By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 6/26/24

President Putin proved once again that he’s mature enough of a leader to make tough decisions that disregard public opinion following his government’s tepid response to Ukraine’s US-backed bombing of beachgoers in Sevastopol over the weekend. It was predicted that “Russia Probably Won’t Impose A No-Fly Zone Over The Black Sea After The Sevastopol Attack”, which explained why it was unlikely to capitulate to the public’s demand due to worries about accidentally sparking World War III.

Instead of shooting down or otherwise neutralizing American reconnaissance drones over international waters in the Black Sea, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov reaffirmed that President Putin’s ceasefire proposal still stands. Shortly afterwards, Peskov also expressed Russia’s continued openness to talks with France after Emmanuel Macron publicly said that he’s interested in them the other day while also walking back his earlier rhetoric about wanting to conventionally intervene in Ukraine.

These two developments were then followed by new Defense Minister Andrey Belousov talking to his American counterpart in a call where “they exchanged views about the situation around Ukraine”. He also warned him about “the dangers of further escalation in terms of the continuing deliveries of American weapons to the Ukrainian Armed Forces.” Taken together, it’s clearly the case that Russia’s response was once again conciliatory and not escalatory, exactly as the earlier cited analysis predicted.

Interestingly, these developments were interspersed with the viral fake news claim that Russia had already supposedly downed an American drone over the Black Sea in revenge, which was introduced into the information ecosystem here but was then quickly walked back by its originator here. Nevertheless, this claim wildly proliferated across social media because it conformed to many wishful thinking observers’ expectations, most of whom never came across the follow-up post walking it back.

The reason why it’s so important to clarify exactly what Russia’s response to last weekend’s provocation was, namely to continue its conciliatory approach for de-escalation purposes as opposed to risking World War III by miscalculation if it reacted as the public demanded, is to prevent false expectations. Those who get their hopes unrealistically high will inevitably experience deep disappointment, after which some might become susceptible to hostile narratives that Russia “sold out” or whatever.

Whether one agrees with the merits of its saintly restraint or not, the fact of the matter is that this is indeed the policy that President Putin has decided to promulgate for the reasons that were explained. While it’s possible that he might order a symbolic show of force by authorizing the shooting down or neutralization of an American drone in the coming future, his tepid response thus far suggests that he’s disinclined to do so, or that it would solely be a one-off in the unlikely event that it happens.

President Putin isn’t a “madman”, “monster”, or “mastermind” like many imagine that he is, but is a consummate pragmatist at least as how he sees himself and is therefore unlikely to ever do anything that could be spun as emotional or radical. He always takes a long time before making major decisions, with the proof being how long it took for him to commence Russia’s aerial intervention in Syria and the ongoing special operation, usually waiting till the last possible moment.

Likewise, if Russia does indeed decide to seriously escalate against the West, then the track record suggests that it would be a seemingly abrupt game-changer but preceded by clear statements of intent that could be seen in hindsight as “ultimatums” (despite being described differently by its diplomats). Some might interpret a few of its recent signals as hinting at that scenario, but the substance of its response thus far as was explained dispels that notion and suggests that the current policy will continue.

YouTube link here.

Natasha Bertrand doesn’t have a great record for reliability as a journalist, but… – Natylie

By Natasha Bertrand & Oren Liebermann, CNN, 6/26/24

The Biden administration is moving toward lifting a de facto ban on American military contractors deploying to Ukraine, four US officials familiar with the matter told CNN, to help the country’s military maintain and repair US-provided weapons systems.

The change would mark another significant shift in the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy, as the US looks for ways to give Ukraine’s military an upper hand against Russia.

The policy is still being worked on by administration officials and has not received final sign-off yet from President Joe Biden, officials said.

“We have not made any decisions and any discussion of this is premature,” said one administration official. “The president is absolutely firm that he will not be sending US troops to Ukraine.”

Once approved, the change would likely be enacted this year, officials said, and would allow the Pentagon to provide contracts to American companies for work inside Ukraine for the first time since Russia invaded in 2022. Officials said they hope it will speed up the maintenance and repairs of weapons systems being used by the Ukrainian military.

Over the last two years, Biden has insisted that all Americans, and particularly US troops, stay far away from the Ukrainian frontlines. The White House has been determined to limit both the danger to Americans and the perception, particularly by Russia, that the US military is engaged in combat there. The State Department has explicitly warned Americans against traveling to Ukraine since 2022.

