Germany to funnel more cash into Ukraine’s corruption-plagued energy sector
RT | November 12, 2025
Germany has pledged to provide Ukraine with an additional €40 million in an effort to prop up its power generation during the winter, Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul has said. The announcement comes as Ukraine’s energy industry finds itself mired in a corruption scandal allegedly linked to an ally of leader Vladimir Zelensky.
Speaking on Tuesday, Wadephul said Berlin was “helping Ukrainians survive another winter of war with an additional €40 million ($46 million).” The diplomat noted that this year alone Germany has already spent €9 billion on military aid for Kiev.
A day earlier, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) announced that it was investigating a “high-level criminal organization” which allegedly profited from contracts involving state-owned nuclear energy company Energoatom.
According to the authorities, the ring forced Energoatom officials and contractors to pay kickbacks for state contracts. Formal charges have so far been brought against seven unnamed individuals. The Ukrainian media has claimed that one of the suspects is Timur Mindich, a close associate and former business partner of Zelensky. The businessman allegedly fled Ukraine just hours before his home was raided by NABU agents.
Mindich’s personal and business ties to the Ukrainian leader are understood to date back to when Zelensky was actively involved in the entertainment industry.
An opinion poll conducted by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) in September indicated that 71% of respondents believed that the level of corruption in Ukraine has increased since the escalation of the conflict with Russia in February 2022.
In recent years, Ukraine has been rocked by a string of corruption scandals.
In August, several high-ranking officials were detained over a scheme involving the purchase of electronic warfare systems. Earlier this year, a food supply fraud case worth nearly $18 million within the Defense Ministry came to light.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has claimed that Western aid has to a large extent been “stolen” in Ukraine due to widespread corruption.
Former US National Security Adviser Michael Waltz has similarly described Ukraine as “one of the most corrupt nations in the world.”
Matthew Hoh: Domestic Divisions Threaten the US Empire
Glenn Diesen | November 11, 2025
Matthew Hoh is a former U.S. Marine Officer and State Department Official. Hoh discusses the growing divisions within the US, which threaten the US empire.
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Russia ‘not a threat’ to Germany – senior opposition MP
RT | November 11, 2025
A senior lawmaker from Germany’s largest opposition party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), has rejected the government’s claim that Russia poses a threat to the country.
Markus Frohnmaier, who leads the right-wing AfD in the Bundestag, also dismissed allegations that the party is working on Moscow’s behalf. The AfD has long criticized military aid to Ukraine and argued that Berlin should instead focus on diplomacy.
“I stand for German interests,” Frohnmaier said on Tuesday during a televised debate with Norbert Roettgen of the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU). He went on to say that Germany should not “get involved in a foreign war” and had no obligation to defend Ukraine, which is not a NATO member. When asked if Russia posed a threat, he replied, “No.”
“We are not at war with Russia,” Frohnmaier said. “The AfD’s position is to remain in dialogue with all global, relevant actors,” he added, criticizing the government for what he called a “hyper-moralizing” foreign policy.
Roettgen, for his part, claimed that Moscow was waging a “hybrid war” against Germany and other European states, accusing his opponent of spreading Russian “propaganda.” In a speech last week, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier likewise listed Russia as one of the threats to Germany’s national security.
Germany recently announced plans to increase financial aid to Kiev by €3 billion ($3.5 billion) next year and, according to Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky, delivered additional US-made Patriot air defense systems to Ukraine last month.
A Forsa opinion poll in August found that 52% of respondents in Germany believed Ukraine should cede some territory to Russia to end the conflict. Zelensky, however, has ruled out any territorial concessions.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said last month that NATO members, including Germany, were already de facto “at war with Russia” because Ukrainian forces were actively using Western-supplied weapons. He has repeatedly said that Russia would not attack NATO states unless attacked first.
The Pokrovsk lesson is that British media are lying through their teeth
By Martin Jay | Strategic Culture Foundation | November 11, 2025
While western commentators ease their audience into a new reality – the eastern strategic town of Pokrovsk is about to fall into Russian hands – it’s interesting to see how they carefully backpedal and twist every morsel of information. It’s as though all of the information that was prepared and delivered to them is so out of touch with reality, that all is left now is to downplay the imminent Russian victory as hollow and meaningless.
