MOSCOW — American, British and Canadian troops in NATO’s forward bases in Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania are being told to prepare for deployment to the Ukraine next year. They are also being warned to expect to fight under heavy Russian artillery, missile, guided bomb, and drone strikes.
This message is also intended to slip into the hands of Russian military intelligence and find its way to the Kremlin. There, Moscow sources believe, the intelligence is interpreted as provocation — part of the US and NATO scheme to escalate NATO attacks in the Black Sea and deep into Russian territory, in order to encourage Russian counter-attacks against NATO targets, triggering thereby Article Five of the NATO Treaty and collective NATO force intervention to follow.
Additionally, Russian sources interpret the intelligence as confirming that the US will not allow capitulation and replacement of Vladimir Zelensky and his regime in Kiev — so no denazification, which is one of the two main objectives of the Special Military Operation. Also, no peace terms will be countenanced short of Russian withdrawal from Crimea and the four regions of Novorossiya, and the military defeat of the Russian Army. So, no demilitarization, the second of Russia’s long-term security objectives.
The immediate General Staff response has been to devise “soft” measures to combat the US, UK and other NATO airborne electronic warfare units which are providing guidance, targeting, launch timing and flight manoeuvre of Storm Shadow and ATACMS missiles, as well as coordination of Ukrainian aerial and naval drone strikes. The Russian command has also unleashed a new round of missile attacks against Ukrainian airfields – Voznesensk and Mirgorod – where the bombers launching long-range Storm Shadow cruise missiles are based, and where the NATO-supplied F-16s are planned for deployment in a few weeks’ time.
Under growing domestic pressure to counter attacks as damaging to civilians as the Sevastopol beach strike of June 23, President Vladimir Putin has been making a sequence of statements of calculated ambiguity, if not of strategic deception. One interpretation of this by security analysts in Moscow is that the president is avoiding the provocation trap, creating instead a record of peace terms he is offering, confident they will be dismissed in Kiev, Brussels, London, and Washington. This is to reserve Russian freedom of action for now, reverse the blame later on.
On Friday, in Putin’s remarks to the press after meeting at the Kremlin with Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orban – currently the rotational president of the European Union Council – Putin repeated his peace terms offer and his expectation of their rejection: “We remain open for a discussion on a political and diplomatic settlement. However, the opposite side only makes clear its reluctance to resolve this issue in this manner. Ukraine’s sponsors continue using this country and its people as a ram, making it a victim in the confrontation with Russia.”
“We outlined our peace initiative quite recently at my meeting with the senior officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation. We believe that its implementation would make it possible to end hostilities and begin negotiations. Moreover, this should not just be a truce or a temporary ceasefire, nor should it be a pause that the Kiev regime could use to recover its losses, regroup and rearm. Russia advocates a full and final end to the conflict. The conditions for that, as I have already said, are set out in my speech at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We are talking about the complete withdrawal of all Ukrainian troops from the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and from the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions. There are other conditions as well.”
Putin is not alone in the war staff – the Stavka – in suspecting provocation by the Americans and British while they prepare for escalation to direct war. Also, the Stavka recognizes this was Stalin’s problem interpreting intelligence from Tokyo and Berlin, especially Richard Sorge’s cables from December 1940 through the early days of June 1941, warning of Hitler’s preparations to invade across the Soviet border.
Moscow sources are sure that avoiding Stalin’s catastrophic misjudgement of Hitler’s timing is a priority of Putin’s and of the General Staff. Misjudging the timing of the US coup in Kiev of February 21, 2014, almost cost the loss of Sevastopol and Crimea; misjudging the readiness of Ukrainian forces at Hostemel on February 24, 2022, cost the lives of at least 300 Russian paratroopers, failed at triggering regime change in Kiev, and doomed the peace negotiations in Istanbul of March 30.
“We told you so” is not a refrain the Kremlin is hearing now from the General Staff for the first time.
Putin’s reluctance to act is criticized in Moscow as the pace of the Ukrainian missile and drone raids increases. “I know for a fact that General Staff fully anticipated NATO’s involvement from the start and contingency planning has been done accordingly,” reported the US-based military analyst Andrei Martyanov on July 3. “It was clear from the first day of SMO [Special Military Operation] not now. The only issue was how Russia will approach escalation and the gradual involvement of NATO until it becomes clear that it is between combined West and Russia.”
“What happened to no NATO, and de-Nazification?” a military source asks. “The Americans, Ukrainians, British have been escalating and the president has been temporizing in response,” he answers. “I don’t believe Orban is just making overtures in Hungary’s interests either. He’s an emissary for Trump’s end-the-war plan”.
The source is referring to Orban’s boostering for Trump’s election in November. “You can criticize [Trump] for many reasons,” Orban has said, “but the best foreign policy of the recent several decades belongs to him. He did not initiate any new war, he treated nicely the North Koreans, and Russia and even the Chinese … and if he would have been the president at the moment of the Russian invasion [of Ukraine], it would be not possible to do that by the Russians. Trump is the man who can save the Western world.”
No other NATO member but Orban, the US ambassador said in Budapest last week, “not a single one — that similarly, overtly and tirelessly, campaigns for a specific candidate in an election in the United States of America, seemingly convinced that, no matter what, it only helps Hungary, or at least helps him personally.”
Moscow sources suspect Orban told Putin he is Trump’s go-between on terms for ending the war in the Ukraine. Orban openly hinted at this himself, telling the press after their meeting “we will not achieve peace without diplomacy, without channels of communication.” As Trump’s channel, Orban then repeated Trump’s recent claims that he will end the war the day after he wins the election on November 5. “I wanted to know what the shortest road to end the war is. I wanted to hear Mr President’s opinion on three important questions, and I heard his opinion. What does he think about the current peace initiatives? What does he think about a ceasefire and peace talks, and in what succession can they be carried out? And the third thing that interested me was Mr President’s vision of Europe after the war.”
For analysis of Trump’s claims and the staff plan he authorized for release in April, click to read this.
For Orban’s repeat version of what he claims to be doing, and his omission of everything which has transpired before he arrived on the scene by “secret message”, “under the carpet”, and “surprise”, watch this interview with the owner of a Swiss German magazine.
“Next surprise on Monday morning”, Orban told his Weltwoche interviewer. “You will see – follow the path”. This was no surprise in Moscow because Orban had told Putin he was planning to fly to Beijing to meet President Xi Jinping, and the Russian milbloggers were briefed hours before the western propaganda agencies, Reuters, Deutsche Welle, and the Voice of America picked up the story. The first Moscow report on Sunday evening commented that Orban is performing “cynical antics”. “Orban is advertising his trip to Moscow. Tomorrow morning [Monday July 8] Orban is waiting in Beijing, where negotiations are expected with Comrade Xi Jinping.”
There is no Russian military confidence in Trump’s proposals, or in Orban’s version of them, or in the Russian oligarchs also presenting themselves to the Kremlin as go-betweens. Instead, there is suspicion that Trump and his intermediaries are attempting to hoodwink the Kremlin with a repeat of the “October surprise” with Iran of Ronald Reagan’s first election campaign in 1980.
To support their case for reciprocal measures, the General Staff are making sure the military bloggers in Moscow report each day on the escalation of frequency, range, and damage of Ukrainian raids, directed by manned aircraft and drones directed from the Black Sea by the US and the UK.
The map shows Ukrainian (AFU) strikes by air-fired missile, aerial and naval drones over July 5 and 6, as well their launch points west of the current line of contact, and Russian air defence interceptions. “At night, Ukrainian formations again attacked the oil infrastructure with drones in the Krasnodar Krai [Territory] off the coast of the Sea of Azov. Several settlements were hit. The work of the air defence was noted in Yeysk, Pavlovskaya, Leningradskaya. The drones were shot down by 51 air defence divisions, but some of the debris from the warheads fell on to the territory of power facilities, but did not cause serious damage.”
