Getting Real With the US Foreign Policy Establishment Realists
By Michael Averko | Strategic Culture Foundation | August 21, 2019
On Russia-related matters, the more sane among us can perhaps be forgiven for becoming sedated by the kind of absurdities regularly spewed by some high profile individuals. The realist wing of the US foreign policy establishment has at times held back in rebuking this reality. We all have our biases, with the ideal to nevertheless be reasonably fair and balanced – a point which leads to a detailed critical overview of some trends among US foreign policy establishment realists.
The realist leaning National Interest, exhibits a different choice of words, relative to actions taken by the Russian and US governments. At that venue, George Beebe’s August 12 piece “How Trump Can Avoid War With Russia,” states: “Reducing Russian cyber aggression will require agreeing on rules to govern US as well as Russian involvement in the affairs of other states. Punishing Moscow’s transgressions must be complemented by rewards for good behavior, or we will simply reinforce perverse incentives for Russia to defy American policies, deepen security cooperation with China, and subvert NATO and the EU.”
In comparison, Beebe is tame in his prose dealing with post-Soviet US actions (in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya and Syria), which within reason can be considered as unnecessarily aggressive and deserving of condemnation. The aforementioned “Russian cyber aggression“, is something continuously brought up with a lack of conclusive evidence. Beebe’s use of “punishing” versus “rewards” towards Russia is along the lines of treating a child.
Dmitri Simes’ August 8 National Interest article “Delusions About Russia,” begins with “Russia is a dangerous adversary.” Neocons and neolibs will find little, if any disagreement with his opening comment. In conjunction with that thought, the second sentence in Simes’ piece is somewhat contradictory in saying “But treating it as an outright enemy could result in a self-fulfilling prophecy, triggering mortal threats to its neighbors which otherwise might not be in the cards.”
Enemy (whether outright or otherwise) is a synonym of adversary. In the post-Soviet era, Russia and America haven’t fought each other. With that in mind, the use of enemy and adversary is in line with tabloid sensationalist inaccuracies, as opposed to a realist seeking a more balanced overview. (The National Interest has had its tabloid moments, like Michael Peck’s April 3, 2016 article “How Poland Saved the World From Russia,” which I took some pleasure in answering.)
Putting aside the attempt to accommodate neolib and neocon biases, here’s an alternative to Simes’ opening salvo: “Russia could be a dangerous adversary. This can unnecessarily occur by incessantly disregarding legitimate Russian concerns.” Thereafter, a litany of fact based examples can be provided.
Categorizing Russia as a “formidable geopolitical rival” to America (and vice versa) arguably serves as a better characterization than “dangerous adversary”. In line with a pragmatic approach, this suggestion is in sync with the foreign policy realist, who second guesses the extent to which these two countries should be at odds with each other.
From a non-establishment realist perspective seeking improved US-Russian ties, the rest of Simes’ piece is for the most part agreeable. Not too long ago, the US based mass media journalist Natasha Bertrand (who the Johnson’s Russia List promoted blogger “Yalensis” has called a “whore”) suggested in so many words that Simes might be, or is, a Kremlin flack. It’s that kind of mass media portrayal which might compel Simes to express himself in the beginning of his article at issue. (Bertrand has ties to MSNBC, Politico and The Atlantic.)
Regardless of whether that’s the case, there’s a basis for the US foreign policy establishment to broaden itself with other sources. BTW, Simes has been at the forefront in having the likes of the Atlantic Council’s John Herbst and former Obama administration official Charles Kupchan, appear on Russian national television, where he co-hosts a show on Channel 1. Comparatively speaking, the major US TV news networks don’t (in overall terms) do a better job in getting diverse views on issues concerning US-Russian relations.
This very point leads to the matter of projection. A US mass media elite saying that Russian media is restricted comes to mind. Projecting some negative US behavior to Russia relates to the suspect claim that the Russian government is looking to promote racial division in the US. That demonic image of the Kremlin was spun by NBC’s Richard Engel this past May. A couple of months later on NBC, US Democratic Party presidential candidate Kamala Harris, flippantly presented this claim as fact, minus any conclusive proof.
Upon further review, Engel’s “proof” includes a subtle acknowledgement of lacking conclusive evidence – an underhanded way of covering his butt if the claim gets completely demolished. Russia is by no means a monolithic country. As is true with many, if not most other nations, individual Russians can pursue agendas on their own, without the approval of the Russian government. The US comedian Dave Chappelle aptly noted that Russia isn’t responsible for bigoted instances in the US. In Russia, the US and elsewhere, there’ve been features on intolerance in the US, with some of that coverage being inaccurate.
Regarding a foreign government seeking to sow ethnic discord in another country, consider the comments of the US State Department’s George Kent at a one-sided Capitol Hill discussion on Crimea, hosted this past March by the Atlantic Council, US Institute of Peace and Ukrainian Embassy. At about the 45 minute mark of this taped event, Kent pointedly said that “Crimea is Ukrainian” in the Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar languages – never minding the majority ethnic Russian population in Crimea and the fact that Russian is the most preferred language there. In addition, Kent made no mention that the majority of Crimea’s ethnic Ukrainian population support Crimea’s reunification with Russia.
Kent’s suggestive advocacy to pit non-Russians in Crimea opposed to Russia/Russians was propagandistically presented by Nick Schifrin in an Al Jazeera segment around the time of Crimea’s reunification with Russia in 2014 – something I had previously noted. Upon being reunited with Russia, Crimea has been spared the level of nationalist violence that has existed in some other parts of the former Ukrainian SSR. Within Crimea, there’s no noticeable call to leave Russia and rejoin Ukraine.
Over the years, Doug Bandow has expressed views which generally put him in the realist wing of the US foreign policy establishment. His comments on Crimea further highlight some of the limits within US foreign policy establishment realist circles. Bandow’s August 30, 2018 National Interest article and August 1, 2019 American Conservative piece, advocates an internationally supervised referendum in Crimea.
It’s crystal clear that a well over 2/3 majority in Crimea support their area being reunited with Russia. It’s a high point of hypocrisy to dwell on Crimea having another referendum, while not advocating a referendum for Kosovo. Such an inconsistency jives with the anti-Russian biases regularly presented in US mass media without much of a rebuttal.
On the subject of Russia and Ukraine, I’m reminded of a September 5, 2014 PBS NewsHour segment, where noted foreign policy realist John Mearsheimer said: “The Russians have made it very clear that they’re not going to tolerate a situation where Ukraine forms an alliance with NATO, the principle reason that Russia is now in Ukraine and trying to wreck Ukraine.
And let’s be clear here. Why Russia is trying to wreck Ukraine, is because Russia doesn’t want Ukraine to become part of the West. It doesn’t want it to be integrated into NATO or the EU. And if we follow the prescriptions that Bill and I know Mike favors as well, what we are going to end up doing is further antagonizing Putin. He is going to play more hardball. And the end result is that Ukraine is going to be wrecked as a country, and we’re going to have terrible relations between Russia and the West, which is not in Russia’s interest and not in our interest.”
At a University of Chicago event, Mearsheimer also singles out Russia as seeking to “wreck” Ukraine. He doesn’t use that word to characterize Western actions. Hence, his usage comes across as disproportionate and puzzling. (Offhand, I don’t recall Mearsheimer using a word like “wreck” to describe US actions in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya.) When compared to Russia, Mearsheimer has said that he finds more fault with the Western stances taken on Ukraine.
All of the following highlighted points have been agreeably acknowledged by Mearsheimer:
– A good deal of Ukraine’s problems pertain to some internal dynamics in Ukraine, which don’t specifically involve Russia or the West.
