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By Michael Vlahos, Landmarks Magazine, 1/10/25

Michael Vlahos is author of the book Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change. He taught strategy at Johns Hopkins University and the Naval War College and joins John Batchelor weekly on CBS Eye on the World. Follow him on @Michalis_Vlahos

They say “all wars must end.” Yet how does this actually happen? First, all parties must agree — to go down that path together. Next, they must enter into formal negotiation, which almost always means horse trading, compromise, and accommodation. Finally, and most important, all belligerents must want the war to end.

Russia almost certainly wants this. Its minimum territorial objectives are within reach. Moreover, the destruction of Ukrainian military potential — equipment, infrastructure, and stockpiles — is almost complete. Furthermore, the General Staff’s strategy of attrition is approaching its endpoint. The Ukrainian Army is breaking, and Ukrainian national society is literally on the eve of destruction.

Within the “collective West,” the new “Decider” and the majority of Americans also want this war to end. Yet powerful constituencies in EU and American politics are emotionally invested in keeping war going. Red Hawks and most of the Blue Establishment are committed to defanging Russia and demonstrating Alliance strength and cohesion. A settlement that reeks of defeat, they say, will only embolden predatory “autocracies” and further fissiparous “extreme right wing” populism in Europe.

The Trans-Atlantic War Party Establishment, therefore, is determined to deny the Decider a free hand. If Mr. Trump gives away too much to Mr. Putin, he will be derided as an “appeaser.” Red Hawks — including barons in his new administration — will pressure him to bargain from “a position of strength,” creating an instant fissure in his authority if he shows weakness, and an instant, exploitable opening for Blue. Their bitter establishment, still licking its electoral wounds, will leap at the opportunity to tar Trump as a Paper Tiger, abdicating America’s predestined world leadership while also abdicating the sovereignty of the American Century: They will declare, “Even his advisers say so.”

However, if the new president gives in, and “shows strength” by up-arming Ukraine, and offering only a suspension of hostilities, the war will likely go on. Putin has declared that Russia will not accept a truce, armistice, or ceasefire in lieu of a permanent settlement. A long-term compact can be achieved, he insists, only by accommodating Russia’s inviolable strategic needs. Absent this, negotiation will fail, and failure would surely lead to much buyer’s remorse and dismay among those millions who voted for Trump’s promise to bring the fighting to an end.

For “45/47” it would represent a personal failure as well. After all, he vowed to end the war with speed and éclat: Éclat in the sense of “acclamation” as well as “brilliant success.” This is no trivial matter for him: Success could only elevate and enhance his now-mythic persona. In contrast, failure would be a body blow to his stature.

Thus, failure now beckons from two directions. If Trump “appeases,” then Blue will launch him into the meme trajectory of “weak king, enemy comprador.” However, if his Peace Ship fails, and the war goes on, he will be fatefully captured by the War Party, and the conflict will become “Trump’s War.” He will then be well and truly stuck tight in their hand-crafted Tar Baby and its tender snare.

So how then can a new president thread a course between the Scylla and Charybdis of antagonists, foreign and domestic? Perhaps, like Odysseus, the best course might be to “choose the lesser of two evils.”

Here, the lesser evil is a settlement that both accommodates Russia and saves Ukraine. The greater evil is a continuation of the war, leading to the destruction of Ukraine and the breakup of NATO — and just possibly, another world war.

All this means taking on, and overthrowing, the grip of the War Party (Red and Blue) on this nation’s affairs. There is only one way, moreover, to do this: He must break the iron narrative of “Appeasement” — where the only strategic choice is between war and surrender. Thankfully, the hammer and chisel that will break it is at hand.

It means, simply, that the president must tell the whole truth, at long last, about this war.

The Ukraine proxy war against Russia was sold through the greatest Black-and-White story ever told: Of naked aggression unleashed by a maniacal dictator, the latest threat in a long lineage of Evil, from Kaiser to Hitler to Stalin to Mao, and now, the tyrant Putin.

The truth is that the United States, after 2009 (and especially 2014), relentlessly curated conflict between Russia and Ukraine, with the ultimate intent of expanding NATO and breaking Russia. This is the real story. Highly authoritative expert commentary on how it happened is easily accessed: For example, the lectures and videos of John Mearsheimer, and the almost biblical epic volume of Scott Horton, Provoked. There are many, many sources, both scholarly books and an Internet library of unimpeachable analysis.

