By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, 6/18/23

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday met with African leaders in St. Petersburg and displayed a document that he said was a draft treaty on Ukrainian neutrality that was drawn up during negotiations in Istanbul in March 2022.

“As you know, a string of talks between Russia and Ukraine took place in Turkey so as to work out both the confidence-building measures you mentioned and to draw up the text of the agreement,” Putin told the African delegation, according to TASS.

“We did not discuss with the Ukrainian side that this treaty would be classified, but we have never presented it, nor commented on it. This draft agreement was initialed by the head of the Kiev negotiation team. He put his signature there. Here it is,” he added.

According to RT, the treaty, titled “Permanent Neutrality and Security Guarantees for Ukraine,” required Ukraine to enshrine “permanent neutrality” in its constitution. The US, Britain, Russia, China, and France are listed as guarantors. Since the treaty was a draft, it indicates that it wasn’t finalized and more details needed to be worked out.

Putin’s claim reflects an article published in Foreign Affairs last year that cited multiple former senior US officials who said Russia and Ukraine tentatively agreed on a peace deal in April 2022. They said the agreement would have involved a Ukrainian promise not to join NATO in exchange for a Russian withdrawal to the pre-invasion lines, and Ukraine would have received security guarantees from several countries.

Russian and Ukrainian officials met face-to-face in Istanbul on March 29, 2022, which was followed up with virtual consultations. After the meeting, Russia’s lead negotiator described the talks as “constructive,” and the Russian Defense Ministry announced it would “drastically” reduce military activity near the northern cities of Kyiv and Chernihiv, which led to a full Russian withdrawal from the north.

Putin said after the Russian withdrawal, Ukraine abandoned the treaty. “After we pulled our troops away from Kiev — as we had promised to do — the Kiev authorities … tossed [their commitments] into the dustbin of history,” he said. “They abandoned everything.”

Ukraine accused Russian troops of intentionally killing civilians in the northern areas it withdrew from, most notably in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha. But if Putin’s account is true, Western pressure could have also led to Ukraine scuttling the treaty.

Then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited Kyiv on April 9, 2022, a few days after Russia completed its withdrawal from the north. According to a report from Ukrainska Pravda, Johnson urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky not to negotiate with Russia and that even if Ukraine was ready to sign a deal with Putin, Kyiv’s Western backers were not.

The Ukrainska Pravda report said at the time, Russia was ready for a Putin-Zelensky meeting, but two factors stopped it from happening: the discovery of dead Ukrainian civilians and Johnson’s visit.

Then-Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet was trying to mediate between Putin and Zelensky in March 2022 and gave a similar account of the West’s position. He said the US and its allies “blocked” his mediation effort and that he thought there was a “legitimate decision by the West to keep striking Putin” and not negotiate.

After peace talks were scuttled in April 2022, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said he expected the conflict to end after the Istanbul talks but then realized some countries in NATO wanted to prolong the war to “weaken” Russia. A few days after Cavusoglu’s comments, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin admitted that one of the US’s goals in supporting Ukraine is to see Russia “weakened.”

As the war has dragged on, the Biden administration has come out explicitly against a ceasefire. Secretary of State Antony Blinken outlined the position earlier this month and said the US would continue building up Ukraine’s military rather than push for peace.

The African leaders who met with Putin on Saturday traveled to Russia and Ukraine to push for peace talks and an end to the war, but the chances of new negotiations between the warring sides are slim. The delegation included the presidents of Comoros, Senegal, South Africa, and Zambia, the prime minister of Egypt, and the foreign ministers of the Republic of Congo and Uganda.

The African delegation was in Ukraine on Friday, but Zelensky did not seem open to their proposals and reiterated his position that peace talks can’t happen until a full Russian withdrawal. In Moscow, the Kremlin said that the peace initiative presented by the African delegation “is very difficult to implement, difficult to compare positions.”

