UN Official’s Battle With “Toxic Information” Raises Censorship Fears Ahead of US Election
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | September 30, 2024
United Nations (UN) Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications Melissa Fleming’s focus is “disinformation” and “toxic information systems” – and she presents those as standing in the way of the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs).
SDGs are the UN’s plan that opponents say is “toxic” in itself since it seeks to promote such controversial things as censorship and digital ID and, to make matters worse, that’s supported by major countries.
Now, Fleming seems to be keen to add to the avalanche of pressure on Big Tech – even though the term she no doubt carefully uses instead is “domination of public discourse” in places where this alleged disinformation is most present.
Coincidentally or not this is coming right before a US presidential election, but Fleming is framing her parroting of the “disinformation” narrative in terms of the social platforms, as purely an “SDGs and UN” issue.
She is even trying to link this with the UN’s purpose, which is (rather, should be) peacekeeping and humanitarian missions, but from which the world organization has been disconnecting for a while.
Responding to a question lumping disinformation, climate change, and conflict resolution into one, Fleming asserted that disinformation and “toxic information systems” are damaging humanitarian and peacekeeping efforts, not to mention SDGs (she doesn’t quite explain this assertion).
Fleming’s official UN bio says one of her roles is “far-reaching efforts to address mis- and disinformation, and hate speech,” while supposedly simultaneously promoting “free and independent media.”
However, she started her career with an outlet that’s anything but free and independent: Fleming used to work for “Radio Free Europe,” funded by the US authorities (originally through the CIA).
Now, no doubt thanks to Fleming, the UN has something called DG Media Zone and it is there and during this year’s UN General Assembly that Fleming sounded her alarm bells, going as far as to say that “every single one” of UN’s priorities is these days under threat due to disinformation. (“Climate change” is now proudly listed among those priorities, in case you missed that.)
Fleming’s solution: collusion. This time (and publicly) “merely” with “civil society and people” who need to “work on our information ecosystems together.”
A word of warning about “civil society,” though: it’s often a moniker behind which groups implementing censorship through “fact-checking” etc, like to hide.
Americans queueing to assassinate Trump, yet Iran is blamed
By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 27, 2024
The United States does not have an impressive history of truth-telling when it comes to finding the culprits of presidential assassinations.
Indeed, the opposite. Cover-up and scapegoating are par for the course. So, bear that in mind about hyped reports this week about Iran allegedly trying to assassinate Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
In 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald, a former U.S. Marine, was officially blamed for killing John F Kennedy. It was also mooted at the time that Oswald was working as a sympathizer for Communist Cuba or the Soviet Union.
Despite decades of the U.S. mainstream media and academia sticking to the preposterous narrative of Oswald as the lone shooter in Dallas, there is cogent evidence that JFK was assassinated by the American deep state of CIA and corporate power because of the president’s opposition to Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union.
For more than six decades, the official narrative of JFK’s assassination has not changed despite the absurdities of the official account. Three fatal bullets in quick succession from a notoriously poor shot (Oswald) and the third to the front of the president’s head, supposedly from Oswald perched in a high-rise building hundreds of feet to the rear. Give us a break.
Fast forward to the summer of 2024. Two attempts have been made on the life of Republican candidate Donald Trump. On both occasions, the attacks were carried out by American citizens. On July 13, Thomas Matthew Crooks was shot dead by Secret Service agents after he fired his assault rifle at Trump during a rally in Pennsylvania. On September 15, Ryan Routh was arrested for trying to kill Trump at his golf course in Florida. It’s not clear what the shooters’ motives were. But both incidents involve American citizens as would-be assassins.
Moreover, there are disturbing questions about the lax conduct of the state security services and bigger forces who might want Trump dead. The first assassination attempt in Pennsylvania saw gaping lapses that allowed the shooter to breach the security perimeter. In the second case, the suspect had active ties with recruiting foreign mercenaries for the NATO-backed Ukrainian regime and presumably U.S. intelligence networks.
Yet this week, the U.S. intelligence services accuse Iran of plotting to kill Trump. The story has been doing the rounds in the U.S. media for weeks, having first been reported by CNN shortly after the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. The unsubstantiated Iranian connection smacks of a blatant distraction from possibly more homegrown culprits.
Gullibly, Trump this week appeared to buy the accusations against Iran. He threatened to blow Iran to “smithereens” if he were president.
This is while Trump has previously blamed his Democrat rivals for responsibility, pointing out how they have labelled him as a “threat to American democracy”.
There is no evidence from the U.S. spooks to substantiate their high-flown claims against Iran. The accusations come at an extremely tense time when Israel is threatening to drag the Middle East into an all-out war with Lebanon and Iran. The latest U.S. intel accusations against Iran serve to give Israel a cover for its regional aggression.
Trump’s unquestioning reaction to blame Iran is no doubt driven by his desire to act tough for electioneering gain. Threatening to blow a country to smithereens might play well with some voters.
No doubt, too, Trump is living out his own fears of Iranian revenge. He ordered the assassination in 2020 of Iran’s top military commander Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad.
Tehran has never officially declared its intention to kill Trump out of revenge for Soleimani. This week at the United Nations General Assembly, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian spoke of Iran not wanting war and of seeking diplomatic negotiations with the US to avoid further conflict in the Middle East. It would, therefore, be irrational for Tehran to jeopardize the region by engaging in a vendetta against a presidential candidate.
