By Caitlin Johnstone, Substack, 5/21/22

The Ukrainian government is quickly learning that it can say anything, literally anything at all, about what’s happening on the ground there and get it uncritically reported as an actual news story by the mainstream western press.

The latest story making the rounds is a completely unevidenced claim made by a Ukrainian government official that Russians are going around raping Ukrainian babies to death. Business Insider, The Daily Beast, The Daily Mail and Yahoo News have all run this story despite no actual evidence existing for it beyond the empty assertions of a government who would have every incentive to lie.

“A one-year-old boy died after being raped by two Russian soldiers, the Ukrainian Parliament’s Commissioner for Human Rights said on Thursday,” reads a report by Business Insider which was subsequently picked up by Yahoo News. “The accusation is one of the most horrific from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but is not unique.”

At the end of the fourth paragraph we get to the disclaimer that every critical thinker should look for when reading such stories in the mainstream press:

“Insider could find no independent evidence for the claim.”

In its trademark style, The Daily Beast ran the same story in a much more flamboyant and click-friendly fashion.

“The dead boy is among dozens of alleged child rape victims which include two 10-year-old boys, triplets aged 9, a 2-year-old girl raped by two Russian soldiers, and a 9-month-old baby who was penetrated with a candlestick in front of its mother, according to Ukraine’s Commissioner for Human Rights,” The Daily Beast writes.

The one and only source for this latest spate of “the Russians are raping babies to death” stories is a statement on a Ukrainian government website by Ukraine’s Human Rights Commissioner Lyudmyla Denisova. The brief statement contains no evidence of any kind, and its English translation concludes as follows:

I appeal to the UN Commission for Investigation Human Rights Violations during the Russian military invasion of Ukraine to take into account these facts of genocide of the Ukrainian people.

I call on our partners around the world to increase sanctions pressure on russia, to provide Ukraine with offensive weapons, to join the investigation of rashist crimes in our country!

The enemy must be stopped and all those involved in the atrocities in Ukraine must be brought to justice!

This is what passes for journalism in the western world today. Reporting completely unfounded allegations against US enemies based solely on assertions by a government official demanding more weapons and sanctions against those enemies and making claims that sound like they came from an It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia bit.

We cannot say definitively that these rapes never happened. We also cannot say definitively that the Australian government isn’t warehousing extraterrestrial aircraft in an underground bunker in Canberra, but we don’t treat that like it’s an established fact and publish mainstream news reports about it just because we can’t prove it’s false. That’s not how the burden of proof works.

Obviously the rape of children is a very real and very serious matter, and obviously rape is one of the many horrors which can be inflicted upon people in the lawless environment of war. But to turn strategically convenient government assertions about such matters into a news story based on no evidence whatsoever is not just journalistic malpractice but actual atrocity propaganda.

As we discussed previously, the US and its proxies have an established history of using atrocity propaganda, as in the infamous “taking babies from incubators” narrative that was circulated in the infamous 1990 Nayirah testimony which helped manufacture consent for the Gulf War.

Atrocity propaganda has been in use for a very long time due to how effective it can be at getting populations mobilized against targeted enemies, from the Middle Ages when Jews were accused of kidnapping Christian children to kill them and drink their blood, to 17th century claims that the Irish were killing English children and throwing them into the sea, to World War I claims that Germans were mutilating and eating Belgian babies.

Atrocity propaganda frequently involves children, because children cannot be construed as combatants or non-innocents, and generally involves the most horrific allegations the propagandists can possibly get away with at that point in history. It creates a useful appeal to emotion which bypasses people’s logical faculties and gets them accepting the propaganda based not on facts and evidence but on how it makes them feel.

And the atrocity propaganda is functioning exactly as it’s meant to. Do a search on social media for this bogus story that’s been forcibly injected into public discourse and you’ll find countless individuals expressing their outrage at the evil baby-raping Russians. Democratic Party operative Andrea Chalupa, known for her controversial collusion with the Ukrainian government to undermine the 2016 Trump campaign, can be seen citing the aforementioned Daily Beast article on Twitter to angrily admonish the New York Times editorial board for expressing a rare word of caution about US involvement in the war.

“Before writing this, the members of the New York Times Editorial Board should have asked themselves who among them wanted to have their children, including babies and infants, raped by Russian soldiers, because that is what’s happening in Ukraine,” Chalupa tweeted.