By Phil Miller, Declassified UK, 6/8/23

A Russian football hooligan leading cross-border raids from Ukraine taught at a neo-Nazi camp in Wales where organisers dreamed of recreating Hitler’s SS.

The leader of an anti-Putin militia has disturbing links to an extreme-right wing movement banned in Britain, Declassified has found.

Denis Kapustin, who also uses the names Denis Nikitin and ‘White Rex’, was an instructor at a far-right camp in Wales in 2014.

His presence was noted by a Sunday Mirror investigation that year.

More recently, the White Rex has been in the news for leading the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK).

They are a group of armed dissidents launching raids into Russia from their base in Ukraine since March.

At least two civilians and a child have been killed in their attacks so far, with another 13 wounded.

While the RDK’s far-right ideology was belatedly noted in media reports, the fact its leader spent time teaching neo-Nazis in Britain has so far been forgotten.

He taught at the Sigurd Culture Camp in the Brecon Beacons in August 2014, which was designed to “enthuse them with a sense of racial pride, and to awaken the ‘Spirit Warrior’ within”.

Camp organiser Craig Fraser wanted to recreate Hitler’s SS by drilling his men into shape – and even planned to show footage from ISIS training in Syria at the next session.

The Sunday Mirror said a “key trainer at the event…was Denis Nitikin [sic], the owner and organiser of White Rex, a Russian martial arts and cage fighting club.”

Yesterday immigration minister Robert Jenrick refused to tell parliament what information the Home Office holds on Kapustin’s visit to the UK in 2014 or whether he had since been banned from entering the country, claiming not to comment on individual cases.

‘Go kick some immigrants’

In Wales, Kapustin taught over 30 participants how to deal with “attackers armed with knives” in “gruelling full contact practice fighting from which participants often emerged bruised but undaunted”.

When not fighting, organisers “spoke at length about the virtues of…our Pagan spiritual heritage”.

Anti-fascist research group Hope Not Hate found the Sigurd camp was a front for National Action, a neo-Nazi group later banned in the UK under the Terrorism Act for praising the murder of MP Jo Cox.

Two National Action figures who attended the training camp, Christopher Lythgoe and Matthew Hankinson, were later jailed for a total of 14 years for their involvement with the group.

German authorities reportedly banned Kapustin from entering Europe in 2019. He once had a framed photo of Joseph Goebbels in his bedroom and has been heavily engaged in football hooliganism across the continent.

When living in Moscow, he enjoyed hosting forest fights between hooligans after which they would “go kick some immigrants”.

The enemy of my enemy…

Despite Kapustin’s links to a banned British neo-Nazi group and violent racism, he has obtained Western arms in Ukraine for his rebellion against Russia – and appears to receive support from Ukrainian military intelligence (the GUR).

A GUR spokesman called RDK members “one of those forces that will be shaping the future configuration of post-Putin Russia.”

Yet in one Telegram message from May, Kapustin called for Russians to support him by praising the: “Glory of the Great Russian Empire!”

Journalist Leonid Ragozin has said that after the RDK attacked Bryansk region of Russia in March, Kapustin mocked a Muslim boy wounded in the attack over his mixed Tajik/Tartar heritage.

He placed swastikas over photos of his family and wrote: “Russia will be Aryan or lifeless”.

Mark Galeotti, author of the book Putin’s Wars, told Declassified: “I imagine Ukraine will use any weapon at its disposal against Russia, and if this means arming and supporting a neo-Nazi well, so long as he proves a capable leader and can attract like-minded fighters to the cause of challenging the Putin regime, so be it. 

“Churchill’s famous quote that ‘If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons’ springs to mind. 

“This is, after all, only a very small element of the overall war effort and Ukrainian military intelligence, GUR – which seems largely behind these pro-Kyiv Russian forces – is trying to distract and torment the Kremlin, and neo-Nazis certainly fit that bill.”

Maxim Solopov, a journalist who has investigated Russian neo-Nazis, said on his Telegram channel that a White Rex social media account had almost 45,000 subscribers by 2020. 

