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Category: Russia

  • CPJ joins call to President Biden to designate RFE/RL’s Alsu Kurmasheva ‘wrongfully detained’ by Russia

    The Committee to Protect Journalists joined 17 press freedom organizations, journalists associations and rights groups on Wednesday in calling on U.S. President Joe Biden to act immediately to declare Alsu Kurmasheva, a dual U.S.-Russian citizen and an editor with the Tatar-Bashkir service of the U.S. Congress-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), as “wrongfully detained” by the Russian government, a status that would unlock a broad U.S. government effort to free her.

    Kurmasheva has been in pretrial detention since authorities apprehended her on October 18, 2023, on charges of failing to register herself as a foreign agent, which carries a prison sentence of up to five years. An additional charge of spreading “fake” information about the Russian army was later brought against her, which could carry a prison sentence of up to 10 years.

    Read the full letter here.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Did The West Provoke The Ukraine War? Sorry, That Question Has Been Cancelled

    Is it possible for an entire ‘mainstream’ media system – every newspaper, website, TV channel – to completely suppress one side of a crucial argument without anyone expressing outrage, or even noticing? Consider the following.

    In February 2022, Nigel Farage, former and future leader of the Reform UK party, tweeted that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was:

    ‘A consequence of EU and NATO expansion, which came to a head in 2014. It made no sense to poke the Russian bear with a stick.’

    In a recent interview, the BBC reminded Farage of this comment. He responded:

    ‘Why did I say that? It was obvious to me that the ever-eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union was giving this man [Putin] a reason to his Russian people to say they’re coming for us again, and to go to war.

    ‘We’ve provoked this war – of course it’s his fault – he’s used what we’ve done as an excuse.’

    The BBC quickly made this a major news story by publishing a front page, top headline piece by BBC journalist Becky Morton who cited, and repeated, high-level sources attacking Farage. Morton wrote:

    ‘Former Conservative Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, who is not standing in the election, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme Mr Farage was like a “pub bore we’ve all met at the end of the bar”.’

    And:

    ‘Conservative Home Secretary James Cleverly said Mr Farage was echoing Mr Putin’s “vile justification” for the war and Labour branded him “unfit” for any political office.’

    Morton then repeated both criticisms:

    ‘Mr Wallace – who oversaw the UK’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 – said Mr Farage “is a bit like that pub bore we’ve all met at the end of the bar” and often presents “very simplistic answers” to complex problems.’

    And:

    ‘Conservative Home Secretary James Cleverly said Mr Farage was “echoing Putin’s vile justification for the brutal invasion of Ukraine”.’

    Morton piled on the pain:

    ‘Labour defence spokesman John Healey said Mr Farage’s comments made him “unfit for any political office in our country, let alone leading a serious party in Parliament”.

    ‘Former Nato Secretary General Lord Robertson accused Mr Farage of “parroting the Kremlin Line” and “producing new excuses for the brutal, unprovoked attack”.’

    Wallace, Cleverly, Healey and Robertson are all, of course, influential, high-profile figures; compiling their criticisms in this way sent a powerful message to BBC readers. Remarkably, one might think – given the BBC’s supposed devotion to presenting ‘both sides’ of an argument – Morton offered no source of any kind in support of Farage’s argument.

    The BBC intensified its coverage by opening a ‘Live’ blog (reserved for top news stories, disasters and scandals) on the issue, titled:

    ‘Farage “won’t apologise” for Ukraine comments after Starmer and Sunak criticism’

    The BBC reported:

    ‘Keir Starmer has called Nigel Farage’s comments on Ukraine “disgraceful” as Rishi Sunak says they play into Putin’s hands’

    Again, nowhere in the ‘Live’ blog coverage did the BBC cite arguments in support of Farage’s argument. Is it because they don’t exist?

    In June 2022, Ramzy Baroud interviewed Noam Chomsky:

    ‘Chomsky told us that it “should be clear that the (Russian) invasion of Ukraine has no (moral) justification.” He compared it to the US invasion of Iraq, seeing it as an example of “supreme international crime.” With this moral question settled, Chomsky believes that the main “background” of this war, a factor that is missing in mainstream media coverage, is “NATO expansion.”

    ‘”This is not just my opinion,” said Chomsky, “it is the opinion of every high-level US official in the diplomatic services who has any familiarity with Russia and Eastern Europe. This goes back to George Kennan and, in the 1990s, Reagan’s ambassador Jack Matlock, including the current director of the CIA; in fact, just everybody who knows anything has been warning Washington that it is reckless and provocative to ignore Russia’s very clear and explicit red lines. That goes way before (Vladimir) Putin, it has nothing to do with him; (Mikhail) Gorbachev, all said the same thing. Ukraine and Georgia cannot join NATO, this is the geostrategic heartland of Russia.”’

    We know people are interested in Chomsky’s views on the Ukraine war because when we posted a comment from him on X it received 430,000 views and 7,000 likes (huge numbers by our standards).

    In 2022, John Pilger commented:

    ‘The news from the war in Ukraine is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, omission.  I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket propaganda.

    ‘In February, Russia invaded Ukraine as a response to almost eight years of killing and criminal destruction in the Russian-speaking region of Donbass on their border.

    ‘In 2014, the United States had sponsored a coup in Kiev that got rid of Ukraine’s democratically elected, Russian-friendly president and installed a successor whom the Americans made clear was their man.’

    Pilger added:

    ‘Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wanton and inexcusable. It is a crime to invade a sovereign country. There are no “buts” – except one.

    ‘When did the present war in Ukraine begin and who started it? According to the United Nations, between 2014 and this year, some 14,000 people have been killed in the Kiev regime’s civil war on the Donbass. Many of the attacks were carried out by neo-Nazis.’

    In May 2023, economist Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University wrote:

    ‘Regarding the Ukraine War, the Biden administration has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the Ukraine War started with an unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In fact, the war was provoked by the U.S. in ways that leading U.S. diplomats anticipated for decades in the lead-up to the war, meaning that the war could have been avoided and should now be stopped through negotiations.

    ‘Recognizing that the war was provoked helps us to understand how to stop it. It doesn’t justify Russia’s invasion.’ (Our emphasis)

    Sachs has previously been presented as a credible source by the BBC on other issues. In 2007, Sachs gave five talks for the BBC’s Reith Lectures.

    The New Yorker magazine described political scientist Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago as ‘one of the most famous critics of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War’. Mearsheimer commented:

    ‘I think the evidence is clear that we did not think he [Putin] was an aggressor before February 22, 2014. This is a story that we invented so that we could blame him. My argument is that the West, especially the United States, is principally responsible for this disaster. But no American policymaker, and hardly anywhere in the American foreign-policy establishment, is going to want to acknowledge that line of argument…’

    There are numerous other credible sources, including Benjamin Abelow, author of How The West Brought War to Ukraine (Siland Press, 2022) and Richard Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands (Yale University Press, 2022). Journalist Ian Sinclair, author of The March That Shook Blair (Peace News, 2013), published a collection of material titled:

    ‘Testimony from US government and military officials, and other experts, on the role of NATO expansion in creating the conditions for the Russian invasion of Ukraine’

    Sinclair cited, for example, current CIA Director William Burns:

    ‘Sitting at the embassy in Moscow in the mid-nineties, it seemed to me that NATO expansion was premature at best and needlessly provocative at worst.’

    And George F. Kennan, a leading US Cold War diplomat:

    ‘…something of the highest importance is at stake here. And perhaps it is not too late to advance a view that, I believe, is not only mine alone but is shared by a number of others with extensive and in most instances more recent experience in Russian matters. The view, bluntly stated, is that expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era’.

    We can understand why the BBC might want to cite Sunak, Starmer, Wallace, Cleverly, Healey and Robertson, but we can’t understand why it would ignore the counterarguments and sources cited above.

    It gets worse. A piece in the Daily Mail essentially repeated the BBC performance with endless vitriolic comments again cited from Sunak, Starmer, Cleverly, Healey, Robertson and several others. And again, no counterarguments.

    A Reuter’s report quoted Sunak and Healey but no counterarguments.

    ITV cited former prime minister Boris Johnson:

    ‘To try and spread the blame is morally repugnant and parroting Putin’s lies.’

    No counterarguments were allowed, other than from Farage himself. At a recent rally, he held up a front-page headline from the i newspaper in 2016, which read, tragicomically:

    ‘Boris blames EU for war in Ukraine’

    That about sums up the state of both Boris Johnson and UK politics generally.

    The Telegraph cited Cleverly and other high-profile sources attacking Farage:

    ‘Tobias Ellwood, the former Tory defence minister, told The Telegraph: “Churchill will be turning in his grave. Putin, already enjoying how Farage is disrupting British politics, will be delighted to hear this talk of appeasement entering our election debate.”

    ‘Lord West of Spithead, the former chief of the naval staff, said: “Anyone who gives any seeming excuse to president Putin and his disgraceful attack … is standing into danger as regards their views on world affairs.” James Cleverly, the Home Secretary, wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “Just Farage echoing Putin’s vile justification for the brutal invasion of Ukraine.”

    ‘Liam Fox, the former Tory defence secretary, told The Telegraph: “The West did not ‘provoke this war’ in Ukraine and it is shocking that Nigel Farage should say so.”’ (Daily Telegraph, ‘Farage: West provoked Russia to attack Ukraine’, 22 June 2024)

    Again, all alternative views were ignored as non-existent.

    In the Independent, journalist Tom Watling packed his article with comments from Sunak, Starmer and Wallace. Again, no counterarguments were allowed.

    The Guardian cited Sunak, Healey and Cleverly. Again, no counterarguments were included. (Peter Walker, ‘Nigel Farage claims Russia was provoked into Ukraine war’, The Guardian, 21 June 2024)

    With such limited resources, it is difficult for us to wade through all mentions of this story, but we will stick our necks out and suggest that it is quite possible that no sources supporting Farage’s argument have been cited in any UK national newspaper.

    By any rational accounting, this ‘mainstream’ coverage is actually a form of totalitarian propaganda. It has denied the British public the ability to even understand the criticisms. Most people reading these reports will simply not understand why Farage made the claim – it is a taboo subject in ‘mainstream’ coverage – and so they have no way of making sense of either his argument or the backlash. This is deep bias presented as ‘news’. It is fake news.

    And this suppression of honest journalism in relation to one of the most dangerous and devastating wars of our time, in which our own country is deeply involved, is happening in the run up to what is supposed to be a democratic election.

    None of the above is intended as a defence of Farage’s wider political stance. On the contrary, we agree with political journalist Peter Oborne:

    ‘Farage, a close ally of Donald Trump, who has supported Marine Le Pen in France and spoken at an AfD rally in Germany, fits naturally into the rancid politics of the far-right movements making ground across Europe and in the United States.’

    Farage and his far-right views have been endlessly platformed by the BBC.

    Needless to say, the Ukraine war is only one of many key issues that are off the agenda for our choice-as-no-choice political system. In a rare example of dissent, Owen Jones commented in the Guardian:

    ‘Is this a serious country or not? It is egregious enough that this general election campaign is so stripped of discussion about the defining issues facing us at home for the next half decade, whether that be public spending, the NHS or education. But it is especially shocking how quickly the butchery in Gaza – and the position of this imploding government and its successor – has been forgotten.’

    Jones noted:

    ‘On Thursday night’s BBC Question Time leaders’ special, there was not a single question or answer on Gaza.

    ‘Seriously? Clearly this is an issue that matters to many Britons.’

    Earlier this month, Professor Bill McGuire, Emeritus Professor of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London commented:

    ‘The most astonishing thing about the UK election campaign is not what the leaders and parties are saying, but what they are NOT saying

    ‘It beggars belief that the #climate is simply not an issue and – as far as I have heard – has not been addressed by either leader

    ‘Just criminal’

    It works like magic: two major political parties ostensibly representing the ‘left’ and ‘right’ of the political spectrum, but both actually serving the same establishment interests, naturally ignore issues that offend power. Establishment media can then also ignore these issues on the pretext that the party-political system covers the entire spectrum of thinkable thought, and that any ideas outside that ‘spectrum’ have no particular right to be heard at election time. Indeed, to venture beyond the carefully filtered bubble of party politics is seen as actually undemocratic. As one ITV journalist reported:

    ‘Outrage at Nigel Farage’s comments about the war in Ukraine has drawn criticism from all corners of British politics.’

    Not quite. They drew criticism from the select few corners of British politics that are allowed to exist in our ‘managed democracy’.

    The post Did The West Provoke The Ukraine War? Sorry, That Question Has Been Cancelled first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US journalist Evan Gershkovich faces 20-year sentence as trial begins in Russia

    New York, June 26, 2024—As the closed-door trial of U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich opened in a Russian court on Wednesday, the Committee to Protect Journalists denounced it as a travesty of justice and renewed its call for the journalist’s immediate release.

    “U.S. reporter Evan Gershkovich goes on trial today after nearly 15 months of unjust detention. Given the spurious and unsubstantiated charges brought against him, this trial is nothing more than a masquerade,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Russian authorities must put an end to this travesty of justice, release Gershkovich, drop all charges against him, and stop prosecuting members of the press for their work.”

    Gershkovich’s trial started Wednesday, June 26, in the Sverdlovsk Regional Court in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg, reports said. It is not known how long the trial will last.

    Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) accused Gershkovich, a reporter with The Wall Street Journal, of collecting “secret information” for the CIA on a Russian tank factory in the Sverdlovsk region and arrested him on espionage charges on March 29, 2023.

    Gershkovich faces up to 20 years in prison and is the first American journalist to face such accusations by Russia since the end of the Cold War. The journalist, his outlet, and the U.S. government have all denied the espionage allegations.

    “No evidence has been unveiled. And we already know the conclusion: This bogus accusation of espionage will inevitably lead to a bogus conviction for an innocent man who would then face up to 20 years in prison for simply doing his job,” said Emma Tucker, editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal, in a Tuesday statement.

    On June 13, the Russian prosecutor general’s office announced that Gershkovich’s indictment had been finalized.

    “I think we were all hopeful that we were able to broker a deal with the Russians before this happened, but it doesn’t stop or slow us down,” Roger Carstens, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs at the U.S. Department of State, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee the same day.

    On April 11, 2023, the U.S. State Department designated Gershkovich as “wrongfully detained,” unlocking a broad government effort to free him.

    Russia was the world’s fourth-worst jailer of journalists, with at least 22 behind bars, including Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva, a U.S.-Russian journalist, when CPJ conducted its most recent prison census on December 1, 2023.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • NATO’s Endgame Appears to Be Nuclear War

    The world is at its most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Back then, however, the fear of total destruction consumed the public; today, few people seem even to be aware of this possibility.

    It is easily imaginable that nuclear war could break out between Russia (and perhaps China) and the West, yet politicians continue to escalate tensions, place hundreds of thousands of troops at “high readiness,” and attack military targets inside Russia, even while ordinary citizens blithely go on with their lives.

    The situation is without parallel in history.

    Consider the following facts. A hostile military alliance, now including even Sweden and Finland, is at the very borders of Russia. How are Russian leaders—whose country was almost destroyed by Western invasion twice in the twentieth century—supposed to react to this? How would Washington react if Mexico or Canada belonged to an enormous, expansionist, and highly belligerent anti-U.S. military alliance?

    As if expanding NATO to include Eastern Europe wasn’t provocative enough, Washington began to send billions of dollars’ worth of military aid to Ukraine in 2014, to “improve interoperability with NATO,” in the words of the Defense Department. Why this Western involvement in Ukraine, which, as Obama said while president, is “a core Russian interest but not an American one”? One reason was given by Senator Lindsey Graham in a recent moment of startling televised candor: Ukraine is “sitting on $10 to $12 trillion of critical minerals… I don’t want to give that money and those assets to Putin to share with China.”

    As the Washington Post has reported, “Ukraine harbors some of the world’s largest reserves of titanium and iron ore, fields of untapped lithium and massive deposits of coal. Collectively, they are worth tens of trillions of dollars.” Ukraine also has colossal reserves of natural gas and oil, in addition to neon, nickel, beryllium, and other critical rare earth metals. For NATO’s leadership, Russia and, in particular, China can’t be permitted access to these resources. The war in Ukraine must, therefore, continue indefinitely, and negotiations with Russia mustn’t be pursued.

    Meanwhile, as Ukraine was being de facto integrated into NATO in the years before 2022, the United States put into operation an anti-ballistic-missile site in Romania in 2016. As Benjamin Abelow notes in How the West Brought War to Ukraine, the missile launchers that the ABM system uses can accommodate nuclear-tipped offensive weapons like the Tomahawk cruise missile. “Tomahawks,” he points out, “have a range of 1,500 miles, can strike Moscow and other targets deep inside Russia, and can carry hydrogen bomb warheads with selectable yields up to 150 kilotons, roughly ten times that of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.” Poland now boasts a similar ABM site.

    American assurances that these anti-missile bases are defensive in nature, to protect against an (incredibly unlikely) attack from Iran, can hardly reassure Russia, given the missile launchers’ capability to launch offensive weapons.

    In another bellicose move, the Trump administration in 2019 unilaterally withdrew from the 1987 Treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces. Russia responded by proposing that the U.S. declare a moratorium on the deployment of short- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe, saying it wouldn’t deploy such missiles as long as NATO members didn’t. Washington dismissed these proposals, which upset some European leaders. “Has the absence of dialogue with Russia,” Emmanuel Macron said, “made the European continent any safer? I don’t think so.”

    The situation is especially dangerous given what experts call “warhead ambiguity.” As senior Russian military officers have said, “there will be no way to determine if an incoming ballistic missile is fitted with a nuclear or a conventional warhead, and so the military will see it as a nuclear attack” that warrants a nuclear retaliation. A possible misunderstanding could thus plunge the world into nuclear war.

    So now we’re more than two years into a proxy war with Russia that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and has seen Ukraine even more closely integrated into the structures of NATO than it was before. And the West continues to inch ever closer to the nuclear precipice. Ukraine has begun using U.S. missiles to strike Russian territory, including defensive (not only offensive) missile systems.

    This summer, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Belgium will begin sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine; and Denmark and the Netherlands have said there will be no restrictions on the use of these planes to strike targets in Russia. F-16s are able to deliver nuclear weapons, and Russia has said the planes will be considered a nuclear threat.

    Bringing the world even closer to terminal crisis, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg states that 500,000 troops are at “high readiness,” and in the next five years, NATO allies will “acquire thousands of air defense and artillery systems, 850 modern aircraft—mostly 5th-generation F-35s—and also a lot of other high-end capabilities.” Macron has morphed into one of Europe’s most hawkish leaders, with plans to send military instructors to Ukraine very soon. At the same time, NATO is holding talks about taking more nuclear weapons out of storage and placing them on standby.

    Where all this is heading is unclear, but what’s obvious is that Western leaders are acting with reckless disregard for the future of humanity. Their bet is that Putin will never deploy nuclear weapons, despite his many threats to do so and recent Russian military drills to deploy tactical nuclear weapons. Given that Russian use of nuclear warheads might well precipitate a nuclear response by the West, the fate of humanity hangs on the restraint and rationality of one man, Putin—a figure who is constantly portrayed by Western media and politicians as an irrational, bloodthirsty monster. So the human species is supposed to place its hope for survival in someone we’re told is a madman, who leads a state that feels besieged by the most powerful military coalition in history, apparently committed to its demise.