See that? How a completely unevidenced government assertion was turned into an official-looking news story, and how that official-looking news story was then cited as though it’s an objective fact that Russian soldiers are running around raping babies to death in Ukraine? And how it’s done to help manufacture consent for a geostrategically crucial proxy war, and to bludgeon those who express any amount of caution about these world-threatening escalations? 

That’s atrocity propaganda doing exactly what it is meant to do.

Now on top of all the other reasons we’re being given why the US and its allies need to send Ukraine more and more war machinery of higher and higher destructive capability, they also need to do so because the Russians are just raping babies to death willy nilly over there. Which just so happens to work out nicely for the US-centralized empire’s goals of unipolar domination, for the Ukrainian regime, and for the military-industrial complex.

And that wasn’t even the extent of obscene mass media atrocity propaganda conducted on behalf of Ukrainian officials for the day. Newsweek has a new article out titled “Russians Targeting Kids’ Beds, Rooms With Explosives: Ukrainian Bomb Team,” which informs us that “The leader of a Ukrainian bomb squad has said that Russian forces are targeting children by placing explosive devices inside their rooms and under their beds.”

Then at the end of the second paragraph we again find that magical phrase:

“Newsweek has not independently verified the claim.”

The Newsweek report is based on part of an embarrassing ABC News Australia puff piece about a Ukrainian team which is allegedly responsible for removing landmines in areas that were previously occupied by Russian forces. The puff piece refers to the team as a “unit of brave de-miners” while calling Russian forces “barbaric”.

ABC uncritically reports all the nefarious ways the evil Russians have been planting explosives with the goal of killing Ukrainian civilians, including setting mines in children’s beds and teddy bears and placing them under fallen Ukrainian soldiers. Way down toward the bottom of the article we see the magical phrase again:

“The ABC has not been able to independently verify these reports, but they back up allegations made by Ukraine’s President.”

Ahh, so what you’re being told by Ukrainian forces “backs up” what you’ve been told by the president of Ukraine. Doesn’t get any more rock solid than that, does it? Great journalism there, fellas.

The Ukrainian government stands everything to gain and nothing to lose by just saying whatever it needs to say in order to obtain more weapons, more funding and increasingly direct assistance from western powers, so if it knows the western media will uncritically report every claim it makes, why not lie? Why not tell whatever lie you need to tell in order to advance your own interests and agendas? It would be pretty silly of them not to take advantage of the opening they’re being given.

This is something the western press know is happening. They know full well that Ukraine is waging a very sophisticated propaganda campaign against Russia and seeding disinformation to facilitate that infowar. It’s not a secret. They are participating in that campaign knowingly.

The mass media have been cranking out atrocity propaganda about what’s happening in Ukraine since before the invasion even started, like when they reported in February that Russia has a list of dissidents, journalists and “vulnerable populations such as religious and ethnic minorities and LGBTQI+ persons” who it plans on rounding up and torturing when it invades. Funny how we just completely stopped hearing about that one.

And this is all happening at the same time the western political/media class continues to shriek about the dangers of “disinformation” and the urgent need to strictly regulate its circulation on the internet, even after US officials came right out and admitted that they’ve been circulating disinformation about Russia and Ukraine. I guarantee you none of these completely evidence-free claims will be subject to censorship by the “fact checkers” of social media platforms.

The fact that both Silicon Valley and the mainstream news media have accepted it as a given that it is their job to manipulate public thought about this war tells you everything you need to know about how free and truth-based the so-called liberal democracies of the western world really are. We are being deceived and confused into consenting to agendas that could very easily lead to nuclear armageddon, and if we ever raise our voices in objection to this we are branded Putin propagandists and disinformation agents. 

It’s getting very, very bad. Turn around, people. Wrong way.

By MK Bhadrakumar, Indian Punchline, 5/25/22

Bhadrakumar is a retired Indian diplomat.

The Western narrative that Russia is facing defeat at the hands of the Ukrainian military is falling apart. The contrived narrative that Ukraine was “winning” made Kiev delusional which in turn created conditions for Washington and London to extend the war and incrementally enter into it laterally and turn it into a war of attrition against Russia.