He estimated that even if only 1% of them remained active, it would give Kapustin around 500 supporters – some of who could be in Moscow, where pro-RDK graffiti has recently appeared.

Western weaponry

Photos from Kapustin’s recent raid in the Belgorod region of Russia show US-made armoured vehicles in his group’s convoy.

Earlier footage posted on the RDK’s Telegram channel indicates they have operated US-made rocket launchers – known as High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) – which cost around $5m each.

For small arms, Kapustin’s men do not all have to rely on rusty kalashnikovs, with some wielding sophisticated Belgian-made FN SCAR assault rifles. This has triggered concern from Belgium’s prime minister, Alexander de Croo, as to how weapons meant for Ukraine have ended up in the group’s hands. 

Swedish Pansarskott rocket launchers are also in Kapustin’s arsenal. And some of his men can be seen wearing camouflage smocks embroidered with union jacks, suggesting their uniforms might come from British army stocks. 

The RDK’s activities have not been limited to cross-border raids. They were responsible in December for guarding Snake Island, Ukraine’s famous outpost in the Black Sea. When a CNN reporter met them there, he omitted to mention the group’s neo-Nazi associations.

Their maritime capabilities often feature in Telegram posts, with members showing off amphibious landings from inflatable boats. 

They even claim to have landed in Zaporizhzhia, where Russian troops are occupying Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. 

Russian friends

Kapustin moved to Ukraine in 2017 following an invitation from Sergei Korotkikh, who founded Russia’s National Socialist Society and is accused of beheading a migrant beneath a swastika flag.

Declassified has previously revealed how Korotkikh obtained five rocket launchers Britain supplied to Ukraine, on whose side he now fights.

Prominent Russian neo-Nazis flocking to join the RDK include Aleksey Levkin, from the band Hitler’s Hammer. He organised the annual National-Socialist Black Metal festival in Kyiv. 

He is heavily involved with the Wotanjugend Telegram channel, which promoted the manifesto of Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 51 Muslims at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

A few weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, Levkin posted a photo of a British-made NLAW rocket launcher with the caption “mastering NLAW”, suggesting he was learning to use the UK-supplied anti-tank weapon.

Freedom of Russia Legion

Another anti-Putin militia fighting alongside White Rex is the Freedom of Russia Legion, which also has far-right figures involved in its Ukraine-based leadership.

The Legion’s commander, Maximillian ‘Caesar’ Andronnikov, is a former member of the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM), which was designated as a global terrorist group by the US State Department in 2020.

The then Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, said RIM “has provided paramilitary-style training to white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Europe”, linking their alumni to the bombing of refugee shelters in Sweden.

Vladimir Putin says his illegal invasion of Ukraine is needed to “de-nazify” the country, a claim which has been widely derided, partly owing to President Zelensky’s Jewish heritage.

Increasing evidence of the role played by neo-Nazis in attacking Russian soil from Ukraine will only fuel the Kremlin’s narrative.

This week the New York Times said some journalists asked Ukrainian soldiers to remove Nazi emblems on their uniforms before photographing them.

They expressed concern that the use of such patches “risks fueling Russian propaganda and spreading imagery that the West has spent a half-century trying to eliminate.”

---

Link here.

Full written transcript here.

By Kyle Anzalone, The Libertarian Institute, 6/8/23

Two recent reports have uncovered billions in trade between members of the North Atlantic alliance and Russia, after the Kremlin ordered the invasion of Ukraine last year. 

Corisk, a Norwegian risk-management firm, issued a report in May detailing billions in trade between Russia and Western states that transited through a third nation. “This report presents total estimates of Western circumventions of sanctions against Russia.” The report states, “Through a combination of top-down and bottom-up methodological approaches, we estimate the indirect trade of 16 Western countries with Russia at 8 billion Euros of indirect exports via third countries, and the indirect imports at 6 billion Euros via third countries in 2022.”

