nationalist movement
which self-identifies as pure ethnic Ukrainians. Ukraine is an
ethnically mixed population, with both ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic
Russians living together.
In light of this situation, how are we to regard the people of
Donbass asking to form their own republics of Donetsk and Lugansk,
separate from the rest of Ukraine? Are we in the west going to deny the
people of Donbass, with a large population of ethnic Russians, the right
to separate themselves from an ultra-nationalist movement that
self-identifies as a pure Ukrainian race?
How are we to regard
Crimea’s own request to re-join Russia in 2014, a referendum that the
West refuses to acknowledge actually happened, despite mainstream western reporters confirming that Crimeans have indeed chosen and are happy to have returned to Russia? (Crimeans mostly consist of ethnic Russians.)
What are we to think of the Ukrainian government withholding 85% of drinkable water to Crimea these
past eight years? An action by the Ukrainian government that
constitutes a humanitarian crisis against the Crimean people. Are these
the actions of a friendly government that cares for the welfare of the
Crimean people?
This humanitarian crisis was corrected by the Russians as soon as they entered Ukraine, as acknowledged by Reuters. However, most in the west will never hear anything about this.
We
should have the courage to ask ourselves: Is there in fact a civil war
that has been going on in Ukraine not just these past weeks, but these past eight years?
A civil war that has not been reported to the western people for
political reasons, where certain regions of Ukraine have been under
attack by neo-Nazi paramilitary units who have been receiving political
support and funding from the United States, and possibly NATO.
Why would the west support such a horrific initiative?
To
answer these questions, we will have to have the courage to look at the
historical root of Ukrainian Nationalism and its relationship to namely
U.S. Intelligence and NATO post-WWII.
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