– The leading Western governments took a casual approach to the overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych, shortly after he signed an internationally brokered power sharing arrangement with his main opponents.
– Following Yanukovych’s overthrow, there were a series of increased anti-Russian acts in Ukraine.
– Russia (prior to Yanukovych being overthrown) was if anything more open than the leading Western nations to a jointly negotiated Russian-Ukrainian and Western agreement on how Ukraine’s economy should develop.
– Forget about Russia for a moment. Like it or not, there’re pro-Russian elements in Ukraine who’ve opposed some key aspects of the Euromaidan. The overwhelming majority of the Donbass situated rebels are from the territory of the former Ukrainian SSR. For its part, the Russian government can’t be seen as being too oblivious to the concerns of Russian speaking pro-Russians just outside Russia’s border.
I’ll add that it’s ultimately not in Russia’s interest to have on its border, a relatively large country like Ukraine, with considerable socioeconomic problems. Such a scenario can lead to a negative spillover effect. On the other hand, there’re anti-Russian elements who (whether they admit to it) seek to make propaganda points out of increased tensions with Russia. A good number of these folks reside safely beyond Russia and Ukraine.
Babi Yar: The Einsatzgruppen Killings
Babi Yar Memorial in Ukraine
By John Wear | Inconvenient History | May 19, 2018
One of the worst atrocities attributed to the Einsatzgruppen was the Babi Yar massacre, which allegedly occurred in a large ravine outside Kiev in the Ukraine. The allegation is that Einsatzgruppe C rounded up 33,771 Jews in Kiev and shot all of them over the period September 29-30, 1941.[1] German Reserve Police Battalion 45 and Police Battalion 303 are said to have assisted in the operation.[2] This article will examine the veracity of these allegations.
Einsatzgruppen Report
The figure of 33,771 Jews murdered at Babi Yar comes from Einsatzgruppen Event Report 106 of October 7, 1941.[3] That the Germans let copies of the Einsatzgruppen reports fall into the hands of the Allies is strikingly odd. They could have easily burned these few stacks of incriminating papers before the Allies conquered Germany.[4] The authenticity of the Einsatzgruppen reports has also been questioned because, like so much other “evidence” of Nazi atrocities, the documents emerged from the Soviet occupation zone.[5]
The Einsatzgruppen reports that have been produced are copies which often show clear signs of postwar additions, inaccurate and inflated figures, and rare signatures which appear on non-incriminating pages. Such reports would not constitute valid proof to historians or a legitimate court of law.[6] It is also surprising that the alleged mass murder at Babi Yar took place almost four months prior to the Wannsee Conference, where the mass killing of Jews was allegedly first planned.[7]
The very few figures given in Event Report 106 are provable fabrications. This report claims that there were about 300,000 Jews in Kiev at the time the report was made. The population of Kiev at the time of the report, however, had shrunk from 850,000 or more persons to about 305,000 due to evacuations. So if there had still been 300,000 Jews in Kiev on October 7, 1941, there would have been practically no one in Kiev who was not Jewish. The German experts who made the Einsatzgruppen reports would not have made such a major mistake in their report.[8]
Cremation Eyewitness
Today there are no remains to be found of the tens of thousands of Jews allegedly murdered by the Einsatzgruppen at Babi Yar. The official Holocaust story claims that the Nazis sent a special team back to the site in 1943 to exhume and burn the bodies.[9]
The Jew Vladimir K. Davidov is apparently the only survivor who claims to have participated in the cremation of bodies at Babi Yar. Davidov stated that on August 18, 1943, he and 99 other prisoners were taken to Babi Yar and forced to dig up the bodies of the Jews shot in 1941. He claimed that 70,000 bodies had been buried in the mass graves of Babi Yar. Davidov said that he and about 35 to 40 other prisoners escaped their own murders during the night of September 29. About 10 of his comrades were killed during this escape.[10]
According to Davidov, the prisoners exhumed the dead bodies and later burned them on grilles that consisted of granite blocks with train rails laid upon them. A layer of wood was piled on top of these grilles with the dead bodies piled on top of the wood. This resulted in an enormous stack of bodies 10 to 12 meters high. According to Davidov, there was only a single grille in the beginning, but later 75 grilles were built.[11]
Davidov said that the cremation of the bodies at Babi Yar was finished on September 25 or 26, 1943. The German Luftwaffe took an aerial photograph of the area around Babi Yar on September 26, 1943.[12]
John C. Ball, a Canadian mineral-exploration geologist with experience interpreting air photos, has published this photograph with the following commentary:
Photo 2—September 26th, 1943:
This photo was taken one week after the end of the supposed mass cremations in the ravine. If 33,000 people were exhumed and burned evidence of vehicle and foot traffic to supply fuel should be evident in the area where the Jewish cemetery meets Babi Yar ravine, however there is no evidence of traffic either on the end of the narrow road that proceeds to the ravine from the end of Melnik Street, or on the grass and shrubbery or on the sides of the cemetery.[13]
Ball writes regarding an enlarged section of the same photograph:
An enlargement reveals no evidence that 325 people were working in the ravine finishing the cremation of 33,000 bodies just one week earlier, for many truckloads of fuel would have had to be brought in, and there are no scars from vehicle traffic either on the grass and shrubs at the side of the Jewish cemetery or in the ravine where the bodies were supposedly burned.
1943 air photos of Babi Yar Ravine and the adjoining Jewish cemetery in Kiev reveal that neither the soil nor the vegetation is disturbed as would be expected if materials and fuel had been transported one week earlier to hundreds of workers who had dug up and burned tens of thousands of bodies in one month.[14]
Ball’s findings are all the more valuable since according to Davidov the cremation of the bodies at Babi Yar was completed on the same day or the day before the photo of September 26, 1943 was taken. This would have left behind clear evidence from the cremation of the bodies that would have shown on the photo. Carlo Mattogno and Jürgen Graf write:
[T]he cremation of 33,771 bodies would have required approximately 4,500 tons of firewood and approximately 430 tons of wood ashes and about 190 tons of human ashes would have been generated by the process. Moreover, several dozen tons of granite (gravestones and monuments) would have had to have been transported from the Jewish cemetery to Babi Yar and back again in order to construct the support for the 75 “ovens.” If the claims put forward about Babi Yar were true, all of this would have had to leave behind unmistakable traces on the air photo of September 26, 1943.[15]
If 33,771 Jews had been shot at Babi Yar, large numbers of rifle bullets would have also remained at the site. To shoot people with rifles, one needs at least twice as many bullets as there are people to be shot. Since the lead core of bullets survives practically forever, finding the remains of these bullets would have been an easy matter.[16]
No one ever conducted a detailed forensic investigation to confirm the witness statements and allegations at Babi Yar. Why was no detailed forensic investigation ever conducted at Babi Yar? The only reasonable answer is that the mass shootings of Jews at Babi Yar never took place. Since there is no material evidence for the mass shootings and cremation of the bodies at Babi Yar, and since the photograph of September 26, 1943 disproves these allegations, Davidov’s eyewitness testimony is clearly inaccurate.[17]
Survivor Eyewitnesses
Some Jewish survivors and authors have described the massacre at Babi Yar. Elie Wiesel wrote in one of his books that after Jews were executed at Babi Yar: “Eye witnesses say that for months after the killings the ground continued to spurt geysers of blood. One was always treading on corpses.”[18] Wiesel later repeated this claim with some embellishment: “Later, I learn from a witness that, for month after month, the ground never stopped trembling; and that, from time to time, geysers of blood spurted from it.”[19] This story lacks all credibility.