“However, this is the second day in a row when the enemy is attacking the coastal zones of the Sea of Azov. Yesterday, Primorsko-Akhtarsk became the target of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, in the direction of which 20 drones were launched. Almost all of them were shot down by air defence calculations and units of the 4th Army. However, one UAV hit a local [power] substation, which caused problems with electric lighting. After that, the Ukrainian Armed Forces struck again: this time three Neptune anti-ship missiles were launched from the territory of the Zaporozhye region, which are increasingly being observed along the entire line of contact, starting from Belgorod and ending with Crimea. Two missiles were shot down by air defence units; one went off course and hit a residential building, which injured civilians. A little later, seven Ukrainian drones were shot down between Rostov-on-Don and Bataisk. The ultimate objective remains unclear: this could be oil depots, or maybe the drones were flying further in the direction of the Morozovsk airfield. And there was trouble in Crimea yesterday [July 5]. During the day, missile and unmanned drones were introduced at least 5-6 times, and in most cases due to deception missile launches and false targets. However, at one point, a Ukrainian Su-24M bomber launched two Storm Shadow cruise missiles, which were shot down near Tarkhankut and south of Yevpatoria by MiG-31 fighters of the Russian Aerospace Forces.”
The milbloggers leave no doubt that the USAF Global Hawk (RQ-4B) electronic war drone has returned to Black Sea airspace from its new base in Romania to direct the new Ukrainian raids.
Zvinchuk’s Rybar has also reposted a report on NATO preparations for basing NATO ground forces, manned aircraft, and drones on Romanian territory, as well as for repairing HIMARS and other artillery units salvaged from the Ukrainian battlefield, in order to return them to action.
For a list of the eight forward battlegroups NATO is preparing for direct NATO war against Russia, click to read.
On the fareastern front which Russia shares with China, Vzglyad has just published a warning that “NATO is approaching Russia’s borders from the other side.” The author, Gevorg Mirzoyan, is a regular writer for the semi-official security medium Vzglyad and an academic at the state Finance University in Moscow.
Source: https://vz.ru/
Days after the publication, a Ukrainian military publication reported the first ever Chinese Army deployment in Belarus for exercises described as “anti-terrorist training”. NATO is approaching Russia’s borders from the other side By Gevorg Mirzayan July 4, 2024
The NATO bloc will become a global one in the medium term, the experts say. They are referring to the possible advance of the alliance in the Pacific region – directly at the borders of China and the Far Eastern borders of Russia. How will this happen and how can it affect relations between Russia and China?
The leadership of the North Atlantic Alliance has announced its readiness to participate more actively in East Asian affairs. This is ostensibly a response to China’s actions.
Firstly, because of its cooperation with Russia. “The growing rapprochement between Russia and its authoritarian friends in Asia makes our work with friends in the Indo-Pacific region even more important,” says NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. Western states are looking for the culprits in this – and find them in the person of the Chinese comrades, who, they say, have provided Russia with everything necessary to confront the “civilized world.”
Secondly, because China’s actions allegedly threaten the security of Europe. “Publicly, President Xi pretends that he avoids the conflict in Ukraine in order to avoid sanctions and maintain trade relations. However, in fact, China supports the largest military conflict in Europe since World War II, while wishing to maintain good relations with the West,” continues Stoltenberg.
In China, of course, they deny all the accusations. “NATO is a product of the Cold War and the largest military force in the world. Instead of denigrating China and attacking it with all sorts of statements, NATO should realize the role that the alliance has played in the Ukrainian crisis,” said the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Lin Jian (right). According to him, China is neither the initiator nor a party to the Ukrainian crisis. “I advise the parties concerned to stop shifting responsibility and sowing discord, to refrain from adding fuel to the fire and provoking an inter-bloc confrontation. And instead do something useful for a political solution to the crisis,” the diplomat explained.
Moreover, the Chinese claim NATO has no place in East Asia, if only because the organization will bring with it only conflicts and wars. “All countries of the Asia-Pacific region are committed to promoting peace and development. Americans need to respect this commitment and also work for peace and development, and not bring block confrontation and conflict with them to the region,” the Chinese Embassy in Washington has said in a statement.
However, the Americans seem to ignore these accusations. The arrival of NATO in East Asia has already been resolved for them — it will be implemented under whatever administration comes next. And the statement about China’s partisan involvement in the Ukrainian crisis is just an excuse, as well as a rhetorical device in order to put pressure on the European countries and convince/force them to support the expansion of NATO to the Far East.
“The fact is that Europe is trying to avoid genuine participation in the military confrontation with China. And it motivates this by the fact that the confrontation with Russia is already difficult enough. Europe is ready to support the United States verbally, but at the same time it is not even ready to allocate money for the fareast confrontation, not to mention sending the military to the shores of China,” Vadim Trukhachev, associate professor at the Russian State University, explains to Vzglyad.
“The Americans are really creating a global planetary player or a police organization out of NATO. And they’re not shy about talking about it – to argue that not only American bases, but also European and other bases should restrain China. All this has already been implemented in the form of small missions, and now the Americans are pushing the topic of creating NATO rapid reaction forces. Now these troops consist of 30,000 people, but they want to increase them to 300,000,” Andrei Klintsevich, head of the Center for the Study of Military and Political Conflicts, explains to Vzglyad.
Left to right: Gevorg Mirzayan of the Finance University; Vadim Trukhachev of the Russian State University for the Humanities; and Andrei Klintsevich, Trukhachev’s assesment of Orban’s “peacemaking” mission can be read here.
Such international forces, Polish, German, French and Italian, would operate outside national command and control. “That is, at any moment, the NATO general picks up the phone and, on instructions from Washington, issues a directive to certain units without the approval of their national parliaments. And the troops are flying away to carry out the multinational task,” Klintsevich continues.
Europe’s sluggish resistance to the prospects of such a deployment is the last problem on the way to the Far Eastern expansion of the alliance. Moreover, there are already enough countries in the Far East which are ready to support the arrival of NATO in the region.
Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea are seen as the key partners of the alliance here. Countries that are very much afraid of China’s growth. Which are much more dependent on the United States than India, and will attend the NATO summit in Washington. According to US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, the Indo-Pacific region is “now more connected to Europe than ever before.”
Finally, the United States has already made certain preparations – for example, the AUKUS bloc (consisting of Australia, United Kingdom, and the United States), which was conceived precisely as a weapon to deter the PRC. “The AUKUS bloc is likely to expand – additional countries will be included, most likely Japan and South Korea. And then this bloc will sign some kind of unification agreement with NATO, after which the alliance will become a global one,” Klintsevich explains.
Australian Prime Minister Albanese meeting NATO Secretary-General Stoltenberg at the NATO summit of July 2023. For the Australian version of joining NATO’s war in the Uklraine, click to read: https://www.afr.com/ NATO’s version of the Australian role in NATO: https://www.nato.int/
China understands the high probability of NATO’s arrival, as well as the fact that they will have to change their policy somewhat. Militarily, Beijing is, of course, ready. “The Chinese have already turned on their full military-industrial machine. They are laying down aircraft carriers in series, creating hypersonic weapons, building bases on landfill artificial islands in areas that they would like to control. The Chinese have imposed an arms race on the Americans – and this process will continue even without NATO moving there,” says Klintsevich.
But Chinese foreign policy will have to be modified. More recently, Beijing used the Ukrainian crisis to score international points. And not only through their peace initiatives.
For example, the Chinese accuse NATO of “nuclear blackmail” (based on Stoltenberg’s statements about the possible deployment of nuclear weapons in Europe). Thus, Beijing not only plays the role of a peacemaker, but also appears to be a kind of spokesman for the opinions of the Global South – non-nuclear countries which look with fear at the games of their nuclear colleagues. Such a position will also help the Chinese to divert the world’s attention somewhat from their own build-up of the nuclear arsenal (to which Beijing, not being a signatory to any START, has every right).
