US Media Cover Up Their Own People Setting Themselves on Fire to Stop the Gaza Genocide
US citizen Matt Nelson set himself ablaze in solidarity protest of his country’s support of the genocide in Gaza. (Photo: video grab)
By Robert Inlakesh | The Palestine Chronicle | September 22, 2024
So far, three US citizens have self-immolated in protest of their government’s support for Israel’s ongoing genocide against the people of Gaza.
However, in two of the cases, American media actively worked to cover up that it even happened, and the most prominent example they deflected, trying to hint at mental illness being the reason.
On September 11, a man named Matt Nelson set himself ablaze across the street from the Israeli consulate in Boston.
“My name is Matt Nelson and I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest,” echoing the speech delivered by Aaron Bushnell who also self-immolated on February 24.
Matt Nelson went on to say that “we are slaves to capitalism and the military-industrial complex. Most of us are too apathetic to care,” adding that “we are all culpable in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
He then stated:
“The protest I’m about to engage in is a call to our government to stop supplying Israel with the money and weapons it uses to imprison and murder innocent Palestinians, to pressure Israel to end the genocide in Gaza, and to support the (International Criminal Court) indictment of (Israeli Prime Minister) Benjamin Netanyahu and other members of the Israeli government.”
There can be no mistaking the intentions of Matt Nelson’s actions and even without the video, the fact that he was positioned right across from the road from the Israeli consulate when he self-immolated is enough of an indicator that this was a political act. However, not for the likes of NBC Boston who ran the headline “Man sets himself on fire outside Four Seasons hotel in Boston, witnesses say”.
Even Israeli media outlets like The Jerusalem Post and The Times of Israel covered the story with correct headlines, but not Western corporate media. In the US media, they either ignored it altogether or decided to twist it to make it seem like a random act of suicide.
On December 1, a similar instance occurred when a woman – whose name still has not been released to the public – self-immolated in front of the Israeli consulate in Atlanta, Georgia.
While the Atlanta Police Department publicly stated that what happened was an “act of extreme political protest”, the story was completely ignored in Western Corporate media.
The only exception to the story was the self-immolation of 25-year-old Aaron Bushnell, who was an active-duty airman, who self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington this February.
While the coverage began with a similarly biased slant, where his act was depicted as a man lighting himself on fire, without any reason being presented, the truth could not be ignored in the end after it went viral on social media.
Aaron Bushnell had live-streamed the whole event, giving his very clearly stated reason for his actions that day and providing the world with a video of him burning alive while screaming “free Palestine” literally until his dying breath. Everyone who watched the video, either with blur over his body as he burned, or without it, was similarly in shock.
The fact that a young American man would put on his military uniform, cover himself with flammable liquid and scream the words “free Palestine” until he literally couldn’t speak anymore, should have been enough to shock the world. However, the corporate media decided to try and paint him as being mentally ill, later burying the story.
Instead of being praised as heroes who sacrificed themselves in order to try and prevent a genocide from continuing, the US media has put the interests of Israel ahead of its own people, hiding the truth, and actively participating in blocking their voices from being heard. Luckily, however, in the era of social media, their words still remain free for those who seek to hear them.
– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine.
Zelensky-led ‘peace summit’ a fraud – Moscow
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. © Sputnik
RT | September 22, 2024
Russia won’t attend the proposed second Ukrainian-promoted “peace summit” later this year, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has warned. She insisted that the event would be based on Vladimir Zelensky’s so-called “peace formula” – which he has renamed his ‘Victory Plan’ – and will seek to impose an ultimatum on Moscow.
Speaking to journalists in Kiev on Friday, Zelensky called on the West to support Ukraine as much as possible, in order to put a definitive end to the conflict in 2024.
Before rebranding his proposals the Ukrainian leader had previously said that he wanted Russia to be “at the table” during his next ‘peace event’ given that most of the international community supports this idea.
Zakharova, however, rejected such an idea. “This process itself has nothing to do with the [conflict] settlement,” she said, calling it “a fraud by the Anglo-Saxons and their Ukrainian puppets,” she told reporters on Saturday.
“The so-called second summit has the same goal – to push through the absolutely unviable ‘Zelensky formula’ as an uncompromising basis for the settlement of the conflict, to get the global majority to support it, and in its name to present Russia with an ultimatum to capitulate. We will not participate in such ‘summits’.”
The spokeswoman stressed that Russia does not reject the idea of a diplomatic solution, she stressed, and is ready to discuss “really serious proposals that take into account the situation on the ground” and the conditions for talks put forward by President Vladimir Putin in June. The Russian leader said that Moscow would immediately start negotiations once Kiev starts withdrawing troops from Russia’s Donbass, as well as Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions and commits to neutrality, demilitarization, and denazification.
Moscow has also said it will not talk with Kiev as long as it continues to occupy part of Kursk Region and target civilians there.
Zakharova, however, remarked that Kiev and the West “do not think about peace… They need war. This is confirmed by the bandit invasion of the Ukrainian army into Kursk Region and Zelensky’s requests to be allowed to strike deep into Russia with NATO long-range weapons. This is a continuation of terror against the population of our country. We will not talk to terrorists.”
The first “peace summit” was held in Switzerland in June, to which Russia was not invited. The event revolved around several points of Zelensky’s supposed peace formula, but did not touch on some of Kiev’s key demands of Russia, including the withdrawal of the latter’s troops from territory Ukraine claims as its own.
Putin called the event a Western ploy to create the illusion of a global anti-Russian coalition and divert attention from the roots of the conflict.
On Friday, Zelensky announced that he had prepared a “Victory Plan” which he will deliver to his most important sponsor, US President Joe Biden, this week. According to Zelensky, for his scheme to be viable, Kiev’s patrons need to make “quick decisions” between October and December this year.
Could Bird Flu Be the October Surprise?
By Clayton J. Baker, MD | Brownstone Institute | September 21, 2024
Bird flu was the hot topic in pandemic fear-mongering until very recently. Just a few months ago, former CDC director Robert Redfield publicly described Bird flu (also known as H5N1 Influenza A or Avian Influenza virus) as the likely next pandemic – predicting a laboratory-leaked virus as the cause. Meanwhile, Deborah Birx, aka the “Scarf Lady” of Covid infamy, was making the TV news, promoting an unrealistic and excessive program of testing farm animals and humans for Bird flu.
At present, bird flu seems to have been put on the back burner by the authorities. Monkeypox has since taken center stage, with the World Health Organization declaring a state of emergency over that virus. Furthermore, the “experts” have trotted out numerous other viruses with which to terrify the public. Examples include West Nile virus – who no less than Anthony Fauci himself supposedly contracted – and even the exotic “Sloth virus” (also known as Oropouche virus).