A. Anatoli Kuznetsov wrote a novel titled Babi Yar to document the alleged Babi Yar massacre. The author was born in Kiev on August 18, 1929.[20] Thus, he was only 12 years old when the alleged massacre of Jews at Babi Yar took place. This is a relatively young age and tends to lessen his credibility.
Kuznetsov wrote: “On September 29th, 1941, for example, every single eye witness of what happened in Babi Yar was executed, but the people of Kurenyovka knew all about it an hour after the first shots had been fired.”[21]
So Kuznetsov says that he knows of no living eyewitnesses to the massacre of some 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar. Kuznetsov attempts to document the alleged atrocity at Babi Yar with almost exclusively hearsay evidence.
Dina Mironovna Pronicheva was a Jewess who says she survived the alleged massacre at Babi Yar. She is the only person believed to have fallen into the ravine unwounded and feigned death. Assuming various non-Jewish identities, she survived the German occupation of the Soviet Union during World War II. While nobody seems to have interviewed Pronicheva with a tape recorder, there are 12 written records of her testimony dating back to the 1940s. These records differ in substance, and most of the texts fail to meet the standards of contemporary oral history interviews.[22]
Despite the inconsistencies in her testimony, historian Karel C. Berkhoff writes that historians of the alleged Babi Yar massacre should use Pronicheva’s and other testimonies much more extensively. Berkhoff writes: “The fact remains that only very few sources come as close as Pronicheva’s testimonies do to the horrendous details of Kiev’s Jewish Holocaust.”[23]
Berkhoff and other historians fail to acknowledge the extreme disparity in the eyewitness testimonies regarding the events at Babi Yar. For example, Pronicheva’s accounts emphasize guns and rifles as the murder weapons. Other eyewitness accounts have included clubs, rocks, rifle butts, tanks, mines, hand grenades, gas vans, bayonets and knives, burial alive, drowning, injections, and electric shock as the murder weapons at Babi Yar. Herbert Tiedemann asked: “What would an unbiased court do if it had to pass judgement on an alleged mass murderer, if the witnesses were in such thorough disagreement?”[24]
Jürgen Graf writes concerning the contradictory testimony of witnesses at Babi Yar:
According to the established version of the facts, these 33,711 Jews were shot and their bodies thrown into the ravine of Babi Yar on 29 September 1941. But the first witnesses told completely different stories: The massacre was perpetrated in a graveyard, or near a graveyard, or in a forest, or in the very city of Kiev, or on the banks of the Dnieper. As to the murder weapons, the early witnesses spoke of rifles, or machine guns, or submachine guns, or hand grenades, or bayonets, or knives; some witnesses claimed that the victims had been put to death via lethal injections whereas others asserted that they had been drowned in the Dnieper, or buried alive, or killed by means of electric current, or squashed by tanks, or driven into minefields, or that their skulls had been crushed with rocks, or that they had been murdered in gas vans.[25]
Conclusion
Witness testimonies of the alleged Babi Yar massacre have been given full credence by historians even though these testimonies contradict each other and claim the most ridiculous impossibilities. Also, no one ever tried to secure any evidence in order to prove the murders. The Soviets after the end of the war turned the ravine of Babi Yar into a municipal garbage dump, and later into a garbage-incineration site. It is no less incomprehensible that the Soviets intended to build a sports facility over this site of the alleged mass murder of 33,771 Jews.[26]
The air photo taken of the ravine of Babi Yar on September 26, 1943 shows a placid and peaceful valley. Neither the vegetation nor the topography has been disturbed by human activity. There are no burning sites, no smoke, no excavations, no fuel depots, and no access roads for the transport of humans or fuel. We can conclude with certainty from this photo that no part of Babi Yar was subjected to topographical changes of any magnitude right up to the Soviet reoccupation of the area. Hence, the mass graves and mass cremations attested to by witnesses at Babi Yar did not take place.[27]
Endnotes
[1] Winter, Peter, The Six Million: Fact or Fiction?, The Revisionist Press, 2015, p. 25.
[2] Brandon, Ray and Lower, Wendy, The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization: Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2008, p. 292.
[3] Tiedemann, Herbert, “Babi Yar: Critical Questions and Comments,” in Gauss, Ernst (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust: The Growing Critique of Truth and Memory, Capshaw, Ala.: Theses and Dissertations Press, 2000, p. 521.
[4] Mattogno, Carlo and Graf, Jürgen, Treblinka: Transit Camp or Extermination Camp?, Washington, D.C.: The Barnes Review, 2010, p. 204.
[5] Winter, Peter, The Six Million: Fact or Fiction?, The Revisionist Press, 2015, p. 25
[6] Mattogno, Carlo and Graf, Jürgen, Treblinka: Transit Camp or Extermination Camp?, Washington, D.C.: The Barnes Review, 2010, pp. 203-211.
[7] Tiedemann, Herbert, “Babi Yar: Critical Questions and Comments,” in Gauss, Ernst (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust: The Growing Critique of Truth and Memory, Capshaw, Ala.: Theses and Dissertations Press, 2000, p. 497.
[8] Ibid., pp. 499, 521.
[9] Winter, Peter, The Six Million: Fact or Fiction?, The Revisionist Press, 2015, p. 25.
[10] Mattogno, Carlo and Graf, Jürgen, Treblinka: Transit Camp or Extermination Camp?, Washington, D.C.: The Barnes Review, 2010, pp. 220-221.
[11] Ibid., p. 220.
[12] Ibid., p. 221.
[13] Ball, John C., Air Photo Evidence: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor, Bergen Belsen, Belzec, Babi Yar, Katyn Forest, Delta, B.C., Canada: Ball Resources Services Limited, 1992, p. 107.
[14] Ibid., p. 108.
[15] Mattogno, Carlo and Graf, Jürgen, Treblinka: Transit Camp or Extermination Camp?, Washington, D.C.: The Barnes Review, 2010, p. 222.
[16] Tiedemann, Herbert, “Babi Yar: Critical Questions and Comments,” in Gauss, Ernst (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust: The Growing Critique of Truth and Memory, Capshaw, Ala.: Theses and Dissertations Press, 2000, p. 500.
[17] Ibid., pp. 498-524.
[18] Wiesel, Elie, The Jews of Silence, London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1968, p. 37.
[19] Wiesel, Elie, Paroles d’étranger, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982, p. 86.
[20] Kuznetsov, A. Anatoli, Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970, p. 14.
[21] Ibid., p. 365.
[22] Brandon, Ray (editor) and Lower, Wendy (editor), The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization, Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2008, pp. 294-295.
[23] Ibid., p. 309.
[24] Tiedemann, Herbert, “Babi Yar: Critical Questions and Comments,” in Gauss, Ernst (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust: The Growing Critique of Truth and Memory, Capshaw, Ala.: Theses and Dissertations Press, 2000, p. 523.
[25] Graf, Jürgen, “The Moral and Intellectual Bankruptcy of a Scholar,” Inconvenient History, Vol. 3, No. 4, 2011.
[26] Tiedemann, Herbert, “Babi Yar: Critical Questions and Comments,” in Gauss, Ernst (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust: The Growing Critique of Truth and Memory, Capshaw, Ala.: Theses and Dissertations Press, 2000, pp. 524-525.
[27] Ball, John Clive, “Air Photo Evidence,” in Gauss, Ernst (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust: The Growing Critique of Truth and Memory, Capshaw, Ala.: Theses and Dissertations Press, 2000, pp. 275, 284.
