From covert war in 2014 to the invasion of Russia in 2024
By Glenn Diesen | August 19, 2024
The use of NATO weapons to attack Russia is a controversial topic due to the ambiguity about the role of NATO. The common argument by the Western political-media elites is that Ukraine was attacked in an unprovoked Russian invasion, and NATO has every right to assist Ukraine with weapons to defend itself. This is an appealing narrative that serves the purpose of manufacturing consent from the public to send weapons worth billions of dollars to fight Russia. If one accepts this narrative, it is even seen to be immoral to put restrictions on Ukraine in terms of where these weapons are used as the country is correctly fighting for its survival. The problem with this narrative is that NATO is not a passive non-participant in this war.
The war began in February 2014 when Western governments backed the coup in Ukraine that removed the democratically elected President of Ukraine and replaced him with a government hand-picked by Washington.[1] On the first day of the new Ukrainian government, a partnership was established between the CIA, MI6 and the intelligence services of the new government in Ukraine installed by the US.[2] This happened before there were any conflicts between Russia and Ukraine, and it resulted in 12 secret CIA bases along the Russian borders. Over the next 8 years, the US instigated tensions with Russia, armed Ukraine, and sabotaged the Minsk peace agreement to extend and weaken Russia.[3]
The US developing Ukraine as a proxy against Russia was the reason for the Russian invasion in 2022. As reported by the New York Times : “Toward the end of 2021, according to a senior European official, Mr. Putin was weighing whether to launch his full-scale invasion when he met with the head of one of Russia’s main spy services, who told him that the C.I.A., together with Britain’s MI6, were controlling Ukraine and turning it into a beachhead for operations against Moscow”.[4]
When Russia invaded in 2022, it contacted Ukraine on the first day after the war to start negotiations to impose a peace agreement that would restore Ukraine’s neutrality.[5] The US and UK sabotaged the Istanbul peace agreement by promising Zelensky all the weapons he would need if he would walk away from the peace talks and fight. Both the Israeli and Turkish mediators confirmed that the US chose war as it saw an opportunity to fight Russia through a proxy and thus weaken a strategic rival. Numerous American leaders have since expressed that this is a great war as they get to weaken Russia without losing any American troops. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has dismissed diplomacy and insists that “Weapons are the way to peace”.
Niall Ferguson wrote in Bloomberg in March 2022 that US and UK officials had confirmed that the only acceptable outcome for the war was the military defeat of Russia and regime change in Moscow. The objective was for “the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin” as “the only end game now is the end of Putin regime”.[6] The US Helsinki Commission argued in March 2022 that peace must be achieved by “decolonising” Russia, the destruction of Russia by Balkanising it.[7] The President of Poland (Andrzej Duda) and the incoming Foreign Policy Chief of the EU (Kaja Kallas) have also defined victory in Ukraine in terms of breaking Russia into many small nations.
NATO is providing weapons, ammunition, training, war planning, intelligence, target selection, management of complex weapon systems, and mercenaries to fight Russia – all under the guise of “helping Ukraine” to defend itself. NATO has authorised the use of long-range missiles to strike inside Russian territory and provides its support in the invasion of Russian territory. From Britain to Germany, the success of conquering Russian territory is openly used as an argument to send more weapons.
In this context, if we look at the actual objectives of the US and NATO, rather than the childish assertion that the US is merely attempting to protect democracy, then one can only conclude that NATO has gone to war against the world’s largest nuclear power.
Russia’s dilemma: Emboldening NATO or risking nuclear war
The insanity of NATO’s relentless escalations in the Ukraine proxy war rests on the narrative that Russia will not defend its red lines as it is deterred by NATO. This delusion exists because all Russian responses are presented as “unprovoked” and thus occur seemingly in a vacuum. Yet, when the Western government toppled the Ukrainian government in February 2014 and subsequently threatened the Russian naval base in Sevastopol, Russia responded by seizing Crimea. When Western governments sabotaged the Minsk agreement for 7 years and then refused to give Russia any security guarantees in December 2021, Russia responded by invading Ukraine in 2022. When NATO began to send weapons to Ukraine to fight Russia, Russia responded by annexing four oblasts – Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhiya, and Kherson.