The first step in dealing with these continual reports of horrific pathogens is recognizing the vital importance of living in knowledge rather than in fear. “Fear porn” is a real psychological weapon and one that is being used against us on a daily basis. As we painfully learned during Covid, a terrified population is easily manipulated, controlled, and exploited. As free citizens, we must remain mindful and knowledgeable, rather than fearful, about the flood of information and propaganda that is hurled at us.
Regarding bird flu, we should remain mindful of the following. In its current iteration, bird flu has caused no widespread human illness, no human deaths, and sporadic outbreaks in farm animal populations. However, there is much evidence that bird flu could be used as a bioweapon. Furthermore, it could also be applied to disrupt the November 5 US Presidential election.
Here are 3 reasons why bird flu may still be weaponized to alter the election:
- Multiple bio labs in the United States and abroad – such as the lab run by Yoshihiro Kawaoka, PhD at the University of Wisconsin – perform alarming Gain-of-Function research on the H5N1 virus, making variants of the virus that are much more dangerous to humans than variants that occur in nature. These labs have had leaks with alarming frequency. The current strains of bird flu in the US show strong genetic evidence of having originated in a laboratory. A laboratory leak of a new strain of the virus, manipulated to be highly transmissible and/or pathogenic in humans, remains a real possibility.
- The “International Bird Flu Summit” will be held on October 2-4, 2024 at the Hilton Fairfax in Fairfax, VA – just outside Washington, DC – exactly one month prior to the election. Listed topics include “Command, Control and Management,” “Emergency Response Management,” and “Surveillance and Data Management.” If this sounds eerily reminiscent to you of the Covid lockdowns – which were also closely preceded by government-based planning exercises – your memory serves you well.
- The infrastructure is already in place for a “pandemic” of bird flu, much more than it is for other potential pathogens. Already, widespread testing of farms is underway. The development of bird flu vaccines has increased dramatically. The FDA has already approved vaccines made by Sanofi, GSK subsidiary ID Biomedical Corporation of Quebec, and CSL Seqirus, while Moderna recently received a $176 million government grant for its mRNA-based bird flu injection, which is in development.
In the bigger picture, a number of viruses could potentially be employed as an “October Surprise” to disrupt the election. Bird flu appears to be a leading candidate (pun intended), but it is not the only one.
We, as citizens, must remain vigilant to this threat to our electoral process. We should contact our local and state officials now, before anything is attempted, and express our absolute insistence on fair, legal, and regular elections. We should share this information widely with others so that all are aware of what might be attempted. Over the longer term, we must work to end Gain-of-Function research.
With Covid, we experienced first-hand what can be done to our civil rights and to our Constitutionally guaranteed electoral and governmental processes when a fear-driven, emergency-based takeover of society occurs. As free citizens, we must never allow this to happen again. From now on, we must live in knowledge, not in fear.
C.J. Baker, M.D. is an internal medicine physician with a quarter century in clinical practice. He has held numerous academic medical appointments, and his work has appeared in many journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. From 2012 to 2018 he was Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.
US agency plotted to channel government funds into anti-Iran campaign after 2022 riots: Report
Press TV – September 20, 2024
A new report has revealed that the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) privately plotted to direct government resources into an anti-Iran campaign established after 2022 foreign-backed riots.
Citing leaked documents and emails, The Grayzone news website reported Thursday that the NED had tried to channel US State Department resources into the so-called Iran Freedom Coalition.
The coalition, that is composed of pro-Western Iranian figures and warmongering US neoconservative operatives, represents a clear attempt to impose an “exiled leadership” over anti-Iran opposition, the report added.
It further said that the initiative against the Islamic Republic was spearheaded by Carl Gershman, the longtime director of the NED, which is considered Washington’s regime-change arm or the CIA spy agency in disguise.
“Regardless of the listed members’ level of participation, the composition of Gershman’s proposed Iran Freedom Coalition demonstrates how Iran’s self-proclaimed pro-democracy movement has become a plaything for the Bomb Iran lobby,” it said.
“Among those handpicked by Gershman to lead the initiative was William Kristol, the neocon impresario who has led a decades-long lobbying campaign for a US military invasion of Iran. Also selected was Joshua Muravchik, a flamboyant supporter of Israel’s Likud Party who insists that ‘war with Iran is probably our best option.’”
The report also said that the anti-Iran campaign’s Iranian members consist heavily of US government-sponsored cultural figures and staffers at interventionist Western think tanks like the Tony Blair Institute.
“As Gershman’s leaked proposal illustrates, these elements quickly hijacked the protests, inserting US government-sponsored exiles as the movement’s international face and voice, thus ensuring that their ultimate effect would be a deepening of US sanctions on average Iranians,” adds the report.
The Foreign-sponsored riots broke out in Iran in September 2022, when 22-year-old woman Mahsa Amini died in a hospital in the capital Tehran, three days after she collapsed at a police station.
The findings of an investigation into her death later attributed the tragic incident to Amini’s pre-existing medical condition, debunking claims that she was beaten by the police.
Rioters, nonetheless, went on rampage across the country, causing massive material damage to public property and, in some cases, lynching security forces as well as civilians whom they regarded as supporters of the Islamic establishment.
Iran’s intelligence community said several countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, used their spy and propaganda apparatuses to provoke unrest in the country.
The Second Trump Shooter Believed Exactly What the Establishment Media Wanted Him to Believe
By Connor O’Keeffe | Mises Institute | September 18, 2024
On Sunday, for the second time this election cycle, a man was able to get close to Donald Trump with a rifle. The former president was golfing when Secret Service agents spotted a rifle barrel poking out of some bushes just off the course, near a hole Trump would soon play. Agents fired on the suspect, causing him to flee as Trump was rushed off the course. Shortly after, the man was apprehended by police.
A scoped rifle, two backpacks, and a video camera were recovered from the woods where the suspect was hiding. The FBI said it was investigating the incident as an attempted assassination. The suspect, Ryan Routh, has so far been charged with two gun-related crimes.
While there are clearly some major differences between this incident and the first assassination attempt in July—when Trump was shot in the ear during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania—the fact that an armed man was able to get so close to the former president and remain undetected until the last moment for the second time in two months is a big deal.
Yet the reaction from the political establishment and the establishment media has been notably different. Back in July, there was broad agreement within the establishment that they needed to “lower the temperature.” This week, the rhetoric has changed. While most go through the motion of denouncing political violence, establishment figures and outlets have downplayed the assassination attempt, obscured the attempted shooter’s political ideology, and even blamed Trump himself for provoking people into trying to kill him.
It’s not surprising that the political establishment and their friends in the media want to dismiss or play down what happened on Sunday. Because Ryan Routh, the suspect, appears to have been motivated by the exact narrative of the war in Ukraine and the prospect of a second Trump term that the establishment is trying so hard to get the American public to accept.
In early 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, the American establishment went into overdrive to whitewash all the developments that had led to the invasion. They instead defined Vladamir Putin as an expansionist tyrant bent on conquering all of Europe simply because he hates freedom and democracy.