It’s certainly true that a victory for Russian forces now in Pokrovsk is less strategic than it was a few months ago, but to write it off as insignificant is just one more lie that western media and commentators are guilty of delivering.
The analysis and reporting about Pokrovsk has to be deciphered, but when British journalists like Sam Kiley, who are there on the ground, talk about the victory cry from pro-Russian media as being “premature” it’s worth noting that nearly all such journalists have crossed the line of journalism for the preferred role of commentator. Kiley’s piece in the Independent is so peppered with the conditional tense that it has little or no credibility. And like all British hacks, he is cleverly removing the sweet taste of victory out of Putin’s mouth by going into the zone of spouting irrefutable so called “facts” which are naturally impossible to disprove. The main one, which gives you an indication that he also believes Pokrovsk is close to falling, is that he mentions that the gains the Russians made came through so many dead soldiers. This ol’ chestnut is repeated over and over again as British readers like to believe it’s true. Is it true? Has Russia lost a disproportionate number of soldiers on the battlefield? We will never know, so how in God’s name does Kiley?
Irrefutable claims, written as fact, are part and parcel of British reporting on the Ukraine war. Kiley might be comforted by the sensationally bad Times Radio which takes this dark art to a new level. Philip Ingram’s podcast with his friend former British Army Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon is a shining example of what one ex-spook and one former colonel in the British army can do with MOD disinformation. Their podcast is so bad and bigoted, it leaves you wondering whether to laugh or cry as they both start off with the absurd argument that most of the reporting from Pokrovsk is Russian social media channels which exaggerate the scale of Russian gains and so, according to the hapless Bretton-Gordon, shouldn’t be taken seriously – before he blathers that if Russia were to take the town, it would take four years for them to do it.
He then goes on to conclude that not much is happening on the ground and that things are “opaque”. Ingram then chimes in to tone down the significance of the town, when it falls, but claims that the Ukrainians have had a success there, given what they both agree are causalities on the Russian side of a 1000 losses a day. Yet both of these numpties are reading from MOD/Mi6 data which only underlines the point that disinformation even for ex-soldiers having a go at podcasts is alive and well. While it is disturbing that Bretton-Gordon is so reliant on such data it is also off putting that he can’t even pronounce the name of the town itself correctly. Where does Times Radio find such amateurs?
For American media, even those who support Biden, the defeat of Pokrovsk is nigh and the narrative they offer contradicts the two podcasters outright. Perhaps if Times Radio Laurel and Hardy act were to actually do the legwork and interview people who are on the ground, even if it’s only the Ukrainians, their banta might have a slither of credibility about it and not leave the viewer cringing at how awful it is.
“The situation is difficult, with all types of fighting going on, firefights in urban areas, and shelling with all types of weapons,” one battalion commander told CNN, speaking on the condition of anonymity for security reasons.
“We are almost surrounded, but we are used to it,” he said. Another soldier, who also asked for his name to be withheld for safety reasons, told CNN the Russian military continues to press forward with large numbers of men.
“The intensity of their movements is so great that (Ukrainian) drone operators simply cannot keep up with the pace. The Russians often move in groups of three, counting on the fact that two will be destroyed, but one will still reach the city and gain a foothold there. About a hundred such groups can pass through in a day,” a soldier from the Ukrainian Peaky Blinders drone unit told CNN.
And so, the reporting on the British side lacks all credibility. And like all bad journalists, or pseudo journalists, the Times Radio also like to practice the deft art of omission. How did it simply pass these two that there are plenty of Ukrainian soldiers who will tell them that their MI6 taking points are BS and that it’s a shitstorm in Pokrovsk with Ukrainian losses also high? Would that not have scored them the propaganda points they crave?
In the UK, the reporting about Ukraine is so biased and manipulated by MI6/MOD disinfo that it is practically a Hollywood movie which the press is asking a gullible public to believe. Could this possibly be responsible for broad support for the war? Is a disinformation campaign actually driving the political dynamic, just as it did so many times before, not dissimilar to how many people in 2003 were happy that Tony Blair sent troops to Iraq, based on similar reports?
Ukrainian-British plot to steal MiG-31 thwarted – FSB
RT | November 11, 2025
The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) has said it foiled an elaborate Ukrainian-British plot to steal a MiG-31 fighter jet armed with a Kinzhal hypersonic ballistic missile.