The fingering of Iran with allegations of plotting to assassinate Trump comes at a suspicious time.
The U.S. presidential race is heading to a tight finish, with the Democrat candidate Kamala Harris receiving endorsements from the Washington establishment, including former Republican administration officials. Harris is the deep-state favorite to ensure the continuation of foreign policy goals of confronting Russia and China. Trump is too much of a maverick and unreliable for the powers-that-be. The stakes are high to make sure he does not get back to the White House, as far as the interests of the U.S. imperial planners are concerned. His talk about cutting military aid to the Ukrainian regime and calls for a peace settlement are not what the military-intel-imperialist deep state wants.
What if a third assassination attempt on Trump succeeds? There are plenty of grounds to suspect that he could be taken out by “executive action” sanctioned by enemies within the U.S. power nexus because of the high stakes of this election. The deep state needs to pursue confrontation with Russia and China to prop up waning American global power. The stakes could not be higher.
Against all the evidence of Trump being threatened by Americans who have nothing to do with Iran, there now emerges a false flag of an Iranian threat.
One has to wonder if Iran is being set up as a patsy for eliminating an American presidential candidate.
TikTok Likely Coerced Into Scrubbing Sputnik Ahead of Pivotal US Vote to ‘Get Feds Off Their Back’
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 21.09.2024
Hugely popular video-sharing platform TikTak removed Sputnik International’s account without warning on Saturday, providing no explanation for its decision. Sputnik asked a leading US military and intelligence analyst and former Washington insider about the likely motive of the move.
While it has no legal leg to stand on and an utter lack of domestic support for a ban on TikTok, what the US State Department does have is “unlimited resources with which to prosecute TikTok as a company,” and the latter may have chosen to cooperate with the state by scrubbing Sputnik’s channel to try to “get the feds off their backs,” retired Pentagon analyst Karen Kwiatkowski told Sputnik.
“Of course, the better choice for Americans would be for TikTok to refuse to cooperate, forcing the federal government’s hand. If the incredibly popular and useful TikTok were to be banned in response to their refusal to remove selected overseas media, it would wake up the masses to the diminished state of their liberty,” she suggested.
Citing the ability of alternative news sources to break through establishment narratives using social media, including to provide an alternative, outsider’s take on US politics and candidates’ respective foreign policy positions, Kwiatkowski predicted that “any reversal of this unwarranted ban” on Sputnik will happen only after the vote, with the restrictions thus serving as “a direct example of the DoJ interfering with the election, and undermining the concept of an informed citizenry prior to an election.”
The deep state needs total “hegemony in the information arena, just as with financial and military power,” Kwiatkowski explained. “The US leadership team believes they can manage all narratives, and limit the flow of evidence that contradicts the current narrative. Domestically, this has worked well, as we saw with the instant domestic media reversal on the health and performance of Joe Biden. Internationally, this control is more of a challenge.”
Furthermore, the state actually has little choice but to continue its attempts to control the narrative and suppress the harmful impacts of its actions both at home and abroad, according to the observer, since the United States today is more and more coming to resemble a “failed state” – suffering from ballooning debt, an electoral system and government lacking transparency, and a leadership taking huge risks with the economy and Americans’ security through their foreign and domestic policies.
“Lastly, the CIA and the surveillance sector of government, which has long specialized in the manipulation of information abroad, and to a significant extent domestically, is more powerful than ever. Its world very much requires the suppression of information and the shaping of ‘truth’ in order to ‘succeed’,” Kwiatkowski stressed.
The federal government and the Justice Department operate using a legally dubious, unwritten code of conduct, Kwiatkowski said, pointing out there’s no legal requirement to ban foreign news sources, and that virtually all of the executive branch’s various bans, boycotts, embargos and other restrictions are unlawful under the Constitution.
“Likewise, the modern US surveillance state uses IT, telecommunications and social media companies as their extra-constitutional tool to directly violate the 1st and 4th Amendments that do not allow federal interference in the conduct of speech, movement, beliefs, assembly, redress of government, and security of body, property and communications. This is the world that TikTok and all social media companies operate in – do what the government tells you or face market losses, and criminal prosecution that while ultimately winnable, can bankrupt most businesses,” Kwiatkowski summed up.
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.
Ukraine offers ‘drones-for-fighters’ deal to Syrian extremist group: Report
The Cradle | September 10, 2024
Ukrainian government representatives recently met with members of Syria’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) extremist group to discuss a drones-for-fighters deal, Turkish newspaper Aydinlik reported on 9 September.
“A delegation from Ukraine went to Idlib in recent months and met with the leaders of the terrorist organization,” the newspaper said. According to the report, the meeting took place on 18 June.
The report said Kiev requested the release of a number of Chechen and Georgian militants being held in HTS prisons. In recent years, HTS began rooting out foreign fighters from its ranks, as well as those belonging to other armed opposition groups in northern Syria.
The newspaper added that in exchange for the release of the fighters – who Kiev plans to enlist in the fight against Russian forces – Ukraine offered 75 drones to HTS.
Aydinlik goes on to cite Kurdish reports as saying that “HTS accepted the conditions … and some radical figures were released from their prisons,” adding that “75 [Ukrainian] drones were handed over” to the extremist faction. It does note, however, that no further information or images have emerged to confirm this.