We are now talking about a confrontation already in the traditionally Chinese sphere of influence. Not on other people’s shores, but on their own. Which can be defended only with the support of Moscow – resource, infrastructure, political, and all other forms of support.
“This reduces the Chinese room for manoeuvre – it will be more difficult for them to push us into discounts on hydrocarbons and other aspects of Sino-Russian economic cooperation. The realization of a real confrontation with America will force them to build relations with us in a slightly different way. Just because, one by one, we are all just being pushed around,” Klintsevich sums up.
As a result, NATO’s expansion into the Far East could lead to what expansion in Europe has led to already. To bring together and unite the opponents of the United States.
The original of the lead image was this cartoon of August 1939, showing Hitler wrestling with the Russian bear. This was a comment on the non-aggression pact agreed between Hitler and Stalin and signed on August 25, 1939, by foreign ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov. It was known officially as the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. On December 17, 2021, Putin authorized the Russian Foreign Ministry to present to Biden the Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Security Guarantees. Biden dismissed it without negotiations.
Anti-NATO protest in Chicago, 2012. Photo credit: Julie Dermansky.
After NATO’s catastrophic, illegal invasions of Yugoslavia, Libya and Afghanistan, on July 9th NATO plans to invade Washington DC. The good news is that it only plans to occupy Washington for three days. The British will not burn down the U.S. Capitol as they did in 1814, and the Germans are still meekly pretending that they don’t know who blew up their Nord Stream gas pipelines. So expect smiling photo-ops and an overblown orgy of mutual congratulation.
The details of NATO’s agenda for the Washington summit were revealed at a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting in Prague at the end of May. NATO will drag its members into the U.S. Cold War with China by accusing it of supplying dual-use weapons technology to Russia, and it will unveil new NATO initiatives to spend our tax dollars on a mysterious “drone wall” in the Baltics and an expensive-sounding “integrated air defense system” across Europe.
But the main feature of the summit will be a superficial show of unity to try to convince the public that NATO and Ukraine can defeat Russia and that negotiating with Russia would be tantamount to surrender.
On the face of it, that should be a hard sell. The one thing that most Americans agree on about the war in Ukraine is that they support a negotiated peace. When asked in a November 2023 Economist/YouGov poll “Would you support or oppose Ukraine and Russia agreeing to a ceasefire now?,” 68% said “support,” and only 8% said “oppose,” while 24% said they were not sure.
However, while President Biden and NATO leaders hold endless debates over different ways to escalate the war, they have repeatedly rejected negotiations, notably in April 2022, November 2022 and January 2024, even as their failed war plans leave Ukraine in an ever worsening negotiating position.
The endgame of this non-strategy is that Ukraine will only be allowed to negotiate with Russia once it is facing total defeat and has nothing left to negotiate with – exactly the surrender NATO says it wants to avoid.
As other countries have pointed out at the UN General Assembly, the U.S.and NATO’s rejection of negotiation and diplomacy in favor of a long war they hope will eventually “weaken” Russia is a flagrant violation of the “Pacific Settlement of Disputes” that all UN members are legally committed to under Chapter VI of the UN Charter. As it says in Article 33(1),
The parties to any dispute, the continuance of which is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security, shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice.
But NATO’s leaders are not coming to Washington to work out how they can comply with their international obligations and negotiate peace in Ukraine. On the contrary. At a June meeting in preparation for the Summit, NATO defense ministers approved a plan to put NATO’s military support to Ukraine “on a firmer footing for years to come.”
The effort will be headquartered at a U.S. military base in Wiesbaden, Germany, and involve almost 700 staff. It has been described as a way to “Trump proof” NATO backing for Ukraine, in case Trump wins the election and tries to draw down U.S. support.
At the Summit, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg wants NATO leaders to commit to providing Ukraine with $43 billion worth of equipment each year, indefinitely. Echoing George Orwell’s doublethink that “war is peace”, Stoltenberg said, “The paradox is that the longer we plan, and the longer we commit [to war], the sooner Ukraine can have peace.”
The Summit will also discuss how to bring Ukraine closer to NATO membership, a move that guarantees the war will continue, since Ukrainian neutrality is Russia’s principal war aim.
As Ian Davis of NATO Watch reported, NATO’s rhetoric echoes the same lines he heard throughout twenty years of war in Afghanistan: “The Taliban (now Russia) can’t wait us out.” But this vague hope that the other side will eventually give up is not a strategy.
There is no evidence that Ukraine will be different from Afghanistan. The U.S. and NATO are making the same assumptions, which will lead to the same result. The underlying assumption is that NATO’s greater GDP, extravagant and corrupt military budgets and fetish for expensive weapons technology must somehow, magically, lead Ukraine to victory over Russia.
When the U.S. and NATO finally admitted defeat in Afghanistan, it was the Afghans who had paid in blood for the West’s folly, while the US-NATO war machine simply moved on to its next “challenge,” learning nothing and making political hay out of abject denial.
Less than three years after the rout in Afghanistan, US Defense Secretary Austin recently called NATO “the most powerful and successful alliance in history.” It is a promising sign for the future of Ukraine that most Ukrainians are reluctant to throw away their lives in NATO’s dumpster-fire.
In an article titled “The New Theory of Ukrainian Victory Is the Same as the Old,” the Quincy Institute’s Mark Episkopos wrote, “Western planning continues to be strategically backwards. Aiding Kyiv has become an end in itself, divorced from a coherent strategy for bringing the war to a close”.
Episkopos concluded that “the key to wielding [the West’s] influence effectively is to finally abandon a zero-sum framing of victory…”
We would add that this was a trap set by the United States and the United Kingdom, not just for Ukraine, but for their NATO allies too. By refusing to support Ukraine at the negotiating table in April 2022, and instead demanding this “zero-sum framing of victory” as the condition for NATO’s support, the U.S. and U.K. escalated what could have been a very short war into a protracted, potentially nuclear, war between NATO and Russia.
Turkish leaders and diplomats complained at how their American and British allies undermined their peacemaking, while France, Italy and Germany squirmed for a month or two but soon surrendered to the war camp.
When NATO leaders meet in Washington, what they should be doing, apart from figuring out how to comply with Article 33(1) of the UN Charter, is conducting a clear-eyed review of how this organization that claims to be a force for peace keeps escalating unwinnable wars and leaving countries in ruins.
The fundamental question is whether NATO can ever be a force for peace or whether it can never be anything but a dangerous, subservient extension of the U.S. war machine.
We believe that NATO is an anachronism in today’s multipolar world: an aggressive, expansionist military alliance whose inherent institutional myopia and blinkered, self-serving threat assessments condemn us all to endless war and potential nuclear annihilation.
We suggest that the only way NATO could be a real force for peace would be to declare that, by this time next year, it will take the same steps that its counterpart, the Warsaw Pact, took in 1991, and finally dissolve what Secretary Austin would have been wiser to call “the most dangerous military alliance in history.”
However, the world’s population that is suffering under the yoke of militarism cannot afford to wait for NATO to give up and go away of its own accord. Our fellow citizens and political leaders need to hear from us all about the dangers posed by this unaccountable, nuclear-armed war machine, and we hope you will join us—in person or online—in using the occasion of this NATO summit to sound the alarm loudly.
Anti-NATO protest in Chicago, 2012. Photo credit: Julie Dermansky.
After NATO’s catastrophic, illegal invasions of Yugoslavia, Libya and Afghanistan, on July 9th NATO plans to invade Washington DC. The good news is that it only plans to occupy Washington for three days. The British will not burn down the U.S. Capitol as they did in 1814, and the Germans are still meekly pretending that they don’t know who blew up their Nord Stream gas pipelines. So expect smiling photo-ops and an overblown orgy of mutual congratulation.