But the compelling reality is that the Russian forces are steadily seizing the upper hand in the Battle for Donbass. The Ukrainian Defence Ministry spokesperson said on Tuesday that “the most active phase” of the Russian special operation has begun in Donbass. In military terms, Russian forces face the daunting task of taking over the best-fortified areas of Ukraine, which have been carefully preparing for this battle for seven years. But on the other hand, after their triumphant victory in Mariupol, Russian forces have the wind on their sail.

Looking back through the past 3-month period, Russia’s topmost priority has been to establish a land corridor to Crimea and put in place the economic underpinnings for the region’s development. That objective stands fulfilled. It is from such a viewpoint that the current operation in Donbass needs to be understood. Ukraine and its Western allies are pinning hopes that the sanctions will eventually exhaust Russia’s military and economic potential.

But life is real. By the World Bank estimates, Ukraine’s economy may shrink by 45 percent by the end of 2022. The talk of a major Ukrainian counter-offensive later this year bolstered by the heavy weaponry from Western allies, will remain a pipe dream. Kiev may not even have sufficient manpower to wage a war by the end of the year. Russia is a formidable enemy and Kiev may be risking an abject surrender on humiliating terms in the downstream of the Battle for Donbass.

The Russian forces are now close to establishing full control of the Luhansk region of Donbass. The Ukrainian governor of the eastern region admitted on Tuesday that “The Russians are advancing in all directions at the same time; they brought over an insane number of fighters and equipment.” The situation is looking increasingly precarious for the Ukrainian forces. (Listen to the podcast The Battlefields of the Donbass and Beyond, War on the Rocks)  

The key signposts are Popasnaya and Severodonetsk in Donbass and the city of Izyum just to the north in the Kharkiv region. Popasnaya and Izyum are under Russian control already while Russian troops entered Severodonetsk yesterday. 

The Russian forces are currently expanding their control zone around Popasnaya to its north, west and south; they have approached the outskirts of the city of Severodonetsk; and have resumed their advance to the west and south of Izyum.

Latest reports are that assault groups from Popasnaya are heading west towards Bakhmut, which is a strategic hub for Kiev to replenish its forces in the eastern region. The highway between Bakhmut and Lisichansk is within firing range of Russian forces and military supplies to the Ukrainian grouping in Severodonetsk and Lisichansk have become problematic.

As for Izyum, in the area of Liman to its south (west of Severodonetsk), Russian forces have surrounded the Ukrainian forces. The Russian forces entered Severodonetsk city yesterday and there is street fighting going on.

Severodonetsk is a highly strategic asset for both sides. An estimated 15-16 thousand Ukrainian servicemen are deployed there, who are being reinforced. If Russian forces succeed in trapping and destroying the Ukrainian forces between Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, Kiev’s ability to contest the eastern Donbas region will be seriously weakened.

On Monday, Russian forces succeeded in destroying all but one bridge into Severodonetsk, threatening to cut the city off from supplies and reinforcements. A retreat and regrouping by the Ukrainian forces seems too late. The big picture is rather grim. The National Interest magazine assessed the developing situation as follows: 

“The coming battle could prove decisive to the course of the Kremlin’s Donbass campaign. Russian control over the eastern Donbas region would cut Ukraine off from the areas comprising its industrial heartland and fulfil the Kremlin’s key strategic goal of establishing a secure land bridge to Crimea.

“If Russia’s military successfully traps and destroys the Ukrainian forces between Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, they will significantly degrade Ukraine’s ability to contest the eastern Donbas region. It is unclear if Ukrainian military units in the Severodonetsk salient are considering plans to retreat further westward in order to avoid potential Russian envelopment.”

The next big target in the Russian sights is Slovyansk. Controlling it would enable Russian forces to drive west and link up with the forces pushing south-east of Izyum. The objective is to control the supply lines by road and block Ukrainian access to rail routes from the west. Ten Ukrainian brigades were deployed in the east when the war began in February, which were regarded as the best-equipped and best-trained soldiers that Kiev has.

Indeed, the fall of Mariupol to the Russian military represents a turning point. Russia now has a land corridor to Crimea and has ended Crimea’s water and power blockade. The freshwater canal connecting the Dnieper River to the arid Crimean Peninsula is now in Russia’s hands. So is a nuclear power station to the north of the peninsula, not to mention the power grid in southeastern Ukraine which can be now connected to Russia. These are strategic gains for Russia.