The report also says that Ukraine has been working with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and its affiliates in Syria “to conduct covert operations against Russian soldiers in Syria.”
Over the past two years, there have been numerous reports of HTS and ISIS militants being sent to fight Russia in Ukraine.
“The Kiev regime has been in contact with terrorists for a long time, and Ukrainian authorities themselves have already become an international terrorist group,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in response to the Turkish newspaper.
In July 2022, Sputnik cited a source as saying that the CIA was recruiting ISIS fighters and training them in preparation for deployment to Ukraine. The outlet had reported months earlier that scores of HTS fighters were being released from prisons in Idlib to be sent to the Ukrainian battlefield.
Before these reports started emerging, Syria’s ambassador to Russia, Bashar al-Jaafari, said, “We, as a state, have evidence that the US military in Syria is transferring terrorists from one place to another, especially members of ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra [HTS] … So, one should not be surprised, and we do not exclude, that tomorrow ISIS terrorists will be sent to Ukraine.”
‘How I Got Fired From The CIA’: Philip Giraldi Tells All
By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – September 6, 2024
Americans are by now familiar with a handful of whistleblowers who after spending years employed by the US intelligence community (IC) eventually saw enough to make them angry and throw away the safety of their future government careers by exposing state secrets to the public. Names like Snowden, Manning, Kiriakou or John Stockwell, William Binney and Thomas Drake (both of NSA whistleblower fame) are well-known, especially in independent and alternative media circles.
But lesser known are the names of those abruptly fired and dismissed from their posts as analysts or as officers for merely questioning and pushing back in real time against what they understood to be disastrous and criminal foreign action and policy. We suspect that this list of names, still largely unknown to the public or media, is much bigger than anyone knows. Such ex-employees of the CIA, NSA, DIA or other alphabet soup agencies typically have their security clearances revoked and are threatened with criminal prosecution should they ever reveal state secrets and classified information. The possibility of future employment even in the civilian world then comes under threat. This means most of them remain unknown.
Typically the American public only finds out about massive covert CIA operations or US war plans long after the fact. For example, the intelligence community knew that the Bush-Cheney White House was gearing up for a ‘shock and awe’ invasion of Iraq for at least many months before it happened. Or for another example, the truth about the CIA’s covert program to overthrow Syria’s Assad (called ‘Timber Sycamore’) finally leaked to The New York Times at least half a decade after it began. Intelligence planners under President Obama understood that the US was arming and training al-Qaeda linked Libyan rebels to overthrow and execute Gaddafi. And all the while, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was getting briefed on these US-backed ‘rebels’ conducting extermination campaigns against ethnic minorities. Such horrific and suppressed truths only typically come out years or decades after they happen.
But again, what of those rare voices who dissent in real time and quietly suffer the full retribution of the national security deep state, far from the public eye? ZeroHedge was able to hear directly from one such rare dissenter in the Washington D.C. area this weekend. Former CIA operations officer Philip Giraldi spent over two decades in the agency, which took him around the world. We heard his fascinating and alarming story of “How I Got Fired From The CIA” during a closed-door session at the Ron Paul Institute‘s Liberty Platform conference held in Dulles, Virginia.
Below are ex-CIA Giraldi’s words recounting how his long career led up to a difficult show-down with CIA leadership, and what happened next, as transcribed directly by ZeroHedge [emphasis ours].
* * *
After graduate school and following time in the US Army as an intelligence officer, I joined the CIA. I was an operations officer, which means a spy. I was sent to a lot of nice places to live in, starting with Rome. And then I was in Hamburg and then I was in Istanbul, and then Barcelona. After Barcelona I left the agency for a while and came back as a contractor after 9/11, and I was there for another three years.
How I got in trouble with the agency was… after I came back as a contractor I was sent to Afghanistan – this was after we had overrun it. It didn’t take me long to figure out that we had replaced the Taliban by becoming worse than the Taliban.
And there was no evidence whatsoever coming from CIA analysts that [Osama] bin Laden [and the Afghan government] had actually been involved in 9/11, and so it was a bit of a contradictory assignment, and I became suspicious after that concerning the bogus things going on and what was developing inside the government.
So a couple years later I was back at CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia and working with them on basic security issues. I had been a counterterrorism specialist and so I was working on different groups that they were considering to be ‘over horizon’ threats to the United States. This was a new concept, this threat. The tune that was being played in Washington was that ‘we are threatened’.
Anyway, while I was doing this I was also talking to a number of my friends who were classmates [from prior schooling and training early in his career] who were analysts and they at this point were very senior analysts in the agency. And the United States meanwhile was preparing to attack Iraq because Iraq was ‘a threat’.
And these friends of mine who were analysts saw all of the raw information that went into what the US government was seeing and they said, “you know this is all bullshit, this is all a lie – the intelligence that’s coming in is fake. And this fake intelligence is being used to justify starting another war.”
So anyway I got ‘converted’ and I started to be somewhat outspoken on the issue of why we should not be going into Iraq and we should leave this alone. And word of this got around [the agency].