Why does Trump need Zelensky
By Alexander Ponomarenko | August 16, 2019
On August 9, Voice of America journalist Mikhail Komadovsky asked President of the United States Donald Trump whether he plans to invite President Vladimir Zelensky to the White House and how he would advise him to communicate with Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the conflict in Eastern Ukraine.
The US President’s response was eyebrow-raising enough: “He’s going to make a deal with President Putin. And he will be invited to the White House. He is a reasonable guy. He wants to see peace in Ukraine. I think he’ll be coming very soon.”
The sensation was that a few hours earlier, United States Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor said that a possibility of a Zelensky-Trump meeting in Warsaw and New York is only being worked out. It was clear that it was about a symbolic act, a brief meeting and a succinct conversation on the sidelines of a UN General Assembly session and arrangements timed to the 80th anniversary of the World War II outbreak.
And suddenly the American President himself says Zelensky’s visit will take place soon and pays him generous compliments. Why would he? We certainly need to take heed that Trump said not a single negative word about Russia and welcomed an early settlement. All of this sustains the hypothesis that he wants to get along with Moscow, but I do not think that this was the President’s number-one motivation. For Trump, the main thing is his re-election next year, as well as his key alleged rival, Joe Biden. And his compliments to the President of Ukraine seem to testify to his having enlisted cooperation of the new Kiev authorities in this regard.
Here it is appropriate to recall the conversation between Trump and Zelensky of July 25. The press service of the President of Ukraine reported that the US leader offered his congratulations to the former on the victory of the Servant of the People party at the parliamentary elections and expressed conviction that the new Ukrainian government proves able to quickly improve the image of Ukraine and to complete the investigation into corruption cases that hampered cooperation between Ukraine and the United States.
It is clear that the above phrase about the image and corruption cases restraining bilateral relations is a broad hint at both Kiev’s help in the 2016 struggle of the Democratic Party with Trump, which resulted in the Manafort case, and the dark Ukraine business of former US Vice President and Trump’s likely opponent Joe Biden.
But the most interesting thing is that the entire text with its transparent hints is a product of the Ukrainian President’s press service. After all, it is the only source of information in this respect, as the conversation between the two presidents has been mentioned neither on the White House website nor on Donald Trump’s Twitter. As press services traditionally provide a summary of the conversation, if both parties report on it, their messages are never identical, because each focuses on the facts considered the most fascinating to it.
In other words, it’s not just that Trump took interest in the part Hunter Biden, the son of his rival, had in the Burisma gas producing company and the role of the last Kiev administration and the Soros grant-eaters in digging up dirt while fighting against his election campaign in 2016, but that the Zelensky press service has actually voiced this. But they could have erased the hints and just report that “the US President stressed the importance of combating corruption.”
The presence of such a hint could be explained by the unsophistication of the Ukrainian President’s press service, but an explanation of this kind is out of place after Trump’s statement about his imminent meeting with Zelensky. Compliments to the President of Ukraine are a likely consequence of his willingness to help Trump in the issue key for him.
Yes, a week before the Kiev inauguration, The Washington Post reported Zelensky as afraid to be involved in the internal American conflict, as well as that he was surrounded by people who were enemies of Trump. The last phrase is an expression by attorney to the American President and former mayor of the New York City Rudolf Giuliani in justification of his planned trip to Kiev. He did not mention any names, but there could be only one person behind the transparent hint – Deputy of the eighth Verkhovna Rada convocation Serhiy Leshchenko, who was first to make a point of Manafort’s getting money from the Party of Regions. Leshchenko did really support Zelensky and attended events arranged by him, but all of this was before the inauguration.
The Zelensky team set a course for a criminal prosecution of former President Petro Poroshenko. And there is an opinion among Kiev experts that it is through the imprisonment of old team representatives that the new President will try to ensure his ratings, because succeeding here appears incomparably easier than in economy or in the Donbass region. However, with the patrons Poroshenko has in the West, the victory may be hollow. And those patrons will stand up for the ex-President even notwithstanding such skeletons in the closet as Poroshenko’s role in digging up Trump’s dirt in 2016 and the role of Yuri Lutsenko (№1 on list to the PPB in the 2014 elections), his political appointee to the post of Prosecutor General, as regards the termination of the Prosecutor’s Office’s interest in Burisma. And if probing into those “skeletons”, one can expect a favorable attitude of the White House.
But that’s not all of Zelensky’s motivation to support Trump. In exchange for such assistance one can ensure patronage in matters important. For instance, the presence of those close to Igor Kolomoyskyi in the establishment. I am primarily referring to Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine (the former Presidential Administration) Andriy Bohdan. Let me remind you that in May Giuliani hurled forth his rage upon Kolomoyskyi as a “criminal oligarch”.
However, the Ukrainian media have published leaked information that Trump refuses to meet with Zelensky while Bohdan heads the administration. But the compliments of the American President to the President of Ukraine obviously disavow such a rumor. By the way, it is quite possible that pressure on Zelensky through Kolomoyskyi has originally been a lever to persuade him to cooperate in the Biden case and other things Trump is concerned with.
Yes, getting involved in domestic political games of the United States is risky for Zelensky, because there is no guarantee that the White House will not be occupied by the Democrats in 2021. But it’s a long way off, and the situation is far from being easy under pressure coming from Washington. In addition, assistance to Trump in matters essential to him will obviously be delivered through the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office, with its leadership to change after a new Rada convocation starts its work. And Zelensky will get an opportunity to say that the Prosecutor’s Office is an independent agency free from presidential interference.
Alexander Ponomarenko is a political scientist with BRICS.
Ukraine on the cusp of change
By M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | Indian Punchline | July 23, 2019
The thumping victory by the Ukraine President Vladimir Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, securing an absolute majority of 253 seats in the 450 member parliament, can be viewed as a tectonic shift in the geopolitical landscape of Eurasia. The next big party in the parliament will be the pro-Russia Platform – For Life, which secured 44 seats. The stunning rout of the pro-western forces symbolised by former President Poroshenko’s Solidarity party (24 seats).
The West must see the writing on the wall that the tide of opinion in Ukraine is overwhelmingly favouring the country’s reconciliation with Russia — a total negation, in other words, of the “regime change” through a US-sponsored colour revolution in 2014. The pro-western forces had let loose a campaign that the July 21 election was about Renewal (pro-west regime change in 2014) versus Revanche (rapprochement with Russia). The latter has won resoundingly. (See a commentary in the US government controlled Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty titled Renewal Or ‘Revanche’? Buzzwords Of Ukraine’s Parliamentary Elections Forecast Tension Following Vote.)
In effective terms, the control of parliament consolidates Zelenskiy’s gip on political power and enables him to accelerate three things: one, the purge of the Poroshenko era personnel from the top echelons of the government most of whom are western nominees or proxies; two, a parliament that will cooperate with his legislative and reform agenda; and, three, robust efforts forthwith to bring the war in Donbas to an end and an improvement in relations with Russia.
Moscow has every reason to be quietly pleased with the outcome of the July 21parliamentary poll in Ukraine. Did Moscow anticipate the election results? Possibly so — even if the scale of Zelensky’s victory might have surpassed expectations. President Putin voiced optimism on the eve of the poll saying that the two countries will mend ties. As he put it, “We [Russia and Ukraine] have many things in common, we can use this as our competitive advantage during some form of integration. Rapprochement is inevitable.”
In fact, Moscow has already begun sensing that the Ukrainian government is no longer taking a hostile attitude toward Russia. The Kremlin noted last week that Kiev’s newly-appointed representatives in the contact group working on Donbas are taking a cooperative and constructive attitude, eschewing the negativism of the Poroshenko era. Besides, Zelensky has also signalled readiness to release from detention the editor-in-chief of the Russian state-run news agency RIA Novosti, Kirill Vyshinsky.