Because of unearthed social media posts, numerous interviews with major outlets like The New York Times, and a self-published book, we can clearly see that Routh was completely convinced by the establishment’s characterization of the war. So much so that in the months after the war broke out, Routh traveled to Ukraine to try and join the fight. He was turned away, apparently due to his age, but stuck around to try and recruit other foreigners to join Ukraine’s ranks.
In one interview with Newsweek, Routh laid out how he views the war:
To me, a lot of the other conflicts are gray, but this conflict is definitely black-and-white. This is about good versus evil. This is a storybook— you know, any movie we’ve ever watched, this is definitely evil against good. … It seems asinine that we have a leader and a country that does not understand the concept of being unselfish, and being generous, and being kind, and just the basic moral values that are required by human beings these days. It blows my mind.
That is exactly how the pundits and politicians who make up the American political establishment want us thinking about this war. Not as an unnecessary geopolitical conflict that escalated for decades before erupting into the conventional war we see today, but simply as a black-and-white showdown with an evil country.
Importantly, as can be seen in the opening to Biden’s State of the Union address from earlier this year, the establishment has explicitly conflated this threat abroad with what they call the threat at home—meaning Trump and the MAGA movement. So if a disturbed person like Ryan Routh was convinced that he would be a hero if he went and fought the evil Russians in Ukraine only to be turned away because of his age, it’s not much of a jump to expect that he concluded he could still be a hero if he set his sights on, what he was told, is the same threat at home.
That’s not to say that the establishment voices pushing the simplistic narratives that captured Routh directly incited his assassination attempt—although it would under the standard they apply to Trump and January 6. Only that the establishment is using misleading and sometimes wholly fictional narratives about the war in Ukraine and the populist anger directed toward them to try to scare us into voting in ways that support their interests. It shouldn’t surprise anyone when these contrived, simplistic, overly dramatic narratives lead some people to decide voting isn’t enough.
Meta’s Ban on Sputnik ‘Very Bad’ and Politicized Decision – Analyst
By Oleg Burunov – Sputnik – September 17, 2024
A politically motivated move by Meta to ban Russia’s Rossiya Segodnya and RT news outlets from its apps globally reflects the company’s biased approach, analysts said in separate interviews with Sputnik.
“There is a perception in the United States that the flow of Russian information will always be disinformation and that it will be tipped in favor of Donald Trump, even though [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has said that he could deal with Kamala Harris, too. This [perception] is simply untrue. I mean, the idea is to frighten the American people that they don’t know one idea from another. I mean, that’s the smokescreen,” Professor Joe Siracusa, political scientist and dean of Global Futures, Curtin University, told Sputnik.
As such, the idea that Russia spends all of its time to propagandize the American public, and that “there is a body of information out there that is going to undermine their faith and their freedom is ridiculous”, Siracusa underlines.
Recently, Russia’s Rossiya Segodnya, RT and “other related entities” were banned from Meta apps globally over alleged foreign interference activity.
This is a “very bad decision, particularly coming from an American company,” the political scientist points out.
Meta’s ban on Russian news outlets mean that “they [Meta] are really sort of censoring the news themselves. What they’re saying to the American people is that you’re not mature enough to understand ideas”, per the professor.
“This is the kind of game that the Democratic Party plays. I mean, there’s no excuse or reason for this kind of embargo on foreign information based on the idea that it’s protecting the American people… from whom? From Mark Zuckerberg? It’s ridiculous. Meta was in very close cahoots with the Democratic Party the last time around when it went after Donald Trump. So, in a way, it’s already been politicized,” the professor concludes.
In a separate interview with Sputnik, Facebook whistleblower Ryan Hartwig says that as a former Facebook content moderator, he saw firsthand how the company “influenced elections throughout the world.”
“Facebook is clearly biased and has an agenda with elections. At a whim, it can make newsworthy exceptions to protect certain politicians. They may as well ban their own app and go after themselves for foreign interference activity,” Hartwig, who is the co-author of “Behind the Mask of Facebook: A Whistleblower’s Shocking Story of Big Tech Bias and Censorship”, points out.
When it comes to Facebook’s foreign influence, suffice to mention the elections in Spain, Venezuela, and the US, according to Hartwig.
Given the fact that Facebook was being influenced by the US’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) “to suppress major stories” like the Hunter Biden laptop saga, “other countries should consider Meta a government agency,” the whistleblower adds.
As for the Ukraine crisis, “It’s clear that Meta is acting in coordination with the US government and the US State Department as a proxy for a foreign conflict,” Hartwig concludes.
Canadian journalist outs himself as Canadian, Ukrainian intelligence collaborator
By Wyatt Reed · The Grayzone · September 3, 2024
Canada’s National Post is refusing to comment after one of its columnists revealed himself to be a collaborator with Western-aligned intelligence agencies. A Canadian activist is now threatening to sue the paper after the confessed spy smeared him in a front page article.
Adam Zivo, a columnist who covered the war in Ukraine for Canada’s National Post newspaper, has outed himself as an operative of Canadian and Ukrainian intelligence. The admission came as Zivo publicly leapt to the defense of Canada’s Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), in response to a wave of online mockery directed towards a post by the spy agency which asked readers, “Has a stranger ever tried to inflate your ego?,” before warning them that such flattery “could be elicitation.”
“People are dunking on this tweet but this actually happened to me in Odesa in early 2023 with a guy who seemed to be a Chinese spy,” Zivo volunteered. “I ended up organizing a small sting operation with two Ukrainian intelligence officers to figure out what his deal was,” he declared.
In a subsequent post, Zivo expanded on his repeated attempts to entrap a man he had encountered in Odessa, and whom he claimed was a Chinese intelligence agent. “I met the Chinese man and his wife at a restaurant while wearing a wire,” while “SBU officers watched us from a car parked outside, which had tinted windows,” Zivo stated.
He told Canada’s PressProgress that following his meeting with the supposed Chinese agent, “I drafted a detailed report which I quickly provided to the National Post, CSIS [Canadian Security Intelligence Service] and the Ukrainian government. After the recorded dinner, I produced transcripts and a follow-up report which was also shared with these stakeholders.”
The National Post has so far refused to comment on the revelation. As PressProgress reported, “National Post Editor-in-Chief Rob Roberts and Managing Editor Carson Jerema did not respond to several requests for comment.”
In response to questions to that publication, Zivo insisted he kept his bosses at the National Post updated about his intelligence activities.
“I informed them of what was occurring and that I was working with local authorities to address my safety concerns,” Zivo said, though he reportedly insisted later that he “did not run this by my editors for a sign off,” because, since he was a “freelancer, not a staff writer,” he did not “need permission.”
According to Zivo, his working relationship with Canadian and Ukrainian intelligence services began in late 2022. None of his articles published in the National Post have disclosed his ties to foreign or domestic spy agencies.