According to the FSB, although Ukrainian agents unsuccessfully tried to persuade the pilots to defect, their actual goal was for the aircraft to be shot down in Romanian airspace, provoking an international incident with NATO. The agency said the operation was organized by Ukraine’s military intelligence service (HUR) in coordination with the UK’s MI6.
A MiG-31 pilot said he was contacted last year by a man introducing himself as Sergey Lugovsky, a researcher for the open-source investigative group Bellingcat, which has received funding from several Western governments. The pilot said Lugovsky initially sought consultations, later offering money for defection.
After the pilot declined, a Ukrainian agent using the name Aleksandr approached the aircraft’s navigator, offering $3 million and a foreign passport in exchange for directing the plane to fly over an air base near Constanta, Romania.
Kiev has previously offered money and assistance to defectors. In 2023, Russian Mi-8 pilot Maksim Kuzminov defected to Ukraine, landing his helicopter behind the front lines with the HUR’s help. Two of the other crew members, unaware of his plan, were killed upon landing. Kuzminov was assassinated a year later in Spain, where he was living under a new identity and with a Ukrainian passport.
In 2022, the FSB accused former Bellingcat investigator Christo Grozev, a Bulgarian-born journalist, of taking part in a failed Ukrainian attempt to recruit Russian military pilots. Grozev said he was embedded with Ukrainian intelligence officers as a documentary filmmaker and claimed that his text messages were forged.
Gordon Hahn: The Strange Death of Europe
Glenn Diesen | November 10, 2025
Gordon Hahn discusses Europe’s ideological fundamentalism, detached leadership, Russophobia, subservience to the US, and other causes for the death of the old continent.
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What You Won’t Read About Ukraine in Your Newspaper
By Ted Snider | The Libertarian Institute | November 10, 2025
There is much of significance happening in Ukraine right now that is being reported either lightly or not at all by the mainstream Western media in an apparent attempt to harmonize their reporting with Kiev’s narrative in order to keep hopes high and economic and military support flowing.
Though the mainstream media has begun to report on the Russian encirclement of the Donetsk city of Pokrovsk, it is failing to report on how dire and how ominous the situation is. The reporting suggests that the battlefield situation is being stabilized, that the Russian losses are enormous, and that the loss of Pokrovsk would be strategically insignificant. None of those claims are true.
Russia’s chief of staff, General Valery Gerasimov, reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin that the Russian armed forces are “advancing along converging axes” and “have completed the encirclement of the enemy” in Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad.” His Ukrainian counterpart, Oleksandr Syrskii, said the report does “not correspond to reality.” Ukrainian officials “insist,” The New York Times reports, “that special units are clearing Russians out of the city.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky boasted that “in Pokrovsk, we continue to destroy the occupier.”
Though the Ukrainian armed forces may have temporarily pushed the Russian forces partially back, the Russian forces have retaken a large part of Pokrovsk and now control about 80% of it. The pincers that are steadily closing around Pokrovsk are now just a kilometer apart, a gap that is difficult and dangerous for Ukraine’s best paratroopers to escape through. Though Ukraine continues to deny the encroaching encirclement, admitting only that the situation is “difficult,” the narrative won’t change the reality on the battlefield. Ukraine’s Euromaidan Press says that Pokrovsk now “risks becoming a graveyard for Ukraine’s finest.” The Kyiv Independent assesses that “saving the city from falling in the short term looks to be a daunting, and likely impossible task.”
The Western media also reports that Russia’s gains are coming at a greater loss. The Times reports that “Russia’s incremental advances have come at an immense cost. While Ukraine wants to hold on to Pokrovsk, military commanders argue that the large losses it is inflicting on the Kremlin’s troops there will hurt the Russian war effort more broadly.”
But the Times exaggerates Russia’s losses in the war more broadly by at least three times and shrinks Ukraine’s losses by the same amount. As far as Pokrovsk goes, analysts have noted that the attrition of Ukraine’s forces in the war have led to a situation in Pokrovsk where Russia’s forces are taking the fortified city without huge losses in troops or equipment.
And, according to the Times, “the military significance of losing Pokrovsk may be relatively small for Ukraine.” But the loss of Pokrovsk means not only the loss of a critical strategic hub for supplying Ukrainian forces in the east, but also the possible loss of control of Ukraine’s defensive line of linked fortification in Donetsk.