Beyond Donbass and Crimea, Russia might have other objectives too in the southern region. There have been demands — at the local level so far — for merger of the southern regions of Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Mykolaiv with Crimea (Russia), which have large Russian population. Some degree of integration of this region with Russia seems to have begun.

In Kherson region, Russian currency ruble has been introduced; Russian, along with Ukrainian, will become a state language and will become the main language for office work, communication and all issues of national importance; teaching in schools and universities will be conducted in Russian. The authorities of the Kherson Region have voiced the demand for establishment of a Russian military base in the region.

The secretary of Russia’s Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, said in an interview published Tuesday that the Russian government “is not chasing deadlines.” Indeed, the Western estimations also seem to anticipate future Russian operations in the southern regions. There are pointers. On May 23, the US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that Denmark will provide Ukraine with a modern Harpoon anti-ship launcher and missiles to safeguard its coasts. On May 24, Hungary announced national emergency to take immediate steps to be able to project the country against threats emanating from the war in Ukraine. Over the last weekend, Moscow publicly voiced disquiet over a British statement about the possibility of NATO arms supplies to Moldavia.

Excellent discussion.

By Leif Reigstad, The Nation, 5/24/22

ODESA, UKRAINE—On a hot and sunny summer day along the Black Sea beachfront, Igor cast his fishing line over the edge of a long pier. Wearing nothing but a blue Speedo and the faded red beach towel wrapped around his neck, the leathery-skinned Odessan was at a different spot from his preferred place for finding Gobi fish and mussels, where he’d been fishing for 10 years. His usual place had been wrecked by a recent rocket attack.

An engineer by trade, Igor was out of work because of the war, and he’d been coming here to fish all day to keep busy. He didn’t seem to care that Russian ships were just out of sight somewhere off the coast, training their armaments on this picturesque and historic city. The evidence of their destructive might was visible just a short walk down the shoreline, where the charred remains of a ritzy waterfront hotel sat in a massive pile of rubble a week after being struck by a Russian missile. As Igor fished, the soft booms of defensive artillery sounded in the background. “I don’t even consider going to a shelter,” he told me. “If it hits, it hits.”

Odesa had been considered an early target of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose efforts on the southern front were stalled at Mariupol and, so far, have been largely stopped at Mykolaiv, preventing ground forces from reaching this crown jewel on the Black Sea. Odesa has since become a symbol of Ukraine’s stubborn resistance. It was roughly 75 miles along the coast from here that Russia’s warship Moskva was famously sunk, and while a curfew remains in effect and city officials still warn that Russian attempts at a marine landing remain possible, it seems extremely improbable that the war will reach Odesa anytime soon in the way that it’s reached the Donbas region or the villages surrounding Kyiv.

Still, rockets continue to strike, and every so often mines wash in with the tide. A few days after I met Igor, a beach bathroom was destroyed by rocket. But none of this seemed to bother beachgoers bathing on the white sands. Their easy-going enjoyment of the waterfront seemed emblematic of the Odessan spirit.

As in most of the cities that sit far from the front lines, life here has continued amid the war. At the city’s Privoz Market, a maze of shops selling everything from seafood to showerheads, shoppers bought cheese and fresh bread from Georgians, dried fruit and nuts from Uzbeks, and fresh fruit and wine from Moldovans, including bushels of the brightest-red strawberries I’ve ever seen. One woman selling hunks of salty cheese told me the market never closed, not even on February 24, when the recent invasion began.

While the market remained open, it wasn’t quite as busy as usual, according to my fixer, Olga Pariieva. The streets of Odesa were similarly busy, yet missing the hordes of tourists and cars typical for this time of year. It felt peaceful, particularly given the surrounding context of a country at war. Locals were out enjoying the green parks and cobblestone streets, lined by ornate buildings from the 18th and 19th centuries, crumbling masterpieces in shades of pastel pink and sea-green. At the Odesa City Garden, the proverbial heart of the city, a street violinist played Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” over the distant sounds of air raid sirens. “Odesa never gives up,” Pariieva told me. “You cannot do this to Odesa.”

But much of the historic downtown is blocked by checkpoints, and some landmarks, like the National Opera, are completely shut off from the public. And while Odesa traditionally moves at a more relaxed pace than the typical big city, civilians here have been mobilizing to support the war effort in parts of Ukraine that have been more directly impacted.