So they called me in, they polygraphed me. They wanted to know who among all of my friends have similar views. I refused to cooperate and they said at that point, “well you failed your polygraph exam, we want to take away your security clearance.“
So this was after twenty-one years in the agency, they took away my clearance, and I was basically fired. So it’s kind of an interesting tale. I think it’s probably shaped my thinking ever since then. I’m automatically suspicious of people who talk about justifications for wars. I think I will continue for the rest of my life to be that way. Thank you.
Trump Is Lying about Releasing the JFK Records
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | August 26, 2024
To honor Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump (after Kennedy was rebuffed by Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris), Trump announced that if Americans elect him president again, this time around he will order a release of the CIA’s long-secret JFK-assassination-related records.
What a crock. What amazes me is that Trumpsters believe anything and everything this guy says, despite his proven track record of failing to tell the truth.
Remember: Trump was president for four long years. During any of that period of time, he could have issued a simple order to the National Archives: Release the CIA’s 50-year-old Kennedy-assassination-related records to the public immediately.
Trump didn’t do that, even though he promised to do it, just as he is now promising to do it if American voters will give him another chance. After repeatedly promising to release those records when he was president, Trump buckled and granted the CIA’s demand for secrecy for several more years. When that new deadline came due, President Biden granted a new request for secrecy by the CIA and ultimately extended the secrecy into perpetuity.
There is also what has to be a lie that Trump told Judge Andrew Napolitano regarding the CIA’s secret records. According to Napolitano, in a conversation he had with Trump, he asked Trump why he had not ordered the release of the CIA’s JFK-assassination-related records. Trump responded with “Judge, if they showed you what they showed me, you wouldn’t have released them either.”
If Trump was suggesting that there was some sort of big smoking-gun matter in those records, it’s got to be a lie because there is no chance whatsoever that the CIA would have turned over such a record to the Assassination Records Review Board or the National Archives instead of simply destroying it. Moreover, ever since the CIA was established, it has been standard practice to never put anything regarding a state-sponsored assassination in writing. What are the chances that the CIA would make an exception to that rule with respect to its assassination of a U.S. president? None!
Moreover, if Trump is really going to order a release of the records if he is again elected president, as he is now promising again that he will, then why not reveal publicly what he supposedly saw that motivated him to make that statement to Napolitano? If he is going to release them anyway, why does he need to wait until he’s elected president to reveal that particular part of the records to the American people?
So, the question naturally arises: Why would Trump lie about why he broke his promise to release the CIA’s secret records when he was president for four long years? Because he can’t admit the real reason for his broken promise: The CIA would not permit him to release the records. He knows what President Biden, Harris, and everyone in Washington, D.C., knows: The CIA, along with the Pentagon and the CIA, are in charge.
Oh sure, Trump talks big again about “draining the swamp,” taking on the deep state, and making America great again, but let’s not forget that he talked the same way before he was elected president. He broke all those promises also. Immediately upon being elected president, he surrounded himself with generals and foreign interventionist John Bolton, traveled to CIA headquarters obviously to bend the knee and kiss the ring, kept U.S. troops killing and dying in Afghanistan for nothing, and refused to pardon Edward Snowden for revealing the NSA’s illegal secret surveillance scheme. If Trump did all that the first time, he’ll do it again, especially given that he has never expressed any regret or remorse for doing it the first time.
The fact is that the CIA’s JFK-assassination related records will never be released, unless the CIA authorizes a president to order their release. That’s not likely to happen, not because there is some sort of huge smoking-gun confession within the records but instead because the records undoubtedly contain small bits of incriminating circumstantial evidence that further fill out, even in very small ways, the overall mosaic establishing criminal culpability of the U.S. national-security state in Kennedy’s assassination.
Durov’s arrest represents a new level of desperation from western elites
By Martin Jay | Strategic Culture Foundation | August 26, 2024
The arrest of Pavel Durov marks a new low point on the scumline of the side of the bath – the tub being western democracies and the line being their desperation to stay in power at the costs of controlling social media. Durov, who owns Telegram and lives in Dubai, could be in jail for months and possibly years on the trumped-up charges which the French state has conjured up simply because he refuses to allow any government to have a back door into Telegram. He has fought this tooth and nail for years with the west, in particular the U.S., playing every dirty trick in the book to get access to the platform for its own nefarious purposes – to destroy opposition figures, their strategies etc. – rather than what it is dressed up to be, identifying terrorists and international criminals.
As the UK ponders how its own state has sunk to a new totalitarian level in recent days with the arrest of its citizens who merely like a posting on a social media platform, the West has arrested this French Russian dual national genius who is charged with the crimes of those criminals active on Telegram. And so charges of terrorism and trafficking in minors, drugs and whatever else they can find on the platform will be made against him as someone abetting in the crimes. Of course, the same rules will not be levelled against Elon Musk who surely has criminals on his platform or for that matter any of the other social media platforms.
But how many of these platforms are also taking the same stand as Durov? We are led to believe that most of them aren’t but in light of his arrest we should assume that many of them have already allowed some sort of access to them for the deep state. Elon Musk likes to brag about his refusal to comply with the EU’s demands that he “moderates” who he allows onto X, adding that other social media platforms accepted the deal offered to him by Brussels: comply with our requests and we grant you some leniency on future antitrust fines. This offer, which he claims was happily accepted by other platforms is as close as you can get to the EU offering a brown envelope stuffed full of cash to a man in a pub. It’s a bribe and gives a clue as to how anti-democratic the EU is and how it operates in the shadows.