Since then, Zivo has zealously advocated for rapid deliveries of heavy weapons to Ukraine. He has also used his column as a platform for denigrating those he deemed an impediment to the war effort – including both the Canadian military and the nation of Germany, which he accused of “reckless greed and a callous disregard for eastern European lives” for initially declining to send tanks to Ukraine.
Among Zivo’s targets was Dimitri Lascaris, a Canadian lawyer who narrowly lost the Canadian Green Party’s 2020 leadership election. In early 2023, Zivo made Lascaris the subject of a front-page report entitled, “Former Green party leadership candidate goes to Moscow to whitewash war.” In the column, Zivo accused Lascaris of “pro-Putin sympathies,” “seemingly endorsing pro-Kremlin propaganda,” and “uncritically and reflexively taking Russia’s side.”
Zivo also rang up the co-leader of Canada’s Green Party, Jonathan Pednault, to solicit criticism of Lascaris. In a parenthetical, Zivo stated that he had helped facilitate a solidarity tour of Kiev for Pednault, and “introduced him to some contacts for his trip, such as local Jewish and LGBTQ leaders.”
While hinting at his ties to the Ukrainian government, Zivo neglected once again to disclose his role as an intelligence collaborator.
“No corporate media outlet in Canada has taken an interest in this story”
Following Zivo’s unmasking as a Ukrainian intelligence collaborator, Lascaris took to social media to argue the reporter-turned-spook “perpetrated a fraud by concealing from me and the public his spying activities,” then proceeded to write an “article about me [which] falsely insinuated that I was working in the service of the Russian government.”
“The supreme irony here is that it was Zivo – not me – who was acting as a government agent,” Lascaris explained.
In comments to The Grayzone, Lascaris remarked that “Zivo has also violated the journalistic values of transparency and integrity because he secured an interview with me on false pretences, and when the National Post published Zivo’s many articles about the Ukraine war, neither Zivo nor the Post disclosed to the public that Zivo was a spy.”
Zivo has previously described himself as a “journalist,” “content vendor,” “filmmaker,” “activist” and – apparently ironically – as a “geopolitical analyst via an ecosystem of NATO-affiliated NGOs.”
Lascaris dismissed these labels as window dressing. “There’s now little doubt that Zivo wears only one hat: he is a shill for the Western military industrial complex,” he said.
“There are probably many more ‘journalists’ like Zivo in the Western corporate media. What is unusual about Zivo is that he bragged publicly about being a spy for Western intelligence agencies,” Lascaris added.
It is unknown whether other intelligence operatives are employed by the National Post, or its parent company, Postmedia News, which is owned by a pro-Trump hedge fund in the US known as Chatham Asset Management.
Describing Postmedia as “fanatically pro-Israel,” Lascaris accused the company’s newspapers of “attacking me for the past eight years,” noting that the hit pieces “started around the time that I became a prominent advocate for Palestinian human rights in Canada.”
But for Lascaris, deploying an actual spy to imply he was acting as a Kremlin asset was a step too far. He now says he is considering legal action against the National Post and its parent company, Postmedia News, which is Canada’s largest newspaper publisher.
“Because Zivo misled me… I sent a letter to the National Post’s editor-in-chief in which I threatened to sue the Post for fraud,” Lascaris explained, adding: “I’m awaiting the editor’s response.”
A handful of Canadian journalists have condemned Zivo on an individual basis, with the President of the Canadian Association of Journalists, Brent Jolly, describing Zivo’s intelligence activities as “problematic” and “ethically murky.” Jolly told PressProgress : “I don’t think we can go around and just have people one minute working for CSIS and the next writing a story about what an amazing job CSIS is doing.”
Sonya Fatah, the Associate Chair of Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Journalism, described Zivo’s actions as a major breach of journalistic ethics, stating: “I imagine most newsrooms would be horrified.”
But so far, Canadian mainstream media has done its best to ignore Zivo’s disturbing double game.
“As far as I know, no corporate media outlet in Canada has taken an interest in this story,” Lascaris said. “Although I am well known to the corporate media, no Canadian corporate media outlet has sought comment from me about this scandal.”
But outside the Western media bubble, Lascaris said he suspects that Zivo’s activities will have dangerous repercussions.
“It’s almost certain that Zivo’s admission will heighten Russian suspicions about Western corporate journalists. And it’s not just Russia. China and other states targeted by Western government belligerence are sure to take these revelations into account in their dealings with Western journalists,” according to Lascaris.
“Zivo said that his employer knew about his activities. As far as I know, Postmedia has not denied this, nor has it taken any action against Zivo. The logical inference to draw is that Canada’s largest newspaper publisher believes that Zivo did nothing wrong.”
Zivo’s admission that he worked with intelligence services “will only heighten the belief in Russia, China and elsewhere that Western media have been coopted by, and have become tools of, hostile Western governments” Lascaris emphasized.
“In essence, the National Post’s response to this scandal will inevitably make it harder for Western journalists to do their jobs in the non-Western world.”
NATO’s Destruction of Ukraine Under the Guise of “Helping”
Propaganda & Proxy Wars
By Glenn Diesen | September 17, 2024
In a recent public event, the heads of the CIA and the MI6 assessed developments in the Ukraine War. The head of the MI6 applauded the invasion of Kursk for having changed the “narrative” of the war, while the head of the CIA also outlined the objective to “put a dent” in the Kremlin’s narrative about the development of the war. There can be no doubt that the invasion of Kursk was an utter disaster for Ukraine and NATO. However, controlling the narrative is imperative as the Western public will support financing the war if they believe they are helping Ukraine and the war can be won.
During the 20-year-long NATO occupation of Afghanistan, public support was also maintained by constructing a narrative of progress and helping the people of Afghanistan. Every week the Western public was reassured by the media that the war effort in Afghanistan was making great progress, until NATO fled in a great hurry as people fell off planes. Much like how the Pentagon Papers exposed the deceit of the Vietnam War, the Afghanistan Papers exposed how the war was an unmitigated disaster. Yet, in both instances, a rosy picture was presented by the media.
A leaked CIA report outlined how they could increase public support for NATO’s occupation of Afghanistan by selling it to the public as helping women. The report revealed that “Afghan women could serve as ideal messengers in humanizing the ISAF role in combating the Taliban”, and framing NATO’s occupation as a crusade for women’s rights could “overcome pervasive scepticism among women in Western Europe towards the ISAF mission”.[1] NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg even co-authored an article with Hollywood star Angelina Jolie with the title: “Why NATO must defend women’s rights”.[2] Appealing to the best in human nature to mobilise public support for doing the worst in human nature is a good description of war propaganda.
Selling the Ukraine War
The Ukraine War is sold to the public as being merely selfless “help” from NATO for Ukraine to defend itself against an expansionist Russia, motivated solely by territorial acquisition and restoring the Soviet Union. Framing the war as a simple struggle between good and evil is why NATO cannot negotiate or even pursue basic diplomacy, and peace depends on good defeating evil. In what is close to a copyright infringement of “war is peace” in George Orwell’s 1984, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg asserts that “weapons are the way to peace”.