The details of NATO’s agenda for the Washington summit were revealed at a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting in Prague at the end of May. NATO will drag its members into the U.S. Cold War with China by accusing it of supplying dual-use weapons technology to Russia, and it will unveil new NATO initiatives to spend our tax dollars on a mysterious “drone wall” in the Baltics and an expensive-sounding “integrated air defense system” across Europe.
But the main feature of the summit will be a superficial show of unity to try to convince the public that NATO and Ukraine can defeat Russia and that negotiating with Russia would be tantamount to surrender.
On the face of it, that should be a hard sell. The one thing that most Americans agree on about the war in Ukraine is that they support a negotiated peace. When asked in a November 2023 Economist/YouGov poll “Would you support or oppose Ukraine and Russia agreeing to a ceasefire now?,” 68% said “support,” and only 8% said “oppose,” while 24% said they were not sure.
However, while President Biden and NATO leaders hold endless debates over different ways to escalate the war, they have repeatedly rejected negotiations, notably in April 2022, November 2022 and January 2024, even as their failed war plans leave Ukraine in an ever worsening negotiating position.
The endgame of this non-strategy is that Ukraine will only be allowed to negotiate with Russia once it is facing total defeat and has nothing left to negotiate with – exactly the surrender NATO says it wants to avoid.
As other countries have pointed out at the UN General Assembly, the U.S.and NATO’s rejection of negotiation and diplomacy in favor of a long war they hope will eventually “weaken” Russia is a flagrant violation of the “Pacific Settlement of Disputes” that all UN members are legally committed to under Chapter VI of the UN Charter. As it says in Article 33(1),
The parties to any dispute, the continuance of which is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security, shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice.
But NATO’s leaders are not coming to Washington to work out how they can comply with their international obligations and negotiate peace in Ukraine. On the contrary. At a June meeting in preparation for the Summit, NATO defense ministers approved a plan to put NATO’s military support to Ukraine “on a firmer footing for years to come.”
The effort will be headquartered at a U.S. military base in Wiesbaden, Germany, and involve almost 700 staff. It has been described as a way to “Trump proof” NATO backing for Ukraine, in case Trump wins the election and tries to draw down U.S. support.
At the Summit, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg wants NATO leaders to commit to providing Ukraine with $43 billion worth of equipment each year, indefinitely. Echoing George Orwell’s doublethink that “war is peace”, Stoltenberg said, “The paradox is that the longer we plan, and the longer we commit [to war], the sooner Ukraine can have peace.”
The Summit will also discuss how to bring Ukraine closer to NATO membership, a move that guarantees the war will continue, since Ukrainian neutrality is Russia’s principal war aim.
As Ian Davis of NATO Watch reported, NATO’s rhetoric echoes the same lines he heard throughout twenty years of war in Afghanistan: “The Taliban (now Russia) can’t wait us out.” But this vague hope that the other side will eventually give up is not a strategy.
There is no evidence that Ukraine will be different from Afghanistan. The U.S. and NATO are making the same assumptions, which will lead to the same result. The underlying assumption is that NATO’s greater GDP, extravagant and corrupt military budgets and fetish for expensive weapons technology must somehow, magically, lead Ukraine to victory over Russia.
When the U.S. and NATO finally admitted defeat in Afghanistan, it was the Afghans who had paid in blood for the West’s folly, while the US-NATO war machine simply moved on to its next “challenge,” learning nothing and making political hay out of abject denial.
Less than three years after the rout in Afghanistan, US Defense Secretary Austin recently called NATO “the most powerful and successful alliance in history.” It is a promising sign for the future of Ukraine that most Ukrainians are reluctant to throw away their lives in NATO’s dumpster-fire.
In an article titled “The New Theory of Ukrainian Victory Is the Same as the Old,” the Quincy Institute’s Mark Episkopos wrote, “Western planning continues to be strategically backwards. Aiding Kyiv has become an end in itself, divorced from a coherent strategy for bringing the war to a close”.
Episkopos concluded that “the key to wielding [the West’s] influence effectively is to finally abandon a zero-sum framing of victory…”
We would add that this was a trap set by the United States and the United Kingdom, not just for Ukraine, but for their NATO allies too. By refusing to support Ukraine at the negotiating table in April 2022, and instead demanding this “zero-sum framing of victory” as the condition for NATO’s support, the U.S. and U.K. escalated what could have been a very short war into a protracted, potentially nuclear, war between NATO and Russia.
Turkish leaders and diplomats complained at how their American and British allies undermined their peacemaking, while France, Italy and Germany squirmed for a month or two but soon surrendered to the war camp.
When NATO leaders meet in Washington, what they should be doing, apart from figuring out how to comply with Article 33(1) of the UN Charter, is conducting a clear-eyed review of how this organization that claims to be a force for peace keeps escalating unwinnable wars and leaving countries in ruins.
The fundamental question is whether NATO can ever be a force for peace or whether it can never be anything but a dangerous, subservient extension of the U.S. war machine.
We believe that NATO is an anachronism in today’s multipolar world: an aggressive, expansionist military alliance whose inherent institutional myopia and blinkered, self-serving threat assessments condemn us all to endless war and potential nuclear annihilation.
We suggest that the only way NATO could be a real force for peace would be to declare that, by this time next year, it will take the same steps that its counterpart, the Warsaw Pact, took in 1991, and finally dissolve what Secretary Austin would have been wiser to call “the most dangerous military alliance in history.”
However, the world’s population that is suffering under the yoke of militarism cannot afford to wait for NATO to give up and go away of its own accord. Our fellow citizens and political leaders need to hear from us all about the dangers posed by this unaccountable, nuclear-armed war machine, and we hope you will join us—in person or online—in using the occasion of this NATO summit to sound the alarm loudly.
A book of first-hand accounts of the war in Ukraine by Victoria Amelina is to be published posthumously by William Collins. Publication for Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary is scheduled for February 2025. It will be followed by a novel in 2026.
Amelina, who died exactly a year ago as a result of a missile strike in Kramatorsk, was a well-known novelist and children’s author in Ukraine. Rights to her unfinished non-fiction book were pre-empted by Arabella Pike at Williams Collins from Emma Shercliff at Laxfield Literary Associates. It will be published in the US by St Martin’s Press and translation rights have been sold in France (Gallimard), Italy (Guanda), Korea and Georgia.
Amelina’s book follows 11 female journalists, human rights defenders, lawyers, and volunteers documenting war crimes in Ukraine while the war is still ongoing. It includes Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk, and chronicles Amelina’s own transformation from novelist and mother into a war crimes researcher.
Pike said: “After hearing the cruel news of Victoria’s death, it was a small consolation to us that she knew her vitally important book would be published in English. We at William Collins are so proud to publish her account of the hideous war crimes happening daily in Ukraine and regret deeply that this must be posthumous.”
Arabella Tetyana Teren, head of PEN Ukraine, said: “This book is the voice of Ukraine fighting for its freedom and future. This book is the voice of a writer who, in the most difficult time for her country, chose the role of testifying about the war crimes of the Russians and seeking punishment for the perpetrators. This book was born from love—the author’s love for her country and her heroines, and our love for the talented Ukrainian writer, brave woman, and our dear friend, whose life was taken by Russia.”.”
Amelina, who was 37 when she died, worked in the high-tech industry for ten years before becoming a writer and lived in the US in 2019/20. She travelled extensively to talk about her work with Truth Hounds, and her poetry, essays and prose have appeared in publications including the Irish Times, the Dublin Review of Books, The Guardian and the New Yorker. Victoria was the founder of a literary festival in a city named New York in the Donetsk region, Ukraine. [see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2023/10/12/5th-dublin-arts-and-human-rights-festival-in-october-2023/]
On 20 June 2024 Swissinfo spoke with human rights defenders from Ukraine and Israel about how they operate in tough contexts. The main tasks of human rights defenders include investigating, collecting information about, and reporting rights violations. They raise public awareness to ensure that human rights are respected. But how do they work in a war zone or in an environment where a large part of public opinion is against them? SWI swissinfo met activists from Ukraine and Israel in Geneva’s Palais des Nations, where they had come to meet delegations and attend side-events during a session of the Human Rights CouncilExternal link .