As a result, US-provided military equipment that has sustained significant damage in combat has had to be transported out of the country to Poland, Romania, or other NATO countries for repairs, a process which takes time. US troops are also available to help the Ukrainians with more routine maintenance and logistics, but only from afar via video chat or secure phone—an arrangement that has come with inherent limitations, since US troops and contractors are not able to work directly on the systems.

Administration officials began to seriously reconsider those restrictions over the last several months, officials said, as Russia continued to make gains on the battlefield and US funding for Ukraine stalled in Congress. Allowing experienced, US government-funded American contractors to maintain a presence in Ukraine means they will be able to help fix damaged, high-value equipment much faster, officials said. One advanced system that officials say will likely require regular maintenance is the F-16 fighter jet, which Ukraine is set to receive later this year.

Companies bidding for the contracts would be required to develop robust risk mitigation plans to mitigate threats to their employees, an official said.

The discussions follow a series of decisions the US has made in recent months to try to help Ukraine beat back the Russians. In late-May, Biden gave Ukraine permission to strike targets inside Russia, near the border with the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, with US weapons—a request the US had repeatedly denied in the past. Last week, that policy appeared to expand once again, when National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said Ukraine could counterstrike anywhere along the Ukraine-Russia border using US weapons.

Current and former officials familiar with the discussions about deploying contractors to Ukraine emphasized that the policy change will not result in the kind of overwhelming American contractor presence there that existed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, it would likely result in anywhere from a few dozen to a couple hundred contractors working in Ukraine at a time.

“This would be a much more focused and thoughtful effort to support Ukraine in country,” said retired Army officer Alex Vindman, who served as the director for European Affairs on former President Donald Trump’s National Security Council.

Vindman has been pushing the administration to lift the restrictions for nearly two years and said the administration has been working on a plan to ease the restrictions since earlier this year.

“Ukraine is an ally,” Vindman told CNN. “The US has keen, critical national security interests in supporting Ukraine, and there are plenty of risk mitigation measures.”

By Guy Mettan, The Floutist, 6/3/24

To destroy the shared past of a people is to go some way toward destroying a people—the coherence and solidity of their identity, their ability to think and act collectively, their collective confidence in themselves, altogether their place in the world. It is among the most vicious methods known to aggressor armies, imperial powers, and dictators—psychologically vicious, vicious because effective—of attacking the psyches and souls of others in the course of violent campaigns to dominate them.

Pierre Nora, the honored French scholar of history and identity, termed the places where people preserve their pasts lieux de mémoire, sites of memory. It is these that are attacked, sooner or later, when one or another kind of power seeks to destroy or conquer other people. You saw this during the Cultural Revolution, when Red Guards defaced as many monuments to China’s past as they could. You have long seen this in the Israelis’ aggressions against Palestinians. And you have seen it this past decade as the Kiev regime continues its war against the people of Donbas.

This war on memory, as Guy Mettan terms it, is in our view a pernicious, quite significant dimension of ethnic cleansing. In Part 2 of his “Report from Donbas,” Mettan takes us to some of the places where this war is waged to show us how the people of Donetsk and Lugansk, once again Russian by choice, defend their sites of memory as a matter of defending themselves.

The Floutist published the first part of this exceptional series 11 May. We are pleased to welcome Mettan, the distinguished Swiss journalist, back into our pages. Part 1 of his Report can be found here:

https://thefloutist.substack.com/p/report-from-donbas

—The Editors.

Guy Mettan

It is now two years and several months since the Russian military began its intervention in Ukraine. And between Russia and the West, between the Ukrainians in Kiev and the former Ukrainians who have become Russians again, the battle is not just a military struggle. It is also a struggle in defence of memory against those who would obliterate it.

In the West, the 80th anniversary of the D–Day landings on 6 June will be commemorated without the Russians. This is an official if symbolic denial that the victory over Nazi Germany was first and foremost a Soviet victory and that Operation Overlord could not have succeeded without the Red Army’s Operation Bagration in the east, to hold off German tank divisions.