Zelensky can be expected to push for a radical fresh start in the policies, domestic and foreign. He has made it clear that he disowned the legacy of the Poroshenko presidency. He will now push through parliament his plan to extend a current ban preventing officials from the Yanukovych era (prior to 2014 regime change) from working in the public service to Poroshenko and his team. Legal prosecutions also seem possible, especially as Zelensky seeks to abolish the general immunity enjoyed by parliamentarians. These are hugely popular moves — and they will seriously debilitate the pro-western forces.
Zelensky’s projection of himself as a president for peace echoes the deep yearning of a big majority of Ukrainians for an end to the war in Donbas. “We are prepared to do everything required by the Minsk agreements,” he recently said in an interview with Deutsche Welle. He seems willing to make concessions to the separatists, as envisaged under the Minsk agreements — such as a measure of regional autonomy, a say in the foreign and security policies, the use of Russian language and so on. If he moves in that direction, a sea change in the climate of relations between Ukraine and Russia is possible.
However, the complexity of the Donbas question should not be underestimated. The conflict is multi-dimensional and external powers — Russia as well as western powers — are deeply involved in Ukraine. The regime change in Ukraine in 2014 is at the root of it. Will the West let Ukraine slip out of its hands? Will Zelensky be allowed by the West to plough an independent furrow toward the east? These are key questions today. The Russian attitudes will be largely conditional on that. For the moment, it does appear, though, that Ukraine is on the cusp of change. See a recent research paper by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs titled The Donbas Conflict: Opposing Interests and Narratives, Difficult Peace Process.
MH17: Turning Truth & Victims into Pawns
By Ulson Gunnar – New Eastern Outlook – 29.06.2019
As the wreckage of Malaysian flight MH-17 laid scattered in eastern Ukraine, and many days before the first investigators even arrived on scene, the US had already blamed Russia and separatists it accused of aiding for the tragic downing of the passenger plane and the loss of all 298 people on board.
It would be a July 31, 2014 article by the BBC titled, “Ukraine MH17: Forensic scientists reach jet crash site,” nearly 2 weeks after the aircraft’s downing that would announce the arrival of forensic scientists at the crash site.
Yet as early as July 21, more than a week before investigators arrived, Newsweek in its article, “U.S. Report Outlines Evidence That Rebels Downed Flight MH17,” was already claiming:
The U.S. State Department has outlined the evidence behind its assertion that Russia-backed separatists are responsible for the missile strike that downed Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17. In a statement posted on the website of the U.S. embassy to Ukraine, it said the flight was “likely downed by a SA-11 surface-to-air missile from separatist-controlled territory in eastern Ukraine.”
The assertions made within the report were a summary of accusations the US leveled against Russia even earlier still.
An Australia’s ABC would report a day before the investigators’ arrival in eastern Ukraine that the US and EU had already leveled additional sanctions against Russia, spurred on by US accusations regarding MH-17.
The article, “MH17: US and EU to impose broad sanctions on Russia over support for Ukraine rebels; fighting keeps investigators from Malaysia Airlines crash site,” would note:
The measures mark the start of a new phase in the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the Cold War, which worsened dramatically after the downing of MH17 over rebel-held territory on July 17.
German chancellor Angela Merkel, who had been reluctant to step up sanctions before the crash because of her country’s trade links with Russia, said the EU measures were “unavoidable”.
Washington’s accusations and its rush to leverage their impact on public and political circles at the time to pass further sanctions against Russia fits a pattern not of an impartial investigation or search for truth, but a cynical propaganda campaign carried out at the expense of both.
A Familiar Lack of Evidence…
The subsequent Joint Investigation Team (JIT) assembled to supposedly ascertain the truth behind the airliner’s downing included among its member states, Ukraine. As others have pointed out, Ukraine was and still is a prime suspect.
Ukraine’s decision not to close airspace over contested areas where military aircraft were already being shot down alone makes Kiev at least partially culpable for the loss of MH-17.
Expectations of honesty and cooperation from Kiev (berated by even its Western sponsors as being corrupt, abusive and inept) are unrealistic and their inclusion within the JIT undermines its credibility and any conclusion they reach, especially if that conclusion lacks substantial evidence to support it.
The fact that no convincing evidence has been produced by either the JIT or the nations using it as a vehicle to target Russia years after the incident and that the JIT itself cited “social media” as an “important part of the investigation,” further illustrates the political motivations of the team.
Mentioning the use of “social media” as evidence points toward NATO-backed propaganda platforms like Bellingcat which, again, represent “investigators” and “experts” on the payroll of and working with potential suspects in the downing of MH-17 itself.
If it would be unreasonable to place Russia at the center of such an investigation, it is likewise unreasonable to place those who benefit most from Russia being found “guilty” at the center of it as well.
… And a Familiar Lack of Motivation
Russia and any separatists it was backing in eastern Ukraine at the time had nothing to gain by shooting down a civilian airliner. At best, if separatists did launch the missile that allegedly brought down MH-17, it would have been an accident with Ukrainian military aircraft undoubtedly their intended target.
Conversely, the US and its allies had everything to gain by either allowing a civilian airliner to stray over territory knowingly putting it at risk, or shooting it down themselves as part of a false flag operation.
It is already admitted fact, even across the Western media that Ukraine failed to close airspace over eastern Ukraine. This is despite Ukraine losing several military aircraft to separatist air defenses in the weeks leading up to MH-17’s downing.
The BBC just days before the MH-17 downing would report in their July 14, 2014 article, “Ukraine military plane shot down as fighting rages,” that:
A Ukrainian military transport aircraft has been shot down in the east, amid fighting with pro-Russian separatist rebels, Ukrainian officials say.
Despite this incident and others like it leading up to the loss of MH-17, Kiev has claimed it did not believe civilian airliners would be at risk.
A Reuters article titled, “Ukraine defends not closing airspace where MH17 shot down,” would claim:
Ukraine on Tuesday defended its decision not to close airspace in the east of the country where a Malaysian passenger plane was shot down, saying it was unaware that anti-aircraft weapons were being used in the area and that planes could be under threat.
How the JIT is moving forward with a “trial” implicating Russia while Kiev’s overt negligence remains not only unpunished, but now unmentioned, further illustrates the politically motivated nature of the JIT and the nations involved.
It should be noted however that Malaysia, a member of the JIT, has (to say the least) expressed skepticism over the JIT’s latest move to begin trials implicating Russia and Ukrainian separatists.
Malaysia’s PM Doubts the JIT’s Credibility
The BBC in its article, “MH17 crash: Malaysia PM Mahathir denounces murder charges,” would note:
A day after the MH17 plane crash inquiry team announced murder charges against four men, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has condemned the decision as “ridiculous”.
The article also noted:
“From the very beginning it became a political issue on how to accuse Russia of wrongdoing,” Mr Mahathir said.
Of course, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad is absolutely correct. As we’ve seen, the US and its allies accused Russia of MH-17’s downing before any investigation began, let alone any evidence was in hand. The conclusion was reached as MH-17’s wreckage still smoldered.
For the JIT, the Truth Doesn’t Matter, Just People’s Perception of it
If it is possible that Russia or separatists mistakenly identified MH-17 as a Ukrainian military aircraft (the only possible explanation if Russia or separatists were responsible) it was only because Ukraine itself intentionally left dangerous airspace its own military aircraft were being shot out of open to invite just such a disaster. They did so with every intention to politically exploit any potential tragedy to target Russia.