“We are documenting testimonies from victims of the war in Ukraine,” says Lyubov Smachylo, an analyst with the Ukrainian organisation Media Initiative for Human Rights (MIHR).
MIHR’s main office is in Kyiv. It has direct access to victims and witnesses of rights violations, such as Ukrainians living in the north of the country – formerly under Russian occupation and now back under Ukrainian rule – or former prisoners in Russian jails. Smachylo, who lives between Kyiv and Paris, analyses documented testimonies of human rights violations committed by Russia. These include Russian armed forces acting with generalised impunity, the arbitrary detention of civilians – often accompanied by torture and ill-treatment – and in some cases enforced disappearances. Lyubov Smachylo from the Ukrainian Media Initiative for Human Rights. Courtesy of Lyubov Smachlyo
MIHR is one of the few NGOs able to gather information on the ground. Virtually no international organisation can go into the occupied Ukrainian regions, not even the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), for example, has only limited access to Ukrainian prisoners of war. This absence of accountability and the underreporting of abuses mean there is an increased risk of mistreatment and of perpetrators going unpunished.
Among other things, the MIHR deals with prisoners of war and civilians who have been arrested in the Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine or who are being detained in unknown places. Beatings and torture are rife, and some have died because of the poor detention conditions, says Smachylo.
“We know of 55 places of detention in the occupied regions of Ukraine and 40 in Russia, where a total of at least 1,550 Ukrainian civilians are being held,” says Smachylo. Contacted by SWI, the ICRC did not comment on whether it has access to the occupied regions. More More Human Rights Council: Fundamental or fundamentally flawed?
This content was published on Jun 30, 2021 The Human Rights Council, convening in Geneva, is mired in US-China rivalry, while the Council also faces criticism from developing countries. Read more: Human Rights Council: Fundamental or fundamentally flawed Increasingly hostile environment
Tal Steiner is meanwhile a human rights lawyer and director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI). The NGO holds Israel accountable on its use of torture, which is not illegal in the country, although there is an absolute prohibition on torture enshrined in international human rights instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Steiner says her NGO’s work has become particularly difficult since the Hamas attacks of October 7 and the Israeli-Palestinian war. Israel has restricted access to political prisoners, while rights defenders find themselves in an increasingly hostile environment where they are regularly branded as“defending terrorists”.
The political prisoners to which Steiner has access include Palestinians living in Israel and in the West Bank as well as Jewish Israeli citizens.
“Working on the issue of torture – or on any issue in Israel that affects human rights in terms of security – has never been easy,” she says. Tal Steiner, right, pictured with Miriam Azem, advocacy associate at the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel (ADALAH). Keystone/AFP/Coffrini
Compassion for Palestinian prisoners and the view that human rights apply to everyone have been greatly diminished since the war, Steiner explains.“This means that the circle that supports our work has become smaller.”
According to her, many Israelis have opted for security above human rights. Many also harbour feelings of vengeance towards Palestinians.“We saw this, for example, at the Israeli Prison Service (IPS),” Steiner says. There, extreme overcrowding since October 7 has led to a severe deterioration in conditions, including limited access to basic needs like water, electricity, food, and medical care. Human rights groups have also noted cases of severe beating of detainees and prisoners, sexual harassment and intimidation.
Miriam Azem also took part in the SWI interview with Steiner. The international advocacy expert works for Palestinian organisation Adalah, which defends Palestinians living in Israel and the occupied territories in Israeli courts. “Since October 7, the attitude towards our lawyers has changed a lot,” she says. This has become apparent in disciplinary committees, which handle disputes in universities.“Since the beginning of the war, over 120 disciplinary proceedings have been initiated against Palestinian students – citizens of Israel – for statements made on their private social media accounts” she says.
She cites the example of Palestinian students with Israeli citizenship who have been accused of inciting terrorism on the basis of unfounded arguments. Adalah attorneys, who have represented 95 Palestinian students facing this charge,“were questioned regarding their loyalty to Israel”, Azem says.
According to Azem, there has been an increase in arrests and interrogations due to posts on social media. “The vast majority of these posts do not meet any criminal threshold. Nevertheless, the accusations against activists were grounded in Israel’s Counter-Terror Law, which carries severe imprisonment penalties,” she says. More More Is Geneva still the capital of peace?
In February, PCATI and Adalah, together with two other Israeli organisations, sent an urgent appeal to the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Alice Jill Edwards. They called on Edwards to intervene immediately to stop torture and the systematic mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention facilities. Apart from private lawyers, these are the only four organisations that can currently visit Israeli prisons – Israel has denied the ICRC access.
“We are therefore the only ones who can report what we have seen there,” says Steiner. Around 10,000 Palestinian prisoners are currently in Israeli custody, many of them detained without trial. However, no one is allowed to visit the Israeli military camps for prisoners from the Gaza Strip. PCATI fears a“new Guantanamo” is being established there, in reference to the US facility in Cuba where prisoners were held indefinitely without trial in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.
In their appeal to the UN rapporteur, the four organisations also expressed concern about the dehumanising rhetoric being used by some members of the Israeli government. The Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, in charge of the IPS, has repeatedly spoken out in favour of subjecting Palestinians to degrading and inhumane treatment.
In the meantime, UN rapporteur Edwards has called on Israel to investigate the numerous allegations of torture against detained Palestinians. Since the attacks of October 7, it is estimated that thousands of Palestinians including children have been detained, she has written. Edwards says she received allegations of individuals being beaten, kept blindfolded in cells, handcuffed for excessive periods, deprived of sleep, and threatened with physical and sexual violence. Burnouts and death threats
Burnout and death threats are also part of the job. Smachylo says the war which stretches through the whole of Ukraine is an added strain on a very stressful job. Activists and staff members of her organisation spend hours writing reports detailing torture and mistreatment of Ukrainian citizens by the Russian authorities. She particularly highlights the risk of burnout for those who regularly carry out missions in the field.
The Geneva-based World Organization against Torture (OMCT), which cooperates with the NGO, provides financial support for their psychological and therapeutic retreats.
Steiner, for her part, draws particular attention to the huge amount of work involved.“In view of the grief over the tragedies of October 7 and the war in the Gaza Strip, cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians is proving to be a challenge right now,” she says. For her, it is fundamental that every detainee has the right to defense.
Smear campaigns have also targeted her work. For example, the Israeli TV station Channel14, the equivalent of the rightwing US station Fox News, made a derogatory programme about PCATI and other organisations campaigning for Palestinian rights. The title:“Disgrace: the Israeli activists who take care of the treatment of Hamas terrorists”. The program led to harassment and threatening phone calls. Some of the emails Steiner received were about rape and death threats, others targeted her family.
“We are aware that we are operating in an environment that is very hostile to our work,” says Azem.“As an NGO registered in Israel, we are extremely cautious.” Steiner adds that the persecution of NGOs in Israel and Palestine has a long history. Six Palestinian human rights organisations have been classified as terrorist by Israel. And several bills currently envisage a higher taxation rate for Israeli NGOs in order to block their work.
Erik Bulatov (USSR), People in the Landscape, 1976.
There was a time when calls for a nuclear-free Europe rang across the continent. It began with the Stockholm Appeal (1950), which opened with the powerful words ‘We demand the outlawing of atomic weapons as instruments of intimidation and mass murder of peoples’ and then deepened with the Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament (1980), which issued the chilling warning ‘We are entering the most dangerous decade in human history’. Roughly 274 million people signed the Stockholm Appeal, including – as is often reported – the entire adult population of the Soviet Union. Yet, since the European appeal of 1980, it feels as if each decade has been more and more dangerous than the previous one. ‘It is still 90 seconds to midnight’, the editors at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (the keepers of the Doomsday Clock) wrote in January. Midnight is Armageddon. In 1949, the clock sat at three minutes to midnight, and in 1980 it had retreated slightly from the precipice, back to seven minutes to midnight. By 2023, however, the clock’s hand had moved all the way up to ninety seconds to midnight, where it remains, the closest we have ever been to full-scale annihilation.