    Maybe the madmen aren’t in the Russian government but rather in NATO governments?

    It is downright puzzling that millions of people aren’t protesting in the streets every day to deescalate the crisis and pull civilization back from the brink. Evidently the mass media have successfully fulfilled their function of manufacturing consent. But unless the Western public wakes up, the current crisis might not end as benignly as did the one in 1962.

    The post NATO’s Endgame Appears to Be Nuclear War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • North Korea, Russia agree to offer military assistance if either is attacked

    North Korea and Russia have agreed to offer military assistance “without delay” if either is attacked under a new partnership treaty signed after a summit between their leaders on Wednesday.

    North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin met   in Pyongyang for talks aimed at bolstering their economic and security relations and underscoring her defiance of Western sanctions.

    North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency, or KCNA, reported details of their new pact on Thursday, as Putin was beginning a visit to Vietnam.

    “If one of the two sides is placed under war situations due to an armed invasion from an individual country or several nations, the other side provides military and other assistance without delay by mobilizing all means in its possession in line with the Article 51 of the U.N. Charter and the laws of the DPRK and the Russian Federation,” the treaty reads.

    DPRK, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, is North Korea’s official name. 

    The Article 51 of the U.N. Charter stipulates that all U.N. member countries have the inherent right of individual and collective self-defense right if an armed attack is staged against them.

    The new treaty also requires both sides not to sign treaties with third countries that infringe on the other’s core interests or participate in such acts, KCNA reported.

    The mutual defense provision in the new Russia-North Korea treaty recalls the 1961 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance  between North Korea and the Soviet Union that became void upon the collapse of the latter in 1991. 

    The mutual defense clause was notably missing when the two countries signed a Treaty of Friendship, Good Neighborliness, and Cooperation in 2000, at the beginning of Putin’s reign.

    The new partnership treaty will replace bilateral treaties that North Korea and Russia agreed earlier, including the 2000 treaty. 

    After their meeting, Putin said that the treaty provided for mutual assistance in the event of aggression against one of the two countries, while Kim declared the bilateral relationship has been upgraded to the level of alliance.

    Views are still divided as to whether the treaty can be seen as a mutual defense treaty, but experts believe the agreement is likely to boost cooperation between two nations in weapons production.

    “The more likely consequence of the treaty is simply closer cooperation in weapons production, with North Korea manufacturing more munitions for Russia and Russia providing more high-end help for North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, likely including aid in developing submarines capable of launching ballistic nuclear missiles,” Sue Mi Terry, senior fellow for Korea studies, told the American think tank Council on Foreign Relations.

    “This  will lead Russia to improve North Korean WMD [weapons of mass destruction] capabilities. There is some evidence of this already happening, with Russia possibly providing help to North Korea with its successful satellite launch last November, just two months after the last Putin-Kim meeting,” Terry added.

    “This is deeply concerning because of the substantial overlap between the technologies used for space launches and intercontinental ballistic missiles.”

    Edited by RFA Staff.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Taejun Kang for RFA.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • North Korea, Russia begin summit, vow to improve relations

    Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un began summit talks in Pyongyang on Wednesday, with both leaders intent on bolstering their relations as they confront the West. 

    Putin arrived in North Korea in the early hours of Wednesday on his first trip to Russia’s isolated eastern neighbor in 24 years.

    “The situation in the world is becoming more complicated and changing rapidly,” Russia’s TASS state news agency cited Kim as saying. “In this situation, we intend to further strengthen strategic contacts with Russia, with the Russian leadership.”

    Putin told Kim he appreciated North Korean support on Ukraine adding that a new fundamental document has been prepared that would form the long-term basis of their relations, Russia’s RIA Novosti reported.

    “We very much appreciate your systematic and permanent support of Russian policy, including on the Ukrainian issue,” Russian media quoted Putin as telling Kim at the start of their meeting, AFP reported. 

    “Russia and North Korea have been tied for several decades by a solid friendship and close neighborhood [relations],” said Putin who heralded bilateral cooperation “based on the principles of equality and mutual respect of interests”.

    North Korea has supplied Russia with large amounts of weapons for its war in Ukraine, in particular artillery rounds and ballistic missiles, the United States has said, though both Russia and North Korea deny that.

    In exchange for its weapons, North Korea is suspected of getting Russian  technological assistance for its space program. In May, the North’s attempt to launch a military spy satellite ended in failure with the rocket exploding on liftoff. But in November last year, North Korea successfully placed a spy satellite into orbit, and it had planned to launch three more satellites in 2024.

    Both Russia and North Korea have faced heavy sanctions, the former for its invasion of Ukraine and the latter for its development of nuclear bombs and the missiles to deliver them around the world.

    In an apparent reference to the sanctions, Putin, in a commentary published on the eve of his visit in North Korea’s state-run Rodong Sinmun newspaper, called for unity in resisting “illegal and unilateral restrictions”, while vowing to build alternative systems for trade and settlements with North Korea out of the control of the West.

    Earlier, the two leaders took part in a welcome ceremony at Pyongyang’s massive Kim Il Sung Square, complete with an honor guard and buildings bedecked with the countries’  flags and huge portraits of the two men, pictures in Russian state media showed.

    Citizens in red, white and blue shirts waved flowers and flags as the two leaders passed by, standing in an open-top limousine.

    Putin’s trip is a rare visit by a foreign leader to North Korea and boosts a relationship that offers Pyongyang an alternative to its close ties to Beijing, analysts say.

    It is Putin’s first trip to North Korea since July 2000, when he met the then leader, Kim Jong-il, the late father of the current leader. It also comes nine months after Kim traveled to Russia’s Far East for a summit with Putin.

    North Korea and the former Soviet Union signed a treaty of friendship and mutual assistance in 1961 which included a provision for so called automatic military intervention, under which if one side is under armed attack, the other provides troops and other aid without hesitation.

    North Korea and Russia signed a new treaty of bilateral ties in 2000, but it did not contain such a provision as it centered on economic, scientific and cultural cooperation.

    Experts said the two leaders could discuss  North Korean workers going to Russia. The North is desperate for foreign currency due to the international sanctions, while Russia has been facing a labor shortage exacerbated by the war in Ukraine.

    Edited by RFA Staff.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Taejun Kang for RFA.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Serbia court rules to extradite journalist Andrey Gnyot to Belarus

    New York, June 18, 2024—A Serbian appeals court must not indulge a request from Belarusian authorities and should overturn a recent decision to extradite journalist Andrey Gnyot to Belarus, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Tuesday.

    On May 31, the Higher Court in Belgrade ruled to extradite Gnyot to Belarus for tax evasion, according to media reports and Gnyot, who spoke to CPJ. The decision was made public and communicated to the journalist on June 13.

    “They want to extradite me, not right now, but this is a very bad decision,” Gnyot told Belarusian independent news outlet Zerkalo. A tax evasion charge carries up to seven years of imprisonment, according to the Belarusian criminal code.

    “The decision to extradite Belarusian journalist Andrey Gnyot to comply with a request from Aleksandr Lukashenko’s repressive regime is not only absurd and unfounded, it also deeply undermines the country’s aspirations to join the European Union,” said Carlos Martínez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director. “The Serbian appeals court should overturn the recent ruling to extradite journalist Andrey Gnyot. Belarusian authorities, on their end, should stop their attempts to instrumentalize Interpol to transnationally repress dissenting voices.”

    Gnyot, a filmmaker, collaborated with a range of independent news outlets, including Radio Svaboda, during the 2020 protests demanding President Aleksandr Lukashenko’s resignation after the country’s election. In December 2021, the Belarusian authorities labeled the outlet an “extremist” group.

    Serbian authorities arrested Gnyot in Belgrade, the capital, on October 30, 2023, based on an Interpol arrest warrant issued by the Belarusian Interpol bureau. He remained in a Belgrade prison until June 5, when he was transferred to house arrest, according to the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ), an advocacy and trade group operating from exile, and a report by Radio Svaboda, the Belarusian service of U.S. Congress-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL).

    Gnyot told CPJ that he filed two appeals on June 17, one from himself and one from his lawyers. “I work on my defense every day because a lot of time was lost while I was in prison. So it is not possible for me to relax. Moreover, I even eat and sleep less because I don’t have time. But the end justifies the means — I am fighting to save my life,” he said.

    “Everything I provided to the court was ignored,” he added. “We have a saying that ‘hope dies last,’ and of course I expect that the appellate court will correct this mistake, because to do so, you just need to study the evidence provided and not ignore it. It scares me to think that a judge making a decision would so easily send a man to his death.”

    Belarusian authorities charged Gnyot with tax evasion for allegedly failing to pay around 300,000 euros (US$323,600) in taxes between 2012 and 2018, according to media reports and a friend of Gnyot, who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal. Gnyot denies the tax evasion accusations, and his defense considers his persecution as politically motivated.

    Gnyot is also one of the founders of SOS BY, an independent association of Belarusian sportspeople that influenced the cancellation of the 2021 Hockey World Cup in Belarus. The Belarusian authorities later designated SOS BY an “extremist” group.

    If Gnyot is extradited to Belarus, he could potentially face additional charges for creating or participating in an extremist group, which carries up to 10 years in prison.

    Gnyot’s health deteriorated significantly in prison, he said in a May 11 letter reviewed by CPJ. As of June 18, he still had not managed to get medical care while under house arrest, he told CPJ.

    “Unfortunately, I have never received any medical help, and I can’t arrange it myself: one hour of freedom to leave my apartment to get to the doctor and get medical help is just physically not enough for me,” he said. “Psychologically I feel good, because I see a huge support and solidarity of people.”

    CPJ emailed the Higher Court and the Court of Appeal in Belgrade for comment on Gnyot’s case but did not receive any response.

    Separately, on June 8, Serbian border police in Belgrade’s Nikola Tesla Airport banned Russian-Israeli freelance journalist Roman Perl from entering the country, according to media reports.

    “They never explained anything to me at the airport but just gave me a paper stating that my entry into Serbia would pose a security risk,” Perl, who works with Current Time TV, a project affiliated with RFE/RL and U.S. Congress-funded broadcaster Voice of America, told Serbian broadcaster N1TV.

    The journalist believes the ban to be connected to his 2023 brief detention in Serbia, after a man he was interviewing for a documentary about Serbia and Russia’s war in Ukraine unfurled a Ukrainian flag near the Russian Embassy. Russian authorities labeled Perl a “foreign agent” in October 2021.

    Belarus was the world’s third-worst jailer of journalists, with at least 28 journalists behind bars on December 1, 2023, when CPJ conducted its most recent prison census. Serbia had no journalists behind bars at the time, except for Gnyot, who was not included in the census due to a lack of information about his journalism.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Trump Criticizes Zelenskyy and Threatens to Cut Aid to Ukraine If Reelected

    It has long been known that preemptive GOP nominee, Donald Trump, has had plans to curb or altogether end the U.S. support to Ukraine. He reaffirmed his plans on Saturday. Earlier in March, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in an interview that Trump told him his plans to cease the U.S. military aid to Ukraine to help end its conflicts with Russia, NBC News reported.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Why Modi’s India is Suddenly getting Washington’s Cold Shoulder

    Modi’s narrow re-election this month was greeted in the U.S. media with petulant satisfaction that Indian voters had “woken up”, as an oped piece in the New York Times put it.

    The Washington Post’s editorial board rebuked Modi with the headline: “In India, the voters have spoken. They do not want autocracy.”

    The Post editors went on to say that Modi “will lack a free hand for further repression of civil society, imprisonment of the opposition, infiltration and takeover of democratic institutions, and persecution of Muslims.”

    That is quite a withering rap sheet for a political leader who not so long ago was given the VIP treatment in Washington.

    Other U.S. media outlets also sounded smug that India’s legislative elections had returned a diminished majority for Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The “shock setback” for India’s strongman would mean that his Hindu nationalist politics would be restrained and he would have to govern during his third term with more moderation and compromise.

    The American media’s contempt for the 73-year-old Indian leader is a dramatic turnaround from how he was lionized by the same media only a year ago.

    Back in June 2023, Modi was feted by U.S. President Joe Biden with a privileged state dinner in the White House. The Indian premier was invited to address the Congress and the media were rhapsodic in their praise for his leadership.

    Back then, the Washington Post’s editors recommended “toasting” Modi’s India, which Biden duly did at the White House reception. Raising a glass, Biden said: “We believe in the dignity of every citizen, and it is in America’s DNA, and I believe in India’s DNA that the whole world – the whole world has a stake in our success, both of us, and maintaining our democracies.” With trademark stumbling words, Biden added: “[This] makes us appealing partners and enables us to expand democratic institutions across, around the world.”

    Modi may well wonder what happened over the past year. The Indian leader has gone from receiving the red carpet treatment to having the rug pulled from under his feet.

    The difference is explained by the changing geopolitical calculation for Washington, which is not to its liking.

    It is not that the Indian government under Modi has suddenly become a bad strongman who has taken to trashing democratic institutions and repressing minorities. Arguably, those tendencies have been associated with Modi since he first came to power in 2014.

    The United States had long been critical of Modi’s Hindu nationalism. For more than a decade, Modi was persona non-grata in Washington. At one stage, he was even banned from entering the country owing to allegations that he was fanning sectarian violence against Muslims and Christians in India.

    Washington’s view of Modi, however, began to warm up under the Trump administration because India was seen as a useful partner for the U.S. to counter China’s growing influence in the Asia-Pacific, a region which Washington renamed as the Indo-Pacific in part to inveigle India into its fold. To that end, the U.S. revived the Quad security alliance in 2017 with India, Japan and Australia.

    The Biden administration continued the courting of India and Modi who was re-elected in 2019 for his second term.

    Biden’s fawning over India culminated in the White House extravaganza for Modi last June when the U.S. media championed the “new heights” of U.S.-India relations. There were at the time residual complaints about India’s deteriorating democratic conditions under Modi, but such concerns were brushed aside by the sweep of media eulogizing, epitomized by Biden’s grandiloquent toasting of the U.S. and India as supposedly world-conquering democratic partners.

    It was discernible, though, that all the American charm and indulgence was setting India up for an ulterior purpose.

    In between the lines of effusive praise and celebration, the expected pay-off from India was that it would be a “bulwark” for U.S. interests against China and Russia.

    As a piece in CNN at the time of Modi’s visit last year in Washington asked: “Will India deliver after lavish U.S. attention?”

    The article noted with some prescience: “India and the U.S. may have different ambitions and visions for their ever-tightening relationship, and the possibility that Biden could end up being disappointed in the returns for his attention on Modi.”

    The Indian leader certainly did receive some major sweeteners while in the U.S. Several significant military manufacturing deals were signed such as General Electric sharing top-secret technology for fighter jet engines.

    Still, despite the zealous courting of New Delhi, over the following months, the Modi government appeared not to change its foreign policy dramatically to suit Washington’s bidding.

    India has had long-held strained relations with China over border disputes and regional rivalry. Nevertheless, Modi has been careful not to antagonize Beijing. Notably, India did not participate in recent security drills in the Asia-Pacific along with the U.S. and other partners.

    New Delhi has also maintained its strong support for the BRICS group that includes Russia, China, Brazil and other Global South nations advocating for a multipolar world not in hock to Western dominance.

    This traditional policy of non-alignment by India is not what Washington wants. It seems that Modi did not heed the memo given during his splendid Washington visit. He rebuffed the American expectation of steering India towards U.S. geopolitical objectives of toeing a tougher line against China and Russia.

    What seems to have intensified Washington’s exasperation with Modi is the worsening proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. After two and half years of conflict, President Vladimir Putin’s forces have gained a decisive upper hand over the NATO-backed Kiev regime. Hence, Biden and other NATO leaders have begun to desperately ramp up provocations against Moscow with recent permission for Ukraine to use Western long-range weapons to hit Russian territory.

    When Modi visited Washington last June, the West was (unrealistically) confident that the Ukrainian counteroffensive underway at the time would prove to be a damaging blow to Russian forces. Western predictions of overcoming Russian lines have waned from the cruel reality that Russian weapons and superior troops numbers have decimated the Ukrainian side.

    During Modi’s state trip last year, Washington’s focus was on getting India to act as a bulwark against China, not so much Russia. Modi has not delivered on either count, but the situation in Ukraine has cratered, from the NATO point of view.

    Commenting on U.S. priorities last June, Richard Rossow of the Washington-based think-tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said: “If the invasion went worse for Ukraine, or was destabilizing the region, the Biden administration might have chosen to reduce the intensity of engagement with India. But the United States has found that nominal support to Ukraine, with allies and partners, has been sufficient to blunt the Russian offensive…” (How wrong was that assessment!)

    Rossow continued his wrongheaded assessment: “Russia’s ineffective military campaign [in Ukraine] has also underscored the fact that China presents the only real state-led threat to global security, and the United States and India are steadily deepening their partnership bilaterally and through forums like the Quad to improve the likelihood of peace and tranquility in the region. So long as this strategic relationship continues to grow, it is unlikely that a U.S. administration will press India to take a hard line on Russia.”

    Washington and its NATO allies have got their expectations about Russia losing the conflict in Ukraine all badly wrong. Russia is winning decisively as the Ukrainian regime stumbles towards collapse.

    This is a double whammy for the Biden administration. China and Russia are stronger than ever, and India has given little in return for all the concessions it received from Washington.

    From the American viewpoint, India’s Modi has not delivered in the way he was expected to by Washington despite the latter’s fawning and concessions. New Delhi has remained committed to the BRICS multipolar group, it has not antagonized China and it has not succumbed to U.S. pressure to condemn Russia. Far from condemning Moscow, India has increased its imports of Russian oil and gas.

    Now with the U.S. and NATO’s reckless bet on Ukraine defeating Russia looking like a beaten docket, Washington’s disappointment with India is taking on an acrimonious tone.

    In one year, Modi’s India has gone from a geopolitical darling to a target of U.S. recrimination over alleged human rights violations and democratic backsliding. It is not so much that political conditions in India have degraded any further. It is Washington’s geopolitical calculations that have been upended. Hence the chagrined and increasingly abrasive attitude towards New Delhi from its erstwhile American partner.

    • First published in Strategic Culture Foundation

    The post Why Modi’s India is Suddenly getting Washington’s Cold Shoulder first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Acting As If It Weren’t Really So

    Laughing on the bus/Playing Games with the faces/She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy/I said, Be careful his bowtie is really a camera.
    — America by Paul Simon, recorded by Simon and Garfunkel in their Bookends album, 1968

    Only people who listen to the chorus of reliable alternative media voices warning of the quickly growing threat of nuclear war have any sense of the nightmare that is approaching.  Even for them, however, and surely for most others, unreality reigns.  Reality has a tough time countering illusions.  For we are cataleptically slow-walking to WW III.  If it is very hard or impossible to imagine our own deaths, how much harder is it to imagine the deaths of hundreds of millions of others or more.

    In 1915, amid the insane slaughter of tens of millions during WW I that was a shocking embarrassment to the meliorist fantasy of the long-standing public consciousness, Freud wrote:

    It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death, and whenever we attempt to do so, we can perceive that we are, in fact, still present as spectators. Hence the psychoanalytic school could venture on the assertion that, at bottom, no one believes in his own death, or to put the same thing another way, that, in the unconscious, every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.