It is also possible that Ukraine and its US-NATO sponsors took advantage of their strategic losses on the ground and the growing tempo of lost military aircraft overhead by shooting down MH-17 themselves, also meaning that even before MH-17’s downing, they fully intended to frame Russia.
The entire “Skripal affair” follows the same pattern, complete with a crime blamed on Russia but lacking any conceivable motivation for Moscow to have carried it out. In fact, in both cases, either with the downing of a civilian aircraft at the height of separatist victories in eastern Ukraine or the alleged poisoning of the Skripals on British soil at the onset of the Russian-hosted World Cup, only Washington and London had anything to gain from either crime.
The immediate accusations made before investigations even began and the politically motivated nature of the investigations that followed, along with their predictable lack of evidence and their equally predictable conclusions only adds insult to injury for the victims of MH-17 and any notions of actual justice.
The truth and justice have been openly turned into pawns to the point of the Malaysian prime minister himself, whose nation is on the JIT, calling out this politically motivated circus for what it is.
We may never know what really happened on July 17, 2014 over eastern Ukraine because those with the power to find out have already long since decided the truth doesn’t matter. What matters is only how manipulating public perception regarding that day’s events benefits them politically, strategically and geopolitically.
With the JIT’s “trials” set to begin, their charges and trials will be cited as “evidence” Russia did it, rather than any actual evidence proving it did.
This leaves us with another example of the West’s so-called rules-based international order and maybe gives us a little more insight into why so many have lost faith in it or why it is no longer sustainable. We have to wonder though, do the people in Washington, London or Brussels stop and think about this when considering why their rules-based international order no longer inspires confidence and as it begins to fade?
MH17 Probe – Perpetual Smear Job on Russia
By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | June 22, 2019
The Joint Investigation Team (JIT) tasked with probing the Malaysian MH17 airliner disaster in 2014 is a travesty of legal due process and justice. It is a politically motivated vehicle for smearing Russia. A vehicle designed to run and run for years to come.
Despite its grand-sounding legal title, the JIT is a mockery of jurisprudence. It has, for example, included Ukrainian police in its “fact finding” while excluding Russia. That has ensured bias in the investigation in favor of a party – the Ukrainian state – which should have been treated as a suspect.
The Dutch-led investigation is also infused with a NATO bias which inherently blames Russia for the Ukraine conflict that began in 2014. It is a hopelessly flawed investigation based on prejudice and preconceived notions of guilt.
As with previous reports, the JIT has openly acknowledged cooperating with the private blog site Bellingcat for its purported evidence gathering. How can a supposed official investigation into a mass murder be taken seriously when it is relying on the “expertise” of a freelance blogger-sleuth? Moreover, Bellingcat is complicit in peddling NATO propaganda concerning chemical weapons false-flag attacks in Syria and the Skripal poisoning case.
The JIT report this week into the crash in eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014 again draws on Bellingcat “information”. That information has been shown by other investigators to be based on fabricated video and audio material. Like previous JIT reports, the so-called “evidence” is vague and relies more on innuendo of guilt. The latest so-called report did not bring any new “evidence” to back up previous claims that Russia is culpable for the alleged shoot-down of the Boeing 777 over eastern Ukraine. The investigators claimed last year that a Russian anti-aircraft brigade based in Kursk entered Ukrainian territory with a Buk missile system. The munition was allegedly used by pro-Russian rebels fighting against Kiev-controlled military to blow the Boeing 777 from the sky.
The passenger jet was on its way from the Netherlands to Malaysia when it was apparently shot down by an anti-aircraft missile while traversing eastern Ukraine. All 298 onboard were killed in the crash.
Russia and the Ukrainian separatist militia have both denied any involvement. They reject the JIT claims as “baseless”.
The videos purportedly showing a Buk missile system being transported from Russia to eastern Ukraine – which Belllingcat and the JIT rely on as evidence – have long been exposed as doctored fakes.
What Dutch-led “investigators” did this week is more PR trick. They name four suspects ostensibly to prosecute for murder in a Dutch court next year. Three of the named persons are reportedly Russian nationals, while the fourth is Ukrainian. All are said to be located presently in the Russian Federation. The JIT will request Russia extradite the alleged suspects to face trial. The JIT investigators claim that the named individuals “prove” a link between Russian military and the Ukrainian rebels.
It is extremely unlikely that Russia will extradite the persons. That is because they will not receive a fair trial given the extreme prejudice of the prosecutors. And also because the Russian state has been continually refused participation in the investigation and fair access to investigation files. Russia’s own significant evidence into the air disaster – and what could have really happened – has also been continually and unreasonably repudiated by the JIT.
The Dutch-led investigators know full well that Russia will not cooperate with their extradition requests. What will happen therefore is that the “indictments” forever hang in the air and serve as a quasi-conviction. This is the same cynical technique of the Mueller Report into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential elections. Mueller indicted several Russian citizens for “meddling” in the elections, inferring they were serving a Kremlin-directed operation. Those accused citizens will never be extradited to face a trial in the US. Mueller knew that and didn’t expect it. The purpose was to let indictments hang in the air to serve as a perpetual smear against Russia.
Unlike the Mueller probe which wound up earlier this year after two years of meandering, empty-handed investigation into alleged “Russian collusion”, the MH17 investigation is set to trundle on for several years to come.
Wilbert Paulissen, head of the national investigative department of the Dutch police, said the investigation has much further to go, according to Radio Free Europe reporting.
“Today, we – the JIT – have taken an important step, but – as we said – our investigation will not end with the prosecution of those four people,” he said.
“There were more people who played a role in the downing of MH17. Investigation also continues into the personnel running the air-defense missile system Buk and into the people who were an important link in the Russian Federation’s decision-making process to provide military support to [separatists in] eastern Ukraine.”
Dutch chief prosecutor Fred Westerbeke was also quoted as saying that Russia was involved in the “crime in one way or another.” He added, the Kremlin is “in a position to tell us what happened… I’m sure they know what happened.”
For the head of Dutch police and the state attorney to make such prejudicial statements against Russia before a court case has even been opened is an astounding contempt of due process. Russia has been convicted and condemned for the Malaysian airliner disaster without even having a chance to present an alternative narrative, never mind defense.
Moscow’s response to the latest JIT accusations this week was one of dismay. The Kremlin said it was “regrettable” and “baseless” –unworthy of a substantial response.
Russia’s own significant evidence in the MH17 catastrophe has been repeatedly rebuffed by the JIT. That evidence reportedly includes radar and air traffic control data which puts the onus of responsibility for the crash on the Ukrainian authorities in Kiev. Why was the plane apparently directed by Kiev along an air route over a war zone?
Most revealing, however, is that Buk missile evidence presented last year by the JIT inadvertently showed that the casing of the projectile allegedly involved in downing the plane indicated it was a 1986 model of that munition. That strongly suggests that the missile did not come from Russia, but rather belonged to the Ukrainian armed forces dating from the Soviet era.
Incredibly, for a so-called international criminal investigation, such highly pertinent evidence from Russia has been shunned. However, this oversight is not incredible when one considers that the real purpose of the Dutch-led JIT is not to uncover the truth and guilt over the MH17 incident. The real purpose is to serve as a NATO vehicle to frame-up Russia for an atrocity. An atrocity which in all likelihood was perpetrated by one of the investigating parties – the NATO-backed Ukrainian regime in Kiev.
Dutch-led investigators demand arrest of 4 people allegedly involved in MH17 downing
RT | June 19, 2019
International investigators have accused three Russians and one Ukrainian of shooting down Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 in 2014, with the trial to start next year. Moscow has repeatedly criticized “inconsistencies” in the probe.