How will Russia respond? Russia is faced with a dilemma: It has been restrained as retaliations could easily escalate into a NATO-Russia nuclear exchange, yet the failure to retaliate will only embolden NATO. Western media refers to the failure of Russia to respond as a reason for why NATO can continue to escalate, as Russia is not retaliating. Yet, with every step up the escalation ladder, the pressure mounts on Russia to restore its deterrent.
The retaliation will come, but Russia keeps its head cool to decide when, where and how it best serves Russian interests. The Western media is obsessed with the objective of humiliating Putin without considering the possible consequences. Anyone calling for a return to common sense is denounced as being soft on Russia, and the recognition of Russia’s nuclear deterrent is framed as accepting Russia’s “nuclear blackmail”. Consequently, warmongering is celebrated as morality while advocating for diplomacy is denounced as appeasement. In our narrative-driven media, even arguing that NATO has gone to war against Russia is deemed treasonous as it is depicted as “taking the side of Russia”.
The propaganda prevents us from asking the most important question: How exactly do we think this escalation will end? Irrespective of what narrative we have sold to our own public about defending democracy, from Moscow’s perspective, NATO has now placed itself in the same category as Napoleon and Hitler. Let’s pick up a history book and ask ourselves how Russia will likely respond: capitulation or a powerful response?
I was on the Indian TV channel WION discussing NATO weapons being used to target Russian territory.
[1] Ukraine crisis: Transcript of leaked Nuland-Pyatt call – BBC News
[2] The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
[3] Read the RAND report on how to overextend Russia: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3063.html
[4] The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
[5] Address by the President to Ukrainians at the end of the first day of Russia’s attacks — Official website of the President of Ukraine
[6] Niall Ferguson: Putin and Biden Misunderstand History in Ukraine War – Bloomberg
[7] Decolonizing Russia: a Moral and Strategic Imperative – CSCE
I’m still on August hiatus, but here’s a two-hour lecture on the history of mass media to tide you over until September! This is Lesson One of my three lesson Mass Media: A History online course. Buy the complete course for audio and video downloads, a hyperlinked transcript of each lesson and a study guide with questions and reading recommendations. Enjoy!
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Theodore Postol, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen
Glenn Diesen | August 6, 2024
I had a very interesting discussion with Alexander Mercouris and Theodore Postol – a nuclear engineer and missile technology expert professor from MIT and former advisor to the Pentagon.
Professor Postol spoke about the new missiles that the US will deploy to Germany, which will be able to reach Moscow within 2-3 minutes and thus dramatically elevate the potential for a successful nuclear first-strike. Russia will have very little time to respond to a possible strike, which increases the risk of an accidental nuclear war or a NATO nuclear first-strike. Russia will have to respond by decentralising decision-making and granting more people the authority to launch a counter-strike against the US to reduce the threat of a decapitating strike against Russia’s decision-making headquarters, and Russia will be under pressure to launch a pre-emptive strike on the US/NATO if it suspects a first-strike in coming. This has happened before when NATO’s Able Archer exercise in 1983 almost triggered a Soviet nuclear attack as Moscow thought the NATO military exercise was a cover for a first-strike.
As the world was almost consumed by a nuclear holocaust, both Washington and Moscow recognised the need to extend the warning period for a possible nuclear first-strike. The result was the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 1987 to remove an entire class of missiles from Europe (500-5,500km range). In 2019, the US unilaterally withdrew from the INF Treaty, and new missiles will now be deployed to Germany which will give the US the possibility to strike Moscow with almost no warning. The US and Germany are thus setting the stage for something comparable to another Cuban Missile Crisis. The decision has no clear purpose in terms of improving security, it does not respond to any changes in the Russian nuclear posture, and the obedient media has offered no critical reporting.
By Jonathan Cook | July 28, 2024
BBC coverage of the attack on a football pitch in the Golan Heights on Saturday has been intentionally misleading.
The BBC’s evening news entirely ignored the fact that those killed by the blast are a dozen Syrians, not Israeli citizens, and that for decades the surviving Syrian population in the Golan, most of them Druze, has been forced to live unwillingly under an Israeli military occupation.
I suppose mention of this context might complicate the story Israel and the BBC wish to tell – and risk reminding viewers that Israel is a belligerent state occupying not just Palestinian territory but Syrian territory too (not to mention nearby Lebanese territory).