This precarious situation is threatening to reach a tipping point in Europe today. To understand the dangerous possibilities that could be unleashed by the intensified provocations around Ukraine, we collaborated with No Cold War to produce briefing no. 14, NATO’s Actions in Ukraine Are More Dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis. Please read this text carefully and circulate it as widely as possible.
For the past two years, Europe’s largest war since 1945 has been raging in Ukraine. The root cause of this war is the US-driven attempt to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) into Ukraine. This violates the promises the West made to the Soviet Union during the end of the Cold War, such as that NATO would move ‘not one inch eastward’, as US Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990. Over the past decade, the Global North has repeatedly snubbed Russian requests for security guarantees. It was this disregard for Russian concerns that led to the outbreak of the conflict in 2014 and the war in 2022.
Today, a nuclear-armed NATO and a nuclear-armed Russia are in direct conflict in Ukraine. Instead of taking steps to bring this war to an end, NATO has made several new announcements in recent months that threaten to escalate the situation into a still more serious conflict with the potential to spill beyond Ukraine’s borders. It is no exaggeration to say that this conflict has created the greatest threat to world peace since the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962).
This extremely dangerous escalation confirms the correctness of the majority of US experts on Russia and Eastern Europe, who have long warned against the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe. In 1997, George Kennan, the principal architect of US policy in the Cold War, said that this strategy is ‘the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era’. The Ukraine war and the dangers of further escalation fully affirm the seriousness of his warning.
Elif Uras (Turkey), Kapital, 2009.
How Is NATO Escalating the Conflict in Ukraine?
The most dangerous recent developments in this conflict are the decisions by the US and Britain in May to authorise Ukraine to use weapons supplied by the two countries to conduct military attacks inside Russia. Ukraine’s government immediately used this in the most provocative way by attacking Russia’s ballistic missile early warning system. This warning system plays no role in the Ukraine war but is a central part of Russia’s defence system against strategic nuclear attack. In addition, the British government supplied Ukraine with Storm Shadow missiles that have a range of over 250 km (155 miles) and can hit targets not only on the battleground but far inside Russia. The use of NATO weapons to attack Russia risks an equivalent Russian counter-response, threatening to spread the war beyond Ukraine.
This was followed by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s June announcement that a NATO headquarter for operations in the Ukraine war had been created at the US military base in Wiesbaden, Germany, with 700 initial staff. On 7 June, French President Emmanuel Macron said that his government was working to ‘finalise a coalition’ of NATO countries willing to send troops to Ukraine to ‘train’ Ukrainian forces. This would place NATO forces directly in the war. As the Vietnam War and other conflicts have shown, such ‘trainers’ organise and direct fighting, thus becoming targets for attacks.
Why Is Escalation in Ukraine More Dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis?
The Cuban Missile Crisis was the product of an adventurist miscalculation by Soviet leadership that the US would tolerate the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles only 144 km from the nearest US shore and roughly 1,800 km from Washington. Such a deployment would have made it impossible for the US to defend against a nuclear strike and would have ‘levelled the playing field’, since the US already had such capabilities vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The US, predictably, made it clear that this would not be tolerated and that it would prevent it by any means necessary, including nuclear war. With the Doomsday Clock at 12 minutes to midnight, the Soviet leadership realised its miscalculation and, after a few days of intense crisis, withdrew the missiles. This was followed by a relaxation of US-Soviet tensions, leading to the first Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (1963).
No bullets flew between the US and the USSR in 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis was an extremely dangerous short-term incident that could have ignited large-scale – including nuclear – war. However, unlike the Ukraine war, it did not flow from an already existing and intensifying dynamic of war by either the US or the USSR. Thus, while extremely dangerous, the situation could also be, and was, rapidly resolved.
The situation in Ukraine, as well as the growing conflict around China, are more structurally dangerous. Direct confrontation is taking place between NATO and Russia, where the US just authorised direct military strikes (imagine if, during the 1962 crisis, Cuban forces armed and trained by the Soviet Union had carried out major military strikes in Florida). Meanwhile, the US is directly raising military tensions with China around Taiwan and the South China Sea, as well as in the Korean Peninsula. The US government understands that it cannot withstand erosion to its position of global primacy and rightly believes that it may lose its economic dominance to China. That is why it increasingly moves issues onto the military terrain, where it still maintains an advantage. The US position on Gaza is significantly determined by its understanding that it cannot afford a blow to its military supremacy, embodied in the regime that it controls in Israel.
The US and its NATO partners are responsible for 74.3% of global military spending. Within the context of the US’s increasing drive for war and use of military means, the situation in Ukraine, and potentially around China, are, in reality, as dangerous, and potentially more dangerous, than the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Tatiana Grinevich (Belarus), The River of Wishes, 2012.
How Are the Warring Parties to Negotiate?
Hours after Russian troops entered Ukraine, both sides began to talk about a drawdown of tensions. These negotiations developed in Belarus and Turkey before they were scuttled by NATO’s assurances to Ukraine of endless and bottomless support to ‘weaken’ Russia. If those early negotiations had developed, thousands of lives would have been spared. All such wars end in negotiations, which is why the sooner they could have happened, the better. This is a view that is now openly acknowledged by Ukrainians. Vadym Skibitsky, deputy head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, toldThe Economist that negotiations are on the horizon.
For a long time now, the Russia-Ukraine frontline has not moved dramatically. In February 2024, the Chinese government released a twelve-point set of principles to guide a peace process. These points – including ‘abandoning the Cold War mentality’ – should have been seriously considered by the belligerent sides. But the NATO states simply ignored them. Several months later, a Ukraine-driven conference was held in Switzerland from 15–16 June, to which Russia was not invited and which ended with a communiqué that borrowed many of the Chinese proposals about nuclear safety, food security, and prisoner exchanges.
Velislava Gecheva (Bulgaria), Homo photographicus, 2014.
While a number of states – from Albania to Uruguay – signed the document, other countries that attended the meeting refused to sign on for a range of reasons, including their sense that the text did not take Russia’s security concerns seriously. Among the countries that did not sign are Armenia, Bahrain, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Libya, Mauritius, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates. A few days before the Switzerland conference, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin stated his conditions for peace, which include a guarantee that Ukraine will not join NATO. This view is shared by those countries of the Global South that did not join the Switzerland statement.
Both Russia and Ukraine are willing to negotiate. Why should the NATO states be allowed to prolong a war that threatens world peace? The upcoming NATO summit in Washington from 9–11 July must hear, loudly and clearly, that the world does not want its dangerous war or decadent militarism. The world’s peoples want to build bridges, not blow them up.
Maxim Kantor (Russia), Two Versions of History, 1993.
Briefing no. 14, a clear assessment of current dangers around the escalation in and around Ukraine, underscores the need, as Abdullah El Harif of the Workers’ Democratic Way party in Morocco and I wrote in the Bouficha Appeal Against the Preparations for War in 2020, for the peoples of the world to:
Stand against the warmongering of US imperialism, which seeks to impose dangerous wars on an already fragile planet.
Stand against the saturation of the world with weapons of all kinds, which inflame conflicts and often drive political processes toward endless wars.
Stand against the use of military power to prevent the social development of the peoples of the world.
Defend the right of countries to build their sovereignty and their dignity.
Sensitive people around the world must make their voices heard on the streets and in the corridors of power to end this dangerous war, and indeed to set us on a path beyond capitalism’s world of unending wars.
Erik Bulatov (USSR), People in the Landscape, 1976.