Corisk believes third-party counties are used to circumvent sanctions on Moscow. “This means that the indirect exports, largely likely to be circumventing sanctions, represented almost one-fifth of all Western exports ending up in Russia.” It continued, “The main Western countries behind most indirect exports to Russia in 2022 were Germany (2.05 billion Euros), Lithuania (1.45 billion), the United States (980 million), Poland (725 million), Japan (575 million), Czech Republic (490 million), France (400 million), and the Netherlands (290 million).”

A second study conducted by the Atlantic Council accuses Turkey of acting as a “critical” economic lifeline for Russia. “Although Turkish exports of electronic machinery, including critical integrated circuits, fell in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion, they have since recovered and grown well beyond the pre-invasion average,” the report stated. “From March 2022 to March 2023, Turkish electronic exports to Russia jumped by about 85%.”

It added, Turkey’s “trade with Russia remains a vital economic lifeline for its businesses as the country recovers and reconstructs from a devastating earthquake earlier this year.”

After Russia invaded Ukraine last year, President Joe Biden pledged to “cripple” Moscow’s economy with a sanctions package the White House compared to an “economic nuclear weapon.”

Part of the reason the economic war failed to harm Moscow’s ability to wage war in Ukraine is that the global community has largely refused to comply with the Western sanctions. The participants in the economic war are limited to Washington and its close allies. 

The Atlantic Council – a group funded by the US and UK governments – acknowledged that refusal to enforce sanctions is not condoning the war in Ukraine. “Such surges in trade, however, are not necessarily an indicator of support” for the war, the report says. “Instead, it is more likely they are predominantly the result of companies — and countries — pursuing legal opportunities for cheaper exports and new gaps in the Russian market.”

By Michael Tracey, Newsweek, 6/14/23

On June 4, a group referring to itself as the “Polish Volunteer Corps” issued a boastful announcement confirming its participation in a series of cross-border ground offensives into Russia. News of these audacious raids was jarring enough, given the many prior assurances of U.S. and Ukrainian war planners, who insisted no attacks would be carried out inside Russian territory. It was all the more conspicuous that the incursion units were apparently comprised of Polish soldiers.

Poland, of course, is not only a NATO member state, but the NATO member state with which the U.S. has most assiduously aligned itself since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine (Polish government officials deny any formal connection to the “Polish Volunteer Corps”). So the raids raised an obvious, yet oft-neglected question: Just what the hell is U.S. policy in Ukraine?

If you turn on the TV, you’ll find pundits on every channel loyally reciting from memory the broad parameters of the U.S. mission—at least as it’s being conveyed in daily rhetorical flourishes by Biden Administration officials, assorted Congressional chest-thumpers, and brave think tank warriors. Freedom and autocracy are locked in a great cosmic battle of good versus evil, or so goes the usual storyline—most often narrated with a degree of moral complexity that can be generously compared to a lower-tier Marvel Movie.

But apart from this steady stream of heavily recycled platitudes, was it ever plainly disclosed to Americans—the chief financial sponsors of the Ukraine war effort, after all—that the scope of the war effort they’ve found themselves subsidizing would eventually expand to include platoons of Polish soldiers marching straight into Russia? Did anyone back in Washington, D.C. sign off on this, or was there ever an opportunity granted for public consideration of its potentially foreboding implications?

At least in theory, the U.S. is treaty-bound to come to the defense of Poland in the event of armed attack. And while Poland may nominally disavow the Polish Volunteer Corps, a Polish journalist writing for Poland’s largest digital publication says he was in attendance at a founding organizational meeting in Kyiv this past February, during which the unit was established not as a ragtag group of untested amateurs, but as an elite “sabotage and reconnaissance” force—which from the get-go was “reporting directly to the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine.” Per this account, the unit was to consist of Poland’s “most experienced soldiers,” with notable imprecision as to where specifically those soldiers hailed from.