In political propaganda, it is common to frame a war through a concept that everyone agrees with, such as the need to “help” Ukraine. We all want to help Ukraine preserve its sovereignty, territory and the lives of its citizens. However, instead of discussing what would help Ukraine, such concepts are given a fixed meaning to shut down debates. Any argument can then be framed as either being pro-Ukrainian or pro-Russian. However, what is bad for Russia is not automatically good for Ukraine. Yet, people who can be taught to speak in clichés can be taught to think in clichés. Commentary on NATO policies toward Russia is similarly framed as being pro-Western or pro-Russian, which circumvents an actual discussion about whether these policies are in the West’s interests or not.
Concepts such as “helping Ukraine” can then be filled with any content that often contradicts what “helping” entails, but corresponds with proxy war. When we unpack what NATO frames as “helping Ukraine”, we find that it rarely has the support from the majority of Ukrainians and it almost always ends up with disastrous consequences. So how does NATO “help Ukraine”?
NATO Expansion
NATO dismisses any accusations of an expansionist agenda by presenting itself as a passive actor that merely responds to Ukraine’s desire to join NATO. This narrative conceals the reality that every poll between 1991 and 2014 demonstrates that only approximately 20% of Ukrainians wanted to join NATO. When NATO promised future membership to Ukraine in 2008, 43 percent of Ukrainians considered NATO a threat to Ukraine and merely 15 percent associated NATO with protection.[3] Forty-six percent of Ukrainians answered it was more important to have close relations with Russia, while only 10 percent of Ukrainians supported close relations with the US over Russia.[4] In 2011, a NATO document acknowledged: “The greatest challenge for Ukrainian-NATO relations lies in the perception of NATO among the Ukrainian people. NATO membership is not widely supported in the country, with some polls suggesting that popular support of it is less than 20%”.[5]
Even after Russia seized Crimea in response to the Western-backed coup in 2014, only a small minority of Ukrainians wanted integration with NATO (10.3% in the South and 13.1% in the East).[6] Nonetheless, Ukraine was still pulled toward NATO even though CIA Director Burns had warned already back in 2008 that it would likely trigger a civil war in Ukraine and “Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face”.[7] In December 2020, former British ambassador to Russia Roderic Lyne similarly warned that attempting to push Ukraine into NATO “was stupid on every level at that time. If you want to start a war with Russia, that’s the best way of doing it. Moreover, any poll in Ukraine showed that two thirds of the Ukrainian public did not want NATO membership”.[8] If the Ukrainians did not want NATO membership and we knew it would trigger a war, why was it “pro-Ukrainian”?
Regime Change in Kiev
In February 2014, NATO countries toppled the government in Ukraine under the guise of supporting a “democratic revolution”. Yanukovich had been elected in what the OSCE had recognised to be a free and fair election, and there was no evidence that Yanukovich would not have stepped down if he had lost in the next election. The Maidan protests did not enjoy democratic majority support from the Ukrainians and even fewer supported a coup.[9] British Foreign Minister William Hague deceived the public by claiming that the toppling of President Yanukovich had been done in compliance with the constitution, contrary to the clear rules in the Ukrainian constitution that specified procedures for removing the head of state.[10] A phone call leaked two weeks before the coup, exposed how Washington was planning the coup and hand-picked the new government that would be installed.[11] NATO supported the toppling of the democratically elected government that attempted to bridge a divided society, and replaced it with a divisive pro-NATO/anti-Russian government. Yet criticise the Western-backed coup in Kiev and you will be branded to be “anti-Ukrainian” and “pro-Russian”. In contrast, the people who set Ukraine on a path to destruction against their will claim to “stand with Ukraine”.
Asserting Administrative Control over Ukraine
On the first day after the coup, the head of Ukraine’s intelligence services in the new government that the US had hand-picked, called the CIA and MI6 to start a partnership for a covert war against Russia.[12] This partnership was a key reason why Russia decided to intervene militarily eight years later in February 2022.[13] The Washington Post reported: “the CIA has spent tens of millions of dollars to transform Ukraine’s Soviet-formed services into potent allies against Moscow”.[14] The US then also strengthened the far-right fascist groups in Ukraine as they functioned as a veto power on any efforts to seek peace with Russia.
Several Westerners took key positions in the Ukrainian government. In 2014, Natalie Jaresko took the position of Finance Minister of Ukraine and received Ukrainian citizenship on the same day as she took the job. Jaresko was a former US State Department official and former Economic Section Chief of the US Embassy in Ukraine. She transitioned from representing American interests in Ukraine, to representing Ukraine. The general prosecutor of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, complained that since 2014, “the most shocking thing is that all the [government] appointments were made in agreement with the United States”. According to Shokin, Washington’s behaviour indicated that they “believed that Ukraine was their fiefdom”.[15] Biden would later take credit for having fired Ukraine’s General Prosecutor, who had opened an investigation into the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Three months after the coup in February 2014, Hunter Biden and a close family friend of US Secretary of State, John Kerry, became board members of Burisma.[16]
After Russia invaded in February 2022, the US further strengthened its grip over Ukraine. In 2023, an American transgender who argued that Russians are not human beings became the new spokesperson for Ukraine’s Territorial Defence Forces. As Ukraine’s situation became more precarious and dependence on the West increased, Kiev largely outsourced the post-war reconstruction process to BlackRock and J.P. Morgan to manage the Ukraine Development Fund. The US asserting administrative control over the Ukrainian government was depicted as helping Ukraine with democratic governance and fighting corruption.
De-Russifying Ukraine
Decoupling Ukraine from Russia was a key objective to permanently place Ukraine in NATO’s orbit. The US-orchestrated Orange Revolution in 2004 installed the Yushchenko government that distanced itself from Russia and pursued NATO membership, however, the public eventually reversed this trajectory by electing Yanukovich. At the end of Yushchenko’s presidential term, Newsweek labelled Yushchenko the world’s most unpopular leader with a 2.7 percent approval rating.[17]
US support for the de-Russification of Ukrainian society entailed purging the political opposition, arresting the main opposition leader, banning independent media, banning the Orthodox Church, and purging the Russian language and culture. The first decree by the new Ukrainian Parliament in 2014 was a call to repeal Russian as a regional language. By 2024, Ukraine even had language inspectors to counter the spread of the Russian language.[18] The BBC reported that after the coup, Kiev’s city council was covered with large neo-Nazi banners, the American confederate flag, and portraits of the fascist ally of Hitler, Stepan Bandera.[19] A new nationalist identity was supported based on the far-right in which street names with the shared Russian or Soviet history were replaced with fascists who collaborated with Hitler. To de-Russify a country that lived in the same state as Russia for centuries and shared language, culture and faith, could not possibly coexist with democracy, stability or basic human rights. Such policies caused a deep rift in the social cohesion of the country and caused misery for millions of Ukrainians who became second-rate citizens in their own country.