Perhaps even more lacking in Western reporting of the battlefield is that a number of military analysts have pointed out that singular focus on Pokrovsk misses the larger picture that that the Russian armed forces have entered or partially encircled several cities in Donetsk, threatening a larger encirclement of the area, and that for the first year in the war, the Ukrainian armed forces have been unable to launch any kind of offensive in 2025. Those two battlefield realities combine to create a larger context that is more ominous still. It suggests that Russia’s war of attrition has depleted Ukrainian troops to the point that they are no longer able to attack Russia or to defend themselves.
Ukraine’s desperate situation on the battlefield has led to two more underreported events. The first was the simultaneous explosions at oil refineries in Hungary and Romania. The fact that both refineries process Russian crude oil and that Ukraine and Europe seem to have shifted their strategy from defeating Russia on the battlefield to cutting off Russia’s oil revenue to drive them to the negotiating table, have led to speculation that Ukraine was behind the two acts of sabotage.
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said recently that the explosion at Hungary’s oil refinery could have been caused by an “external attack.” The external actor is unlikely to be Russia. They lack the motivation to sabotage their own customers at a time when U.S. sanctions are attempting to strangle its exports of oil. That seems to leave, as a consensus among analysts suggests, Ukraine or its partners. Ukraine has offered no comment on the explosions, and the silence of the Western media adds to the suspicion. It is alarming that the mainstream media has not a word to say about seemingly coordinated attacks on two European countries that could have enormous consequences in the post Ukraine war world.
Ukraine’s desperation has also led to an underreported crisis at home. Ukraine is losing troops, not only to Russian attacks on the battlefield, but to desertion. As part of the solution, Ukraine has turned to forced mobilization in which men are abducted, often aggressively, against their will and bussed off to recruitment centers. From there, they find themselves on the battlefield with very little training.
Once on the front, troops have deserted in the thousands. Though little reported in the mainstream media, in the first months of 2025 alone, more than 110,000 Ukrainian soldiers deserted. As many as 20% of Ukraine’s armed forces have deserted. Since the war began, the number of desertions may be as high as 200,000, and it is getting worse by the month.
The Western media seems to be complicit in harmonizing with Kiev’s misleading message in order to keep Western morale up and Western arms flowing. But, though the narrative may be strong enough to mislead a public that trusts its newspapers, it will not be strong enough to alter reality. Ukraine is turning to more desperate measures in an attempt to address a dire situation on the battlefield in which they no longer have the manpower to go on the offensive nor to defend themselves and in which troops are deserting as fast as they are being killed.
Zelensky should halt ‘senseless’ attacks on Russia – Finnish politician
RT | November 10, 2025
Vladimir Zelensky should end “senseless” attacks on Russia as they merely end up worsening the security situation in Ukraine due to retaliatory strikes by Moscow, Euroskeptic Finnish politician Armando Mema said on Monday.
Long-range strikes on Russian regions using domestically produced drones have become a central element of Kiev’s military approach. Zelensky has repeatedly pledged to cause blackouts in Moscow and other places to “bring the war” to the Russian people. Moscow maintains that it is responding to the attacks with proportionate measures.
“Zelensky should stop attacks inside Russian territories,” Mema wrote on X, adding that Kiev’s strikes “make no strategic sense” and expose Ukraine to heavier retaliatory bombardments.
Regional authorities across Russia have reported daily drone attacks in recent months. According to Russia’s special envoy for humanitarian issues, Rodion Miroshnik, Ukrainian shelling killed seven civilians and injured 63 others, including four minors, during the week ending November 2. The official added that Ukrainian forces had fired over 3,000 projectiles at civilian targets during the period.
In response, Russia has intensified long-range strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, with the stated aim of degrading Kiev’s arms production and military logistics.
Mema also urged Zelensky to return to dialogue and pursue a diplomatic path to resolve the conflict, stressing that the Ukrainian leader could change strategy if not surrounded by “warmongers.”
Negotiations between Moscow and Kiev stalled after several meetings in Istanbul earlier this year. Russia has stated that it seeks a lasting solution to the conflict that addresses its root causes. Ukraine and its Western backers have repeatedly called for an immediate ceasefire, which Russia insists would only allow Ukraine to regroup its military and receive more weapons.