There was a time when calls for a nuclear-free Europe rang across the continent. It began with the Stockholm Appeal (1950), which opened with the powerful words ‘We demand the outlawing of atomic weapons as instruments of intimidation and mass murder of peoples’ and then deepened with the Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament (1980), which issued the chilling warning ‘We are entering the most dangerous decade in human history’. Roughly 274 million people signed the Stockholm Appeal, including – as is often reported – the entire adult population of the Soviet Union. Yet, since the European appeal of 1980, it feels as if each decade has been more and more dangerous than the previous one. ‘It is still 90 seconds to midnight’, the editors at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (the keepers of the Doomsday Clock) wrote in January. Midnight is Armageddon. In 1949, the clock sat at three minutes to midnight, and in 1980 it had retreated slightly from the precipice, back to seven minutes to midnight. By 2023, however, the clock’s hand had moved all the way up to ninety seconds to midnight, where it remains, the closest we have ever been to full-scale annihilation.
This precarious situation is threatening to reach a tipping point in Europe today. To understand the dangerous possibilities that could be unleashed by the intensified provocations around Ukraine, we collaborated with No Cold War to produce briefing no. 14, NATO’s Actions in Ukraine Are More Dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis. Please read this text carefully and circulate it as widely as possible.
For the past two years, Europe’s largest war since 1945 has been raging in Ukraine. The root cause of this war is the US-driven attempt to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) into Ukraine. This violates the promises the West made to the Soviet Union during the end of the Cold War, such as that NATO would move ‘not one inch eastward’, as US Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990. Over the past decade, the Global North has repeatedly snubbed Russian requests for security guarantees. It was this disregard for Russian concerns that led to the outbreak of the conflict in 2014 and the war in 2022.
Today, a nuclear-armed NATO and a nuclear-armed Russia are in direct conflict in Ukraine. Instead of taking steps to bring this war to an end, NATO has made several new announcements in recent months that threaten to escalate the situation into a still more serious conflict with the potential to spill beyond Ukraine’s borders. It is no exaggeration to say that this conflict has created the greatest threat to world peace since the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962).
This extremely dangerous escalation confirms the correctness of the majority of US experts on Russia and Eastern Europe, who have long warned against the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe. In 1997, George Kennan, the principal architect of US policy in the Cold War, said that this strategy is ‘the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era’. The Ukraine war and the dangers of further escalation fully affirm the seriousness of his warning.
Elif Uras (Turkey), Kapital, 2009.
How Is NATO Escalating the Conflict in Ukraine?
The most dangerous recent developments in this conflict are the decisions by the US and Britain in May to authorise Ukraine to use weapons supplied by the two countries to conduct military attacks inside Russia. Ukraine’s government immediately used this in the most provocative way by attacking Russia’s ballistic missile early warning system. This warning system plays no role in the Ukraine war but is a central part of Russia’s defence system against strategic nuclear attack. In addition, the British government supplied Ukraine with Storm Shadow missiles that have a range of over 250 km (155 miles) and can hit targets not only on the battleground but far inside Russia. The use of NATO weapons to attack Russia risks an equivalent Russian counter-response, threatening to spread the war beyond Ukraine.
This was followed by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s June announcement that a NATO headquarter for operations in the Ukraine war had been created at the US military base in Wiesbaden, Germany, with 700 initial staff. On 7 June, French President Emmanuel Macron said that his government was working to ‘finalise a coalition’ of NATO countries willing to send troops to Ukraine to ‘train’ Ukrainian forces. This would place NATO forces directly in the war. As the Vietnam War and other conflicts have shown, such ‘trainers’ organise and direct fighting, thus becoming targets for attacks.
Why Is Escalation in Ukraine More Dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis?
The Cuban Missile Crisis was the product of an adventurist miscalculation by Soviet leadership that the US would tolerate the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles only 144 km from the nearest US shore and roughly 1,800 km from Washington. Such a deployment would have made it impossible for the US to defend against a nuclear strike and would have ‘levelled the playing field’, since the US already had such capabilities vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The US, predictably, made it clear that this would not be tolerated and that it would prevent it by any means necessary, including nuclear war. With the Doomsday Clock at 12 minutes to midnight, the Soviet leadership realised its miscalculation and, after a few days of intense crisis, withdrew the missiles. This was followed by a relaxation of US-Soviet tensions, leading to the first Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (1963).
No bullets flew between the US and the USSR in 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis was an extremely dangerous short-term incident that could have ignited large-scale – including nuclear – war. However, unlike the Ukraine war, it did not flow from an already existing and intensifying dynamic of war by either the US or the USSR. Thus, while extremely dangerous, the situation could also be, and was, rapidly resolved.
The situation in Ukraine, as well as the growing conflict around China, are more structurally dangerous. Direct confrontation is taking place between NATO and Russia, where the US just authorised direct military strikes (imagine if, during the 1962 crisis, Cuban forces armed and trained by the Soviet Union had carried out major military strikes in Florida). Meanwhile, the US is directly raising military tensions with China around Taiwan and the South China Sea, as well as in the Korean Peninsula. The US government understands that it cannot withstand erosion to its position of global primacy and rightly believes that it may lose its economic dominance to China. That is why it increasingly moves issues onto the military terrain, where it still maintains an advantage. The US position on Gaza is significantly determined by its understanding that it cannot afford a blow to its military supremacy, embodied in the regime that it controls in Israel.
The US and its NATO partners are responsible for 74.3% of global military spending. Within the context of the US’s increasing drive for war and use of military means, the situation in Ukraine, and potentially around China, are, in reality, as dangerous, and potentially more dangerous, than the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Tatiana Grinevich (Belarus), The River of Wishes, 2012.
How Are the Warring Parties to Negotiate?
Hours after Russian troops entered Ukraine, both sides began to talk about a drawdown of tensions. These negotiations developed in Belarus and Turkey before they were scuttled by NATO’s assurances to Ukraine of endless and bottomless support to ‘weaken’ Russia. If those early negotiations had developed, thousands of lives would have been spared. All such wars end in negotiations, which is why the sooner they could have happened, the better. This is a view that is now openly acknowledged by Ukrainians. Vadym Skibitsky, deputy head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, toldThe Economist that negotiations are on the horizon.
For a long time now, the Russia-Ukraine frontline has not moved dramatically. In February 2024, the Chinese government released a twelve-point set of principles to guide a peace process. These points – including ‘abandoning the Cold War mentality’ – should have been seriously considered by the belligerent sides. But the NATO states simply ignored them. Several months later, a Ukraine-driven conference was held in Switzerland from 15–16 June, to which Russia was not invited and which ended with a communiqué that borrowed many of the Chinese proposals about nuclear safety, food security, and prisoner exchanges.
Velislava Gecheva (Bulgaria), Homo photographicus, 2014.
While a number of states – from Albania to Uruguay – signed the document, other countries that attended the meeting refused to sign on for a range of reasons, including their sense that the text did not take Russia’s security concerns seriously. Among the countries that did not sign are Armenia, Bahrain, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Libya, Mauritius, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates. A few days before the Switzerland conference, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin stated his conditions for peace, which include a guarantee that Ukraine will not join NATO. This view is shared by those countries of the Global South that did not join the Switzerland statement.
Both Russia and Ukraine are willing to negotiate. Why should the NATO states be allowed to prolong a war that threatens world peace? The upcoming NATO summit in Washington from 9–11 July must hear, loudly and clearly, that the world does not want its dangerous war or decadent militarism. The world’s peoples want to build bridges, not blow them up.
Maxim Kantor (Russia), Two Versions of History, 1993.
Briefing no. 14, a clear assessment of current dangers around the escalation in and around Ukraine, underscores the need, as Abdullah El Harif of the Workers’ Democratic Way party in Morocco and I wrote in the Bouficha Appeal Against the Preparations for War in 2020, for the peoples of the world to:
Stand against the warmongering of US imperialism, which seeks to impose dangerous wars on an already fragile planet.
Stand against the saturation of the world with weapons of all kinds, which inflame conflicts and often drive political processes toward endless wars.