    The growing lunacy of the Biden administration’s provocations against Russia via Ukraine seem lost on so many.  The long-running and deep-seated demonization of Russia and its President Vladimir Putin by U.S. propagandists has sunk so deep into the Western mind that facts can’t descend that deep to counteract it. It is one of the greatest triumphs of U.S. government propaganda.

    A friend, a retired history professor at an elite university, recently told me that he can’t think of such matters as the growing threat of nuclear war if he wants to sleep at night, but anyway, he’s more concerned with the consequences of global warming.  Readers at publications where my numerous articles about the nuclear war risk have appeared – the worst since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 – have made many comments such as “nuclear weapons don’t exist,” that it’s all a hoax, that Putin is in cahoots with Biden in a game of fear mongering to promote a secret agenda, etc.  How can one respond to such denials of reality?

    The other day I met another friend who likes to talk about politics.  He is an intelligent and a caring man.  He was sporting a tee-shirt with a quote from George Washington and quickly started talking about his obsessive fear of Donald Trump and the possibility that he could be elected again.  I told him that I despised Trump but that Biden was a far greater threat right now.  He spoke highly of Biden, and when I responded that Biden has been a warmonger throughout his political career and, of course, in Ukraine, was instigating the use of nuclear weapons, and was in full support of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, he looked at me as if I were saying something he had never heard before.  When I spoke of the 2014 U.S. engineered coup d’état in Ukraine, he, a man in his sixties at least, said he was unaware of it, but in any case Biden supported our military as he did and that was good.  When I said Biden is mentally out of it and physically tottering, he emphatically denied it; said Biden was very sharp and fully engaged.  He said Trump was fat and a great danger and George Washington would agree.  I was at a loss for words.  The conversation ended.

    A third friend, just back from living overseas for a year, flew back east from California to visit old friends and relatives.  He told me this sad tale:

    There were experiences that troubled me very deeply during my visit that had nothing to do with all the death and final goodbyes I was immersed in.  My family I would say is pretty typical working class Democrat.  Liberal/progressive in social outlook.  Most are devout Catholics.  All are kind, generous very loving people.  What was troubling was that it was pretty much impossible to carry on a rational reasonably sane political conversation with all but a couple of them, as the “Trump Derangement Syndrome” symptoms were absolutely off the charts.  It was quite stunning actually.  It is almost as if Dementia-Joe isn’t even in office as they had no interest in discussing his many failings, because their entire focus was the orange haired clown.  If I had ten bucks for every time someone told me any one of the following NPR/PBS talking points I’d buy a nice meal for myself – (Trump will be a dictator if elected – Trump will prosecute his enemies if elected – Trump will destroy our democracy if he gets in – etc.)  Any and all attempts to question these narratives and talking points by bringing the behavior of the current administration into the conversation were met with befuddlement – as if people couldn’t believe that “I” wasn’t as terrified as they were by the “Trump-Monster” lurking in the shadows.

    So I guess I’m sharing these thoughts with you, Ed, because it feels like I’m dealing with several different kinds of loss right now.  The more obvious “loss” associated with the physical death of loved ones – but I’m also mourning the intellectual and psychological death of living loved ones who have somehow become completely untethered from the “material realities” I observe on planet earth.  They can repeat “talking points” but can’t explain the evidence or reason that needs to be attached to those talking points for them to be anything but propaganda. Physical death is a natural thing – something we will all face – but this intellectual and spiritual death I am witness to is perhaps even more painful and disconcerting for me.  How do we find our way forward when reason, rational debate, evidence, and real-world events are replaced with fear – and rather irrational fears at that?

    This intellectual and spiritual death that he describes is a widespread phenomenon.  It is not new, but COVID 19 with its lockdowns, lies, and dangerous “vaccines” dramatically intensified it.  It created vast gaps in interpersonal communication that were earlier exploited in the lead-up to the 2016 election and Trump’s surprising victory.  Families and friends stopped talking to each other.  The longstanding official propaganda apparatus went into overdrive.  Then in 2020 the normal human fear of death and chaos was fully digitized during the lockdowns.  Putin, Trump, the Chinese, sexual predators, viruses, space aliens, your next door neighbor, etc. – you name it – were all tossed into the mix that created fear and panic to replace the growing realization that the war on terror initiated by George W. Bush in 2001 was losing its power.  New terrors were created, censorship was reinforced, and here we are in 2024 in a country supporting Israeli genocide in Gaza and with a population blind to the growing threat of WW III and the use of nuclear weapons.

    The communication gap – what my friend aptly describes as “this intellectual and spiritual death” – is two-sided.  On one hand there is simple ignorance of what is really going on in the world, greatly aided by vast government/media propaganda. On the other, there is chosen ignorance or the wish to be deceived to maintain illusions.

    We are thinking reeds as Pascal called us, vulnerable feeling creatures afraid of death; we, who through the support of wars and violence of all sorts, care just enough to want to be deceived as to what we are doing by supporting wars that make so much blood that is inside other people get to the outside for the earth to drink since it is not our blood and we survive.

    I could, of course, quote liberally from truth tellers down through history who have said the same thing about self-deception with all its shades and nuances. Those quotations are endless.  Why bother?  At some very deep level in the recesses of their hearts, people know it’s true.  I could make a pretty essay here, be erudite and eloquent, and weave a web of wisdom from all those the world says were the great thinkers because they are now dead and can no longer detect hypocrisy.

    For the desire to be deceived and hypocrisy (Greek hypokrites, stage actor, a pretender) are kissing cousins. Grasping the theatrical nature of social life, the need to pretend, to act, to feel oneself part of a “meaningful” play explains a lot.  To stand outside consensus reality, outside the stage door, so to speak, is not very popular.   Despite the mass idiocy of the media’s daily barrage of lies and stupidities that pass for news on the front pages and newscasts of the corporate media, people want to believe them to feel they belong.

    Yet D. H. Lawrence’s point a century ago still applies: “The essential America soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.  It has never yet melted.”

    But this killer soul must be hidden behind a wall of deceptions as the U.S. warfare state ceaselessly wages wars all around the world.  It must be hidden behind feel good news stories about how Americans really care about others, but only others that they are officially allowed to care about.  Not Syrians, Yemenis, Russian speakers of the Donbass, Palestinians, et al.  The terrorist nature of decades upon decades of U.S. savagery and the indifference of so many Americans go hand-in-hand but escape notice in the corporate media that are propagandists. The major theme of these media is that the United States government is the great defender of freedom, peace, and democracy.  Every once in a while, a scapegoat, one rotten apple in the barrel, is offered up to show that all is not perfect in paradise.  Here or there a decent article appears to reinforce the illusion that the corporate media tell the truth.  But essentially it is one massive deception that is leading many people to accept a slow walk toward WW III.

    There’s a make-believe quality to this vast spectacle of violent power and false innocence that baffles the mind.  To see and hear the corporate masked media magicians’ daily reports is to enter a world of pure illusion that deserves only sardonic laughter but sadly captivates so many adult children desperate to believe.

    Here’s an anecdote about a very strange encounter, one I couldn’t make up.  A communication of some sort that also has a make-believe quality to it.  I’m not sure what the message is.

    I was recently meeting with a writer and researcher who has interviewed scores of people about the famous 1960s assassinations and other sensitive matters.  I only knew this person through internet communication, but he was passing my way and suggested that we meet, which we did at a local out-of-the-way cafe.  We were the only customers and we took our drinks out the back to a small table and chairs under a tree in the café’s large garden that bordered open land down to a river.  About 10 yards away a woman sat at a table, writing in a notebook that I took to be journaling of some sort.  The researcher and I talked very openly for more than two hours about our mutual work and what he had learned from many of his interviewees about the assassinations.  Neither of us paid any attention to the woman at the table – naively? – and our conversation naturally revolved around the parts played by intelligence agencies, the CIA, etc. in the assassinations of the Kennedys and MLK, Jr.  The woman sat and wrote.  Near the end of our two plus hours, my friend went inside the café, which had closed to new customers, to use the men’s room.  The woman called to me and said I hope you don’t mind but I overheard some of your conversation and my father worked for U.S. intelligence.  She then told us much more about him, where he went to college, etc. or at least what she said she knew because when growing up he didn’t tell her mother, her, or siblings any details about his decades of spying.  But when she attended his memorial service in Washington D.C., the place was filled with intelligence  operatives and she learned more about her father’s secretive life.  Then, out of the blue, it burst out of her how he was obsessed with the high school he attended, one she assured us we probably never heard of (we were in Massachusetts) – Regis High School, a Jesuit scholarship prep school for boys in NYC.  To say I was startled is an understatement, since I went to Regis myself, and the anomalous “coincidence” of this encounter in the back garden of an empty café spooked my friend as well.  The woman told us more about her father until we had to leave.

    I wondered if he wore a bowtie and if what just happened weren’t really so.

    The post Acting As If It Weren’t Really So first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Ukrainian Peace Summit Wraps With Pledge To Invite Russia To The Table


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Ukrainian Peace Summit Wraps With Pledge To Invite Russia To The Table


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • In our make-believe politics, the strings pulled by the super-rich are all too visible

    We live in a world of make-believe politics, a world where strings pulled in the interests of the super-rich are ever more visible. And yet we are expected to pretend we cannot see those strings. More astonishing still, many people really do seem blind to the puppet show.

    1. The “leader of the free world”, President Joe Biden, can barely maintain his attention for more than a few minutes without straying off topic, or wandering offstage. When he has to walk before the cameras, he does so like he is auditioning for the role of a geriatric robot. His whole body is gripped with the concentration he needs to walk in a straight line.

    And yet we are supposed to believe he is carefully working the levers of the western empire, making critically difficult calculations to keep the West free and prosperous, while keeping in check its enemies – Russia, China, Iran – without provoking a nuclear war. Is he really capable of doing all that when he struggles to put one foot in front of the other?

    2. Part of that tricky diplomatic balancing act Biden is supposedly conducting, along with other western leaders, relates to Israel’s military operation in Gaza. The West’s “diplomacy” – backed by weapons transfers – has resulted in the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children; the gradual starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians over many months; and the destruction of 70 per cent of the enclave’s housing stock and almost all of its major infrastructure and institutions, including schools, universities and hospitals.

    And yet we are supposed to believe that Biden has no leverage over Israel, even though Israel is entirely dependent on the United States for the weapons it is using to destroy Gaza.

    We are supposed to believe Israel is acting solely in “self-defence”, even when most of the people being killed are unarmed civilians; and that it is “eliminating” Hamas, even though Hamas doesn’t appear to have been weakened, and even though Israel’s starvation policies will take their toll on the young, elderly and vulnerable long before they kill a single Hamas fighter.

    We are supposed to believe that Israel has a plan for the “day after” in Gaza that won’t look anything like the outcome these policies appear designed to achieve: making Gaza uninhabitable so that the Palestinian population is forced to leave.

    And on top of all this, we are supposed to believe that, in ruling that a “plausible” case has been made that Israel is committing genocide, the judges of the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, have shown they do not understand the legal definition of the crime of genocide. Or possibly that they are driven by antisemitism.

    3. Meanwhile, the same western leaders arming Israel’s slaughter of many tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including more than 15,000 children, have been shipping hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of armaments to Ukraine to assist its armed forces. Ukraine must be helped, we are told, because it is the victim of an aggressive neighbouring power, Russia, determined on expansion and land theft.

    And yet we are supposed to ignore the two decades of western military expansion eastwards, via Nato, that has finally coming knocking, in Ukraine, on Russia’s door – and the fact that the West’s best experts on Russia warned throughout that time that we were playing with fire in doing so and that Ukraine would prove a red line for Moscow.

    We are supposed to make no comparison between Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and Israel’s aggression against the Palestinians. In the latter case, Israel is supposedly the victim, even though it has been violently occupying its Palestinian neighbours’ territory for three-quarters of a century while, in flagrant violation of international law, building Jewish settlements on the territory meant to form the basis of a Palestinian state.

    We are supposed to believe that the Palestinians of Gaza have no right to defend themselves comparable to Ukraine’s right – no right to defend against decades of Israeli belligerence, whether the ethnic cleansing operations of 1948 and 1967, the apartheid system imposed on the remnant Palestinian population afterwards, the 17-year blockade of Gaza that denied its inhabitants the essentials of life, or the “plausible genocide” the West is now arming and providing diplomatic cover for.

    In fact, if the Palestinians do try to defend themselves, the West not only refuses to help them, as it has Ukraine, but considers them terrorists – even the children, it seems.

    4. Julian Assange, the journalist and publisher who did most to expose the inner workings of western establishments, and their criminal schemes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, has been behind bars for five years in Belmarsh high-security prison. Before that, he spent seven years arbitrarily detained – according to United Nations legal experts – in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, forced to seek asylum there from political persecution. In an interminable legal process, the US seeks his extradition so he can be locked away in near-isolation for up to 175 years.

    And yet we are supposed to believe that his 12 years of effective detention – having been found guilty of no crime – is entirely unrelated to the fact that, in publishing secret cables, Assange revealed that, behind closed doors, the West and its leaders sound and act like gangsters and psychopaths, especially about foreign affairs, not like the stewards of a benign global order they claim to be overseeing.

    The leaked documents Assange published show western leaders ready to destroy whole societies to further western resource domination and their own enrichment – and eager to wield the most outrageous lies to achieve their goals. They have no interest in upholding the supposedly cherished value of freedom of the press, except when that freedom is being weaponised against their enemies.

    We are supposed to believe that western leaders genuinely want journalists to act as a watchdog, a restraint, on their power even when they are hounding to death the very journalist who created a whistleblowers’ platform, Wikileaks, to do precisely that. (Assange has already suffered a stroke from the more than a decade-long strain of fighting for his freedom.)

    We are supposed to believe that the West will give Assange a fair trial, when the very states colluding in his incarceration – and in the CIA’s case, planned assassination – are the ones he exposed for engaging in war crimes and state terrorism. We are supposed to believe that they are pursuing a legal process, not persecution, in redefining as the crime of “espionage” his efforts to bring transparency and accountability to international affairs.

    5. The media claim to represent the interests of western publics in all their diversity, and to act as a true window on the world.

    We are supposed believe that this same media is free and pluralistic, even when it is owned by the super-rich as well as western states that were long ago hollowed out to serve the super-rich.

    We are supposed to believe that a media completely dependent for its survival on revenues from big corporate advertisers can bring us news and analysis without fear or favour. We are supposed to believe that a media whose primary role is selling audiences to corporate advertisers can question whether, in doing so, it is playing a beneficial or harmful role.

    We are supposed to believe that a media plugged firmly into the capitalist financial system that brought the global economy to its knees in 2008, and has been hurtling us towards ecological catastrophe, is in a position to evaluate and critique that capitalist model dispassionately, that media outlets could somehow turn on the billionaires who own them, or could forego the income from the billionaire-owned corporations that prop up the media’s finances through advertising.

     

    We are supposed to believe that the media can objectively assess the merits of going to war. That is, wars waged serially by the West – from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Libya to Syria, from Ukraine to Gaza – when media corporations are embedded in corporate conglomerations whose other big interests include arms manufacturing and fossil-fuel extraction.

    We are supposed to believe that the media uncritically promotes endless growth for reasons of economic necessity and common sense, even though the contradictions are glaring: that the forever growth model is impossible to sustain on a finite planet where resources are running out.

    6. In western political systems, unlike those of its enemies, there is supposedly a meaningful democratic choice between candidates representing opposing worldviews and values.

    We are supposed to believe in a western political model of openness, pluralism and accountability even when in the US and UK the public are offered an electoral scrap between two candidates and parties that, to stand a chance of winning, need to win favour with the corporate media representing the interests of its billionaire owners, need to keep happy billionaire donors who fund their campaigns, and need to win over Big Business by demonstrating their unwavering commitment to a model of endless growth that is completely unsustainable.

    We are supposed to believe that these leaders serve the voting public – offering a choice between right and left, between capital and labour – when, in truth, the public is only ever presented with a choice between two parties prostrated before Big Money, when the parties’ policy programmes are nothing more than competitions in who can best appease the wealth-elite.

    We are supposed to believe that the “democratic” West represents the epitome of political health, even though it repeatedly dredges up the very worst people imaginable to lead it.

    In the US, the “choice” imposed on the electorate is between one candidate (Biden) who should be in pottering around his garden, or maybe preparing for his final, difficult years in a care home, and a competitor (Donald Trump) whose relentless search for adoration and self-enrichment should never have been indulged beyond hosting a TV reality show.

    In the UK, the “choice” is no better: between a candidate (Rishi Sunak) richer than the British king and equally cosseted and a competitor (Sir Keir Starmer) who is so ideologically hollow that his public record is an exercise in decades of shape-shifting.

    All, let us note, are fully signed up to the continuing genocide in Gaza, all are unmoved by many months of the slaughter and starvation of Palestinian children, all are only too ready to defame as antisemites anyone who shows an ounce of the principle and humanity they all too obviously lack.

    The super-rich may be just out of view, but the strings they pull are all too visible. Time to cut ourselves loose.

    The post In our make-believe politics, the strings pulled by the super-rich are all too visible first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Ukraine, Continued Aid, and the Prevailing Logic of Slaughter

    War always commands its own appeal.  It has its own frazzled laurels, the calling of its own worn poets tenured in propaganda.  In battle, the poets keep writing, and keep glorifying.  The chattering diplomats are kept in the cooler, biding their time.  The soldiers die, as do civilians.  The politicians are permitted to behave badly.

    With Ukraine looking desperately bloodied at the hands of their Russian counterparts, the horizon of the conflict had seemingly shrunk of late.  Fatigue and desperation had set in.  Washington seemed more interested in sending such musically illiterate types as the Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Kyiv for moral cuddling rather than suitably murderous military hardware.

    Russian President Vladimir Putin, mindful of the losses inflicted on his own side in the conflict, thought it opportune to spring the question of peace talks.  On June 14, while speaking with members of the Russian Foreign Ministry, he floated the idea that Russia would cease combat operations “immediately” if Ukraine abandoned any aspirations of joining NATO and withdrew its troops from the regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

    Rather than refrigerate the conflict into its previous frozen phase, Putin went further.  It would end provided that Kyiv accepted Moscow’s sovereign control over the four regions as “new territorial realities”.  Russian-speaking citizens in Ukraine would also be afforded protections; sanctions imposed by Western states would be lifted.  “Today,” he stated, “we have put forward another concrete, genuine peace proposal.  If Kyiv and Western capitals reject it as they have in the past, they will bear political and moral responsibility of the ‘continuation of the bloodshed.’”

    He further added that, as soon as Ukraine began withdrawing its military personnel from Donbas and Novorossiya, with an undertaking not to join NATO, “the Russian Federation will cease fire and be ready for negotiations.  I don’t think it will take long.”

    Length and duration, however, remain the signal attributes of this murderous gambit.  Ukraine’s defeat and humbling is unacceptable for the armchair strategists in the US imperium, along with their various satellites.  NATO’s obsessive expansion cannot be thwarted, nor can the projection of Washington’s influence eastwards from Europe.  And as for the defence contractors and companies keen to make a killing on the killings, they must also be considered.

    This was unpardonable for the interests of the Biden administration.  The Washington War Gaming Set must continue.  Empires need their fill, their sullied pound of flesh.  Preponderance of power comes in various forms: direct assault against adversaries (potentially unpopular for the voters), proxy enlistment, or the one degree removed sponsorship of a national state or entity as a convenient hitman.  Ukraine, in this sense, has become the latter, a repurposed, tragic henchman for US interests, shedding blood in patriotic gore.