Yet, these developments could be supported under the guise of “helping Ukraine” to decouple from Russia as a condition for asserting its distinctive identity and sovereignty.
The War Against Donbas
After the coup in 2014, people in Donbas rejected the new government in Kiev that had seized power with the support of the West, as predicted by CIA Director Burns. The first instinct of the new authorities and their backers in Washington was to send the military to destroy the uprising. Yet, the Ukrainian army was weak and regular soldiers were not comfortable with turning their guns on their own population. This problem was overcome by recruiting fascist militias in Western Ukraine, such as Azov, who were happy to kill. Yevhan Karas, the leader of the fascist group C14, informed his audience that the West did not give weapons to help Ukrainians but did so because “we have started a war” that was fulfilling the goals of the West. The nationalists were supported by the West due to their resilience: “because we have fun, we have fun killing and we have fun fighting”.[20]
Kiev launched an “anti-terrorist operation” against Donbas, which killed more than 14.000 Ukrainians. Ignoring all evidence about the involvement of local Ukrainians in the uprising, the Western media largely denied any agency as all fighting was done by “pro-Russian” militias or Russians themselves. Thus, the war against Ukrainians in Donbas could be sold to the Western public as helping Ukraine fight Russian influence.
Sabotaging the Minsk-2 Peace Agreement
The fighting between Kiev and Donbas came to an end with the Minsk-2 peace agreement. Both Poroshenko and Zelensky attempted to implement the Minsk-2 agreement before being opposed by the US-backed far-right.
The BBC reported in August 2015 that a clear majority of 265 MPs out of 450 had supported the first reading of the decentralisation bill to grant more autonomy to Donbas. This sparked a violent veto by the far right, it then reported: ‘Protesters led by the populist Radical Party and the ultra-nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) party—who oppose any concession to the Russian-backed separatists’ clashed with riots police that resulted in the death of a national guard member and over 100 injured.[21] Poroshenko subsequently began to abandon his efforts to implement the Minsk-2 agreement.
Zelensky was therefore able to win a landslide election victory with 73% of the votes in 2019. He won over the Ukrainian public by running on a platform of peace by promising to implement the Minsk agreement to ensure peace After Zelensky became president, he was threatened by the US-backed far right and a protest was arranged in Kiev in which approximately 10,000 people rallied against President Zelensky’s plan to end the war, which was denounced as “capitulation”.[22] After failing to assert control over the far-right groups in the military, Zelensky had to align himself closer with the nationalists and thus rejected peace with Donbas.[23]
The US assisted its government in Ukraine to ignore the UN-approved Minsk-2 peace agreement by building an increasingly powerful Ukrainian army and tying it closer to NATO. Germany and France had negotiated the Minsk-2 peace agreement in 2015, although they later revealed this had been a deceit. Angela Merkel argued in an interview with both Bild and Spiegel that the Minsk Agreement enabled her to buy time for Ukraine to build itself into a powerful and well-fortified country.[24] When her French counterpart, former president François Hollande, was asked about Merkel’s statement that the Minsk-2 peace agreement was merely intended to buy time, he confirmed: “Yes, Angela Merkel is right on this point” and added that the conflict with Russia would be resolved on the battlefield: “There will only be a way out of the conflict when Russia fails on the ground”.[25] Retired German General Harald Kujat, the former head of the German Bundeswehr and former chairman of the NATO Military Committee, later argued that the West’s sabotage of the Minsk agreement was “a breach of international law… it turns out that we are the ones who do not comply with international agreements”.[26]
NATO countries had confirmed for 7 years that the Minsk-2 peace agreement was the only path to a peaceful settlement of the conflict in Ukraine, while concurrently sabotaging the only path to peace. This path to war was done against the overwhelming will of the Ukrainian population, as evidenced by their consistent voting for a peace platform. Why should NATO efforts to overturn the result of the Ukrainian elections to sabotage the peace agreement be considered “pro-Ukrainian” or “helping Ukraine”?
Refusing Russia’s Demand for Security Guarantees in 2021
Russia demanded in 2021 security guarantees to mitigate the threats from NATO’s growing footprint in Ukraine, otherwise, the escalating threat would be resolved by military means. President Biden warned Ukraine that Russia was preparing its military for an invasion, yet he did not want to offer any security guarantees to prevent an invasion.
Kurt Volker, the former US Ambassador to NATO and former US Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations from 2017 to 2019, even argued that Biden should not make any agreements with Putin as “the best possible outcome is not one of modest agreements and a commitment to ‘predictability,’ but one of a lack of agreements altogether. Success is confrontation”.[27] NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also acknowledged that halting NATO expansion was required to prevent an invasion: “President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And [it] was a pre-condition for not invad[ing] Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that”.[28] Under a fierce security competition in which Russia feared for its security, “helping Ukraine” would certainly have involved mitigating some of Russia’s security concerns.
Sabotaging the Istanbul Peace Negotiations in 2022
After the Minsk agreement had been sabotaged for 7 years and no security guarantees were forthcoming, Russia decided in February 2022 to use military force to impose a political settlement. On the first day after the Russian invasion, Zelensky confirmed “Today we heard from Moscow that they still want to talk. They want to talk about Ukraine’s neutral status… We are not afraid to talk about neutral status”.[29] On the third day after the invasion, Moscow and Kiev announced they would hold peace talks “without preconditions” in Belarus.[30] Zelensky even suggested later a “collective security agreement” to ensure that the security concerns of both Russia and Ukraine would be met.[31]
The US had other objectives. On the first day after the Russian invasion, Washington rejected peace without preconditions as Russia first had to withdraw all its forces from Ukraine.[32] Washington even suggested that it would not support Ukraine’s effort to resolve the conflict through a compromise as “this is a war that is in many ways bigger than Russia, it’s bigger than Ukraine”.[33] In March 2022, Zelensky argued in an interview with the Economist that “There are those in the West who don’t mind a long war because it would mean exhausting Russia, even if this means the demise of Ukraine and comes at the cost of Ukrainian lives”.[34]
According to the leader of Zelensky’s political party and Zelensky’s advisor, Russia and Ukraine were close to an agreement. Ukrainian Ambassador Oleksandr Chalyi, who participated in peace talks with Russia, confirms Putin “tried everything” to reach a peace agreement and they were able “to find a very real compromise”.[35]
Retired German General Harald Kujat, the former head of the German Bundeswehr and former chairman of the NATO Military Committee, argued that NATO provoked the war and that the US and UK sabotaged the Istanbul peace negotiations as “the West was not ready for an end to the war”.[36] The Turkish mediators confirmed: “I had the impression that there are those within the NATO member states that want the war to continue—let the war continue and Russia gets weaker. They don’t care much about the situation in Ukraine”.[37] The Israeli mediators reached the same conclusion as former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett recognised “both sides very much wanted a ceasefire” but the West “blocked” the peace agreement as a “decision by the West to keep striking Putin” rather than pursuing peace.[38]
After interviews with American and British leaders, Niall Ferguson reported in Bloomberg that a decision had been made for “the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin” as “the only end game now is the end of Putin regime”.[39] Over the next two and a half years, numerous American political and military leaders expressed their support for the war as it was a great opportunity to weaken Russia as a strategic rival without using and losing American troops. The decision to fight Russia with Ukrainians was nonetheless framed consistently in the media as “helping Ukraine”.