The French arrest however goes deeper in that we can assume that it was not France operating alone to nab Durov. We can assume that the FBI and CIA had probably pushed Macron to do this appalling dirty work but perhaps also Israel had a hand in it. Just recently, Netanyahu complained that data which was stolen from the government was being exchanged on Telegram and asked Durov to step in and retrieve it. He got no reply. Did Mossad have a hand in the arrest of Telegram’s boss? It seems credible given that it is hard to believe that Durov would fly into French airspace eyes wide open. Was it a kidnapping operation to get his plane and his pilot to land in Paris? French TV channel TF1 said Dubai-based Durov had been travelling from Azerbaijan and was arrested at around 8 p.m. (1800 GMT) on Saturday 24th of August but did not state whether the plane’s ultimate destination had been France.
The details around the arrest are very sketchy, but according to Reuters, Durov, whose fortune was estimated by Forbes at $15.5 billion, said some governments had sought to pressure him but the app should remain a “neutral platform” and not a “player in geopolitics”.
Another question which arises from the arrest is whether it is an international effort by western countries led by the U.S. – with Israel very much part of it – to test the waters for other arrests. Pundits have been dismissed as conspiracy theorists for weeks now suggesting Elon Musk will be arrested at some point, or charged in his absence, by UK authorities for some of the more controversial posts he has made about the political situation in the UK, or even by the EU which appears to have started a legal battle with him after he refused to respond to two letters sent to him by a French European Commissioner. Perhaps even the Democrats in the U.S. might play the same card given that Musk has lost all credibility as a neutral player in U.S. politics after he has so openly supported Trump who has promised him a position in a new government if he were to enter the Oval Office. There is no such thing really as free speech. It comes at a very high price for those who want to protect and cherish it and now France will test the political landscape to see how the arrest of Durov will affect Macron’s ratings. The French president has used outstandingly poor judgment in the past in calling for parliamentary elections immediately after EU ones which gave so much power to far-right groups, so he seems to be good at falling on his own sword. He may well have factored that Durov does not have the popularity of say Assange who didn’t stir so much political anger when he was banged up for years in a filthy, dank cell in the UK on trumped up charges from the U.S.
What is especially worrying is that locking up powerful people who have huge followings on the internet is becoming a trend which people are getting used to. The war between those who want to control the perceived truth and those who hold the actual one is hotting up. Scott Ritter, Andrew Tate, Richard Medhurst all arrested within days of one another, while Musk himself shuts down Egyptian comedian Bassem Youseff who had 10m followers on X. What we are witnessing is a new level of desperation that western elites are more afraid than ever after wasting hundreds of billions of dollars in Ukraine and starting a world war in the Middle East that voters have no confidence any more in their decision-making, as they, the public, struggle more and more to pay for groceries or even heat their houses. It’s a new milestone in the blind dogma of elites to resort to tactics which we would have scorned China or North Korea for using just a few years ago. It’s a new level of panic which we haven’t seen before.
Kursk: Fighting Russia to the Last Ukrainian
By Brian Berletic – New Eastern Outlook – 21.08.2024
In the lead up to the Ukrainian military’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, even Western headlines were dominated by reports of Ukraine’s gradual demise. Ukraine is admittedly suffering arms and ammunition shortages, as well as facing an unsolvable manpower crisis. Russia has been destroying Ukrainian military power faster than Ukraine and its Western sponsors can reconstitute it.
Western headlines have also been admitting the scale on which Russia is expanding its own military power as its Special Military Operation (SMO) continues into its third year.
While the launch of Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk has diverted attention away from Ukraine’s collapsing fighting capacity, the incursion itself has not only failed to address the factors leading to this collapse, it is already accelerating it.
Politico in an August 15, 2024 article titled, “As Kyiv makes gains in Kursk, Russia strikes back in Donetsk,” cites the spokesman of Ukraine’s 110th Mechanized Brigade who would admit, “since Ukraine launched the Kursk offensive I would say things have become worse in our part of the front. We have been getting even less ammo than before, and the Russians are pushing.”
The same article would also cite “Deep State,” a mapping project Politico claims is “close” to Ukraine Ministry of Defense, claiming, “over the past 24 hours, Russia occupied the villages of Zhelanne and Orlivka and made advances in New York, Krasnohorivka, Mykolaivka and Zhuravka in Donetsk.”
Thus, while Ukraine claims gains in Kursk, it comes at the expense of territory everywhere else along the line of contact.
Because of the nature of the fighting in Kursk where Ukrainian forces have come out from behind extensive defensive lines and are operating out in the open, they are suffering much greater losses than Ukrainian units being pushed back along the line of contact, according to even the Western media.
Superficial Success, Strategic Suicide
Despite this reality, the Western media has invested heavily in depicting Ukraine’s Kursk incursion as a turning point in the fighting.
CNN in its August 15, 2024 article, “Russia appears to have diverted several thousand troops from occupied Ukraine to counter Kursk offensive, US officials say,” attempts at first glance to portray the Ukrainian operation as having successfully diverted Russian forces from the front lines.