Zelensky’s office accused of energy damage cover-up
RT | November 10, 2025
Vladimir Zelensky’s office forced a Ukrainian energy company to conceal the severity of damage to its facilities following recent Russian strikes, according to domestic media.
The controversy emerged after a wave of Russian missile and drone attacks last week that targeted what the Defense Ministry in Moscow described as military factories and facilities powering them. Kiev confirmed the scale of the assault but downplayed its long-term consequences.
The state-owned energy company Centrenergo, which operates two major thermal power plants in Ukraine, posted an emotional statement on Saturday admitting that the strikes had wiped out months of repair work and halted electricity generation entirely. The message was later replaced with a routine update claiming that restoration efforts are underway as quickly as possible.
According to Ukrainskaya Pravda, the retraction came after direct intervention from the government. “The [Zelensky] office called and scolded us, asking why we were spreading panic and giving a [propaganda] gift to the Russians,” a company insider told the outlet, which described the reaction as “hysterical.”
The Zelensky administration reportedly puts significant effort into avoiding negative publicity, particularly as Ukraine remains dependent on Western financial and military aid. Critics within the military have accused the government of prioritizing political narratives over battlefield realities, including preventing tactical withdrawals to preserve its message of steady resistance. Under martial law, Kiev exerts broad control over the country’s media landscape, which officials justify as necessary for national security.
Long-range strikes on Russian energy infrastructure with domestically-produced kamikaze drones has been a key component of Kiev’s military strategy. Zelensky has repeatedly pledged to cause blackouts in Moscow and other places to “bring the war” to the Russian people. Moscow says it is retaliating to the Ukrainian approach.
Finnish Politician Warns NATO Chief: Stop Arming Ukraine or Risk Nuclear War
Sputnik – 09.11.2025
Armando Mema, a member of Finland’s Freedom Alliance party, said on Sunday that NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte should stop supplying weapons to Ukraine to avoid a nuclear war.
“Secretary Rutte should stop sending weapons to Ukraine if he is truly concerned about a nuclear War. NATO should stop expanding to Ukraine, if we don’t want to end up in a nuclear War,” Mema said on X.
Rutte, despite his supposed concern about nuclear rhetoric, “forgot to rebuke” Belgian Defense Minister Theo Francken for his threats to “wipe out Russia with nuclear weapons,” Mema added.
On Saturday, Rutte told Welt am Sonntag newspaper that NATO intends to place greater emphasis on its nuclear capabilities to deter adversaries more effectively in the future. He said that Russia is using “dangerous and reckless nuclear rhetoric,” and people in the West should not panic because NATO has a strong nuclear deterrent that helps preserve peace.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that Russia is not brandishing its nuclear weapons, but is pursuing a policy of nuclear deterrence. Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov has said that the West’s destructive actions have undermined the foundations for constructive dialogue between nuclear-armed countries.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has said that a number of persistent challenges have accumulated in the strategic sphere, primarily related to destabilizing doctrinal approaches and military-technical programs of Western countries.
EU economies will suffer without tapping Russia’s assets, Brussels warns – FT
RT | November 9, 2025
European Union member states will face ballooning deficits and debt unless they agree to use frozen Russian assets as collateral to fund Ukraine, the European Commission has warned in a document seen by the Financial Times.
The paper was circulated to EU capitals following last month’s failure to reach consensus on the so-called “reparations loan” of around €140 billion ($160 billion), the FT reported on Friday.
Without tapping Moscow’s immobilized central bank reserves, the EU would need to either authorize joint borrowing or issue direct grants – both of which would “directly affect” national budgets and increase public debt, the Commission warned. It remains unclear whether the option of not bankrolling Kiev was even considered.
The potential cost to EU economies is substantial, as servicing a collective loan of that size could result in up to €5.6 billion in annual interest payments. The Commission cautioned that borrowing at such a scale could also raise general EU borrowing costs and undermine other financial instruments.
Kiev expects its Western backers to cover a nearly $50 billion deficit next year, with its 2026 draft budget projecting some $114 billion in spending and only $68 billion in revenue – nearly all of which is earmarked for military purposes. Most non-military government expenses, including salaries, pensions, healthcare, and education, will rely entirely on foreign aid.