Stand against the use of military power to prevent the social development of the peoples of the world.
Defend the right of countries to build their sovereignty and their dignity.
Sensitive people around the world must make their voices heard on the streets and in the corridors of power to end this dangerous war, and indeed to set us on a path beyond capitalism’s world of unending wars.
Berlin, June 26, 2024 – The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) strongly condemns the Russian foreign ministry’s Tuesday decisionto block access to 81 European media outlets in Russia in response to the EU’s recent ban on four pro-Kremlin media outlets.
“Russian authorities’ blocking of 81 European media outlets betrays their deep-seated fear of truthful reporting,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Moscow must immediately stop restricting Russians’ access to information and cease its attempts to stifle the flow of news that deviates from the official line.”
The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ statement included 81 media outlets from 25 of the 27 EU member countries, excluding Croatia and Luxembourg,U.S. Congress-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) reported. Among those listed were television and radio companies, newspapers, magazines, and online media including Germany’s Der Spiegel and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, France’s Le Monde and Libération, Spain’s El País, Italy’s La Stampa and La Repubblica, the Agence France-Presse news agency, Politico and several other media outlets.
“The Russian Federation has repeatedly warned at various levels that politically motivated harassment of domestic journalists and unjustified bans on Russian media in the EU will not go unanswered,” the foreign ministry’s June 25 statement said, adding that the targeted media were spreading “false information” about Russia’s war in Ukraine.
On May 17, the European Union announced it would suspend the “broadcasting activities” of the state-run RIA Novosti news agency, the pro-government newspapers Izvestia and Rossiyskaya Gazeta, and the Prague-based news website Voice of Europe, saying that those outlets were “under the permanent direct or indirect control of the leadership of the Russian Federation, and have been essential and instrumental in bringing forward and supporting Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.” The decision went into effect on June 25.
After Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the EU banned Russian state-controlled media outlets Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik on similar grounds and Russian authorities have forced a number of foreign journalists to leave the country either by revoking their accreditation or refusing to renew their visas.
On June 26, Russia’s foreign ministry responded to Austria’s recent decision to revoke the accreditation of Arina Davidyan, the Vienna-based head of the Russian state news agency TASS, by ordering Carola Schneider, head of the Moscow bureau of Austrian public broadcaster ORF, to “hand over her accreditation” and leave Russia “in the near future.”
CPJ emailed the Russian Foreign Ministry for comment on the media bans, but did not receive any response.
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).
‘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.
‘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 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 Posthas 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.
A Chinese Major Xu Hui claimed in an interview on June 2 that U.S. President Joe Biden had said the U.S. “would help Ukraine fight to the last Ukrainian.”
But the claim is false. Keyword searches found no official or credible reports to back the claim.
Xu’s statement was made on the third day of the latest Shangri-La Dialogue held in Singapore from May 31 to June 2 and was later cited by Chinese media outlets such as Guancha, Sina Military as well as Taiwan’s United Daily News.
“President Biden said something quite frightening. He said he would support Ukraine and fight until the last Ukrainian,” said Xu, as cited by Guacha. Xu did not give a source for the comment he attributed to Biiden.
“If they fight until the last Ukrainian, what are the Ukrainian people fighting for? If there are no people left, what’s the point? He’s not talking about fighting until the last American while supporting Ukraine. He’s selling ammunition to Ukraine, supporting them in the war, and continuing to sell ammunition even if only the last Ukrainian is left.”
Screenshots from Guancha, Sina and United Daily News
Several influential online users on X and Weibo later said that Xu “inaccurately translated” Biden’s statement, saying that Biden in fact said: “As long as there is a single Ukrainian fighting against Russian aggression, the United States will fully support it.”
But both claims are false.
Several influencers claimed Xu’s statement was inaccurate while themselves providing an unsourced quote of Biden that later proved false. (Screenshot/Weibo)
Keyword searches found no official or credible reports to show that Biden made such a remark.
A deputy spokesperson for the White House National Security Council told AFCL that Biden never made remarks claimed by either Xu or social media users.
AFCL found several pro-Beijing media outlets, including The Paper, China Daily, and Xinhua, had reported similar claims before Xu made his remarks.
These outlets cited an opinion piece from the magazine American Conservative titled “Washington Will Fight Russia to the Last Ukrainian.”
“The allies are prepared to back the Zelensky government as long as it fights Moscow to the last Ukrainian – which has always been the West’s approach to Kyiv,” the article reads in part.
While the wording in this opinion piece is similar to the statement Xu attributed to Biden, it does not mention Biden making such a remark.
Translated by Shen Ke. Edited by Shen Ke and Taejun Kang.
Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) was established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. We publish fact-checks, media-watches and in-depth reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of current affairs and public issues. If you like our content, you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Alan Lu for Asia Fact Check Lab.
Russian President Vladimir Putin warned South Korea that sending weapons to Ukraine would be a “very big mistake” after South Korea said it would consider doing so in response to a pact between Russia and North Korea to come to each other’s aid if attacked.
U.S. ally South Korea announced on Thursday it would reconsider its stance on arms to Ukraine in response to North Korea and Russia signing a treaty the previous day that includes a mutual pledge to provide immediate military assistance if either is attacked.
“As for the supply of lethal weapons to the combat zone in Ukraine, it would be a very big mistake. I hope it will not happen. If it does, then we too will then make the respective decisions, which South Korea’s current leadership is unlikely to be pleased with,” Putin told a press conference on Thursday during a visit to Vietnam, Russia’s Sputnik news agency reported.
South Korea’s assistance to Ukraine has included first-aid kits, medicine, portable mine detectors and protective gear but it has not supplied weapons in line with a policy of not providing lethal aid to countries engaged in conflict.
During Putin’s first visit to North Korea in 24 years, he and leader Kim Jong Un, agreed to offer military assistance “without delay” if either is attacked under a new partnership treaty signed after their summit on Wednesday.
South Korea’s National Security Adviser Chang Ho-jin condemned both countries on Thursday, saying that Seoul would have to think again about supplying arms.
“We plan to reconsider the issue of arms support to Ukraine,” Chang said in a press briefing at the presidential office.
He added that any cooperation that directly or indirectly aided North Korea’s military enhancement was a violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions and would be subject to international scrutiny and sanctions.
“The government expresses grave concern and condemns the signing of the comprehensive strategic partnership agreement between North Korea and Russia, which aims to strengthen mutual military and economic cooperation,” Chang said.
John Kirby, the spokesperson for U.S. President Joe Biden’s National Security Council, said the announcement by Russia and North Korea of their pact to come to each other’s help if attacked was “no surprise” but it boded poorly for the people of Ukraine and the Korean peninsula.
“Our view is that this agreement is also a sign of Russia’s desperation,” Kirby added.
“I mean, they’re reaching out to North Korea for missiles, and they’re getting drones from Iran. They don’t have a lot of friends in the world.”
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.
Edited by RFA Staff.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Taejun Kang for RFA.
More than 10,000 students, teachers, and academics were killed or harmed in thousands of attacks on education in 2022 and 2023, according to research published Thursday amid Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip, which has seen its schools and universities decimated by the U.S.-backed Israeli bombing campaign. The Global Coalition to Protect Education From Attack (GCPEA) identified roughly 6…
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 mediareports 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 mediareports.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anyone who denies this is extremely uncomfortable and embarrassing to watch at this point isn't being honest.
And I don't understand how Democrats and their pundits believe they can convince Americans it's not happening.
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.
Antony Blinken: "We can never let the crimes Russia's committing become our new normal… bombing schools and hospitals and apartment buildings to rubble is not normal" pic.twitter.com/W2rBYE8CVk
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.
Compare Keir Starmer's statements on the siege of Gaza with his arguments at the International Court of Justice in 2014, where he argued that the Serb siege of Vukovar was a case of genocide. A thread on Starmer, international law and Gaza. pic.twitter.com/lu0X6sgXfB
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.
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.
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.