Buried deeper in the article, however, CNN reveals that whatever troops Russia is moving are relatively insignificant compared to the number of Russian forces still fighting along the line of contact primarily in Kherson, Zaporozhye, the Donbass, and Kharkov.
In the short-term, experienced forces utilized as a mobile reserve are likely being moved to Kursk until Russian reserves within Russia itself can be sufficiently mobilized and moved to the area of fighting. The vast majority of Russia’s forces not only remain along the actual line of contact, they continue making progress at an accelerated rate.
The same CNN article would quote US officials, saying:
Some officials also raised concerns that Ukraine, which one western official said has sent some of its more experienced forces into Kursk, may have created weaknesses along its own frontlines that Russia may be able to exploit to gain more ground inside Ukraine.
“It’s impressive from a military point of view,” the official said of the Kursk operation. But Ukraine is “committing pretty experienced troops to this, and they can’t afford to lose those troops.”
“And having diverted them from the front line creates opportunities for Russia to seize advantage and break through,” this person added.
Buried under optimistic headlines across the Western media regarding this latest incursion is an ominous truth – that an operation aimed at humiliating Russia, boosting morale, and raising the political, territorial, and military costs for Russia, has only brought Ukraine deeper into its growing arms, ammunition, and manpower crisis.
Toward what end does an incursion accelerating the collapse of Ukraine’s fighting capacity serve?
Washington’s, Not Kiev’s Ends
CNN would also attempt to convince readers that the Kursk incursion took the US itself entirely by surprise. This is untrue.
The United States, following its political capture of Ukraine in 2014, admittedly took over Ukraine’s intelligence networks. These are the same networks that would have been required to organize this most recent incursion.
A New York Times article, “The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin,” not only admits to the CIA’s role in training, shaping, and directing Ukrainian intelligence operations, but also admits to a network of CIA bases along the Ukrainian-Russian border and the fact that the CIA stood up covert military units specifically for crossing over into Russian territory and conducting operations there.
The CIA and other US military and intelligence agencies have been involved in Ukrainian military operations leading up to and all throughout the duration of Russia’s SMO. The Washington Post admits that the US worked with Ukraine to “build a campaign plan” ahead of the failed 2023 Ukrainian offensive.
It is inconceivable Ukraine moved multiple brigades of manpower and equipment, including US-European trained soldiers and Western military equipment to Sumy where the Kursk incursion was launched without Washington’s involvement, let alone without Washington’s knowledge.
Why then did the US organize such an incursion, one admittedly overstretching Ukrainian forces already crumbling under the growing weight of Russian military power? Why, amid Russia’s strategy of attrition, have US planners decided to launch an incursion that will accelerate the loss of Ukrainian manpower, arms, and ammunition it does not have to spare?
In a much wider geopolitical context – Washington’s geopolitical context – the incursion helps raise the cost of victory for Russia in Ukraine as the US seeks to place pressure on and overextend Russia elsewhere within and along its borders.
Years before the SMO even began, as far back as at least 2019, US policymakers openly sought to draw Russia into a costly conflict in Ukraine, just one among many other proposals meant to overextend Russia.
The RAND Corporation in its 2019 paper “Extending Russia” would explain the benefits of “providing lethal aid to Ukraine,” stating:
Expanding U.S. assistance to Ukraine, including lethal military assistance, would likely increase the costs to Russia, in both blood and treasure, of holding the Donbass region. More Russian aid to the separatists and an additional Russian troop presence would likely be required, leading to larger expenditures, equipment losses, and Russian casualties. The latter could become quite controversial at home, as it did when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.
Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk has – at a minimum – raised the political cost of Russia’s ongoing SMO. This most recent incursion into Kursk almost certainly had hoped to reach the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant, just 35 kilometers beyond the furthest extent the incursion has reached as of this writing. Had Ukrainian forces reached the power plant, the price would have been even higher.
In many ways, however, the Kursk incursion has created a much greater strategic dilemma for Ukraine than it has for Russia. While it has unfolded on the wrong side of the border, the outcome is the same as the Kharkov front Russia opened earlier this year.
Regarding the Kharkov front, the New York Times in its May 2024 article, “Facing Russian Advance, a Top Ukrainian General Paints a Bleak Picture,” would admit, “the Russian attacks in the northeast are intended to stretch Ukraine’s already thin reserves of soldiers and divert them from fighting elsewhere,” and that, “the Ukrainian army was trying to redirect troops from other front-line areas to shore up its defenses in the northeast, but that it had been difficult to find the personnel.”
By committing thousands of Ukrainian troops and large amounts of Ukraine’s best military equipment to an incursion into Kursk, it is creating the same overextension of its own forces Russia had created in Kharkov last May, but with the added complication of needing to extend logistics and other means of supporting Ukrainian operations beyond Ukrainian territory itself.
The same RAND Corporation paper proposing to draw Russia into a costly conflict with Ukraine would also discuss the consequences this conflict would have for Ukraine itself, explaining:
… such a move might also come at a significant cost to Ukraine and to U.S. prestige and credibility. This could produce disproportionately large Ukrainian casualties, territorial losses, and refugee flows. It might even lead Ukraine into a disadvantageous peace.
The plan from the very beginning was to lure Russia into a costly conflict in the hopes of precipitating a Soviet-style collapse, but at the expense of Ukraine’s own survival. Thus, what we see unfolding in Ukraine today is simply the consequences predicted by the RAND Corporation in 2019.