Yet official “truth” — from the US and NATO governments — has never veered from the iron narrative that is the Manichaean testament of Putin perfidy, Russian savagery, and a “long, twilight struggle” of good vs. evil, of democracy vs. tyranny, of light against the darkness. Moreover, the “commanding heights” of “the collective West” — its entire ruling establishment — sold its credulous electorates this story, supplemented daily by full injections of Ukrainian propaganda. This “Information Op” was itself fully funded by the US and NATO, and orchestrated by a contractual alliance between intelligence agencies and hundreds of PR firms.

This united front presented by Government, Mainstream Media, Intelligence and the propaganda industry effectively marginalized the voice of actual reality. Those advocating for “foreign policy restraint” were labelled “isolationists.” Those who presented the actual backstory to the war were dismissed as Putinists or Orc lovers or Vatniks.

Over three long years of war, however, actual reality began to sink in. More and more Americans became disenchanted with the war and increasingly suspicious of the official story, and of a Biden administration that, on so many fronts, and with so many issues, had simply, brazenly, lied to the American people. Moreover, by the autumn of 2023, the Ukrainian war effort was visibly failing, a reality that propaganda could no longer conceal.

Today, Ukraine stands at the precipice of national existence.

Ukraine in 1994 was 52 million strong. Then the draining began. The best and the brightest sought opportunity in the EU and Russia. Ukraine was a nation of perhaps 33 million in 2022. Today, a quarter of that already-diminished country’s population has fled to the European Union, and another quarter is in the now Russian oblasts, or residing as new migrants in the Russian Federation. The nation itself has shrunk by half.

Yet this is only one edge of the cliff. Ukraine’s fertility has collapsed. Prewar, it was already one of the lowest in Europe. The years of war have pushed it down below 1.0, perhaps even to 0.7. In the war, Ukraine has sustained shockingly massive casualties. Combined with the sheer number of able-bodied men who are fleeing the country, both draft-dodgers and deserters, or those who were migrants loath to come home, Ukraine — sans settlement — is poised to keep shrinking. Within a generation it may wither to the size of Belgium, perhaps even that of Belarus.

Then there is the matter of casualties. Kiev and Washington — and the entire Media and Official Propaganda industrial complex — has been silent on the subject of battlefield losses until recent months, when the yawning catastrophe could no longer be denied. Yet all along there have been signs and signals and harrowing data points. Stitched together, this is the story they tell.

In the first 18 months of the war — simply counting military obituaries and dead SIM cards — comes to ~330,000 Ukrainian soldiers KIA. Moreover, more than 50,000 lost one or more limbs. Moreover, in the last 18 months, monthly losses intensified. Kiev itself has declared that the army needs 30,000 replacements a month just to maintain the current force. Does this mean that, from September 2023 to date, another ~540,000 soldiers were lost?

Here, it is necessary to be mindful of what Soviet historians call “irrecoverable” losses. Hence, a soldier who will never return to the fight is “irrecoverable.” Killed, crippled, missing: This is the true sum of an army’s losses in war. For Ukraine, arithmetic says that number is not less than ~920,000 men.

Yet not all of these are dead or crippled. Deserters also represent, in a very real sense, irrecoverable casualties, as these are the able-bodied who have fled the country, or who have gone to ground inside Ukraine. Eurostat reports that 650,000 men of fighting age have fled Ukraine. Furthermore, reeling under Russian hammer-blows across the Donbass Front, desertions are reportedly over 200,000 in 2024. Thus, Kiev has been forced to raise its monthly mobilization target from 30,000 to 40,000.

Ukrainian journalists cite a desertion rate of 160 per day in early 2024, rising to 200 by summer, and then jumping to 380 by autumn. This suggests that desertion, over the past year at least, has accounted for a thick slice of irrecoverable losses, perhaps 4500-5000 per month. The sudden surge in desertion after September 2024 has been driven by crushing exhaustion and defeat. This in turn has pushed the state to desperate measures. All “conscription” in Ukraine today takes the form of violent kidnapping, even of the sick, aged, and infirm. Yet in spite of the utmost brutality, that 40K per month target is now short about 20,000 each month.

Moreover, actual irrecoverable losses, across the board, are almost certainly understated. For example, many platoon and company commanders simply do not report desertions, for fear of punishment by their field grade superiors. Likewise, the number of missing KIA is massive, given the sheer number of Ukrainian corpses left on the battlefields. A recent composite of casualty estimates puts the KIA total at 780,000. Adding in the severely wounded, total irrecoverable Ukrainian battle losses could be as high as 1.2 million, after 1000 days of war.