Then there’s the fact that shortly before the formation of the “Polish Volunteer Corps,” a cross-coalition bill was submitted to the Polish parliament which would make it legal for Polish nationals to fight in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The war against Russia was to be recognized as “a special situation from the point of view of the national security of the Republic of Poland,” the text reads, “requiring non-standard political and legislative actions on the part of the state.”

The “Polish Volunteer Corps” has been conducting joint operations with the “Russian Volunteer Corps,” another fully integrated “special unit within the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine”—euphemistically referred to in “Western” media headlines with plausible-deniability monikers like “Pro-Ukraine group of partisans.” Given how these ostensibly unattached “partisans” have been bragging about taking Russian hostages and otherwise getting themselves involved in increasingly spectacular, provocative attacks, one understands why Ukraine might wish to sustain plausible deniability.

“The ground war has come to Russia,” proclaimed one Polish state-backed media organ at the news that their soldiers had breached the border.

For many, the footage provided an occasion for rapturous joy, awash as they are in the primal euphoria of armed retribution. Meanwhile, these elite soldiers billed as “volunteers” have been razing Russian border settlements with U.S.-provided weaponry, according to the New York Times and Washington Post. The units “lobbed shells and missiles on residential areas,” the Times reported, and they appeared to be aiming their attacks at “no apparent military target.”

Convoys of armored vehicles called MRAPs, initially produced for U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, were observed barreling into Russia from Ukraine, with still no explanation forthcoming as to how precisely they wound up there. Maybe someone in Kyiv just happened to leave a garage full of U.S. supplied armored vehicles unlocked. Either way, the Ukraine military was conclusively shown to have used U.S. weapons to attack Russia—the very thing President Biden and other administration officials have emphatically maintained they do not support and are not enabling.

Strangely though, this revelation of systematic government deception doesn’t seem to have moved the needle much in terms of the wider debate over U.S. involvement in Ukraine. Donald Trump could misstate the temperature outside by half-a-degree Farenheit and the entire U.S. media would be falling over themselves to piously accuse him of “lying”—but pile up mounds of incontrovertible evidence that Americans have been chronically deceived about a sprawling U.S. military intervention, and you’ll mostly get eye-rolls from the savvy-minded commentariat. That is, if you’re fortunate enough to be spared the standard sneering accusations of “Russian propagandist.”

Speaking of claims that might arguably be considered “propaganda,” almost exactly one year ago, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky embarked on a U.S. media tour promising Americans from the bottom of his heart that “We are not planning to attack Russia.” These claims were echoed simultaneously by President Biden, who insisted that “We are not encouraging or enabling Ukraine to strike beyond its borders.”

Yet here we are a year later, and there’s no longer any reasonable doubt that Ukraine is “striking beyond its borders,” and in increasingly aggressive fashion—from the cross-border raids to the drone-strike on the Kremlin to the bombing barrage on a residential Moscow neighborhood. And that’s only a smattering of examples from the past several weeks.

Still, it’s harder than one might expect to rouse much critical interest—especially among a media that has been politically, ideologically, and emotionally invested in Ukraine’s glorious war-fighting cause from the outset. One perfect example of late was a CNN article in which “senior U.S. officials” were reported confiding that while they had “condemned the strikes inside Russia,” they of course privately “believe the cross-border attacks are a smart military strategy.” A state official saying one thing in public but another in private used to be the most surefire sign of official deceit a journalist could hope to uncover. Yet CNN seemed to just let it flow by like a gentle spring breeze, almost as though they were actually impressed with the guile of the “senior U.S. officials” they’d been given the honor of anonymously paraphrasing.

As it stands, the U.S. government continuously pelts the American people with provable untruths in service of maintaining a war policy that bears almost no resemblance to how it was initially presented. And in the sectors of society allegedly tasked with scrutinizing government conduct, this is mostly met with a shrug.

How much more extreme does the deception need to get before sustained pushback is no longer avoidable?

If Polish soldiers launching a self-proclaimed “ground war” in Russia isn’t enough to rattle off the complacency, one shudders to think how severe of a shock would be necessary.