In a four-star hotel in the city’s equivalent of Miami’s South Beach—a cluster of glass skyscrapers and night clubs—volunteers were unpacking and sorting packages of combat medical kits, thermal tactical optics, and camo uniforms. The hotel’s restaurant was converted into a donation center at the beginning of the war, and since then volunteers have been sorting donations and cooking meals for soldiers in the kitchen. Piles of potatoes and onions lay atop red velvet couches where once wealthy socialites sat popping bottles of champagne.

In an atrium beneath a gold chandelier, lead organizer Victoria Krotova showed me a photo on her phone of a brand-new silver pickup truck that they’d arranged to be delivered to the front. Swiping to the next image on her phone, she showed me the same truck, several days after it reached the front, turned into a useless piece of scrap by Russian artillery.

“The day the war began, I woke up and immediately understood that part of my life before the war was finished,” she said, wearing a white sweatshirt that read “There’s always hope,” and standing near a table on which sat a package of Pampers next to a pair of thermal vision goggles. “People will never be the same. It will never be the same as it used to be.”

Right now, Krotova said they desperately need uniforms—specifically, MARPAT camo, the pattern type used by the US Marines—and more cars.

Despite the hotel’s plush setting, the horrors of war were close. Another volunteer knew a woman who was killed, along with her mother and her 3-month-old baby, when a rocket struck an apartment complex on Easter weekend. When I visited the site in late May, there was still a gaping hole in the building, and a red toy airplane and two roses lay on a stairwell nearby. According to the City of Odesa’s Telegram channel, 30 apartments there were completely destroyed, and 62 more were damaged.

Abulfat Aliev, the owner of a Turkish imports business on the apartment complex’s ground floor, was on his way to work when the rocket struck. He got a security alert saying that his front door had been forced open, and arrived to see the smoldering remains of apartments and a line of charred cars piled on the street in front. “There were flames and smoke, everything was on fire,” he said. “It was horrible. People died, people lost their homes, their memories, things that can’t be replaced.”

At another apartment complex in Odesa, near a large mall that was struck by a rocket, broken windows peered out over an empty playground in the courtyard. Few people remained here. One resident, Lena Sukhotskaya, told me her daughter and grandson were playing here one day when they saw rockets whizzing overhead. They left shortly after that. When a rocket struck the mall nearby, another resident, Natalia, told me she was inside the hallway, clutching her elderly mother so tightly that she nearly suffocated her; they tried to run down to the basement, but the electricity went out and it was too dark; people were falling down. She told me that one small child was screaming so loudly that they thought he’d been hurt; but he was just terrified, and refused to let anyone touch him to look for injuries.

During my week in Odesa, several more rockets struck: a fertilizer plant was destroyed in one attack, and a 4-year-old girl lost her leg when a residential area was hit in Zatoka, a resort town just south of the city.

Amid the constant threat from above, some places in the city can feel like a ghost town. At an amusement park near the waterfront, attendants sat bored next to their rides. There was a tangled mass of stationary bumper cars, and carnival music echoed eerily throughout the nearly empty grounds. A double-decker carousel twirled around a few times for their painted horses’ only riders: a 2-year-boy and his mother, Katya.

“We come here for the distraction,” Katya told me. “I still haven’t gotten used to the rockets. I’m afraid it might come for us next time, hit our house.” She said she hasn’t left Odesa because her mother lives here, and she won’t leave her behind. Then she began to cry. In English, she said, “Stop the war. Stop killing children.”

By Fred Weir, Christian Science Monitor, 5/20/22

Amid Russia’s aggressive actions in Ukraine, the perennially neutral Nordic states of Finland and Sweden have reversed decades of policy and applied for membership in the NATO military alliance.

For Moscow this is, at least on the symbolic level, a disaster.

Not so long ago, Russian diplomacy aimed to revise European security architecture to make Ukraine look more like the Finnish example of a buffer zone between East and West. Now, with Finland ditching its neutrality to join NATO, even Kyiv has dropped talk it had earlier in the conflict of compromising on the issue of joining NATO. So profound is the geopolitical shift underway that Switzerland, which is often cited in dictionary definitions of “neutrality,” has indicated that it might revise its historical stance under the present circumstances.

Whatever the outcome of Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, many analysts say Moscow faces decades of isolation in a Europe solidly united against it.