    In keeping with that gore, US President Joe Biden, in announcing a funding package for Ukraine from the G7 group, promised that “democracies can deliver”.  The amount on the ledger: $US50 billion.  “We are putting our money to work for Ukraine, and giving another reminder to Putin that we are not backing down.”  That particular amount is derived from frozen Russian assets outside Russian territory, most of it from the Russian Central Bank amounting to US$280 billion.  The circumstances of such freezing will, in future, be the subject of numerous dissertations and legal challenges, but that very fact suggests that Ukraine’s allies are tiring from drawing from their own budgets.  We support you, but we also hate to see the money of our taxpayers continually splurged on the enterprise.

    Biden’s remarks from the Hotel Masseria San Domenico in Fasano have a haunting quality of repetition when it comes to US support for doomed causes and misguided goals.  The fig leaf, when offered, can be withdrawn at any given movement: South Vietnam, doomed to conquest at the hands of North Vietnam; Afghanistan, almost inevitably destined to be recaptured by the Taliban; Kurds the Marsh Arabs, pet projects for US strategists encouraged to revolt only to be slaughtered in betrayal.

    Thus goes Biden: “A lasting peace for Ukraine must be underwritten by Ukraine’s own ability to defend itself now and to deter future aggression anytime […] in the future,” Biden explains, drawing from the echo of Vietnamisation and any such exultation of an indigenous cause against a wicked enemy.   The idea here: strengthen Ukrainian defence and deterrence while not sending US troops.  In other words, we pay you to die.

    The NATO disease, poxy and draining, rears its head.  Weapons and ammunition are to be provided to Ukraine along with the expansion of “intelligence-sharing” and training while “enhancing interoperability between our militaries in line with NATO standards”.  Money is to be put into Ukraine’s own defence industry so that they can duly “supply their own weapons and munitions”.  In the floral bouquet, a cautionary note is appended.  “In terms of longer range of weapons into the interior of Russia we are not changing our positions.”  Killing is always a matter of quantum, and calculation.  The note for Kyiv is clear: use the weapons but do so carefully.

    As for the logistics of finance, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan is already voicing concerns about the complexity of the funding venture.  “The simple proposition is we got to put these assets to work.  The complex proposition is how you do that specifically.”

    While Putin has turned his nose up at the UN Charter in its solemn affirmation of the sovereignty of states, Washington has taken its own wrecking ball to the text.  It has meddled, fiddled and tampered with the internal affairs of states while accusing Russia of the very same thing.  Spiteful of history and its bitter lessons, it has employed such saboteurs as former Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland to undertake such tasks, poking the Russian Bear while courting and seducing the Ukrainian establishment.  The horror is evident for all to see, and unlikely to halt.

    The post Ukraine, Continued Aid, and the Prevailing Logic of Slaughter first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • This Ukrainian Orphan Escaped Being Abducted By Russia, But Thousands Remain


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Russia expels Austrian journalist Maria Knips-Witting in retaliatory response

    Berlin, June 14, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists denounces the expulsion of Austrian journalist Maria Knips-Witting from Russia and calls on the country’s authorities to immediately reinstate the journalist’s credentials and cease turning journalists into political pawns.

    Russian authorities revoked the accreditation of Knips-Witting, a journalist with the Moscow bureau of public broadcaster Austrian Radio and Television (ORF), on Monday, June 10. In a Monday statement, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Knips-Witting, who had been reporting from Moscow since January, was ordered to surrender her accreditation and leave Russia immediately.

    Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said Knips-Witting’s expulsion was a response to Austrian authorities’ expulsion of Ivan Popov, a Vienna-based correspondent of the Russian state news agency TASS.

    “The Kremlin’s openly tit-for-tat policy concerning Austrian journalist Maria Knips-Witting shows what little regard Russia holds for journalists,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Journalists should not be used as a tool to retaliate against another country when there are appropriate diplomatic avenues available. Russia should reinstate the credentials of Knips-Witting and allow her and other foreign journalists to report from Russia without fear of reprisal.”

    The Austrian Foreign Ministry told CPJ that Knips-Witting’s expulsion “has no basis” and was “completely unjustified.” “This is yet another blatant attack on the freedom of the press in Russia,” the Austrian Foreign Ministry said in an emailed statement.

    “ORF regrets the decision and cannot understand it,” the Austrian broadcaster said in a Tuesday statement, adding that it will take “all necessary steps to ensure that ORF audiences continue to receive independent and comprehensive reporting from Russia.”

    News reports said that in April, Austrian authorities expelled two Russian TASS correspondents due to security reasons. The Russian Foreign Ministry’s statement said that Austria revoked Popov’s accreditation in late April, forcing him to leave the country on June 7. CPJ was unable to confirm further details about the second correspondent.

    “These are not some draconian methods,” Zakharova said on the Russian state-funded Sputnik radio, adding later in a social post: “If you touch our journalists, other foreign correspondents will be sent home too.”

    In March, independent Austrian weekly Falter reported that Russian intelligence was surveilling politicians in Vienna under the guise of working as journalists for TASS. The report also mentioned an unnamed foreign correspondent, based in Vienna since 2023, as being closely affiliated with the Russian foreign intelligence service (SVR).

    Zakharova said on Sputnik radio that about two weeks before the expulsion of Popov, the Austrian ambassador was summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry to discuss Vienna’s move regarding Russian journalists, adding that there was no substantive response.

    “He (Austrian diplomat Werner Almhofer) was asked to convey the following message to Vienna: leave Russian journalists alone, we do not want any exchanges, let the media representatives work normally. But Austria, naturally under pressure from the ‘big brother,’ decided otherwise,” Zakharova said on her Telegram channel.  

    In March, Russian authorities refused to renew the visa of Spanish journalist Xavier Colás, a Moscow-based correspondent of Spanish daily newspaper El Mundo, and gave him 24 hours to leave Russia after working in the country for 12 years. 

    Russia has a history of expelling foreign reporters, including The Guardian’s Luke Harding in 2011 and the BBC’s Sarah Rainsford and Tom Vennink of the Dutch daily de Volkskrant in 2021. Since the start of Ukraine’s full-scale invasion, Russian authorities have failed to renew the visas and accreditations of Finnish journalists Arja Paananen and Anna-Lena Laurén, and Dutch journalist Eva Hartog.

    CPJ emailed the Russian Foreign Ministry requesting additional comment on both the TASS correspondents’ and Knips-Witting’s expulsions but received no immediate response.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Ukraine Accuses Russia, China Of Trying To Sabotage Peace Summit


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Why Did It Take Russia So Long to Realize Donbass Was Worth Fighting for?

    Scott Ritter: Why did it take Russia so long to realize Donbass was worth fighting for?

    © Scott Ritter

    On May 26, the Donetsk People’s Republic marked the tenth anniversary of the first battle for the region’s international airport. This was a key clash in the fight between Ukraine and local citizens who opposed the nationalist-dominated government that had seized power in Kiev as a result of the US-backed coup in February 2014. The anniversary was but one in a succession of similar commemorations of events which, together, draw attention to the fact that the war in Donbass has been ongoing for a decade.

    Earlier this year I traveled to the Chechen Republic, Crimea, and the New Russian territories of Kherson and Zaporozhye, all locations which comprised what I called Russia’s “Path of Redemption,” the geographic expression of actions undertaken by Moscow. The fourth – and final – destination of my trip, the two people’s republics of Donetsk and Lugansk that are collectively referred to as the Donbass, brought this journey to a close. By visiting the literal ground zero of the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict, I was able to put a punctation mark at the end of a long and complicated passage which delved into the very essence of modern-day Russia – what it means to be Russian, and the price the Russian nation has been willing to pay to preserve this definition.

    When I crossed the border between Zaporozhye and Donetsk, there was no doubt that I was entering a war zone. The bodyguards from the Sparta Battalion that had escorted my vehicle as we drove through Kherson and Zaporozhye was replaced by a heavily armed detachment of camouflaged Russian soldiers, a constant reminder of the ever-present threat posed by Ukrainian partisans and saboteurs. I was being driven in an armored Chevy Tahoe, the former property of a Bank of Russia executive which had been re-purposed for this trip. My host, Aleksandr Zyryanov, the Director of the Investment Development Agency of Novosibirsk, was at the wheel. My fellow passengers were Aleksandr’s close friend and comrade, Denis, and Kirill, a resident of Saint Petersburg who was our point of contact with several Russian military units in Donbass we were hoping to meet up with.

    Our first stop in Donbass was the city of Mariupol, site of a bloody siege in March-May 2022 which saw the combined forces of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Russian army, including Chechen fighters, defeat thousands of Ukrainian Marines and members of the Azov Regiment, a formation of Ukrainian ultra-nationalists who openly support the ideology of Stepan Bandera, the founder of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, or OUN, which fought alongside Nazi Germany during the Second World War. The last surviving remnants of the Ukrainian garrison which had holed up in a complex of tunnels underneath the sprawling Azovstal iron and steel factory that dominated the center of the city surrendered to Russian forces on May 20, 2022, bringing the battle to an end.

    Mariupol suffered horribly because of the siege and the house-to-house fighting required to clear the city of its fanatic occupiers. The scars of war were so deep and prevalent as to leave the casual observer grasping to figure out how, or even if, the city and its population could ever recover. This was especially so when looking at the ruins of the Azovstal plant from the vantage point of the restored monument to the its workers who died during World War Two. And yet, like the patches of green that mark a charred forest after the first rainfall, Mariupol bore the evidence of a city coming back to life. The southern districts of the city had been completely razed, and new apartment complexes constructed which are populated by families whose children frolicked in playgrounds and parks nestled between the bright new buildings. Across the highway from the newly built neighborhood was a large new hospital complex. And as one drove into the center of the city, row upon row of damaged apartment buildings were undergoing reconstruction and repair work. Shops and restaurants were open, and people scurried about the sidewalks going about their business. Mariupol is very much alive, although the huge swaths of darkened neighborhoods, their buildings still uninhabitable, bear mute testimony to the work that still needs to be done.

    The city of Donetsk, the capital of its eponymous people’s republic, is a living manifestation of the stark contrasts that define a modern metropolitan center during war – shiny high-rise buildings, their glass windows reflecting the morning sunlight, beckon, while in the streets below mothers walk hand in hand with their children, unflinching as the sound of artillery fire – incoming and outgoing – echo around them. Driving through the city, I was struck by the bustling activity at one street corner as families shopped for food and the basic necessities of life in stores fully stocked with the desired goods, only to drive around the next corner to find the ruins of a similar market scene, destroyed by the random artillery and rocket fire from Ukrainian forces who still treat the citizens of Donetsk as ”terrorists.”

    I was taken to the Donbass Liberator’s monument, located in the Donetsk Culture and Leisure Park, next to the city’s arena, where we laid flowers to the memory of the fallen. Afterwards, as I was shown the monuments to the fallen heroes of the ongoing war with Ukraine, the sound of rocket fire shook the grounds. “It’s ours,” said my guide, an attractive young lady whose calm demeanor belied the reality of her current situation. “Uragan,” she said, a reference to the Russian 220-mm multiple launch rocket system. “Don’t worry.”

    That a female tour guide was serving as a walking resource for weapons identification to a former Marine intelligence officer who used to specialize in identifying Soviet arms and equipment only underscored the disparity between perception and reality which marked the city of Donetsk – a world where normalcy was randomly punctuated with the horrors of war. It would be easy to allow yourself to become shrouded in the kind of flinching paranoia that seizes you when you are convinced that every step you take could be your last. To prevent yourself from simply fleeing to a basement until the all-clear signal sounds, you can overcompensate by taking on a devil-may-care attitude of “what happens, happens.”

    But, for most, caution is the name of the game in Donetsk – while death may be randomly delivered in the form of Ukrainian artillery and rockets, you do not need to become a willing victim, especially if you know the Ukrainian enemy is actively searching for you in order to deliver a lethal blow.

    I have been labeled by the Center for Countering Disinformation, a US-funded Ukrainian government agency, as an “information terrorist” who deserves to be treated as an actual “terrorist” in terms of punishment – a not-so-veiled threat to my life. Likewise, my name is on the infamous Mirotvorets (“peacekeepers”) “kill list” promulgated by the Ukrainian intelligence service. Daria Dugina, the daughter of the famous Russian political philosopher, Aleksandr Dugin, and Maksim Fomin, a Russian military blogger who wrote under the name Vladlen Tatarsky, were both on this list and were murdered by agents of the Ukrainian intelligence services. While I would have to be an egocentric narcissist to believe that the entire Ukrainian war effort would grind to a halt in order to hunt me down during my short visit to Donbass, the fact that Ukraine has on a regular basis attacked the hotels frequented by journalists reporting on the conflict also means that one you’d have to have a callous disregard for innocent life by staying at a hotel in Donetsk as long as your name is on such lists.

    Discretion being the better part of valor, my hosts eschewed the offered room in a high-end Donetsk hotel for a more Spartan setting in a safehouse used during their frequent trips to the region. I traded the fine cuisine of Donetsk that my friend and colleague Randy Credico had bragged about during his visit to the region for the traditional soldier’s fare of fried potatoes and sausage cooked over a gas stove by Aleksandr’s friend, Denis.

    Paranoia is the name of the game, however, when it comes to the day-to-day lives of those men and women who govern Donetsk and defend it from the Ukrainian army, if for no other reason than the Ukrainians are, in fact, actively trying to hunt them down and kill them. I had the honor and privilege of meeting with Denis Pushilin, the Governor of the Donetsk People’s Republic, and Aleksandr Khodakovsky, the commander of the legendary Vostok Battalion, one of the first military formations created in the Donbass region in 2014 to fight for independence from Ukraine. On both occasions, extensive security precautions were put in place to forestall any effort by Ukrainian intelligence to discover our meeting, identify its location, and attack it with artillery.

    Pushilin and Khodakovsky both recalled their personal histories of the time of the founding of the Donetsk People’s Republic. Pushilin personally led a rally in Donetsk on April 5, 2014, calling for a referendum for the DPR to join Russia. He served as the first head of the DPR before stepping down in July 2014. In September 2018, he was brought back as the head of the DPR following the assassination of then DPR leader Aleksander Zakharchenko in a bombing of a Donetsk restaurant. He has served in that position ever since.

    Up until early 2014, Aleksandr Khodakovsky was the commander of the elite Ukrainian police commando unit known as Alpha Group. Following the February 2014 Maidan coup that ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich, Khodakovsky and most of his Alpha Group commandoes defected to the Donbass resistance, where they were reformed into the Vostok Battalion. It was Khodakovsky’s Vostok Battalion which led the attack on Donetsk Airport on May 28, 2014, and which led the way into Mariupol in 2022. Today the Vostok Battalion has been expanded into a brigade-sized force operating as part of the Russian military, where it plays an active role in the ongoing battles for control of the Donbass region.

    The contrast between Pushilin and Khodakovsky is quite stark. Both men are confident in the righteousness of their cause and the path of history they are embarked on. But while Pushilin brought with him the buoyant optimism of a politician looking forward to a better future, Khodakovsky exuded the quiet resignation of a soldier who knows that the victory he is fighting for can only come at a cost which, over the course of a decade’s worth of war, had become almost unbearable. Both men exhibited a deep love for the Donetsk People’s Republic, and a genuine appreciation for the sacrifice made by the Russian army and nation in coming to their assistance, and for bringing them into the fold of the Russian Federation.

    The one thing both men had in common was a look of mental exhaustion whenever the subject of Russia’s military intervention was raised. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what caused this look until later, after our meetings had concluded and I found myself in the city of Lugansk, the capital of the Lugansk People’s Republic. The drive from Donetsk to Lugansk took us through towns and villages that had previously been on the front lines of the war with Ukraine. Some of these population centers showed signs of life. Many, however, did not. War, like a tornado, seemed to have a random character, targeting some places for destruction, while skipping over others.

    Today, the city of Lugansk is not on the front line, and its citizens enjoy a life of relative calm when contrasted with their neighbors in Donetsk. But war has visited them in the past, with all the violence and horror that currently unfolds in the regions of Donbass located to the south and west of the city. On June 27, 2017, the citizens of Lugansk unveiled a memorial dedicated to children killed because of the fighting that had been raging since 2014. On that day, 33 white doves were released into the air to symbolize the young lives lost.

    On January 17, 2024, I visited this memorial, known as the ‘Alley of Angels.’ There is another, more well-known Alley of Angels located in Donetsk. Because of the proximity of the war to that city, media coverage of the Donetsk monument, which commemorates the more than 230 children killed in the Donetsk People’s Republic by Ukraine since 2014, has been extensive, to the point that much of the world has seemed to have forgotten that the war with Ukraine has ravaged Lugansk as well. Since the unveiling of the Lugansk monument, another 35 children have been killed, raising the total to 68, with more than 190 additional children injured, all due to indiscriminate Ukrainian shelling.

    Aleksandr and I took part in a small ceremony marked by our laying flowers at the foot of the monument. By the time we had finished, a small crowd had gathered around to witness the sight of an American mourning the loss of their children. I was handed a book about the memorial and given an impromptu tour of the sculptures and plaques that were located there. A television crew asked me for a short interview.

    “What are your impressions of this memorial?” the interviewer asked.

    “It’s a touching tribute to the young lives that were so needlessly lost,” I replied. “And a constant reminder as to why this tragic war needs to be fought and won.”

    Afterwards, a lady emerged from the small crowd that had been watching the proceedings. “We thank you for coming to visit our city, and to honor the memory of our children,” she said, tears welling in her eyes.

    She held out her hand, and I took it in mine, a gesture of friendship and compassion.

    “You must be relieved now that you are part of Russia, and the Russian army is helping drive the Ukrainians back,” I said.

    “Yes,” she said, her voice cracking. “Yes, of course. But why did it take them so long? These children,” she said, gesturing toward the memorial, “did not have to die. Why did it take them so long?”

    I looked into her eyes, and immediately was struck by a sense of déjà vu. I had seen that look before, in the eyes of Denis Pushilin and Alexander Khodakovsky, a mixture of relief and exasperation, of hope and dejection, of happiness and sorrow. Yes, the leadership and people of Donbass are overjoyed by the presence of Russian troops on their territory, and the fact that the region is now legally part of Russia. Yes, Russia loves them now. But where was Russia when the children started dying in 2014? Why did it take so long for Moscow to wake up to the need to bring the Donbass into the fold of the Russian nation?

    This is the eternal question, one that Russia today struggles to find an adequate answer for.

    Russia’s path of redemption ends in Donbass. Here, the sins, errors, and evil which combined to create the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict are manifest. Questions have been asked to which there may be no adequate answer. Today, the situation on the ground increasingly points to a Russian victory over both Ukraine and its supporters in the collective West. But this victory has come at a huge physical and psychological cost. While the dead may be buried and honored, the living will always have to struggle to come to grips over the sacrifices that have been made in support of the cause they were fighting for.

    And, in the end, if they believe that the cause was a just one – and it is my firm position that they do, in fact, believe this to be the case – then the answer to the question as to why it took Russia so long to intervene on behalf of Donbass will hang there, unanswerable, if for no other reason than that the pain any honest answer will generate may be too much to bear for those who had been fighting for the liberation of Donbass these past ten years.