Dangerous Escalation and the Long Game
Perhaps most concerning of all is the looming prospect of the US intervening more directly, including in the form of a “buffer zone” similar to that created by the US and its Turkish allies in the east and north of Syria during Washington’s proxy war there.
For this intervention to succeed, Russia would have to be compelled to restrain itself from attacking Western forces arriving in Ukraine.
The possibility of this happening is difficult to predict.
On one hand, Russia has demonstrated immense patience amid other US proxy wars. Russian patience in Syria is finally paying off after almost a decade of enduring US provocations and the presence of US troops east of the Euphrates River. The US now finds itself isolated and vulnerable in Syria, its forces under regular attack there, and a disproportionate amount of US military hardware remains committed to both Syria and the surrounding region, limiting US combat power ahead of a potential conflict with Russia in Eastern Europe or China in the Asia-Pacific.
Moscow may determine that a Western intervention directly into Ukraine will, over time, collapse under its own weight in a similar manner. In the long term, the US is only going to grow weaker and more isolated as a result of its unsustainable, overreaching foreign policy. Initiating direct conflict with the US now, when it is inevitably going to be weaker later, would be permitting the US a potential and unnecessary advantage.
Instead, Russia and its allies may find an opportunity to exercise many of the means of escalation (short of direct conflict with the US itself) they have held in reserve throughout the duration of this conflict. This includes more open and direct military cooperation between Russia and China, including the arming of Russian forces with Chinese manufactured weapons and ammunition.
On the other hand, Russia may decide to restrain itself from attacking Western forces arriving in Ukraine’s westernmost regions, but continue military operations along the line of contact and obviously within Kursk itself to expel Ukrainian forces. The US would seek to test the limits of Russian resolve, seeking to constrain Russian operations as much as possible, just as the US did in Syria from 2015 onward.
Throughout this process, the potential for escalation and direct conflict between Russia and the US will grow.
Despite the continued collapse of Ukraine’s fighting capacity because Ukraine is ultimately a proxy of the United States, a difficult and dangerous transition period lies ahead dependent on the extent to which the US seeks to mitigate Ukraine’s subsequent political and territorial collapse.
Only time will tell whether the US cuts and runs as it did in Afghanistan, or doubles down as it did in Syria. It should be pointed out, however, that the US withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021 to redirect its resources ahead of Russia’s SMO in 2022. Were the US to cut Ukraine loose, it would only be because the US requires resources for a larger, more dangerous conflict elsewhere – namely in the Asia-Pacific region against China.
Either way, when Ukraine’s fighting capacity nears its end, it is likely only wider conflict awaits.
US embassy played intelligence role in Yemen: Source to Al Mayadeen
Al Mayadeen | August 17, 2024
Confessions made by the US-Israeli spy network revealed Washington’s strategic goal of fragmenting Yemen geographically, sowing divisions, and creating instability in the country, a Yemeni source told Al Mayadeen on Saturday.
In mid-June, the Yemeni Security Forces in Sanaa uncovered a large espionage network operated by American and Israeli intelligence agencies. Officials revealed that the network had been active within various institutions in Yemen since 2015.
The source said that the confessions revealed significant infiltration into the former state leadership and parliament with an aim to influence its decisions and operations.
The confessions exposed “American conspiracies on the political level through reproducing crises and escalating them in Yemen.”
US turned previous Yemeni government into “a puppet”
The spy network admitted that Washington turned the previous Yemeni government into “a puppet under its control.” It also exposed the reality of the US conspiratorial role against the 2011 revolution.
According to the source, the network admitted that the aim was for the Yemeni national dialogue to be merely superficial, allowing Washington to push through its dangerous projects regarding the state structure and constitution.
If it were not for the role of the Ansar Allah movement, Yemen would be in a much worse situation today, the source stressed.
The spy network’s confessions further revealed that all the wars waged on Saada and the assassinations carried out were orchestrated by the United States, with local collaborators serving merely as tools. These efforts aimed to pressure Ansar Allah into accepting regionalization and division.
Washington behind aggression on Yemen
The confessions emphasized that Washington is behind the aggression against Yemen and that all efforts it presents under the guise of political peace initiatives are nothing more than conspiracies and plots within the same context.
In the same vein, one of the network’s members revealed that the so-called “democracy sector” within the US embassy worked to control the Supreme Elections Committee to determine who governs Yemen.
The US embassy’s “election program” played an intelligence role by recruiting party leaders interested in election-related matters, the spy indicated, adding that the embassy and other US intelligence agencies sought to obtain the voter registry of Yemeni citizens.
Another member of the spy network admitted that USAID projects, UN initiatives, and others presented under the guise of providing aid to Yemen, contain hidden and dangerous elements related to intelligence activities.
As part of the US-Israeli spy network’s confessions, a security source told Al Mayadeen in late June that the Cultural Attaché at the US embassy in Yemen targeted all segments of Yemeni society, through which cells were lured and recruited to collect information.
The source pointed out that the spy network’s confessions revealed that the US embassy was nothing more than a den of espionage and a tool for sabotage and that the Cultural Attaché at the US embassy in Yemen was linked to the US intelligence agency, the CIA.