Attempts to erase the past in this manner are not at all new. One finds cases of it throughout history. But in the lands to Europe’s east and the Russian Federation’s west it has greatly intensified since 2014, a decade back, when, some months after the U.S.–cultivated coup in Kiev, the Western powers marked the 70th anniversary of the D–Day landings and refused to invite Russians to the ceremonies held on the Normandy beaches—this while inviting representatives of the former enemy, among them German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Across Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, and in Ukraine in particular, history is being turned upside down. Historical statues and war memorials honouring those who defeated the Reich in the Second World War are being demolished to erect steles, inscribed stone pillars, that commemorate not the Soviet’s hard-won victory but the victims of the Soviets. These monuments are also intended to mark the glory of the nationalists who fought alongside the Nazis and massacred Jews, such as Stepan Bandera, Yaroslav Stetsko, and Roman Shukhevich.

Every day, monuments are taken down and others erected in their place—on the sly, in the silence of the Western media. We seem to forget, to take but one example of many, that the Treblinka death camp was run by a group of some 20 German SS troops and that the exterminations were carried out by a hundred Ukrainian and Lithuanian guards.

This rewriting of history amounts to a war on the past of a people. And if it is waged not on battlefields but at sites of memory, the outcome of this struggle is comparably important. To destroy the collective memories of a people is to destroy their common identity. In this way it also destroys their understanding of their place in the world and their ability to act effectively—and so their ability to go forward. If you have no past you have no future, it has been said: This is the ultimate objective of those who attack the shared memories of others.

None of this has gone unnoticed by the people of Donbas. And, true to their motto, “Never forget, never forgive,” they are in response redoubling their commemorative faith and monuments to fallen heroes.

A typical example of this struggle are the annual commemorations of the Holodomor, held each fourth Sunday of November, as the European Parliament mandated in 2008. The Holodomor is the Ukrainians’ name for the famine unleashed by Stalin against the peasantry in 1932. These events occurred mainly in 1932–1933 and were the result of Stalin’s desire to advance the collectivization of the economy. In this cause he confiscated the peasants’ incomes to finance the Soviet Union’s industrialization following the financial boycott of the Western capitalist countries.

But as a memorial the Holodomor commemoratives are incomplete. They attribute this massacre by famine solely to the Russians. Ukrainians are depicted as its sole victims, even though the famine also affected southern Russia and Kazakhstan and was orchestrated by a Georgian, Stalin, and executed by a Pole, Stanisław Kossior, who ruled Ukraine at the time. The present Ukrainian authorities have never acknowledged the collaboration of local and regional Communists. In the Ukrainian narrative of the tragedy, all responsibility for it has been and continues to be projected onto Russia and Russians, even though ethnic Russians played a minor role in that tragedy.

During the two last days of my trip in Donbas, we visited a dozen of the memorials established to commemorate the victims of the slaughters, massacres, and wars that have occurred on the territory over the last century. These are countless. You can find them in cities, in the countryside, and in small villages. This is why, during two full days, we travelled here and there, on small roads and large, throughout the two republics, Donetsk and Lugansk, to visit these testimonials of past dramas.

■

Perhaps the most disturbing of these memorials is located near the shaft of Mine No. 4/4–bis in Donetsk. The site was once a coal mine and lies not far from the centre of the city. Mines are everywhere here. The entrance, very sober, appears to be to the side of an ordinary street road of an ordinary suburb. There are no large advertisements for it.

I’d never previously heard of Mine No. 4/4–bis, and I suspect you haven’t either. It doesn’t appear in any of our history books and can’t be found in Wikipedia. This why it is maybe the most disturbing place of death that I visited. In Auschwitz or Babi Yar, in Kyiv, you know what you are facing, and you expect to be moved. But here, you have to add the element of surprise.

Where the Nazis once massacreed many. Mine No. 4/4–bis, Donestsk. (Guy Mettan.)

It is estimated that 75,000 to 102,000 people were massacred at 4/4–bis from the end of 1941 to September 1943, two or three times as many as at the better documented massacre in 1941 at the ravine in Kiev known as Babi Yar. The entire Jewish community of Donetsk (called Stalino at the time) was thrown into the pit, along with tens of thousands of others.

The Kiev government ignored the 4/4–bis memorial after 1991, when Ukraine declared its independence, because it disrupted official narratives and concerned only Russian-speaking people in the east of the country. But for the past year the site has been brought to life again. The restoration work, not quite finished, is still under way. The site is, accordingly, not yet open to the public. But the visible parts are quite impressive: There are prominent sculptures, a wall honouring those killed, landscaped gardens and trees.

A visit to No. 4/4–bis is all it takes to understand why the people of Donbas rose up against Kiev in April 2014, when the regime that emerged from the U.S.–backed Maidan coup wanted officially to ban their language while sending the heirs of their forebears’ executioners to suppress them. This region has a strong tradition of resistance to any kind of invaders, from German Nazis to west–Ukrainian ultranationalists in Nazi–style uniforms. If No. 4/4–bis is about remembering, it is also about determination.