Keeping Ukraine in the War
As Zelensky had argued in March 2022, some of its Western partners preferred “long war because it would mean exhausting Russia, even if this means the demise of Ukraine and comes at the cost of Ukrainian lives”.[40] The Americans were pressuring Ukraine to launch the disastrous counter-offensive of 2023, as a “senior Ukrainian military official recalled, the Americans were nagging about a delayed start”.[41] The New York Times reported that “American officials say they fear that Ukraine has become casualty averse, one reason it has been cautious about pressing ahead with the counteroffensive”.[42]
However, despite the disastrous casualties among the Ukrainians and the failure of the counter-offensive, the Washington Post could report that “for the United States and its NATO allies, these 18 months of war have been a strategic windfall, at relatively low cost (other than for the Ukrainians). The West’s most reckless antagonist has been rocked. NATO has grown much stronger with the additions of Sweden and Finland. Germany has weaned itself from dependence on Russian energy and, in many ways, rediscovered its sense of values. NATO squabbles make headlines, but overall, this has been a triumphal summer for the alliance”.[43] As Ukraine continues to bleed dry in the war of attrition, there are more and more videos on Ukrainian Telegram channels of more aggressive “recruitment” tactics that involve grabbing Ukrainians off the street and throwing them into vans. Yet, the discussions in NATO countries revolve around lowering the conscription age in Ukraine or deporting Ukrainian refugees that can be used to refill the trenches.
If these were our own soldiers dying in the hundreds of thousands, would we not have begun negotiations a long time ago? The incoming EU foreign policy chief has rejected any diplomacy with Russia as Putin is a “war criminal”, while also punishing EU member states such as Hungary for attempting to restore diplomacy and negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. NATO could help Ukraine by using the promise to end expansion as a bargaining chip in negotiations with Russia. Instead, NATO continues to threaten further expansion after the war, which makes any peace agreement impossible. When Ukraine begins to collapse, the US and NATO will likely call for a ceasefire to freeze the frontlines to yet again buy some time to rebuild its Ukrainian army and fight another day.
As we reflect on NATO’s policies toward Ukraine, can we conclude that they have been in the interest of Ukraine or had the support of the Ukrainians? Has it been in the interest of the West? The ability to ask critical questions is prevented by presenting all policies as being either pro-Ukrainian or pro-Russian, in which dissent is effectively criminalised. It is a common phenomenon that when political leaders create propaganda, they often end up deceiving themselves.
…..
– The text includes excerpts from my book “The Ukraine War and the Eurasian World Order” https://www.claritypress.com/product/the-ukraine-war-the-eurasian-world-order/
[1] WIKILEAKS – – CIA Red Cell Special Memorandum; Afghanistan: Sustaining West European Support for the NATO-led Mission-Why Counting on Apathy Might Not Be Enough, March 11, 2010
[2] Why Nato must defend women’s rights | Jens Stoltenberg and Angelina Jolie | The Guardian
[3] J. Ray and N. Esipova, ‘Ukrainians Likely Support Move Away From NATO’, Gallup, 2 April 2010.
[4] C. English, ‘Ukrainians See More Value in Ties With Russia Than U.S.’, Gallup, 15 February 2008.
[5] 2011 – 172 CDSDG 11 E REV1 – UKRAINE – MALAN REPORT | NATO PA (nato-pa.int).
[6] GALLUP® CORP Template (usagm.gov)
[7] W.J. Burns, ‘Nyet means nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement Redlines’, Wikileaks, 1 February 2008.
[8] R. Lyne, ‘The UC Interview Series: Sir Roderic Lyne by Nikita Gryazin’, Oxford University Consortium, 18 December 2020.
[9] BBC, ‘Ukraine’s revolution and the far right, BBC, 7 March 2014.
[10] D. Morrison, ‘How William Hague Deceived the House of Commons on Ukraine’, Huffington Post, 10 March 2014.
[11] BBC, ‘Ukraine crisis: Transcript of leaked Nuland-Pyatt call’, BBC, 7 February 2014.
[12] The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
[13] The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
[14] G. Miller and I. Khurshudyan, ‘Ukrainian spies with deep ties to CIA wage shadow war against Russia’, The Washington Post’, 23 October 2023.
[15] M.M. Abrahms, ‘Does Ukraine Have Kompromat on Joe Biden?’, Newsweek, 8 August 2023.
[16] P. Sonne and J. Grimaldi, ‘Biden’s Son, Kerry Family Friend Join Ukrainian Gas Producer’s Board’, The Wall Street Journal, 13 May 2014.
[17] O. Matthews, ‘Viktor Yushchenko’s Star Has Fallen’, Newsweek, 13 March 2009.
[18] Language inspectors to start working in Frankivsk | УНН (unn.ua)
[19] BBC, ‘Ukraine’s Revolution and the Far Right’, BBC, 7 March 2014.
[20] A. Rubenstein and M. Blumenthal, ‘How Ukraine’s Jewish president Zelensky made peace with neo-Nazi paramilitaries on front lines of war with Russia’, The Grayzone, 4 March 2022.
[21] BBC, ‘Ukraine crisis: Deadly anti-autonomy protest outside parliament’, BBC, 31 August 2015.
[22] A. Korniienko, ‘Thousands rally in Kyiv against Zelensky’s plan to end war with Russia’, Kyiv Post, 6 October 2019.
[23] J. Melanovski, ‘Ukrainian President Zelensky deepens alliance with far right’, WSWS, 30 April 2021.
[24] A. Osang, ‘You’re Done with Power Politics’, Spiegel, 1 December 2022.
[25] T. Prouvost ‘Hollande: ‘There will only be a way out of the conflict when Russia fails on the ground’’, The Kyiv Independent, 28 December 2022.
[26] Emma, ‘Russland will verhandeln!’ [Russia wants to negotiate!], Emma, 4 March 2023.
[27] K. Volker, ‘What Does a Successful Biden-Putin Summit Look Like? Not What You Think’, CEPA, 2 June 2021.
[28] J. Stoltenberg, ‘Opening remarks’, NATO, 7 September 2023.
[29] V. Zelensky, ‘Address by the President to Ukrainians at the end of the first day of Russia’s attacks’, President of Ukraine: Official website, 25 February 2022.
[30] S. Raskin and L. Brown, ‘Ukraine and Russia to meet for peace talks ‘without preconditions,’ Zelensky says’, New York Post, 27 February 2022.