The report by Joint Investigation Team (JIT) on Wednesday said they collected enough evidence for murder charges to be presented to the Dutch court. The latter will decide whether the four suspects are responsible for the incident that claimed 298 lives. The plane was shot down by a Buk surface-to-air missile over eastern Ukraine amid an armed conflict between government and rebel forces. Most of the victims were Dutch passengers.
The JIT accused a rebel of shooting down the civilian plane. The top suspect is Igor Girkin, a Russian national, who was a senior commander under the nom de guerre Igor Strelkov at the time. The other suspects are fellow anti-Kiev fighters and Russian nationals Sergey Dubinsky and Oleg Pulatov as well as Leonid Kharchenko, a Ukrainian.
The investigators allege that the four people were responsible for bringing a Buk launcher into Ukraine from the Russian territory and using it to shoot down flight MH17. The probe noted that the tragedy may have happened by accident, with the rebels believing that they were targeting a Ukrainian warplane. That, JIT says, does not make the crime any less serious.
The JIT said three of the suspects are currently in Russia while the fourth is in Ukraine. The Netherlands will issue international arrest warrants for the four individuals, but won’t seek extraditions, since neither Ukraine nor Russia are allowed to extradite its citizens due to their respective constitutions. This makes it unlikely that any of the four individuals would stand before the court, once it begins in March 2020, the JIT said.
Girkin denies the allegations by reiterating that he and his men were not responsible for the downing of the ill-fated flight.
The JIT includes representatives from Australia, Belgium, Malaysia, Ukraine and the Netherlands. Pointing out “inconsistencies” in the probe, Moscow said the Dutch-led team was reluctant to search or study evidence that contradicted the theory that rebels were responsible for the incident. Moscow stands accused of providing the Buk launcher and missile, an allegation that it denies.
Moscow also blamed the JIT of failing to pressure Ukraine into providing radar data for the day when MH17 was shot down. It published its own radar data as well as records related to production and transportation of Buk missiles in Soviet times. According to Moscow, they point to Ukraine as the culprit in the case. In particular, the warhead that destroyed the plane was of an older model that is no longer in use in Russia while its serial numbers, which were recovered at the crash site, point to a projectile that had been shipped to Ukraine.
Russia also criticized the JIT for relying on so-called ‘open source evidence’ like videos published on social media as well as opinions of ‘civilian journalists’ like the UK-based group Bellingcat in its reporting. Moscow says such evidence is not always reliable.
Bellingcat published its own report with a longer list of people, whom it accused of shooting down the airliner. The four suspects named by the JIT are on that list. Notably, the report was issued just hours before the JIT press conference.
Meanwhile, Russia is not the only country that has reservations about JIT’s work. Last month Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said his country was not convinced by the evidence uncovered about either Russia’s involvement or Ukraine’s innocence in the case.
‘Where is the evidence?’ Malaysian PM says attempts to pin MH17 downing on Russia lack proof
RT | May 30, 2019
Malaysia has accepted the Dutch report that a ‘Russian-made’ missile shot down its civilian airliner MH17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014, but has yet to see evidence it was fired by Russia, said Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.
“They are accusing Russia but where is the evidence?” Mahathir told reporters at the Japanese Foreign Correspondents Club (FCCJ) in Tokyo on Thursday.
“You need strong evidence to show it was fired by the Russians,” the prime minister went on, according to the Malaysian state news agency Bernama. “It could be by the rebels in Ukraine; it could be Ukrainian government because they too have the same missile.”
Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014 – amid heavy fighting between residents of two eastern regions who rejected the February coup in Kiev and troops dispatched by the Western-backed government to suppress them.
All 283 passengers and 15 crew members on board the Boeing-777 were killed. Kiev immediately blamed Russia for the incident, and most Western media uncritically agreed.
Mahathir was skeptical that anyone involved with the Russian military could have launched the missile that struck the plane, however, arguing that it would have been clear to professionals that the target was a civilian airliner.
“I don’t think a very highly disciplined party is responsible for launching the missile,” he said.
The Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT), whose report last year blamed Moscow for shooting down MH17, barred Russia from participating in the investigation, but involved the government of Ukraine. Although Malaysia is also a member of JIT, Mahathir revealed that his country’s officials have been blocked from examining the plane’s flight recorders.
“For some reason, Malaysia was not allowed to check the black box to see what happened,” he said. “We don’t know why we are excluded from the examination but from the very beginning, we see too much politics in it.”
“The idea was not to find out how this happened but seems to be concentrated on trying to pin it on the Russians.”
“This is not a neutral kind of examination,” Mahathir added.
Rejecting the JIT accusations, Russia made public the evidence the Dutch-led researchers refused to look into, including the serial number of the missile that allegedly struck MH17, showing that it was manufactured in the Soviet Union in 1986 and was in the arsenal of the Ukrainian army at the time of the tragedy.
Global Elites Started The Russia Nonsense
Ted Eytan (Flickr/CC)
By Thomas Farnan | Human Events | May 24, 2019
Attorney General William Barr has turned the attention of the Russia probe to its origin: who started this and why? The answer, as in all the best crime dramas, is probably hiding in plain sight.
On July 13, 2016, British academic Dr. Andrew Foxall penned an op-ed in the New York Times, “Why Putin Loves Brexit.” He blamed Russia for the previous month’s Brexit vote, adding in a little noted aside:
The United States is so concerned over Moscow’s determination to exploit European disunity that in January, James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, began a review of Russia’s clandestine funding of European parties.
The British aristocracy has a condescending view of the hoi polloi who voted for Brexit, regarding them as easily manipulated Pygmalion-like by smarter people.
Bingo! The Obama administration was spying on conservative European political parties. Which means, almost necessarily under the Five Eyes Agreement, foreign agents were returning the favor and spying on the Trump campaign.
On August 11, 2018, I wrote:
The British aristocracy has a condescending view of the hoi polloi who voted for Brexit, regarding them as easily manipulated Pygmalion-like by smarter people. They assumed Vladimir Putin was somehow playing Professor Henry Higgins to the flower girls who voted to reject the EU, because that’s how they see the world. Among the Cambridge class, this simple prejudice renders Russian collusion a first principle with no need for supporting evidence….
Without supporting evidence to prove their fantastical worldview, the global elite set out to manufacture some.
First up was Christopher Steele, who hasn’t set foot in Russia since 2009. He wears as a badge the claim that Putin hates him which, if true, means he has no real Russian sources. Maybe because of that, Steele’s farcical dossier on Trump was not enough for the FBI to open an investigation, and these international men of mystery needed something more.
They invited George Papadopoulos to London, used a Maltese asset disguised as a Russian agent – Joseph Mifsud – to feed him a whopper about Hillary Clinton’s emails, then claimed he repeated the lie to Andrew Downer, an Australian diplomat with ties to the Clinton Foundation.
That was the final straw that caused lovestruck counterintelligence specialist Peter Strzok to open an FBI investigation into the Trump campaign which he called “Crossfire Hurricane.” Apropos, because when MI6 was joined on its flank by an FBI investigation, it was officially a crossfire: two rogue intelligence services raining fire upon Trump.
Conspiracies are mere abstractions unless they do something criminal. The Russian interference fantasy needed a crime. The DNC sold a doozy of an actus reus to the FBI after John Podesta’s negligent disclosure of damaging Clinton campaign emails: Putin did it.
Conveniently, the FBI delegated the inspection of the computer servers to CrowdStrike, an insider paid by the DNC. James Comey testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee in January 2017 that CrowdStrike was “a highly respected private company.”