You can destroy monuments, but not memories.

■

Seventy kilometres northeast of Donetsk, in the direction of Bakhmut, in the province of Horlivka, the monumental Savur–Mohila cenotaph is another testimony to the battles of the last century. It is erected at the top of the highest hill in the Donbas, on the site of one of the great clashes of the Second World War. That took place in July–August 1943, at the same time as the famous tank battle of Kursk, which was to break the Wehrmacht.

A broad stairway up the hill with a huge spire at the top was built here in 1963. Seven decades later—in August 2014, six months after the coup in Kiev—the hill was the scene of a bitter battle between separatists and units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The monument was hit hard during the battle. When the separatists retook the hill, led by Alexander Zakhartchenko, their prestigious leader, it was a definitive victory for the Donetsk republicans.

But the fighting had devastated the Savur–Mohila site. And after the Russian military operation began in February 2022, President Putin ordered it rebuilt to commemorate two wars—the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 and the Donbas Liberation War of 2014–2022. On either side of a walkway that leads to the spire on top of the hill, large sculpted steles celebrate the heroes who died for the freedom of Donbas from 1941 to 2022. In this important way, the present is anchored in the past.

This battle to preserve memory against its destruction is probably most intense in Lugansk. I’m welcomed there by Anna Soroka, a historian who has been fighting in the republic’s regiments since 2014.

The first monument she shows me commemorates the 67 children killed by Ukrainian militias from the Kraken and Aïdar battalions, both of them neo–Nazi, who tried to take the city in 2014, failed, and then proceeded to shell it until the Russian intervention in 2022. It was built in the middle of a park that serves today as a kindergarten. Several kids were killed there by targeted Ukrainian shelling—targeted, surely, as the surrounding buildings were not hit.

Children are the objects of an unrelenting information war on both sides. The Ukrainians have filed war crimes charges against the Russians, and the International Criminal Court has indicted Vladimir Putin and the head of Russia’s children’s affairs agency, Maria Lvova–Belova, for allegedly kidnapping Ukrainian children. Western propaganda repeats these accusations over and over, in media and in the cinema: A full-length documentary, 20 Days in Mariupol, directed by Mstyslav Chernov, Michelle Mizner, and Raney Aronson–Rath, featured these allegations and has just won this year’s Oscar for best documentary.

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Western media reports naturally fail to pass on the point of view of the inhabitants of the Donbas—who say it is the Ukrainians who are taking children hostage. There is, in fact, a volunteer organization in Ukraine called the White Angels, modelled on the infamous Syrian White Helmets, who, as you will recall, were far from the neutral rescue workers they posed as and, in fact, were covertly funded by Western intelligence and acted in behalf of jihadist groups.

These White Angel detachments were formed in February 2022 by a certain Rustam Lukomsky. The Western (or Western-backed) press has mentioned them on several occasions. The Kyiv Independent (24 March 2024), Le Monde (7 February 2023), the BBC (30 January 2024) are among the media that have reported on this group. “Amid the thud of explosions and rattle of gunfire,” a typical report reads, “a special police unit called the White Angels goes door-to-door helping evacuate the town’s remaining civilians.” Lukomsky, whose background remains unclear, is portrayed invariably as a hero of these operations.

For those in Donbas, the White Angels are something very different. The group’s aim, residents here say, is to force parents in front-line areas to separate from their children under the pretext of protecting them. The children are thus isolated and “taken to safety” in the rear, where they are used as a means of blackmail against their families.

These families are in this way torn between two equally unbearable choices: Either they abandon their homes to join their children, or they remain near the front and are forced to collaborate with the Ukrainian army, which invites them to denounce or sabotage the movements of the Russian army.

One can only imagine the distress of parents faced with such perverse coercion. Testimonies, such as those of Olga V. Zubtsova, from Bakhmut, and Igor Litvinov, from Avdiivka, confirm this version of events. “In Avdiivka,” Igor says, “the ‘White Angels operated completely unhindered and, in the guise of good intentions, offered to evacuate families with children on the Ukrainian side. When the parents refused, they threatened to take the children away.” There are countless rumours circulating on social networks, it bears mentioning, accusing these so-called White Angels of fuelling paedophilic crime networks and child trafficking. But this remains to be proven….