[31] M. Hirsh, ‘Hints of a Ukraine-Russia Deal?’, Foreign Policy, 8 March 2022.
[32] US Department of State, ‘Department Press Briefing’, US Department of State, 25 February 2022.
[33] US Department of State, ‘Department Press Briefing’, US Department of State, 21 March 2022.
[34] The Economist. ‘Volodymyr Zelensky on why Ukraine must defeat Putin’ The Economist, 27 March 2022.
[35] Breaking the Stalemate to Find Peace: The Russia-Ukraine War – A Geneva Security Debate (youtube.com)
[36] J. Helmer, ‘Whr. Gen. Kujat: Ukraine War is Lost, Germany Now Faces an Angry Russia… Alone’, Veterans Today, 25 January 2023.
[37] R. Semonsen, ‘Former Israeli PM: West Blocked Russo-Ukraine Peace Deal’, The European Conservative, 7 February 2023.
[38] N. Bennett, ‘Bennett speaks out’, YouTube Channel of Naftali Bennett, 4 February 2023.
[39] N. Ferguson, ‘Putin Misunderstands History. So, Unfortunately, Does the U.S.’, Bloomberg, 22 March 2022.
[40] The Economist. ‘Volodymyr Zelensky on why Ukraine must defeat Putin’ The Economist, 27 March 2022.
[41] ‘Miscalculations, divisions marked offensive planning by U.S., Ukraine’, The Washington Post, 4 December 2023.
[42] ‘Troop Deaths and Injuries in Ukraine War Near 500,000, U.S. Officials Say’, The New York Times, 18 August 2023.
[43] D. Ignatius, ‘The West feels gloomy about Ukraine. Here’s why it shouldn’t’, The Washington Post, 18 July 2023.
Would Be Assassin is a Media Darling
Ryan Wesley Routh, former roofer from N. Carolina and implacable foe of Trump and Putin, has often been approvingly quoted by MSM
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | September 16, 2024
While we often hear that middle-aged southern white men pose a grave threat to American democracy and public safety, Ryan Wesley Routh—a former roofer from North Carolina who looks and sounds like a dumb cracker —has, in recent years, been a model of anti-Trump and anti-Putin sentiment. Also notable is the fact that in 2002, he was charged with the felony possession of a fully automatic firearm.
The following is a collection of statements he has made to various MSM outlets over the last couple of years.
“It’s a pretty big yard, but the front bank is completely full,” Ryan Routh, an American volunteer who started the memorial last year, said. “There may be 10,000 at this point. ‘Flags of the fallen’ is what I’ve been calling it.”
Routh, a former construction worker who lives in Hawaii, is one of the thousands of foreigners who, after seeing news reports about the invasion, travelled into Ukraine in early 2022 to volunteer as fighters or medics.
“Most of the Ukrainian authorities do not want these soldiers,” said Ryan Routh, head of the International Volunteer Center in Ukraine, a private organization which helps foreigners seeking to assist the war effort connect with military units and aid groups. “I have had partners meeting with [Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense] every week and still have not been able to get them to agree to issue one single visa.”
The New York Times article backs up the Russian Defense Ministry’s information regarding the countries which are actively trying to recruit mercenaries to join the fight in Ukraine. It wrote about Ryan Routh, a former construction worker from North Carolina who spent several months in Ukraine last year and is now seeking recruits among Afghan soldiers who fled the Taliban. He plans to move them to Ukraine from Pakistan and Iran – in some cases, illegally. Nevertheless, dozens of people have apparently expressed an interest.
With Legion growth stalling, Ryan Routh, a former construction worker from Greensboro, N.C., is seeking recruits from among Afghan soldiers who fled the Taliban. Mr. Routh, who spent several months in Ukraine last year, said he planned to move them, in some cases illegally, from Pakistan and Iran to Ukraine. He said dozens had expressed interest. “We can probably purchase some passports through Pakistan, since it’s such a corrupt country,” he said in an interview from Washington.
The man behind the wall of banners, Ryan Routh, told CNA that he posted the flags to pay tribute to the nations that have citizens fighting in Ukraine’s foreign legion, the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine. Routh said there have been no protests about the presence of the Taiwan flag so far, but even if China is dissatisfied, “I can order another 1,000, they can’t touch my flags.”
Routh, 56, originally hails from Hawaii, but most recently worked in the construction industry in North Carolina and has no military background. He came to Kyiv more than two months ago to show his support for Ukraine and wanted to join the foreign legion.
However, due to his age, he was unable to do so, and he is instead currently assisting the legion in recruiting volunteers for the Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie units in Kharkiv. Thus far, Routh has assisted in recruiting 70 volunteers to join the fight against Russia.
Routh began posting flags on the wall of a sandbagged monument in Kyiv’s Independence Square. He told the news agency that he included Taiwan’s flag because he had met at least five Taiwanese volunteers serving in the legion over the past two months and learned about Taiwan’s contribution to Ukraine’s war effort.
According to Routh, he has yet to receive any protests from China about the presence of the Taiwan flag. He said that any pressure that would come from China would be “nothing” compared to the daily assault by Russian forces on every soldier who supports Ukraine.
He said that he will continue to stay in Kyiv and encourage more people to fight against Russia. European countries deliver truckloads of food, medical supplies, and military equipment, but Ukraine may need three to four times more support, estimated Routh.
The volunteer pointed out that there are only 50 national flags on the stone wall, meaning that there are over 100 countries that do not have a single soldier that has volunteered to fight for Ukraine, “This is unacceptable.” He emphasized the war between Russia and Ukraine is a battle of good versus evil.
Routh asserted that at this critical moment, all countries should give their soldiers unpaid leave and provide air tickets to fly to Ukraine to participate in the war to prevent Russia from starting another war. “We should be united and share success and failure, which is what these flags stand for,” said Routh.
Thus, Routh has become a seemingly improbable face and voice of prevailing Democrat Party sentiment and foreign policy orthodoxy.
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Lies are Unbekoming | January 25, 2026
The waiting room is clean. The receptionist is polite. The forms ask reasonable questions. Nothing in the physical environment suggests danger. The magazines are current. The hand sanitizer dispenser works. Someone has chosen calming colors for the walls.
A pregnant woman sits in a chair designed for her comfort. She has been told to be here. Not ordered—no one orders. Recommended. Strongly recommended. Everyone does this. Her mother did this. Her friends did this. The women in her prenatal group compare notes about their appointments the way they compare notes about nursery furniture. Which provider did you choose? What tests have you had? The questions assume the answers. The answers assume the questions.
She will be offered things today. Offered is the word used. The offers will come with information sheets that list risks and benefits in tabular form. She will sign consent documents. Everything will be voluntary in the legal sense. No one will hold her down. No one will threaten her. She will choose, and her choices will feel like choices, and she will leave feeling she has done the responsible thing.
What she will not feel is the weight of what has been arranged before she arrived. … continue
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