Belgium continues to oppose the use of Russian assets as loan collateral, citing serious financial and reputational risks. The frozen funds, totaling around $300 billion globally, with roughly $200 billion held at Belgium’s Euroclear, are technically not confiscated and could be reclaimed by Moscow if EU sanctions are not continually renewed. The EU has already stretched legal definitions by classifying the interest generated on these frozen funds as windfall profits not belonging to Moscow, and using them to arm Kiev.
The new plan hinges on the assumption that Moscow will eventually repay the loan as part of a future peace settlement – an outcome Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever has described as improbable. On Friday, EU Commission officials once again failed to convince Belgium to back the asset seizure.
Moscow has repeatedly said it would regard any use of its frozen assets as theft, and could retaliate by seizing €200 billion ($172 billion) in Western assets held in Russia by foreign governments and companies.
The West discovers Zelensky is not really a good guy
In a fleeting glimpse of lucidity, the mainstream media has noticed a tiny fraction of the corruption and authoritarianism in Kiev
By Tarik Cyril Amar | RT | November 7, 2025
It’s that time of the great proxy war crusade against Russia again. Someone in the mainstream West has woken up to, if not the facts about the politics of Ukraine, then at least a quantum of disquiet.
The last major wave of the likes of the Financial Times, The Economist, and the Spectator suddenly noticing – all at the same time, as if on cue – that Ukraine has an authoritarianism and corruption problem (and then some) took place less than half a year ago.
Now it’s Politico – usually a steadfast party organ of Russophobia, Zionism-come-what-genocide-may, and servility to NATO – that feels vaguely troubled by the realities of the Kiev regime or, as the publication puts it, the “dark side” of Vladimir “I don’t like elections” Zelensky’s rule.
Not all of those realities, of course. That would be asking too much. Instead, Politico is homing in on one great scandal (out of countless ones) concerning one man and the anguish of a few “civil-society”-NGO types, both with good connections to the West. This time, the scandal concerns the obvious, shameless political prosecution of Vladimir Kudritsky, formerly a high-ranking and effective energy infrastructure executive and de facto civil servant.
Yet what about noticing the murder in Ukrainian detention of critical blogger – and US citizen – Gonzalo Lira? Or the vicious persecution of leftist war critic Bogdan Syrotiuk? Or the mean, indecent harassing of Christian clergy and believers for not saying their prayers in quite the right Ukrainian-nationalist-approved manner? Perish the thought!
In a similar spirit of extreme selectiveness, some Western outlets are now registering – a little and very slowly – the brutal realities of Ukrainian forced mobilization that feed the Western proxy war: Recently, a war – pardon, “defense” – editor of the ultra-gung-ho British tabloid The Sun has returned shell-shocked from NATO’s de facto eastern front, not because of the bloody and wasteful fighting but because the uncouth Ukrainians press-ganged his fixer.
In a similarly traumatic experience, Hollywood’s Angelina Jolie had her local driver snatched away at a Ukrainian military roadblock. Yet violent forced mobilization has been an everyday occurrence in Ukraine for years already. So much so that Ukrainians have chosen the term “busification” (from minibus, a popular vehicle for mobilization manhunts) as word of the year for 2025.
For quite a few of its victims, it ends up even worse than for those privileged enough to work for Western movie stars and British propagandists. Roman Sopin, for instance, who did not even resist, has just been beaten to death in a mobilization precinct in central Kiev, as an official medical assessment of his cause of death implies as clearly as anyone may dare under Zelensky’s regime.
But let’s get back to the few things Western media deign to notice occasionally: Already dismissed last year, Kudritsky is now facing the courts under transparently trumped-up charges. The reason is obvious to everyone. He has been too popular and far too vocal about corruption at the highest levels and the authoritarian power grabs of Zelensky’s presidential office in particular.
Kudritsky’s case – comparatively harmless, really – does raise many disturbing questions: why is it that the Zelensky regime has such a nasty record of abusing arbitrary financial sanctions and politically perverted legal processes, or lawfare? And haven’t we been told that this regime under its “Churchillian” leader is fighting for Western values of democracy and legality?