    The post Why Did It Take Russia So Long to Realize Donbass Was Worth Fighting for? first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Scott Ritter.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Obama’s Guilt for Ukraine’s War

    It was well-encapsulated in this 10-minute compilation video from 12 March 2014, “Ukraine Crisis – What You’re Not Being Told” (also archived here and here).

    That 10-minute documentary’s only error is at 22 seconds in, where its narrator said the year “two thousand thirteen” when he obviously meant to say “two thousand fourteen”; but, other than that, I have verified the authenticity and correctness of each one of its many sources and allegations, and find that it is the best (most comprehensive, brief, and accurate) single history of the 20-26 February 2014 coup in Ukraine, which has yet been done.

    It shows Victoria Nuland, whom Obama had selected to plan, organize, oversee, and direct, the coup in Ukraine, instructing America’s Ambassador in Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, whom to get to become appointed to take over control of Ukraine’s government after the democratically elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, will be overthrown. That phone call from Nuland occurred on 27 January 2014, a month before Obama’s coup there was completed, and the person whom she selected to run Obama’s government of Ukraine was the rabidly anti-Russian Arseniy Yatsenyuk, or “Yats” as she sometimes referred to him in this video — and he did get the appointment a month later.

    Here is that complete phone-conversation, which is merely excerpted in the 10-minute documentary. And here is my transcript of it, along with my explanations of what she was referring to and why.

    This recorded phone-conversation is the most “smoking gun” evidence that I know of for any coup that has ever taken place; and for this reason and also on the basis of all of the other evidences on this coup, I agree with what the founder and head of the Stratfor ‘private CIA’ corporate advisory firm said about the matter, that it was “the most blatant coup in history”. (But then, a year later, at the Website of a former convicted Wall-Street trader, he posted an opinion-article to which he slipped in, as-if it were an aside, mention that though on “the internet and Twitter, … you will find me saying the United States staged the most blatant coup in history,” and he went on to misrepresent what he had actually said, and he then alleged that he hadn’t said that, and then he said that “It was no coup,” it was nothing more than “a systematic campaign to saturate the internet, the Russians fed the quote back into some major Russian print publications, then back onto the internet, until it resonated and fed back on itself,” and, so, he alleged that it was just a nothingburger, which “the Russians” had cooked up. He needed to retain his mega-corporate customers.)

    On 4 November 2019, I headlined “The Obama Regime’s Plan to Seize the Russian Naval Base in Crimea,” and provided my latest summary of, and links to, the evidences regarding the planning of Obama’s coup in Ukraine, and of the Obama regime’s extensive pollings of Ukrainians, and especially of Crimeans, both before the coup and after the coup, and noted the polls’ findings, which confirmed and made clear that the U.S. Government couldn’t go public with their poll-findings, because those findings were entirely consistent with the 16 March 2014 Russian-managed pebiscite in Crimea, which had found that 95.6% of Crimea’s voters had marked the option of “Join the Russia Federation as Federal subject of Russia.” Although that percentage was slightly higher than the pollings that the U.S. regime had commissioned, which were closer to 90%, any public challenging of that plebiscite on the basis of these poll-findings would have required the U.S. regime to acknowledge that both the U.S. polls and the Russian plebiscite could simultaneously be right; and, so, there was no U.S.-and-allied publicity given to those polls.

    Furthermore: any such allegation (challenging the Crimean plebiscite’s 95.6% figure) by the U.S. regime might also cause to become dredged up Obama’s plan, as part of the coup, for Russia’s main naval base, which since 1783 has been in Crimea, to become replaced by yet another U.S. naval base (the only part of Obama’s plan that had failed — perhaps because Crimeans overwhelmingly despised the U.S. Government, by a margin of 76.2% “negative” to 2.8% “positive,” which is 96.3% negative to 3.7% positive, in the U.S. regime’s April 2014 poll of Crimeans — so, it would have been a hopeless cause for Obama to continue with that part of his plan, and to challenge that 95.6% plebiscite).

    My 4 November 2019 article also documented Obama’s (Nuland’s, Yatsenyuk’s) plan to kill enough residents in the far-eastern region of Ukraine, which had voted over 90% for Yanukovych, for the population there to become either exterminated or else terrorized by the U.S.-imposed regime, so that enough of Yanukovych’s supporters would be culled from Ukraine’s electorate (around a million of them fled to Russia), so as to virtually assure that subsequently elected national leaders of Ukraine would likewise be rabidly anti-Russian, pro-U.S. regime. This ethnic cleansing by the U.S.-imposed Ukrainian regime, was likewise documented in that article.

    So: this is how the war in Ukraine actually started. It started in 2014, by Obama, not by Putin (such as the U.S. regime and its colonies allege).

    Even NATO’s leader Jens Stoltenberg and Ukraine’s leader Volodmyr Zelensky deny the U.S. Government’s lie that the war in Ukraine started on 24 February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, and acknowledge that it started eight years before that, in 2014; Stoltenberg said, about this, “The war didn’t start in 2022. The war started in 2014.” Zelensky said about it, “I made a point that the war in Ukraine has been lasting for eight years. It’s not just some special military operation.” So, the U.S. Government’s lie, such as U.S. ‘Defense’ (Offense) Secretary Lloyd Austin expressed it, on 1 June 2024, is rabidly false, that:

    “In February of 2022, Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine shocked the world — and this region [Singapore]. And since then, Putin’s war of aggression has provided us all with a preview of a world that none of us would want. It’s a glimpse of a world where tyrants trample sovereign borders, a world where peaceful states live in fear of their neighbors, and a world where chaos and conquest replace rules and rights.

    But Russia’s lawless invasion also reminds us that free countries can rally together to help the victims of aggression.“

    That’s a baldfaced lie, which blames Putin, not Obama, for the war in Ukraine.

    Similar lies are common in U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media, such as:

    “When Russian President Vladimir Putin started the war in Ukraine, he tried to shift the blame to NATO, calling it the instigator. He argued that Russia had no choice but to defensively launch the invasion to prevent NATO from surrounding Russia from all sides. Reality, of course, was different. NATO was a defense alliance in retirement, collecting its “peace dividend” from the breakup of the Soviet Union. Most of its members maintained their defense spending below their shared commitment.” (Note that that commentator calls this “NATO … collecting its ‘peace dividend’ from the breakup of the Soviet Union” — as-if all that matters is peace for the U.S. regime, and that Russia’s authentic national-security concerns to protect Russia’s citizens against a possible U.S.-NATO invasion, should just be ignored — and that it says “NATO was a defense alliance in retirement … from the breakup of the Soviet Union,” though, in fact, that military alliance secretly continued on the American side after the USSR’s Warsaw Pact military alliance ended in 1991 — didn’t ever go into any ‘retirement’ when the Cold War on Russia’s side DID end. So: that’s not actually a “defense alliance” — it is very clearly an aggression alliance, against Russia itself.)

    and,

    “Putin started the war in Ukraine.”

    and,

    “In 2014, Putin started the war in Ukraine by annexing the Crimea.”

    and,

    “Putin started the war in Ukraine and has said negotiations have reached an impasse, without slamming the door on them. But before the war started, Putin presented the West with a list of demands including, most notably, a halt to NATO enlargement.”

    Though the second of the two sentences in that last one is true, nothing was wrong with Putin’s having presented those demands at that time, on 17 December 2021, as his requirements for a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine issue. Ukraine is the only country whose border is a mere 317 miles — five minutes of a nuclear missile’s flying-time — away from hitting The Kremlin and so decapitating Russia’s central command. That is the reason why the U.S. regime has wanted Ukraine so much as to risk WW3 over winning it (as they did) and keeping it (as they won’t): because the U.S. regime demands to ‘win’ WW3, not to merely avoid it. If they can’t be #1 over the whole world, they don’t want anything; they don’t have any “plan B,” yet, unless it’s WW3 itself. On 29 December 2016, I headlined about “America’s Secret Planned Conquest of Russia,” tracking that plan (now called “Nuclear Primacy”) back to at least 2006 as constituting the new mainstream view in the U.S. Government; and, on 19 April 2023, I headlined “U.S. Nuclear-War Strategy”, tracking even farther back, to 1981, when Nuclear Primacy, the goal of winning WW3, first was proposed to replace the pre-existing (but still dominant in Russia and China) “Mutually Assured Destruction” or “M.A.D.” view, that nuclear weapons exist only in order to prevent a WW3, not in order to win a WW3 (via attaining and using “Nuclear Primacy”).

    If Obama had not wanted the war in Ukraine, then he wouldn’t have started it. He wouldn’t have hired people such as Victoria Nuland to get it done. (Maybe he had gotten a good laugh privately when he had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 before he had achieved anything in his Presidency.) He, and not Putin, started the war in Ukraine. Under international law, “the aggressor” is supposed to be the side that STARTED the war, not the side which was mortally endangered by that aggressor and needed to respond in the way it considered existentially necessary in order to respond effectively to and divert that threat, that danger, to one’s nation’s very existence.

    In this case, it is clear that the U.S. regime’s #1 objective is to control the entire world, all countries, including Russia and China, and Iran, and Venezuela, and North Korea, and any other hold-outs. In Russia’s case, this demand by the U.S. regime is so extreme that it placed a requirement upon Finland for Finland to allow the U.S. to position its nuclear weapons in Finland in order for Finland to be allowed to become a NATO member. Finland isn’t as close to Moscow as Ukraine is (it’s 507 miles instead of Ukraine’s 317 miles away from the Kremlin); and, so, it demanded Finland to allow its nuclear missiles, and Finland said yes. That proves how psychopathic the U.S. regime actually is.

    And one should not forget the longstanding post-1991 lies by NATO about what it is: “NATO is not a threat to Russia.”  /   “NATO has tried to build a partnership with Russia, developing dialogue and practical cooperation in areas of common interest. Practical cooperation has been suspended since 2014 in response to Russia’s illegal and illegitimate annexation of Crimea, Ukraine, which NATO will never recognise.”  /  “NATO is not at war with Russia.”

    But the actual fact is, and has been since NATO’s very start in 1949: NATO has always been the post-WW2 U.S. regime’s main military alliance to conquer Russia. For it to have continued after the Soviet Union ended in 1991, is, and should be punished as, an immense international-war crime. It is simply WW3 pushing to happen. Why, then, are not the world’s other nations demanding that NATO end —  demanding: End NATO Now! NATO has terrorized all decent countries. They are too afraid to condemn it publicly. (Similarly, for a different example” “Israel can get away with mass-murder because the world’s super power, USA, defends and excuses them of accountability.“)

    The 14 November 2014 ARD German Government TV network broadcast interview of Putin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdlXqyZHB9k became removed by ARD when Germany’s Government decided that it wants to go to war against Russia, again (reprising Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa); and so broadcasting this interview had been a mistake. Therefore, ever since at least 12 March 2016, “This video is private.” has resulted from that URL. However, up until at least 14 September 2015, it had been public, and was therefore foertunately being archived by some of its viewers online; so, here it is, from an archived copy, of this hostile, pro-U.S. regime, anti-Russia-Government, interview of Putin, about these matters:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20150914075634/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdlXqyZHB9k

    “English: Exclusive ARD interview with Russian President Putin” | Günther Jauch | ARD. 17.Nov.2014

    10:55: JAUCH: For the West, this [Russia’s annexation of Crimea] was a clear breach of international law. PUTIN: What’s the question? JAUCH: The question is, did you underestimate the reaction of the West? … PUTIN: We find this reaction absolutely disproportionate. … When we’re confronted with the accusations that Russia has violated international law, I can hardly feel anything but astonishment. What is international law? First and foremost, it’s the charter of the United Nations. … A vivid and fresh precedent was set in Kosovo. JAUCH: You mean the judgment of the International Criminal Court, with respect to Kosovo, which said that Kosovo had the right to self-determination, and that the people of Kosovo could vote on whether they wanted to have their own state or not? PUTIN: Exactly so, but there’s more to it than that. The most important thing mentioned there was that in terms of self-determination, people populating a certain area are not obliged to ask the opinion of the central authorities of the state where they are resident. There’s no need to have permission from the central governmental authorities, in order to take the necessary steps to self-determination. This is the most crucial point, and nothing that transpired in Crimea was any different from that which happened in Kosovo. I am deeply convinced that Russia has not violated any international laws. I am very open about this. It’s a fact, and we’ve never concealed it. … Besides, what is democracy? You and I know very well, what does demos mean, it means people. Democracy means the rule by the people. In our case, it’s the people’s right to be independent.

    — earlier in it was:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20150914075634/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdlXqyZHB9k

    8:32: JAUCH: There was an agreement [between the national Government and the Maidan demonstrators, on 20 February 2014] which called for national conciliation and a national government. This agreement lasted about 24 hours and then was dead. You followed the events of the 21st of February very closely. Did you talk with President Obama or Chancellor Merkel at the time? PUTIN: Yes. Indeed, on the 21st of February, it was not only the German Minister of Foreign Affairs who came to the Ukraine, to Kiev, but also the ministers of Foreign Affairs of Poland and France. They acted as guarantors [along with the EU’s representative] for the agreement between the then President Yanukovych and the opposition. They were agreed that the process should be carried out peacefully. They signed this document, this agreement between the authorities and the opposition as guarantors, and the authorities actually thought that it would be executed accordingly. And indeed, I had a phone conversation with the President of the United States on the same evening [February 21st], and we discussed this problem in exactly this manner. However, the next day, a coup took place, despite the guarantees given by the Western powers [Obama’s Polish and French, and EU Minister of Foreign Affairs, stooges], the buildings of the Presidential Administration and the Government were taken over. In this context, I would like to stress the following: [10:00:] Either the European Minister of Foreign Affairs [Lord Catherine Ashton, recorded here in a private 26 February 2014 phone call about this matter] shouldn’t have signed the paper and guaranteed the execution of the agreement, or, having done so they should have insisted on its execution. Instead, they distanced themselves from it. Moreover, they seem to prefer not to remember the agreement, as-if it had never existed. I think it’s completely wrong; and even more so, it’s counterproductive. [10:38]

    The U.S.-and-allied line on why Yanukovych was overthrown was that he had turned down the EU’s offer on 20 November 2013. But actually, that was a set-up deal, set up to be rejected in order for Nuland’s plan then to go directly into action. As I headlined on 27 March 2015, “The $160 Billion Cost: Why Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych Spurned EU’s Offer, on 20 Nov. 2013”. Even earlier than that, Putin had explained this to the Russian people, though without mentioning the $160 billion bottom-line price tag for Ukraine to enter the EU:

    On 5 June 2014, less than a half year after Obama had grabbled Ukraine and started the war there, Putin did an interview about the Ukraine war, on Russia’s Voice of Russia channel. It was broadcast the next day, headlining “Russia never annexed Crimea, no plans to intervene in Ukraine, it’s a Western delusion – Putin”. Here are highlights:

    On what happened in Ukraine:

    Vladimir Putin: There was a conflict and that conflict arose because the former Ukrainian president refused to sign an association agreement with the EU. Russia had a certain stance on this issue. We believed it was indeed unreasonable to sign that agreement because it would have a grave impact on the economy, including the Russian economy. We have 390 economic agreements with Ukraine and Ukraine is a member of the free trade zone within the CIS. And we wouldn’t be able to continue this economic relationship with Ukraine as a member of the free trade zone [with the EU]. We discussed this with our European partners. Instead of continuing the debates by legitimate and diplomatic means, our European friends and our friends from the United States supported the anti-constitutional armed coup. This is what happened. We did not cause this crisis to happen. We were against this course of events.

    The point is no one should be brought to power through an armed anti-constitutional coup, and this is especially true in post-Soviet space where government institutions are not fully mature. When it happened, some people accepted the regime and were happy about it, while other people, say, in eastern and southern Ukraine, just won’t accept it. And it is vital to talk with the people who didn’t accept this change of power instead of sending tanks, as you said yourself, instead of firing missiles at civilians from the air and bombing non-military targets.

    On Russian troops in Ukraine:

    The interviewer told the Russian President that the United States claimed they had evidence that Russia had intervened in the conflict by sending troops and weapons.

    Vladimir Putin: Proof? Why don’t they show it? The entire world remembers the US Secretary of State demonstrating the evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, waving around some test tube with washing powder in the UN Security Council. Eventually, the US troops invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein was hanged and later it turned out there had never been any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq [ever since 1998]. You know, it’s one thing to say things and another to actually have evidence. I will tell you again: no Russian troops…

    There are no armed forces, no Russian ‘instructors’ in southeastern Ukraine, and there never were any.

    On whether Russia wanted to annex Ukraine and tried to destabilize the situation there:

    Vladimir Putin: We never did that. The Ukrainian government must now sit down and talk with their own people instead of using weapons, tanks, planes and helicopters. …

    On Crimea:

    Vladimir Putin: It’s a delusion that Russian troops annexed Crimea. Russian troops did nothing of the kind.

    Russian troops were in Crimea under an international treaty on the deployment of the Russian military base. It’s true that Russian troops helped Crimeans hold a referendum on their (a) independence and (b) desire to join the Russian Federation. No one can prevent these people from exercising a right that is stipulated in Article 1 of the UN Charter, the right of nations to self-determination.

    In accordance with the expression of the will of people who live there, Crimea is part of the Russian Federation and its constituent entity.

    I want everyone to understand this clearly. We conducted an exclusively diplomatic and peaceful dialogue – I want to stress this – with our partners in Europe and the United States. In response to our attempts to hold such a dialogue and to negotiate an acceptable solution, they supported the anti-constitutional state coup in Ukraine, and following that we could not be sure that Ukraine would not become part of the North Atlantic military bloc. In that situation, we could not allow a historical part of the Russian territory with a predominantly ethnic Russian population to be incorporated into an international military alliance, especially because Crimeans wanted to be part of Russia. I am sorry, but we couldn’t act differently. …

    There are basically no Russian troops abroad while US troops are everywhere. There are US military bases everywhere around the world and they are always involved in the fates of other countries even though they are thousands of kilometers away from US borders. …

    On the collapse of the Soviet Union:

    Vladimir Putin: We will not promote Russian nationalism [patriotism yes, nationalism no], and we do not intend to revive the Russian Empire. What did I mean when I said that the Soviet Union’s collapse was one of the largest humanitarian – above all humanitarian – disasters of the 20th century? I meant that all the citizens of the Soviet Union lived in a union state irrespective of their ethnicity, and after its collapse 25 million Russians suddenly became foreign citizens. It was a huge humanitarian disaster. Not a political or ideological disaster, but a purely humanitarian upheaval. Families were divided; people lost their jobs and means of subsistence, and had no means to communicate with each other normally. This was the problem.

    Practically everything that The West alleges about the war in Ukraine is false. It’s intentionally that way, not due to any mere negligence.

    The Nobel Peace Prize Winner Barack Obama deserves to be tried at the International Criminal Court for the international war crime of aggression. The biggest problem in this regard is that no sensible definition of “aggression” yet exists in international law. (At the end of that article linked-to there, I proposed a new definition of the term. One of my longer articles explained the history behind that immense collective failure.) For another example of that failure: How is perpetrating an international coup — which in reality is an international war-crime; and it was that against Iran in 1953, Chile in 1973, Ukraine in 2014, and so many others — being addressed in current international law? It’s not; it is instead ignored. The International Criminal Court was designed by victor countries against victim countries. It wasn’t designed to sustain peace and prevent war. It’s a bad joke. However, historians nonetheless have an obligation to 100% truth, never to falsify. In the U.S. and its colonies (‘allies’), they shirk that obligation, because 100% truth can cripple their careers. This is the reality, no matter how much historians in some countries (the countries that have dominated the world for far too long) might publicly deny it. Academic scholarship is profoundly corrupted by this reality.