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“If in the past there were reasons to speculate about a divergence between the [European Union] and NATO, now it looks like they go hand in hand, at least for the foreseeable future,” says Andrey Kortunov, head of the Russian International Affairs Council, which is affiliated with the Foreign Ministry. “If [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s idea was to put an end to NATO expansion, it clearly wasn’t very effective.”

A long frontier with Russia

After talking with Finnish President Sauli Niinistö recently, Mr. Putin surprised many by arguing that things needn’t be that bad. Indeed, he said, there should be “no problem,” as long as the new members of NATO refrain from basing foreign military infrastructure on their soil, especially nuclear weapons. Both Finland and Sweden have long been very capable exemplars of “armed neutrality,” maintaining de facto cooperation with the West in security and intelligence matters, and the actual military balance needn’t change, he suggested.

“Putin said that Russia doesn’t see any fresh threats, but will monitor the appearance of any new infrastructure and react accordingly,” says Igor Korotchenko, editor of the Moscow-based National Defense journal. “My own view is that the situation is extremely unfavorable for Russia. Finland has a long frontier with Russia, and Russian forces in the western military district are currently insufficient to cover that. Sweden is a first-class military power, with a huge network of bases and airfields.”

Sweden has been mostly neutral for over 200 years, even navigating World War II and the Cold War without changing its status.

Finland is a more complicated case. It was invaded by the USSR in 1939, and fought a bitter “Winter War,” which dealt severe damage to Soviet forces before Finland was compelled to cede territory. Defeated again in 1945, Finland adopted an official policy of non-alignment and spent the next several decades walking a careful foreign policy line between the USSR, later Russia, and the West.

In practice, however, Finland has integrated with European institutions, including the EU, and hence the actual situation on the ground may not be practically affected by its impending NATO accession.

Still, the geostrategic map is going to look radically different as Finland and Sweden move into NATO.

“The Baltic Sea will become, effectively, a NATO lake,” says Mr. Kortunov. “The border between Russia and NATO will basically double,” as Finland’s 800-mile frontier becomes, at least theoretically, a confrontation line. “In the Arctic Council, it will now be seven NATO members against Russia.”

It remains to be seen what model of NATO integration Finland and Sweden will adopt, Russian analysts say. Some northern European members of NATO, such as Norway and Iceland, eschew foreign bases on their territories, while others, like Poland and the Baltic states, enthusiastically embrace NATO deployments.

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

In a May 14 telephone conversation between Mr. Putin and Mr. Niinistö, the Russians may have been assured that Finland will take the former route, says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, a leading Moscow-based foreign policy journal.

“Finland probably won’t want to host foreign military bases, much less nuclear weapons. So it’s possible that not much will have to change in practical terms,” he says.

“This issue of Ukraine is special”

Russian analysts say that the threat of Ukraine joining NATO posed a qualitatively different challenge for Moscow, paving the path to conflict, due to the country’s proximity to the Russian heartland, its big Russian-speaking population, and historical ties. Perhaps most importantly, the Kremlin has seen an aggressive nationalist threat in Ukraine since the 2014 Maidan revolution overthrew a Russia-friendly government and replaced it with a pro-Western one in Kyiv. Russia’s failure to secure Ukrainian neutrality is just one of the causes of the current crisis, they say.

“This issue of Ukraine is special,” says Mr. Lukyanov. “After all, Russia has accepted the entry of many others into NATO over the years. We may not have liked the idea of Poland, Estonia, Latvia, etc., joining the alliance, but it did not provoke war. It’s a similar situation with Finland and Sweden. This [war] is about Ukraine specifically.”

But some Russian officials claim that there is a wider, long-term scheme to isolate and undermine Russia now being brought to fruition. Ukraine was inducted into that plan following the Maidan revolution, offered political and military support and seduced with promises of NATO membership and European integration, they say, adding that the inevitable confrontation with Russia is currently being manipulated by Washington to achieve long-held strategic goals in Europe.

“The U.S. is using this Ukraine situation to expand its influence,” says Andrei Klimov, deputy chair of the International Affairs Committee of the Federation Council, Russia’s upper house of parliament. “It’s about much larger things than Ukraine. The U.S. has long wanted Finland and Sweden to abandon neutrality in order to master the Arctic. This is about the bigger picture, and the confrontation in Ukraine is just an instrument that is being exploited to the hilt.”