What he failed to mention was that a month before his testimony, CrowdStrike had been caught falsely blaming Russia for a hack into a Ukrainian artillery computer app.
In other words, at the same time this “highly respected private company” was blaming the Russians for stealing the Clinton campaign’s emails, it was fabricating a different Russian hack to serve Ukrainian misinformation.
Why all the fuss about Russia? Liberal elites – who tended to love the Soviet Union – hate present day Russia, which dares to assert nationality and culture against the pieties of the one-world-order crowd.
The Patriarch of the Orthodox Church passes on all legislation in the country. Putin put the girl rock band Pussy Riot in prison for desecrating an altar, a crime that has not been punished since the 13th century. President Obama sent gay representatives to the Sochi Olympics on his behalf, in protest.
That explains the leftists, but how about Republican elites? Mitch McConnell recently took to the floor of the U.S. Senate to declare the “case closed” on collusion, urging republicans and democrats to unite against Putin’s election interference.
That’s a problem. If Trump was a product of KGB-esque intrigue, then Hillary is a victim of meddling. Trump is merely an un-indicted hapless beneficiary. The deplorables are not only racist, stupid losers, they are also Putin’s unwitting stooges.
The same non-evidence cited to show collusion, though, undergirds the “but Russia interfered” stupidity. It is a three-legged stool that teetered for a while upon Christopher Steele, Joseph Mifsud, and CrowdStrike, and has now crashed to the ground.
President Eisenhower – the furthest thing from a conspiracy theorist America has ever produced – famously warned in his farewell address to beware “the military industrial complex.”
The great funding pipeline that makes Washington D.C. the wealthiest region in America feeds mostly on military spending which still, nearly thirty years removed from the Cold War, requires a Russian enemy.
Unconventional candidate Donald Trump rattled Washington to its core in March 2016 when he wondered about NATO’s continued relevance and questioned America’s foreign policy in Ukraine.
That’s when this “Putin’s candidate” stuff started among both Republicans and Democrats, egged on by Ukrainians – who almost certainly fed Steele the fake kompromat in the dossier.
Russia may be a convenient boogeyman that serves as a necessary foil to both sides in the Washington establishment. But, for once, let’s fight the real enemy: the global elites who started this nonsense.
West-backed think tanks threaten new Ukrainian president with disturbing list of ‘RED LINES’
By Danielle Ryan | RT | May, 2019
When President Volodymyr Zelensky won a landslide victory in the free and undisputed April elections, most accepted that he was given a fairly strong mandate to lead Ukraine. But it seems not everyone is so democratically-minded.
Particularly unmoved by the democratic process are a collection of Ukrainian ‘civil society’ groups, who have just issued a lengthy list of “red lines not to be crossed” by the new president, lest he risk provoking a new wave of political instability – that they would presumably instigate.
Issuing their catalog of demands on Thursday, the groups claim to be “politically neutral” but “deeply concerned” about the first actions taken by the comedian-turned-politician Zelensky, including his decision to appoint members of former President Viktor Yanukovych’s government to positions within his own government.
A scan of the undersigned reveals that many of these “civil society groups” are anything but politically neutral. In fact, quite a few of them are partly funded by the US government, various EU governments (including the UK), the European Commission itself – and, of course, the omnipresent liberal billionaire George Soros.
The list includes the notorious Euromaidan Press, Stop Fake and Ukrainian Crisis Media Center, to name just a few. In their heyday, many of these groups acted as propaganda tools of the Western-backed government of Petro Poroshenko, rather than the watchdogs they claim to be. They now confirm that a pesky election isn’t going to stand in the way of their agenda, reaffirming that their own “principles and positions” on issues remain unchanged and warning:
Should [Zelensky] cross these red lines, such actions will inevitably lead to political instability in our country…
This statement, which precedes the wide-ranging list of red lines, reads like a threat: Do what we say, or there will be trouble. Isn’t that a strange, almost dictatorial approach for groups purporting to be interested in “democracy,” “freedom,” and “dignity”? Did we all miss the part where a group of think tanks were collectively elected president of Ukraine?
Of course, these groups do indeed represent various factions of Ukrainian society and many of them no doubt have worthy aims, and they should continue their work unimpeded. But they do not represent all of Ukrainian society and they certainly do not have the authority to set the political agenda and lay down the law to the incoming government – and that, quite literally, is what they are trying to do.
It’s such a gobsmackingly odd list of demands that even Western journalists who had a broadly friendly relationship with the Poroshenko government are aghast at their audacity. The list is broken down into issues of security, foreign policy, economy, national identity (language, education and culture), media and government functioning.
On security, the groups want to forbid Zelensky from “achieving compromise” with Russia in any manner that would be “to the detriment” of the national interest, presumably as defined by themselves. Inhibiting the implementation of security and defense policies outlined in a 2016 decree signed by Poroshenko is also forbidden, they say.
In the foreign policy realm, these audacious activists warn that democratically-elected Zelensky may not initiate any actions that could lead to the “reduction or lifting” of sanctions on Russia by Western powers. He may not take any action “delaying, sabotaging, or rejecting” the course for EU and NATO membership for Ukraine. Where the economy is concerned, he may not implement any policy that goes against existing agreements with “the IMF and other foreign partners.”
It’s on the national identity front that things get really sketchy, though. The groups would like to forbid any attempt whatsoever to even “review” multiple controversial laws signed by Poroshenko, including an anti-Russia language law (which effectively alienates the 30 percent of Ukrainians who speak Russian as their native tongue) and laws on contentious “de-communization” which banned Soviet symbols in the country.
Ironically, this push for de-communization coincided with a renewed glorification of Nazism that went almost unnoticed by Western media and officials, who have supported Poroshenko’s virulently anti-Russian government as it implemented laws better suited to George Orwell’s 1984 than a modern democracy. The “NGOs” insist that Zelensky may not implement any action to support the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine, another ‘red line’ among their national identity demands.
Remember when Russian television channels and social networks like VKontakte were banned in Ukraine simply for the crime of being Russian? Well, Zelensky will also be in big trouble if he tries to restore them, the “civil society groups” say.
The most vague red line of all comes near the end of the list, when the new president is warned against “ignoring dialogue with civil society” – a command so vague that “almost anything” Zelensky does going forward could be interpreted as ignoring their wishes, France 24 correspondent Gulliver Cragg wrote on Twitter.
BBC correspondent Jonah Fisher tweeted that the groups themselves may have crossed a red line – the red line of “what civil society groups can legitimately demand of a freshly elected government.”
Zelensky was elected to office with 73 percent of the vote – and let’s not forget, he won that election having campaigned against many of the policies these ‘civil society’ groups are aggressively demanding be kept in place.
He has been in office only a matter of days, and these Western-backed groups are threatening to instigate political unrest should he take any action that they don’t find acceptable to their political agenda. So who, exactly, poses the real threat to democracy?
Danielle Ryan is an Irish freelance writer based in Dublin. Follow her on Twitter @DanielleRyanJ
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The Forgotten Terrorist Pretext of the Vietnam War
By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | February 16, 2023
Since 9/11, terrorism has become the ultimate entitlement program for America’s political elite. Whether it is illegally spying on Americans or blowing Somali dissidents to pieces, invoking terrorism provides all the cover needed for Washington policymakers. But the disastrous results of granting politicians a blank check to fight terrorism should have been undeniable almost 60 years ago.
Back in the 1960s, terrorism was what the communists did. Anti-terrorist moral fervor and ideological blinders propelled the U.S. into its biggest foreign policy blunder since World War II. … continue
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