    The latest version of YouGov’s “World’s Most Admired” pollings around the world is the “World’s most admired 2021” version; and it is headlined: “The Obamas remain the world’s most admired man and woman”.

    The post Obama’s Guilt for Ukraine’s War first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • NATO Using AI against Russia – Top Official

    NATO using AI against Russia – top official FILE PHOTO. David van Weel. ©  Getty Images / Anadolu Agency / Omer Taha Cetin

    NATO is utilizing artificial intelligence to track Russian aircraft and fueling stations, the US-led bloc’s Assistant Secretary General for Innovation, Hybrid and Cyber, David van Weel, has revealed.

    Speaking at the NATO-Ukraine Defense Innovators Forum at AGH University of Krakow, Poland, the top official pledged to deepen cooperation with Kiev, with a new agreement on “battlefield innovation” already in sight.

    “The energy for more collaboration between Ukrainian and Allied innovation ecosystems was contagious, and is exactly why Allies and Ukraine are working together on a new innovation agreement in the NATO-Ukraine Council,” van Weel stated.

    As an example of the integration of various AI solutions, he said the bloc utilizes it to analyze satellite imagery in order to track and count Russian aircraft and fueling stations. The assistant secretary general said that using AI in such a manner was in accord with NATO’s principles on ethical Al use.

    “It’s low-risk,” van Weel said. “Nobody gets killed if you get the number off.”

    In recent months, Ukraine has reportedly ramped up its effort to strike Russian airfields, both those close to the combat zone and deep inside the country’s territory. Moscow appears to have significantly expanded its use of frontline aviation as well, primarily to launch aerial bombs fitted with UMPK (Universal Glide and Correction Module) winged guidance kits.

    Various Ukrainian military sources have noted the growing use of UMPK-fitted bombs by Russia, attributing frontline setbacks to the effectiveness of the weapon.

    UMPK modules, widely regarded as an analogue of US-made Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) kits, fit most freefall bombs in Russia’s arsenal. They are frequently upgraded with thermobaric and cluster munitions, which have already been observed being used on the frontline.

    The post NATO Using AI against Russia – Top Official first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • North Korea restores train service to Russia, boosting hopes for tourists

    After a four-year hiatus due to the coronavirus pandemic, passenger rail service between Russia and North Korea has been restored, with 41 Russian tourists taking the train to North Korea last week, according to Moscow’s customs service.

    The news comes amid a report Monday from the Russian daily Vedomosti that President Vladimir Putin will visit North Korea sometime in the next few weeks. 

    That would mark only the second time that Putin has visited the country, after a July 2000 trip – although Putin did meet with Kim Jong Un in September in the Russian far eastern city of Vladivostok.

    The exact timing of the trip wasn’t clear, but Russia’s ambassador in Pyongyang, Alexander Matsegora, said the visit was being “actively prepared.” 

    Putin is also planning to visit Vietnam soon, the report said.

    During their meeting, Putin and Kim Jong Un may discuss restarting trade, strengthening economic ties and bringing in North Korean workers to address Russian labor shortages, Alexander Zhebin, a researcher at the Center for Korean Studies at the Institute of China and Modern Asia of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told Vedomosti.

    ENG_KOR_RUSSIA RAIL_06072024.3.JPG
    Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un visit the Vostochny Сosmodrome in the far eastern Amur region, Russia, September 13, 2023. (Sputnik/Mikhail Metzel/Kremlin via Reuters)

    The train bringing the Russian tourists to North Korea departed from Ussuriysk, a Russian city about 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Vladivostok, the Federal Customs Service of Russia wrote on the Telegram social media platform on June 6. 

    “The first train with Russian tourists left for the DPRK through the Khasan checkpoint,” the service’s post said. “After a four-year break, Ussuri customs officers cleared the first passenger train for departure to North Korea.”

    Last month, Primorski krai’s Gov. Oleg Kozhemyako announced at a meeting with a delegation from North Korea’s northeastern Rason region that passenger rail service between Vladivostok and Rason would soon resume, to the benefit of Russian travelers.

    This announcement followed his statement in January that plans were in place to open passenger rail service within the year, and that he hoped any technical problems stalling the reopening would be resolved.

    Russia and North Korea restarted tourism earlier this year, with 400 Russian tourists flying in by air between February and May, according to stats from the Primorsky krai government, which anticipates that tourist numbers will increase now that the passenger rail link has been restored.

    Foreign workers

    The restoration of service is expected to pave the way for North Korea to soon send large numbers of workers to Russia, Kang Dongwan, a professor at the South Korea-based Dong-A University in Busan, told Radio Free Asia. 

    ENG_KOR_RUSSIA RAIL_06072024.2.jpg
    Ethnic-Korean Chinese get back their passports as they board a Pyongyang bound train April 25, 2004, from Dandong station in China’s northeast Liaoning Province, China. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP)

    “Above all, Russia currently needs a large workforce for construction sites, and North Korea needs to send workers to Russia to earn foreign currency,” said Kang. 

    “Currently, with regular flight routes in operation, the addition of a train route to the Primorsky Krai region means that large-scale personnel and resources will be able to move back and forth.”

    Should North Korea send workers to Russia, however, it would be yet another violation of international nuclear sanctions, which state that all North Korean workers abroad were to have returned home by the end of 2019 and no new work visas should be issued.

    But North Korea maintains overseas workforces in China and Russia, and has been known to get around sanctions by sending new workers on vocational or education visas.

    Translated by Leejin J. Chung. Edited by Eugene Whong.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Cho Jinwoo for RFA Korean.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • America’s Chief Deceit Against Russia That Has Led the World to the Brink of WW3

    This is about the U.S. Government’s lie to the naive Gorbachev, which fooled him to accept the U.S. empire’s proposal that East Germany become a part of West Germany, and that the Soviet Union and its one-Party rule end, and that its Warsaw Pact military alliance end while America’s NATO military alliance wouldn’t. In other words: it’s about how the Cold War on America’s side continued secretly (and now again brings America and Russia to the very brink of WW3), after the Cold War on Russia’s side ended in 1991 — ended on the basis of America’s lie and Russia’s trust in that lie:

    On 10 September 2015, I documented this lie because so many U.S.-and-allied ‘historians’ were alleging it not to have happened but to be mere ‘Russian propaganda’ (and, after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, some have even alleged that “European security has in fact benefited significantly from NATO’s enlargement” — a lie on top of the basic one). I also quoted there ‘historians’ who denied this basic lie, so that a reader could see not only the truth but the regime’s agents’ lies denying that it (the West’s Big Lie) had actually happened or that it was important. But then, on 12 December 2017, the U.S. National Security Archives at George Washington University released even fuller documentation of the lie that had occurred by the U.S. Government, and here are highlights from their documentation of it, so that this continuing Big Lie will be recognized by every sane person as being what it is, the Big Lie that might end up producing World War Three:

    Memorandum of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and James Baker in Moscow.

    Memcon from 2/9/90 meeting w/USSR Prem. Gorbachev & FM Shevardnaze, Moscow, USSR

    Repeating what Bush said at the Malta summit in December 1989, Baker tells Gorbachev: “The President and I have made clear that we seek no unilateral advantage in this process” of inevitable German unification. Baker goes on to say, “We understand the need for assurances to the countries in the East. If we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east.” Later in the conversation, Baker poses the same position as a question, “would you prefer a united Germany outside of NATO that is independent and has no US forces or would you prefer a united Germany with ties to NATO and assurances that there would be no extension of NATO’s current jurisdiction eastward?” The declassifiers of this memcon actually redacted Gorbachev’s response that indeed such an expansion would be “unacceptable” – but Baker’s letter to Kohl the next day, published in 1998 by the Germans, gives the quote.

    Source: U.S. Department of State, FOIA 199504567 (National Security Archive Flashpoints Collection, Box 38).

    *****

    Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner

    Washington D.C., December 12, 2017 – U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu).

    The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels. …

    The conversations before Kohl’s assurance involved explicit discussion of NATO expansion, the Central and East European countries, and how to convince the Soviets to accept unification. For example, on February 6, 1990, when Genscher met with British Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd, the British record showed Genscher saying, “The Russians must have some assurance that if, for example, the Polish Government left the Warsaw Pact one day, they would not join NATO the next.” (See Document 2)

    *****

    In addition, there is this: On 11 August 2014, Mary Elise Sarotte headlined at the U.S. empire’s own Foreign Affairs journal, “A Broken Promise?” as-if there still had been any doubt that it was that, and so an honest title for her article would have been “A Broken Promise” or even “A Broken Promise!” Because there’s no question about it. She reported not only that it definitely was a lie, and one by the U.S. Government itself; and that U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush told America’s stooge leaders, starting on 24 February 1990, that it was going to be a broken promise because “‘TO HELL WITH THAT! [promise]’ HE [Bush] SAID. ‘WE PREVAILED, THEY DIDN’T.’” In other words: on the night of 24 February 1990, Bush started secretly ordering his vassals to continue forward with the intention for the U.S. alliance ultimately to swallow-up not only the rest of the USSR but all of the Warsaw Pact and finally Russia itself. And this has been precisely what the U.S. regime and its colonies have been doing, up until 24 February 2022, when Russia finally put its foot down, to stop NATO’s coming within around a mere 300 miles of The Kremlin.

    Consequently, even if NATO served a constructive purpose during 1945-1991, it has afterward only endangered the world — including especially Europe, making Europe be again the main battlefield if another World War occurs — and thus its continuance after 1991 can reasonably be considered a massive international crime by the U.S. Government.

    NATO is an extension of the will of the U.S. Government, and this is so blatant a fact so that Article 13, which is the only portion of NATO’s charter, the North Atlantic Treaty, that says anything about how a member-nation may either quit NATO or be expelled from NATO, places the U.S. Government in charge of processing a “denunciation” (voluntary withdrawal) — the Charter’s term for resigning from NATO. This term “denunciation” (instead of “withdrawal”) clearly means that if any member does quit, then that will be interpreted by NATO as constituting a hostile act, which will have consequences (the resigning member will be placed onto NATO’s unspoken list of enemies). NATO’s charter has no provision by which a member can be expelled. Moreover, it fails to include any provision by which the charter can be amended or changed in any manner. No charter or constitution that fails to include a provision by which it may be amended can reasonably be acceptable to a democracy: it is so rigid as to be 100% brittle, impossible to adapt to changing challenges. The NATO charter itself is a dictatorial never a democratic document. It takes up, for the U.S. regime after 1945, the function that the Nazi Party had held prior to that in and for Germany: after Hitler died, America took up and has held high his torch for global dictatorship. In fact, “the Government of the United States of America” is also stated in Article 10 as the entity to process applications to join NATO, and, in Article 11, as being the processor of “ratifications” of applications to join.

    This Treaty is an imperial document, of the U.S. empire, none other. And, after 1991, its continuation is based only on lies, including the one that now is coming to a head in Ukraine, which is not a NATO member, though Biden said it is — he said recently of Ukraine, that “they are part of NATO.” Tyrants imagine that what they want can simply be willed into existence, and they don’t care about the essential needs of others. Such individuals are driven by their own hatreds. That is what stands at the very top of NATO.

    And this is why we are now at the nuclear brink, because of an organization that ought to have ended in 1991.

    The post America’s Chief Deceit Against Russia That Has Led the World to the Brink of WW3 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Israel, Russia, and International Law

    International law―the recognized rules of behavior among nations based on customary practices and treaties, among them the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights―has been agreed upon by large and small nations alike.  To implement this law, the nations of the world have established a UN Security Council (to maintain international peace and security) and a variety of international courts, including the UN’s International Court of Justice (which adjudicates disputes between nations and gives advisory opinions on international legal issues) and the International Criminal Court (which prosecutes individuals for crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression).

    Yet nations continue to defy international law.

    In the ongoing Gaza crisis, the Israeli government has failed to uphold international law by rebuffing the calls of international organizations to end its massive slaughter of Palestinian civilians.  The U.S. government has facilitated this behavior by vetoing three UN Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire, while the Israeli government has ignored an International Court of Justice ruling that it should head off genocide in Gaza by ensuring sufficient humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian population.  The Israeli government has also refused to honor an order by the International Court of Justice to halt its offensive in Rafah and denounced the International Criminal Court’s request for arrest warrants for its top officials.

    Russia’s military assault upon Ukraine provides another example of flouting international law.  Given the UN Charter’s prohibition of the “use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state,” when Russian military forces seized and annexed Crimea and commenced military operations to gobble up eastern Ukraine in early 2014, the issue came before the UN Security Council, where condemnation of Russia’s action was promptly vetoed by Russia.  Similarly, in February 2022, when the Russian government commenced a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia again vetoed Security Council action.  That March, the International Court of Justice, by an overwhelming vote, ordered Russia to halt its invasion of Ukraine—but, as usual, to no avail.

    Unfortunately, these violations of international law are not unusual for, over many decades, numerous nations have ignored the recognized rules of international conduct.

    What is lacking is not international law but, rather, its consistent and universal enforcement.  For decades, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France) have repeatedly used their veto power in that entity to block UN action to maintain international peace and security.  Furthermore, nearly two-thirds of the world’s nations do not accept the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, while  more than a third of the world’s nations (including some of the largest, such as Russia, the United States, China, and India) have resisted becoming parties to the International Criminal Court.

    Despite such obstacles, these organizations have sometimes played very useful roles in resolving international disputes.  The UN Security Council has dispatched numerous peacekeeping missions around the world―including 60 alone in the years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union―that have helped defuse crises in conflict-ridden regions.

    For its part, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) paved the way for the Central American Peace Accords during the 1980s through its ruling in Nicaragua v United States, while its ruling in the Nuclear Tests case helped bring an end to nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific.  In addition, the ICJ’s ruling in Chad v Libya resolved a territorial dispute between these two nations and ended their military conflict.

    Although the International Criminal Court has only been in operation since 2002, it has thus far convicted ten individuals of heinous crimes, issued or requested warrants for the arrest of prominent figures charged with war crimes (including Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the leaders of Hamas), and conducted or begun investigations of yet other notorious individuals.

    But, of course, as demonstrated by the persistence of wars of aggression and massive violations of human rights, enforcing international law remains a major problem in the contemporary world.

    Therefore, if the world is to move beyond national impunity―if it is finally to scrap the long and disgraceful tradition among nations of might makes right―it is necessary to empower the world’s major international organizations to enforce the international law that nations have agreed to respect.

    This strengthening of global governance is certainly possible.

    Although provisions in the UN Charter make outright abolition of the UN Security Council veto very difficult, other means are available for reducing the veto’s baneful effects.  In many cases ―including those of the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts―simply invoking Article 27(3) of the UN Charter would be sufficient, for it states that a party to a dispute before the Security Council shall abstain from voting in connection with that dispute.  Furthermore, 124 UN nations have already endorsed a proposal for renunciation of the veto when taking action against genocide, crimes against humanity, and mass atrocities.  Moreover, the UN General Assembly has occasionally employed “Uniting for Peace” resolutions to take action when the Security Council has failed to do so.

    Improving the effectiveness of the international judicial system has also generated attention in recent years.  The LAW Not War campaign, championed by organizations dedicated to improving global governance, advocates strengthening the International Court of Justice, principally by increasing the number of nations accepting the compulsory jurisdiction of the Court.  Similarly, the Coalition for the International Criminal Court, representing numerous organizations, calls on all nations to ratify the Court’s founding statute and, thereby, “expand the Court’s reach and reduce the impunity gap.”

    National impunity is not inevitable, at least if people and governments of the world are willing to take the necessary actions.  Are they?  Or will they continue talking of a “rules-based international order” while they avoid enforcing the rules?

    The post Israel, Russia, and International Law first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • What’s It Like Going To School In Parts Of Ukraine Occupied By Russia?


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • U.S. President Biden Now Authorizes Ukraine to Start WW3

    On May 31st, Politico headlined “Biden secretly gave Ukraine permission to strike inside Russia with US weapons: It’s a major reversal that will help Ukraine to better defend its second-largest city.” It reported:

    The Biden administration has quietly given Ukraine permission to strike inside Russia — solely near the area of Kharkiv — using U.S.-provided weapons, three U.S. officials and two other people familiar with the move said Thursday, a major reversal that will help Ukraine to better defend its second-largest city.

    “The president recently directed his team to ensure that Ukraine is able to use U.S. weapons for counter-fire purposes in Kharkiv so Ukraine can hit back at Russian forces hitting them or preparing to hit them,” one of the U.S. officials said, adding that the policy of not allowing long-range strikes inside Russia “has not changed.”

    Ukraine asked the U.S. to make this policy change only after Russia’s offensive on Kharkiv began this month, the official added. All the people were granted anonymity to discuss internal decisions that haven’t been announced. …

    In effect, Ukraine can now use American-provided weapons, such as rockets and rocket launchers, to shoot down launched Russian missiles heading toward Kharkiv, at troops massing just over the Russian border near the city, or Russian bombers launching bombs toward Ukrainian territory. But the official said Ukraine cannot use those weapons to hit civilian infrastructure or launch long-range missiles, such as the Army Tactical Missile System, to hit military targets deep inside Russia.

    It’s a stunning shift the administration initially said would escalate the war by more directly involving the U.S. in the fight. But worsening conditions for Ukraine on the battlefield –– namely Russia’s advances and improved position in Kharkiv –– led the president to change his mind. …

    What this means is that if Volodmyr Zelensky (whose legal term of office as Ukraine’s President ended on May 20) decides that Ukraine should use American weapons and bombs to hit “military targets” that are in Russia and “near the area of Kharkiv,” then the U.S. Government will not object. The article does not say how the phrase “military targets” there is being defined, nor how “near the area of Kharkiv” is being defined.

    The U.S. Government has been, to a large extent if not fully, operating or in control over the operation of those U.S.-made weapons; and, therefore, one may reasonably presume that any decision as to whether to use those weapons and bombs in any given instance will have the prior approval of both the Ukrainian and the American Governments.

    One also may reasonably assume that if ever Ukraine would violate Biden’s order in this regard, then Biden would condemn Ukraine for having done so. Whether or not Russia’s Government would take that as being sincerely an expression that only Ukraine was to blame for that U.S.-and-Ukraine attack against Russia is impossible reasonably to predict in advance. Consequently, if the limitations upon what Ukraine’s government can do with America’s weapons and bombs are not yet already over the limits of what will precipitate a nuclear attack by Russia against the United States and its colonies (‘allies’), as having “crossed over Russia’s red lines” of what Russia considers to constitute an acceptable violation of Russia’s national security, then how Russia will respond in any case if Ukraine will violate Biden’s command and Biden will condemn Ukraine for that, is likewise impossible reasonably to predict in advance. However, if Russia will in such an instance unleash its estimated 5,580 nuclear weapons against the U.S. and its colonies, then there will be a debate among the immediate survivors of WW3 regarding whether the villain here was Biden or instead Putin, or both.