Are Zelensky, his sinister fixer-in-chief Andrey Yermak and their team preparing the ground for elections after a possible end of the war – that is, after losing it – by preemptively crippling domestic critics and rivals? Does this mean Zelensky, Ukraine’s most catastrophic leader since independence in 1991 (and that’s a high bar) is seriously considering not slinking away into exile but imposing himself even longer on his unfortunate country?
Or is all of this part of decimating whatever is left of Ukraine’s mangled society to continue the meatgrinder war for as long as the NATO-EU Europeans are willing to pay? If things go the way the bloodthirsty fantasists at The Economist want, then the West will shell out another cool $390 billion over the next four years. Apparently, they believe that waves of forced conscription in Ukraine will provide the human cannon fodder to go along with the Western funding.
Yet if Zelensky’s fresh authoritarian moves are really aiming at preparing for a postwar election next year, then that is a terrible sign, too. It would indicate not only that he is planning to damage Ukraine even further by his presence, but also that those postwar elections will be anything but fair and equal. In other words, in that scenario, Zelensky will try to stay around, and so will the authoritarian regime he has built.
To be fair to Zelensky, his authoritarianism has never been a response to the war, as his Western fans still believe, even when they are finally deigning to notice a little of his “dark side.” Zelensky was building an authoritarian regime – widely known and criticized in Ukraine back then already as “mono-vlada” – long before the escalation of February 2022.
Zelensky is not a benevolent leader who has been forced to adopt dictatorial habits by an emergency. In reality, if anything, he has exploited the emergency for all it was worth to indulge his lust for unlimited power and extreme corruption. So, trying to take his misrule into the postwar period is at least not inconsistent: it has never been tied to wartime.
But behind all of this, there is one great irony and one bigger question: The question is simple. If Politico really believes that going after Kudritsky with lawfare and frustrating the “civil-society”-NGO crowd is “the dark side” of Zelensky’s rule, what, if we may ask, is the bright side supposed to be?
Indeed, where is the better side of real-existing Zelensky-ism? Is it the humungous corruption? The Bakhmut-style military fiascos, the Kursk Kamikaze incursion, and now Pokrovsk? The fact that the media have been mercilessly streamlined? The raging nepotism that makes sure that the poor fight and the sons and daughters of Ukraine’s gangsterish “elite” go on holidays and party? The personality cult?
Or is it – and this brings us to the great irony – that Zelensky-Ukraine is allegedly in sync with “Western values”? And do you know what? It really is! But not the way that the propagandists of both Ukraine and the NATO-EU West want us to believe. What the Zelensky regime and its supporters in the EU really have in common is that neither care about either democracy or the rule of law.
Zelensky going after critics with individual financial sanctions to evade normal legal procedures and leave his victims not even a slim chance to defend themselves, for instance? That is exactly what Germany and the EU are now doing to the journalist Hüseyin Dogru, and not only to him. Zelensky using a perverted reading of the law to harass whoever does not submit or is a political danger to him? Bingo again. That as well is now EU practice, too. Ask, for instance, Marine Le Pen in France. Finally, widespread abuse of political office for self-enrichment and influence peddling? Bingo again: Less than a month ago, the Financial Times ran a detailed article on “scores” of EU parliament members who “earn income from second jobs in areas that overlap with their lawmaking,” raising “questions about disclosure of potential conflicts of interest.” How delicately put. And it sounds just like Ukraine’s Rada.
Here’s the real news: The “dark side” of Zelensky’s rule is all of Zelensky’s rule. And it is also what has become the new normal in an increasingly authoritarian and corrupt EU. Who has learned from whom? Kiev from NATO-EU Europe or vice versa? Either way, this is not a bug but a feature. And it must stop. Everywhere.
Tarik Cyril Amar, is a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory.
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Is Israel Uniquely Evil?
By Irfan Chowdhury | Palestine Chronicle | July 18, 2020
… Israel has been carrying out the longest-running military occupation in modern history and the longest-running siege in modern history. These two facts alone render Israel unique in terms of the scope of its brutality and criminality.
There are other respects in which Israel stands out from other countries in its use of terror and violence; for example, it is one of the most aggressive countries in the world, having waged wars of aggression against Lebanon in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996 and 2006, and against Gaza in 2004, 2006, 2008/9, 2012 and 2014, killing huge numbers of civilians in the process (all while issuing threats and carrying out various covert attacks against Iran, which are all in violation of the UN Charter). … continue
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