On June 22, the Yemeni security services published extensive confessions from members of the US-Israeli espionage network, revealing that their operations were aimed at undermining Yemen’s economic sector by collecting data to support US presence and advance its agendas.
CIA awards Qatari intel chief top medal for cooperation with US
The Cradle | August 16, 2024
In a ceremony earlier this week, CIA Director William Burns awarded the head of the Qatari State Security Agency the George Tenet medal for his work on strengthening intelligence cooperation between the US and Qatar, Axios reported on 16 August.
Both Burns and Al-Khulaifi have played important roles in the negotiations between Israel and Hamas for a potential ceasefire in Gaza and prisoner exchange.
One reason for the award is Qatari efforts to release the remaining 111 Israeli captives held by Hamas in Gaza, one source with knowledge of the issue told Axios.
Israel is holding thousands of Palestinians in its prisons and detention camps, where torture and rape is common.
Another source said Burns gave the award to his Qatari counterpart in “appreciation of his role in maintaining national and regional security, and the exceptional support he provided to the CIA in preserving the interests and security of the US and Qatar.”
Another important reason for the award was the cooperation between the CIA and Qatari intelligence in counterterrorism and the ability of the Qatari State Security Agency to prevent and foil threats and attacks in West Asia, the source told Axios.
Both the US and Qatar have long been known for their support of terrorist groups in the region.
Starting in 2011, the US and Qatar worked closely with other regional states to support Al-Qaeda in Syria.
The Syrian branch of the terror group, the Nusra Front, led a jihadist insurgency against the Syrian government led by Bashar al-Assad under the cover of US-sponsored anti-government protests.
Featured Video
Who Conflates Zionism and Judaism?
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Russian gas sector should not be sanctioned – EU energy chief
RT | August 28, 2014
Russian gas sector should not be subjected to EU sanctions despite the situation in Ukraine, EU Energy Commissioner Gunther Oettinger said Thursday.
“Gas is not a suitable sector for sanctions, as in this case everyone will lose – Russia, Ukraine and the European Union,” RIA Novosti cites Oettinger as saying.
EU Energy Commissioner insisted on a quick resolution of the gas dispute between Russia and Ukraine.
“We need a solution that prevents an escalation between Ukraine and Russia,” he told German broadcaster ARD. “We need Ukraine as a transit country. Ukraine needs gas in winter. In a long and cold winter, Ukraine will not have enough stored gas of its own.”
He also acknowledged that in case Ukraine is left without gas supplies in winter it may steal Russian transit gas on its way to the West.
According to Oettinger by the end of October the European Union should develop a concept that provides each bloc member with warm homes, financing of infrastructure and maintenance of industry for the period from November to March. … Full article
Blog Roll
Recent Comments
Aletho News- Normalizing expansion: Israel sets its sights on Egypt’s Sinai
- Israeli ministers discuss plot to divide Syria: Report
- Battle for Tech Metals: What Are 17 Rare Earth Elements and What Are They Used For?
- Austrian President creates political chaos as Green ideology fights against reality
- Musk’s X should be banned in Poland during election campaign, says journalist on state-run television
- Meloni: Soros is interfering in democracies, not Musk
- Multipolar world’s tech edge grows, leaves political West trailing behind
- Slovakia faces energy crisis by next winter after Ukraine shut off Russian gas, president warns
- Slovakia threatens to block Ukraine aid over gas transit dispute – media
- NATO pledges $2 billion in military aid for Ukraine at Ramstein meeting
- If Americans Knew
- NYTimes rejects Quaker ad for calling Israel’s actions “genocide”
- Blinken Declares Genocide in Sudan But Refuses to Acknowledge Genocide in Gaza
- Blood Splattered Madness
- Knesset members urge IDF to destroy Gaza’s food, water and power
- ‘No Civilians’: IDF Soldiers Reveal Killings, Lawlessness in Gaza
- Israel commits atrocities in many shapes and forms – Day 459
- Israel’s Judaization Policy Replaces Arab Towns with Synagogues
- Gaza is Now ‘Hell on Earth’—Exactly as Intended
- Trump shared video criticizing Netanyahu’s ‘obsessive’ push for US-Iran conflict
- Last Christmas in Gaza?
- No Tricks Zone
- Physicists: Increasing CO2 By 100% Only Reduces Radiative Cooling To Space By An Imperceptible 1%
- Japanese Scientist: The IPCC’s Climate Models Are Fundamentally Flawed, Use False Assumptions
- Cambridge Scientists: Climate Change Is Not The Cause Of Megafauna Extinctions
- Scientists: Greenland July 14°C Warmer With 35% Less CO2 250,000 Years Ago!
- Germany Already Rationing Energy…”Avoid Using Electric Appliances Until After 11 A.M.!
- Central Greenland Was Recently Ice-Free And Covered With Plants When CO2 Was Under 300 ppm
- 2025 Looks Bleak For Germany…Energy The Most Expensive In Europe …Growing Speech Tyranny
- Scientists Report A ‘Striking Global Greening Trend’ Over The Last 42 Years
- Global Coal Consumption Continues To Rise As Multi-Trillion Dollar Green Energy Plans Falter
- New Study Finds 1970s-Present Antarctic Ice Loss Is ‘Unexceptional’ And Not Due To ‘Climate Change’
Aletho News 