    If WW3 will happen before America’s November 5 elections, then if such elections will be held, either Donald Trump or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be the President starting in 2025. If WW3 will happen after such elections, then America’s voters today should know that on May 28, the Washington Post, headlined “Trump makes sweeping promises to donors on audacious fundraising tour”, and reported that at one fundraising event for billionaires and centi-millionaires (not for mere voters), “he suggested that he would have bombed Moscow and Beijing if Russia invaded Ukraine or China invaded Taiwan.” In other words: to him, regarding the current war in Ukraine, and regarding the long-sought-by-the-U.S.-Government war in Taiwan, those two wars and to-become wars, are not merely “other people’s wars,” but these are our wars — meaning those American billionaires’ and centi-millionaires’ wars — to which he, as the U.S. President, would respond immediately by bombing, respectively, Russia and China.

    Though the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia (which blacklists [blocks from linking to] sites that aren’t CIA-approved) says nothing about the former President of Ukraine Volodmyr Zelenskyy being no longer legally after 20 May 2024 Ukraine’s President, and he did announce that the 20 May 2024 elections would be cancelled, he still does serve as-if he is Ukraine’s President, and is not questioned about that in U.S.-and-allied media. No polling has been done regarding whom Ukrainians would vote for if they were allowed to vote. However, on 15 February 2024, Yahoo News headlined “New poll shows Zelenskyy’s approval dips 5 points in Ukraine after departure of General Zaluzhnyi” and buried in its news-report that the poll showed that as-of February 24, the level of “trust” in leading political figures by the Ukrainian public were: Valerii Zaluzhnyi – 94%; Kyrylo Budanov – 66%; Volodymyr Zelenskyy – 64%; Serhiy Prytula – 61%; and Oleksandr Syrskyi – 40%. Zaluzhnyi was appointed Ukraine’s Ambassador to UK on 7 March 2024, after having been fired by Zelenskyy as Ukraine’s top General. Zelenskyy replaced him with Oleksandr Syrskyi.

    In any case, Ukraine has been ruled by America’s President ever since February 2014, and Russians have long known that this is so.

    The post U.S. President Biden Now Authorizes Ukraine to Start WW3 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Russia extends detention of journalist Alsu Kurmasheva for 3rd time

    New York, May 31, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists strongly denounced a Russian court’s Friday decision to extend the pretrial detention of U.S.-Russian journalist Alsu Kurmasheva until August 5 and called for her immediate release.

    “U.S.-Russian journalist Alsu Kurmasheva has spent more than seven months behind bars for no reason except her work, and she must be freed at once,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Russian authorities must immediately grant Kurmasheva consular access, provide her with appropriate medical care, drop all charges against her, and release her. Meanwhile, U.S. authorities should not delay any longer Kurmasheva’s designation as ‘wrongfully detained’ and ensure her swift release.”

    In a closed-door hearing held Friday, a court in the western city of Kazan extended Kurmasheva’s detention by two months, according to media reports and a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) report. The court also denied Kurmasheva’s request for house arrest.

    Kurmasheva, an editor with the Tatar-Bashkir service of U.S. Congress-funded RFE/RL, said she has been feeling steadily worse and needs surgery to fix her health problems. She added that she has not been allowed to call her children and that she last heard their voices in October 2023.

    “The injustices multiply every day in this needless, cruel prosecution. Alsu’s fundamental rights as an American citizen are being denied by Russian authorities who have now imprisoned her for 227 days,” said RFE/RL President Stephen Capus in a statement.

    Kurmasheva has been in pretrial detention since authorities apprehended her on October 18, 2023, on charges of failing to register herself as a foreign agent, which carries a prison sentence of up to five years.

    An additional charge of spreading “fake” information about the Russian army — stemming from accusations she helped distribute a book based on stories of residents in Russia’s southwestern Volga region who oppose the country’s invasion of Ukraine — was later brought against her, which could carry a prison sentence of up to 10 years.

    Kurmasheva and RFE/RL both deny the charges.

    Kurmasheva is the second U.S. journalist to be held by Russia after authorities arrested Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich on espionage charges in March 2023. On March 26, 2024, his pretrial detention was extended until June 30.

    While the U.S. government designated Gershkovich as “wrongfully detained” by Russia, a move that unlocked a broad U.S. government effort to free him, it has yet to make the same determination regarding Kurmasheva.

    U.S. State Department deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel said in a May 16 press briefing that the department was “certainly not slow-walking the process.”

    On April 27, during the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in Washington, U.S. President Joe Biden called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to release Gershkovich and Kurmasheva. Patel echoed the call for Kurmasheva’s release during the May 16 press briefing.

    In November 2023, CPJ joined 13 other press freedom and freedom of expression groups in calling on the U.S. to declare Kurmasheva as “wrongfully detained.”

    CPJ emailed the Sovetsky District Court of Kazan for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

    Russia is the fourth-worst jailer of journalists in the world, holding at least 22 journalists, including Kurmasheva and Gershkovich, in prison on December 1, 2023, according to CPJ’s most recent prison census.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • If The Wars Go On

    I suppose my title could have been couched in the singular form, as Hermann Hesse, the Nobel Prize winning German/Swiss author, did with his collection of anti-war essays about World War I (the war to end all wars that didn’t), If The War Goes On . . .  

    Or more appropriately, I might have eliminated that conditional “If” since it seems Pollyannish.

    It’s a long hard road, this anti-war business.  During the first Cold War and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis in the early sixties when Kennedy and Krushchev narrowly avoided blowing the world to smithereens, Bob Dylan put it right in his fierce song, Masters of War:

    (Verse 1)

    Come, you masters of war
    You that build the big guns
    You that build the death planes
    You that build all the bombs
    You that hide behind walls
    You that hide behind desks
    I just want you to know
    I can see through your masks

    (Verse 3)

    Like Judas of old
    You lie and deceive
    A world war can be won
    You want me to believe
    But I see through your eyes
    And I see through your brain
    Like I see through the water
    That runs down my drain

    Indeed there is a system of war that guarantees that the various wars go on and on ad infinitum, and they are linked.  It is why the warfare state has killed our anti-war leaders, first and foremost JFK for turning against war in the last year of his presidency.  Then in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy in quick succession.  It is why if you dare to look around the world today, you will see that there is a series of wars happening, not only in the obvious places like Ukraine and Gaza, but in places that you may never have heard of, and if you peek a bit further into their causes, you will discover that a familiar culprit with 750 plus military bases around the world has its hand in most of them – the United States of America.

    These wars have their cold and hot phases.  There are days when the corporate media let them sleep and other times when the same media wake them a bit, but never enough to wake their readers up to the reality of the deadly game.  That is the media’s job as stenographers for the warfare state.  Wars being essentially the health of the state, as Randolph Bourne wrote long ago, they provide vast profits for the military-industrial complex/Wall St., whether they are in preparation or in operation, awake or asleep, hot or cold.  Ray McGovern, the former CIA analyst with a moral conscience, has aptly named this vast interlocking propaganda apparatus the military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think-tank complex, MICIMATT.  It is a complex that blatantly serves the interests of the masters of war who “ain’t worth the blood/that runs in [their] your veins,” in Dylan’s words.

    The preparation for war is war.  What is prepared must be used up, so other weapons can be prepared to be used up, so other weapons can be prepared to be used up, and on and on until one day no one is left to use anything, for the world will be used up in a nuclear conflagration.  These weapons are produced in nice clean factories that pay good wages to people who take their pay and go their way, giving their souls to the killers.  For the U.S. economy is built on the waging of wars so continuous that it is nearly impossible to find a break between its hot and cold phases, or what seems like decent employment and the diabolic.  They are so intertwined.  It is a system of capitalistic finance, a revolutionary system that builds to destroy.

    The U.S spends nearly $900  billion dollars annually on “defense” spending; this is more than China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, the U.K., Germany, France, South Korea, and Japan combined.  The U.S.A. is a warfare state; it’s as simple as that.  And whether they choose to be aware of it or not, the vast majority of Americans support this killing machine by their insouciance and silence.  That their country is spending up to 2 trillion dollars on modernizing its nuclear weapons disturbs them  not.  It is a death cult.  Some – as I myself have done mistakenly – talk about the “deep state” or some other deceptive phrase that conceals the truth that the official state is the “deep state.”  It stares us in the face, but many refuse to stare it back down.  It is too obvious, standing, as it does, in the way of a life of illusions.

    And what is equally apparent today – or should be if one is not asleep – is that because of the war policies of the U.S., the chances of another world war and the use of nuclear weapons is rising by the day.  Despite all its denials to the contrary, the US/NATO is pushing for open warfare with Russia that will involve the use of nuclear weapons.

    Our masters of war are pushing us toward a nuclear abyss.

    In a recent perceptive article, “Russia and China Have Had Enough,” Pepe Escobar writes truths many prefer not to hear.  That there is no split between Russia and China but the opposite – a rock solid Russia-China strategic partnership and a determination to oppose and defeat the U.S./UK/NATO hybrid war tactics across Eurasia and the Middle East.  That the more these U.S.-led forces attempt to destroy Russia, the more the expanding alliances involved in the Shanghai Cooperative Agreement (SCO) and the expanding BRICS partnerships of emerging economies (originally just Brazil, Russia, India, and then South Africa; now also Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, United Arab Emirates, with many more countries waiting to join) will gain in power.  In Escobar’s words, “. . . the Global Majority is on the move: Russia is closely cooperating, increasingly, with scores of nations in West Asia, wider Asia, Africa and Latin America.”

    Despite this fact, the United States and its allies blithely continue as if their control of the world order is secure.  That they can butcher and badger the world into submission.  The insane are usually deluded, but when they control nuclear weapons, the people of the world need to awaken.

    Ray McGovern, a Russia expert, (see raymcgovern.com) has echoed Escobar on the absurdity of the Russian China split; has emphasized how Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians has made it an isolated but desperate pariah state; and how the U.S. war against Russia in Ukraine is leading to the increased use of  U.S. tactical nuclear weapons that could lead to full-scale nuclear war.  He is not alone in this warning.

    There are many signs that we are moving toward a nuclear war with calls for U.S./NATO to support more strikes inside Russia, crossing a very dangerous Russian red line.  Russia has made it very clear they will respond.  As politicians of various stripes – French President Macron, NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, et al. have ecstatically been urging the Biden administration, who needs no urging, to escalate the war in Ukraine by attacking Russia proper (“The time has come for allies to consider whether they should lift some of the restrictions they have put on the use of weapons they have donated to Ukraine,” Stoltenberg told The Economist.), Mike Whitney has written about a recent such attack that should send chills down everyone’s spines –  “Washington Attacks Key Elements of Russia’s Nuclear Umbrella Threatening Entire Global Security Architecture.” – but  since the corporate media ignore it, most will dream away and get their barbecues ready for Fourth of July celebrations.  They and the flag-dressed Dolly Parton can sing all they want about when Johnny comes marching home again, but Dolly and no one will be jolly if there are no homes to march to, no Johnnies marching anywhere but to death, no anything.  Just a wasteland.

    Michel Chossudovsky, Ray McGovern, Eva Bartlett, Craig Murray, Patrick Lawrence, Vanessa Beeley, Pepe Escobar, Oliver Stone, Andrew Napolitano, Craig Paul Roberts, Chris Hedges, Alastair Crooke, Caitlin Johnstone, Peter Koenig, Finian Cunningham, Diana Johnstone, Lew Rockwell, and so many other sane but marginalized writers whose names I am omitting as I write quickly, are warning us of our closeness to nuclear annihilation.  Cassandras all, I fear.  Marginalized prophets such as writer and antinuclear activist James W. Douglass (Lightning East to West, JFK and the Unspeakable, etc.) have been issuing such warnings for decades.  It is understandable that so many turn away from such warnings, for the thought of a nuclear war induces deep anxiety hard to control.  But unless the vast majority can break through such reticence and see through the official propaganda, the world will be destroyed by madmen sooner or later.  The signs today all point to sooner, for we are on the edge of the abyss.

    Former British diplomat Alistair Crooke, in a recent article – The brink of dissolution: Neurosis in the West as the levee breaks – writes about how the Biden administration’s policy toward Russia-China, not to say Israel-Palestine, being nothing more than more of the same, is stupid, self-defeating, and very dangerous.  Rather than accepting that its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is a disaster, the U.S. is escalating the conflict to a terrifying level.  Rather than accepting the obvious deep alliance between China and Russian exemplified in the recent hug between Putin and Xi and their joint 8,000 word joint statement, Biden has said, “Russia is in a very, very difficult spot right now. They are being squeezed by China.” 

    It doesn’t get any stupider.  But when more of the same doesn’t work and you can’t accept the reality of a changing world order, you do more of the same.  Crooke writes:

    The paradox is that Team Biden – wholly inadvertently – is midwifing the birth of a ‘new world’. It is doing so by dint of its crude opposition to parturition. The more the western élites push against the birthing – through ‘saving Zionism’; ‘saving European Ukraine’ and by crushing dissent – perversely they accelerate the foundering of Leviathan.

    President Xi’s double farewell hug for President Putin following their 16-17 May summit nonetheless sealed the birth – even the New York Times, with customary self-absorption, termed the warm embrace by Xi as ‘defiance of the West’.

    The root of the coming dissolution stems precisely from the shortcoming that the NY Times headline encapsulates in its disdainful labelling of the seismic shift as base anti-westernism.

    More of the same, yes, that is Biden’s approach, inflamed regularly by the anti-Russian hatred spewed by The New York Times and its ilk.  It is an obsession bordering on full-fledged madness, yet it is integral to the belief that the U.S. is an empire and will remain one while the rest of the world can go to hell.  Such a mindset is behind the U.S.’s abrogating all the nuclear weapons treaties that provided a semblance of security that nuclear weapons would not be used.

    Crooke ends his piece with these sobering words:

    Put plainly, with the U.S. unable to exit or to moderate its determination to preserve its hegemony, Lavrov [Sergey Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister] sees the prospect for increased western weapons provision for Ukraine. The discourse of military escalation is in fashion in Europe (of that there is no doubt); but both in the Middle East and Ukraine, western policy is in deep trouble. There must be doubts whether the West has either the political will, or the internal unity, to pursue this aggressive course. Dragging wars are not traditionally thought to be ‘voter friendly’ when campaigning reaches its peak.

    Let me repeat that last understated sentence: “Dragging wars are not traditionally thought to be ‘voter friendly’ when campaigning reaches its peak.”  And so?  More of the same?

    Ray McGovern suggest what is more likely:

    Israel [is] becoming a dangerous pariah; Ukraine/US/NATO a dangerous loser. As Israel defies the UN, and as the “exceptional” geniuses around Biden ignore Kremlin warnings regarding provocations re Ukraine, the likelihood increases for US use of tactical nukes.

    Desperadoes do desperate things.  In Biden and Netanyahu we have two blood-thirsty nihilists at the end of their ropes.  These masters of war make me think that a better title for this piece would have been:

    If the World Goes On.

    The post If The Wars Go On first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • East or West? West is Best

    Konstantin Kisin emigrated to Britain in 1993 at age 11, to join the flood of Russian emigres, high and low, looking for a new life. Kisin is the usual: loves the West, hates the Soviet Union, hates Putin. Ironically, the best writing in this billet doux is Kisin’s depiction of the Soviet Union as genuinely socialist: health care, free education, economic equality. His paean to the freedom and dignity that many in the West take for granted, as reviewed by Peter Boghossian, is self parody. Kisin is also a stand-up comic, a would-be enfant terrible, so he’s comfortable with over-the-top. We learn from the book blurb that ‘he experienced both untold wealth and grinding poverty.’ Not.

    There are two more slots for Konstantin. Jewish. Probably 1/4. His grandfather was a gynaecologist who in 1980 protested openly the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, promptly became a nonperson, and his family blacklisted. The fall from Soviet grace was hard (sorry, no ‘grinding poverty’) and grandpa emigrated to Britain.

    The real story on grandpa is most likely the following. His Jewish great-grandpa was falsely arrested in the 1920s. However, as an engineer, he was still of use to the new socialism, so he lived out his 10 years in the Gulag with three more years added for the hell of it and exile in Siberia till Khrushchev spilled the beans on Stalin and sent everyone home. He had been a devoted communist at the start and seems to have left his prison years behind, welcomed back into the socialist fold, allowing his son (Konstantin’s father) to become the celebrated doctor with fancy car and prestige apartment. Thank you, Nikita.

    The family quickly became part of the nomenklatura and things looked rosy until 1980. Clearly, the gynaecologist had become a dissident, foolishly poking his finger at the bear at a very delicate time. Being a dissident Jew in 1980 in Russia, with Israel and world Jewry hysterically shouting down naive Soviet calls for peace and socialism, demanding the mass emigration of half the Soviet elite NOW, was not a happy vocation. Unless you planned to leave. Again the story is muddled, but Konstantin’s story is that his parents decided he should join grandfather in England and go to a private school. Many Russians gave up hope in the 1990s and looked to the West for a good future. So at 11, he was put on a plane unaccompanied, and began his long march to fame and fortune at the heart of Russia’s traditional enemy.

    His other moniker is dissident. While Konstantin never suffered directly in Moscow and became a devoted anglophile, he seems to have inherited the smart-ass, rabblerouser Jewish gene, and he prides himself in his tussles with political correctness [critical race theory (CRT)], occasionally being banned and censored, which of course only adds to his cachet, provides grist for his podcast and more ‘untold wealth’.

    That is how I stumbled upon Kisin. What a puzzle: Jewish Russian emigre, smart, young, anglophile … but ‘alt-right’, as he gleefully admits he’s been called? ‘All very, very Soviet.’ Disser of CRT, trans, lgbtqaetc. And bestselling author at 40. I wanted to piece together this puzzle.

    An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West starts with an earnest quote from Solzhenitsyn about the decline of the spiritual life leading to social collapse: a tree with a rotten core cannot stand. Hmm. Kisin as a footnote to Solzhenitsyn’s Jeremiad about the decline of both the Soviet Union and the West, but no. Kisin was referring only to the Soviet Union, still hoping the West will recover its soul. It is more interesting as a picture of the confused attempt to justify abandoning his homeland and embrace its enemy. You feel sorry for him at the end, with no sense of where he belongs.

    He starts with the anecdote about opening Tamerlane’s tomb on June 21, 1941, inscribed Whoever disturbs my tomb will unleash an invader more terrible than I. Tamerlane was given a proper Muslim burial on December 20, 1942, in time for the Battle of Stalingrad, ensuring the defeat of Hitler, so that had a happy ending. He sees CRT as the equivalent of Tamerlane. ‘Today, the fate of western civilization hangs in the balance once again. The tomb of discord and division has been forced open by a small group of ideological zealots. Retreat is no longer an option.’

    True, the world around us is indeed changing at unprecedented speed. People are indeed afraid to express their viewers, men and women are opponents, mention of race separates us. He’s right about CRT, but wrong about just about everything else.

    Trust me: West is best

    His first two chapter are great but for the wrong reasons. The social legacy of the Soviet Union which morphs into black Americans’ ‘the talk’, advice to children about how to act if they’re stopped by police. He had the same lecture as a child in the Soviet Union (SU), except he was instructed ‘how to keep our private conversations secret from the State.’ Cool. The US is becoming like the SU. He trots out Pavlik Morozov (a Stalin-era story of a boy betraying his ‘wrecker’ father), comparing him to Bernie Sanders (?) as a ‘useful idiot’. ‘They are generally the sort of college-educated westerner who embraces this bankrupt ideology [communism] without having any understanding of its real-world implications.’