It might suggest to audiences that these various permanent Israeli occupations have been contributing not only to large-scale human rights abuses but to regional tensions as well. That Israel’s acts of aggression against its neighbours might be the cause of “conflict”, rather than, as Israel and the BBC would have us believe, some kind of unusual, pre-emptive form of self-defence.
The BBC, of course, chose to uncritically air comments from a military spokesman for Israel, who blamed Hizbullah for the blast in the Golan.
Daniel Hagari tried to milk the incident for maximum propaganda value, arguing: “This attack shows the true face of Hizbullah, a terrorist organisation that targets and murders children playing soccer.”
Except, as the BBC failed to mention in its report, Israel infamously targeted and murdered four young children from the Bakr family playing football on a beach in Gaza in 2014.
Much more recently, video footage showed Israel striking yet more children playing football at a school in Gaza that was serving as a shelter for families whose homes were destroyed by earlier Israeli bombs.
Doubtless other strikes in Gaza over the past 10 months, so many of them targeting school-shelters, have killed Palestinian children playing football – especially as it is one of the very few ways they can take their mind off the horror all around.
So, should we – and the BBC – not conclude that all these attacks on children playing football make the Israeli military even more of a terrorist organisation than Hizbullah?
Note too the way the western media are so ready to accept unquestioningly Israel’s claim that Hizbullah was responsible for the blast – and dismiss Hizbullah’s denials.
Viewers are discouraged from exercising their memories. Any who do may recall that those same media outlets were only too willing to take on faith Israeli disinformation suggesting that Hamas had hit Gaza’s al-Ahli hospital back in October, even when all the evidence showed it was an Israeli air strike.
(Israel soon went on to destroy all Gaza’s hospitals, effectively eradicating the enclave’s health sector, on the pretext that medical facilities there served as Hamas bases – another patently preposterous claim the western media treated with wide-eyed credulity.)
The BBC next went to Jerusalem to hear from diplomatic editor Paul Adams. He intoned gravely: “This is precisely what we have been worrying about for the past 10 months – that something of this magnitude would occur on the northern border, that would turn what has been a simmering conflict for all of these months into an all-out war.”
So there you have it. Paul Adams and the BBC concede they haven’t been worrying for the past 10 months about the genocide unfolding under their very noses in Gaza, or its consequences.
A genocide of Palestinians, apparently, is not something of significant “magnitude”.
Only now, when Israel can exploit the deaths of Syrians forced to live under its military rule as a pretext to expand its “war”, are we supposed to sit up and take notice. Or so the BBC tells us.
Facebook instantly removed a post linking to this article – and for reasons that are entirely opaque to me (apart from the fact that it is critical of the BBC and Israel).
Facebook’s warning, threatening that my account may face “more account restrictions”, suggests that I was misleading followers by taking them to a “landing page that impersonates another website”. That is patent nonsense. The link took them to my Substack page.
As I have been warning for some time, social media platforms have been tightening the noose around the necks of independent journalists like me, making our work all but impossible to find. It is only a matter of time before we are disappeared completely.
Substack has been a lifeline, because it connects readers to my work directly – either through email or via Substack’s app – bypassing, at least for the moment, the grip of the social-media billionaires.
If you wish to keep reading my articles, and haven’t already, please sign up to my Substack page.
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
By Tim Kirby | Strategic Culture Foundation | November 14, 2026
Did Vladimir Putin just wake up one day on the wrong side of the bed and decide to invade Ukraine in February of 2022 or is there a lot more to this single decision that has been reshaping the 21st century geopolitical landscape?
Obviously, from the way that I just posed the question you can see that I am on the side that views the causes for the war in Ukraine to be very deep, long-term, historical and consciously nefarious, and most importantly, not from within the halls of the Kremlin. So it was a pleasure to take a look at the book “Boiling Point, How America Brought War to Ukraine” by author Stephen Kinzer, who like myself, also believes that the real reasons behind military conflicts around the world are not what CNN and the BBC have been telling you. The main thesis of this book was stated clearly by its creator; the war “may have been illegal, but it was definitely not unprovoked.” … continue
Aletho News If Americans Knew No Tricks Zone