    He then boldly admits that there was optimal income distribution in the Soviet Union (the elite earned 4x what workers earned) vs the 1000+x difference in the West). This was in fact the secret as to why the SU survived so long (and the reason it is mourned by the vast majority of Russians today). Free health, university education (students actually paid a stipend to study!), no racism, no ‘white privilege’, women’s rights, abortion, child care … Things he is disappointed not to see in the West, which he can’t understand. But there’s a catch in all this. Equality, but where everyone is poor, i.e., the Soviet solution to inequality is to cut off people’s legs, though he doesn’t specify that it’s the rich people’s legs that are cut off, so to speak.

    Okay, the SU never managed to ‘catch up’ to the West in money income, consumerism, but that’s not the point. At the Muslim Association of Canada 2024 conference ‘Seizing the moment’, Hussein Elkazzaz addressed this false comparison of the West with the Islamic world, which is really just the other ‘other’ for us in the West, like communism.

    It assumes you are western, interested only in money and things, so if, say, Egypt is poor, then it is bad, a failure. But, Elkazzaz asks, can you worship freely? Observer the holy days in a vibrant spiritual community? Bring your children up in a safe environment, without the Hollywood-driven culture undermining morality? Some Muslim Canadians go back when they start a family, as that is what’s really important to them, not money and fancier things.

    For communism too, money and commodities were not considered as important as good education, health, holidays, camps for children, culture that was moral. Muslims, more than communists, are caught between the two worlds, spiritual growth or economic growth. And they are never really compatible. The SU was operating under the handicap of state-legislated atheism, officially replacing religion with communist ideology, a bad fit as it turned out, as ideological as capitalist America or Muslim Egypt but without the latter’s spirituality.

    A study of East Germany and Bulgaria revealed that women had twice as many orgasms in the socialist bloc than in the West. The men were better husbands, the women weren’t stressed by money worries, everyone was equally ‘poor’. Which is nonsense as people didn’t starve. They lived comfortably. The Soviet Union was widely respected in the global south. That’s why I liked communism. It was people-oriented, a friend of the postcolonial world, not $-oriented (to a fault). I liked that workers were honored vs our capitalists feted and treated like kings.

    Re universal health care, Kisin is blissfully unaware, by his own admission, as to why Trump, ‘even the almighty Clintons and Barack Obama, couldn’t figure that one out.’ Really? How about capitalism? But no, Kisin loves capitalism. And let’s not forget sunny Cuba and its woes. Sanctions and subversion for 60+ years. The SU endured the same treatment from 1917 till it finally collapsed 74 years later, bringing down most of the socialist world with all its many advantages.

    As for freedom, again Kisin admits his parents, and anyone else who cared, had lively debates at home. Everyone was literate and all the pre-Soviet-era classics of world literature and science were available to all. Yes, you had to watch your tongue in public. The SU was never really at peace with a hostile West, so it was naturally paranoid. If you paid any attention to world affairs, that would have been abundantly clear. Nice Cuba also has to restrain its frustrated population to preserve socialism.

    Socialism is not easy to build and is easily destroyed, as the whirlwind collapse of the SU showed. And what comes after it is the nasty what-came-before, only worse, as vengeance must be enacted. So empty shelves are a drag, but as long as no one suffers malnutrition, there is definitely a good case to keep socialism alive in the face of unremitting hostility.

    Magical sky men

    Kisin identifies the underlying problem being the Russian revolution itself, inspired by ideology rejecting real world capitalism. ‘Instead of wasting time trying to create a perfection, which can’t be achieved, the best we can do is deal with reality as we find it.’ Presumably that goes for all revolutions. Kisin excepts the American revolution and its ideology of liberalism, free speech and consumerism.

    Kisin compares the modern West to the cargo cults that sprung up among the Melanesian islanders during and after WWII. The trinkets, guns, SPAM were all magical things these nice sky men brought. The Melanesians are skilled carvers so they fashioned mock guns and headphones of wood and sat in makeshift control towers, even flapping their arms on pretend runways. Lesson? ‘We have forgotten that the prosperity, safety, life expectancy, stability and freedoms we enjoy did not just fall out of the sky. They have stood the test of time.’ Oh, really?

    His analogy with Melanesians is flawed. They saw the sky men as gods with nice miraculous things, and they wanted the things. They didn’t care about western ideology, which indeed is flimsy and is collapsing before our eyes, much like the Soviet ideology of ‘real existing socialism’ collapsed before his eyes. And the magical things we get from Chinese sky men are ‘here today, gone tomorrow’, leaving us high and dry, much like the Melanesians.

    As he described the Melanesians, I was thinking ‘what an apt analogy for the mindless consumerism of the late Soviet period, when anything western, from bubble gum to sleek cars, was worshipped and coveted as if it could magically make Soviets feel happy.

    Kisin and his fellow Russians view westerners as naive and ‘drunk on decadence, so accustomed to liberty and prosperity that they take it for granted and appear to be throwing it away, completely unaware of its inherent value and fragility.’ They are replacing it with postmodern ideologies culminating in transgenderism, and the cancelling/ destruction of western culture as racist etc.

    Kisin is a mirror image to Dmitry Orlov, a hard-nosed Russian American whose Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects (2011) compare the collapse-preparedness of the US and the SU, arguing that the SU was a mild collapse compared to what’s in store for a totally unprepared, over-the-top arrogant US. Like Orlov, Kisin sees the weakness underlying western society, but can’t see the bankruptcy of both the ideology and reality of the West. His hopes for a miraculous renewal of western society are doomed, much like Gorbachev’s hopes of renewing ‘real existing socialism’ with hasty market reforms, still trapped in the materialist ideology.

    I can sympathize with Kisin’s naivete, as I became a communist and lived in hope of a Soviet renewal, reaffirming the ideology of universal brotherhood, real equality, state-funded health and education. It turned out that that ideology-reality was doomed too. Too far apart there. They are equally far apart in the West now too. How about a reality check? Prosperity? Safety? Life expectancy? Stability? Freedoms? Peace? No comment.

    Apologist Kisin and Polyanna Pinker

    Kisin is an acolyte of Steven Pinker, whose Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018) seriously claims the world has never been in such a wonderful state, prosperous, blessed with ‘knowledge, mobilized to improve human welfare’.1

    Kisin is a hard-nosed Russian Brit, with no use for ‘pathological altruism’ or any of the ‘wacky, postmodernist, semi-Soviet viruses’. He chastises the West for too much freedom, e.g., Jimi Hendrix or Michael Jackson, ‘as if their success was their undoing.’ Well, yes, they did have too much material success. Soviet artists lived the high life but a very modest one. I don’t know of any tragedies of the scale of Michael Jackson there.

    When capitalism takes control of culture, it encourages the image of freedom, while poisoning the actual lives being lived. We need constraints, especially artists, something to fight against in the interests of Truth. If there is no truth, only ‘drugs, sex and rock ‘n roll’, of course, overnight success becomes the road to infamy, culture degenerates. Kisin sneers at lefty ‘massive wasters snorting failed theories and downing shots of communism, or occasionally injecting socialism straight into our veins, even though we know it’s bad for us.’ That’s just the price of ‘freedom’.

    Poe, Freud and Visigoths

    Edgar Allan Poe explains in The imp of the perverse (1845) that knowing something is bad for us is the one unconquerable force that compels us to do it. Freud took this to Einstein when he asked Freud if we could avoid war and conflict. Freud replied that we have a tendency to self-sabotage, Thanatos. People are their own worst enemies and strive to bring themselves and the world to ruin, ‘to reduce life to its original condition of inanimate matter.’ We distract ourselves from stress, guilt, fear of death with reckless behavior, leading ourselves and the world to destruction.

    Kisin can’t explain this (like his incomprehension of the lack of universal health care in the US) except as ‘too much freedom’. That’s no explanation, though again, he is right that we are gaslit into thinking that it’s western culture that’s to blame and that the way forward is backwards, to cancel culture, to yet another revolution. To start again, this time basing our (magical) thinking on race, making sure that there’s a balance of colors everywhere, that this balance, like Lenin’s communism, will somehow bring peace and prosperity. He likens the new ideology to a bacterial infection, which targeted and killed Christianity, the English language and capitalism.

    Nonsense! Christianity was in steep decline by the mid-19th century, capitalism is alive and well. Kisin is right about how language is being held hostage (be careful what you say doesn’t hurt anyone’s feelings), but it’s not just woke culture that’s responsible. It’s technology, pushing us to write like AI. You are now a ‘client’ at the public library rather than a patron.

    But a good chunk of cancel culture is well-founded. There’s no getting around it: West was in fact built on slavery, racism, militarism and genocide. Kisin has no time for that. But he has no idea how to stop cancel culture and renew the social fabric. Many argue that ‘a good war’ is the solution’ though he demurs. He wants ‘liberals to have a little bit of grit in their oyster.’

    Kisin is caught in his ‘love letter to the West’ by the contradictions of capitalism, where freedom means more sexual violence, and social malaise is solved by war, which conveniently increases profit and leads to greater ‘prosperity’. He bemoans the ‘new tsars’ who want to flatten everything and start again, much like what happened in the Soviet Union and which led to woeful results. He compares the West to the Roman empire brought to its knees when Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in the 5th century, quoting Carinal Robert Sarah: Europe has lost the sense of its origins. And, like a tree without roots, it will die. ‘Ancient Greece and Rome were the most advanced civilizations of their day. Technologically, culturally, philosophcally, scientifically and politically. Right up until the moment they collapsed.’ Hello Dmitry Orlov!

    From Marx to Islam?

    This is what was missing in Marx’s critique of capitalism – the psychological side of any attempt to make socialism work. Contrary to Kisin (and Thatcher), socialism is the only way out of our physical destruction of the world at this point, so we better get on board fast. This (huge) hole in Marx’s social theory was seized upon by CRT, a pseudo-Marxism which views everything via race.

    No! Kisin reacts viscerally to CRT, but his hatred of all things Soviet prevents him from appreciating that precious part of Soviet reality: an end to racism, and to make sure, you tax the rich and keep income distribution within bounds. Racism is, in the last analysis, economic. Kisin talks about ‘learning from mistakes’ but has no interest in a fair assessment of Soviet experience as important for us precisely now.

    We have to build on what worked in the SU and what didn’t, including psychology as a vital part of any answer. He stands by ‘the marriage of free-market capitalism and western liberal democracy, despite the ‘fact’ that they are both at the center of the problem. He knows that income inequality means a bad society, that ‘people’s subjective experience of life is that they are losing,’ that taxing the rich is the unpalatable answer, i.e., socialism. ‘That the ugliness of socialism is only matched by the grotesqueness of capitalism’s excesses,’ but rather than promoting a political backbone to tax the rich, he lamely concludes that ‘society is usually fucked.’

    Kisin considers us ‘by far and away the luckiest people in history.’ He even claims capitalism creates peace (‘The UK is currently a nation at peace.’), meaning Friedman’s Golden Arches theory of conflict prevention. So why are Macdonalds trashed and  forced to shut down across the Middle East, as IDF soldiers are fed free Big Macs in pursuit of … by far and away not ‘peace’?

    Kisin’s family’s ‘dissident Jew’ status was unpleasant, but understandable. Those that wanted to managed to leave, happy and healthy. The SU was not ‘a complete fucking nightmare’ as Kisin claims. It did not ‘collapse under the weight of its own flaws’ so much as it was subverted to death, done in by paranoia and consumerism. And the post-Soviet ethnic strife was not a return to primordial animal instincts so much as the lifting of a firm social norm of equality, replaced by greed, which loves dissent and strife, the better to chain the masses to a soulless consumerism.

    Read some Marx, Kostya! Have another look at your Soviet-Russian homeland which tirelessly fought for peace from 1917 and was met by war, invasion and subterfuge right up until 2024 and for many more horrible, blood-drenched years, until ‘the collective West’ is defeated. Who incited and why the current war in Ukraine? Whose missiles are raining down on Russian Crimea, Belgorod, the Kremlin?

    Or better yet, have a look at Islam, which meets your socially conservative goals, but unlike capitalism and like socialism, is not so much concerned with flooding the world with consumer junk, but creating a society where your heath and education are free, where social harmony is maintained by redistributing income, where peace is not just hoped for as a by-product of greed, but is the priority of all people, of society, the ummah. Where we have the best conditions to praise God for the bounties we have been blessed with, where we are encouraged to do this with humility. But then there is not a trace of humility in Kisin’s worship of capitalism and ‘his’ talents (as if he produced them), and his new-found exciting consumerist paradise. Our enfant terrible is really just a terrible infant.

    ENDNOTE

    The post East or West? West is Best first appeared on Dissident Voice.
    1    In 2020, an open letter to the Linguistic Society of America requesting the removal of Pinker from its list of LSA Fellows and media experts was signed by hundreds of academics. The letter accused Pinker of a ‘pattern of drowning out the voices of people suffering from racist and sexist violence, in particular in the immediate aftermath of violent acts and/or protests against the systems that created them.’

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Report: Pegasus spyware targets exiled journalists from Russia, Latvia, Belarus

    New York, May 30, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply troubled by a Thursday report by rights group Access Now and research organization Citizen Lab alleging that Pegasus spyware was used to surveil at least five journalists.

    The report, “Exiled, then spied on: Civil society in Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland targeted with Pegasus spyware,” identified at least seven people whose devices were targeted between 2020 and 2023 by Pegasus, a form of zero-click spyware produced by the Israeli company NSO Group.

    “Today’s report raises major concerns about the use of spyware against journalists and shows once again that the press is among the main targets of Pegasus spyware,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Journalists should not be spied on, and these new attacks mean that governments urgently need to implement an immediate moratorium on the development, sale, and use of spyware technologies.”

    The targets included four named journalists and one Lithuania-based exiled Russian journalist whose device was targeted in June 2023 around an event in Riga, Latvia, and who requested to remain anonymous. The report describes the following attacks on the four named journalists:

    • Latvia-based exiled Russian journalist Maria Epifanova’s device was infected in August 2020, “the earliest known use of Pegasus to target Russian civil society,” the report said. Epifanova is the CEO of independent news outlet Novaya Gazeta Europe, which Russian authorities outlawed as “undesirable” in June 2023. The report said the infection occurred when Epifanova was chief editor of Novaya Gazeta Baltija — which covers Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia — and “shortly after she received accreditation to attend exiled Belarusian democratic opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya’s first press conference in Vilnius,” the capital of Lithuania.  

    “Regardless of who is behind this attack, invasion in private life is unacceptable. I am now working with a lawyer to decide on the next steps and will do my best to bring more light onto my own case and cases of my colleagues,” Epifanova told CPJ.

    • Latvia-based exiled Israeli-Russian journalist Evgeniy Erlich’s device was infected in late November 2022 while on vacation in Austria, the report said. Erlich, an independent producer, has worked with various media outlets, including broadcaster Current Time TV and Votvot, an on-demand Russian-language streaming platform. Both outlets are affiliated with the U.S. Congress-funded broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL).

    Erlich told CPJ that “we will most likely never know” who ordered the attacks.

    • Latvian journalist Evgeniy Pavlov’s device was targeted in November 2022 and April 2023. Pavlov, a former correspondent with Novaya Gazeta Baltija and a freelance journalist for Current Time TV’s “Baltija” program, told CPJ that he was in Latvia at both times. Access Now was unable to confirm if the attempts were successful.

    “If the intelligence services of any country can interfere with the activities of journalists in this way, it poses a very great threat to free and safe journalism. And to free speech in general,” Pavlov told CPJ.

    “My phone was illegally tapped in Belarus, where I was persecuted for political reasons, prosecuted, and imprisoned by the KGB [Belarusian national security service],” Radina told CPJ. “I know that…my absolutely legal journalistic activity can be of interest only to Belarusian and Russian special services, and I am only afraid of the possible cooperation in this matter of the present operators, whoever they are, with the KGB or the FSB [Russian Federal Security Service].”

    In an email response to CPJ, the vice president of global communications for NSO group, Gil Lainer, maintained that the organization complies with all laws and regulations, emphasizing that it only sells to vetted intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and to allies of Israel and the United States. Lainer added that NSO group investigates all credible claims of misuse, adding that a number of investigations resulted in the suspension or termination of accounts.

    A 2022 CPJ special report noted that the development of high-tech “zero-click” spyware like Pegasus — the kind that takes over a phone without a user’s knowledge or interaction — poses an existential crisis for journalism and the future of press freedom around the world. The report included CPJ’s recommendations to protect journalists and their sources from the abuse of the technology and called for an immediate moratorium on exporting this technology to countries with poor human rights records.

    CPJ has also joined other rights groups in calling for immediate action to stop spyware threatening press freedom.

    In September 2023, an investigation released by Access Now and Citizen Lab revealed that the phone of Galina Timchenko, the head of independent Russian-language news website Meduza, who has lived in Latvia since 2014, was infected by Pegasus while she was in Germany in February 2023.

    The next day, Epifanova, Pavlov, and Erlich said Apple had notified them that their phone could have been targeted by hacker attacks.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Russia confirms detention of Ukrainian journalist Viktoria Roshchina

    New York, May 29, 2024—Russian authorities must immediately release Ukrainian journalist Viktoria Roshchina and end the practice of illegally detaining Ukrainian journalists in occupied territories, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Wednesday.

    “CPJ strongly denounces Russian authorities’ detention of journalist Viktoria Roshchina, who went missing 300 days ago while reporting in Russian-occupied Ukraine,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Russian authorities must immediately release Roshchina and stop detaining Ukrainian nationals. Journalists must be able to freely report on the war without fear of reprisal. Ukrainian authorities should include Ukrainian journalists captured by Russia in prisoner exchange plans to bring them home to safety.”

    The Russian Ministry of Defense confirmed in an April 17 letter to Roshchina’s father that the journalist was detained and “currently in the territory of the Russian Federation,” according to a May 27 report by the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine (NUJU), a local advocacy and trade group.

    “The most important is that Russia has officially recognized its responsibility for Viktoria’s fate. We all need to make great efforts to see our colleague free. But this confirmation gives us a

    chance,” NUJU’s head Sergiy Tomilenko told CPJ.

    Roshchina’s detention was later confirmed by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which told her father that there was currently no access to her, NUJU reported.

    Roshchina is a freelance reporter who has been covering the war in Ukraine for several Ukrainian media outlets, including independent Ukrainian news website Ukrainska Pravda, regional news website Novosti Donbassa, and privately owned news website Censor.net. She went missing on August 3, 2023, when she traveled to the occupied territories of eastern Ukraine to report on the situation there.

    In March 2022, Roshchina was detained by Russian forces for 10 days while reporting in southeastern Ukraine. That same month, Russian forces in Ukraine’s southeastern Zaporizhzhia region fired on her vehicle.

    CPJ’s emails to the Russian Ministry of Defense and the International Committee of the Red Cross about Roshchina did not receive an immediate response.

    Multiple Ukrainian journalists have been detained in the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine. The whereabouts of former journalist Iryna Levchenko, missing since early May 2023, of journalist Dmytro Khilyuk, detained in early March 2022, and of journalists Heorhiy Levchenko and Anastasiya Glukhovska, detained in August 2023, are still unknown.

    Russia was the world’s fourth-worst jailer of journalists in CPJ’s 2023 prison census, with at least 22 journalists behind bars as of December 1.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.