To put all this in perspective: Today’s shrunken Ukraine is half the size of the French Republic in 1914. In World War I, France lost 3.6 percent of its population: A monstrous and unnecessary national bloodletting, and a stain on the very idea of “Civilization.”

America’s proxy war against Russia — goading and pitting Ukraine against a nation nearly 8 times its size — has led to yet another unnecessary bloodletting. Ukraine has lost 3.9 percent of its population. Hidden from us for years, in plain sight.

What hath America wrought? Biden’s narrative narcissism would have us believe the United States has been heroically defending democracy against tyranny and pure evil. How he boasted, loudly, that America was bleeding Russia white — all for the price of not one American soldier. What a bargain! However, in sharper focus, an American emperor and his court, in their lust to bring Russia to its knees, destroyed another nation (and this time, not a “primitive,” but rather a “European” nation) to no purpose but to fulfill its own vanity.

Unwittingly perhaps, the real effect of Biden’s fulmination was to fulfill the enemy’s existential need. Curating and handcrafting this naked American proxy war, ironically, gave Russia the signal opportunity to halt NATO expansion, and buy itself strategic breathing room. Biden’s assault served to mobilize and renew Russian national identity. Eager and blind, an addled Emperor thus became Russia’s strategic helpmate.

Now try out this counterpoint. Imagine an alternative reality where Mr. Putin actually agrees to a ceasefire in-place. This is the last fallback wet dream of the US/NATO War Party. An armistice — with NATO “peacekeepers” — would surely let the collective West rejuvenate and rearm Ukraine. A new army, drafted from the 18-25 age cohort, including even women, might then be harnessed by the War Party to have another go at Russia, and give us yet another vicarious national bleed.

In this fantasy, a nation of 20 million (or less) would be trumpeted as the return of Ulysses, i.e., the million fighting men who fled, and their families, would return to their homeland to “fight the good fight” yet again. In the next war, a righteous Ukraine, eager and steel-annealed to exact revenge, would unleash “Fire and Sword” on the Russian serpent: A summoning of NeoCon Nirvana.

Yet think: An armistice premeditating another war could lead only to the further, final hollowing-out of Ukraine. Any male person in that cursed country — given the terrors they know — will surely flee: “Get out now before it’s too late!” The irreversible downhill slope in fertility keeps singing, ominously, of an irreversible path toward national extinction. Ukrainians will never, ever embrace yet more blood after the sheer terror of 2022-2025.

The Ukraine Question must be permanently settled.

Only this argument can silence Red Hawks and the Blue War Party alike. All the peoples American Empire has ravaged and wrecked this century — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen — stand as mute witness to the dark descent of a once stainless and world-redemptive American Mission. The new president could make use of this American myth about itself to proclaim to the world that “The Fall” stops here.

Bringing peace to Ukraine is the very smallest mercy this nation might ever offer to those millions of innocents betrayed by America’s supremely venal, exiting emperor. Adding further to the argument that this all must end: Russia too has suffered in this war. Their KIA is about twice what America suffered in Vietnam, from a population slightly smaller than the US in 1960. Russia will seek no more wars, whatever ever-ardent keyboard War Hawks declare.

Surely, President Trump can end the madness of another “Forever War” — cold or hot — with Russia. This, without hesitation or reservation, is the greater evil we face.

Surely, a permanent settlement in Ukraine is the lesser of two evils.

By Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter, 1/18/25

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Editor’s Note: The following is the fourth and final article in The Dissenter’s series on President Joe Biden’s legacy when it comes to press freedom, whistleblowing, and government secrecy. The series began in November, and you can find previous articles here.

President Joe Biden’s administration proclaimed numerous times that “journalism is not a crime” and that the United States government supports “free and independent media around the world.” Biden said the “free press is crumbling” in his farewell address. But the reality is that Biden and his administration helped make the state of the free press more fragile.

Over 200 journalists in Gaza were killed by Israeli military forces armed by the Biden administration. Other client states, like India and Saudi Arabia, trampled on the human rights of reporters without fearing much criticism. 

Through the political case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Biden became the first president to secure an Espionage Act conviction against a journalist. 

Biden, along with Democrats, had plenty of time to pass a federal shield law to protect U.S. journalists from government interference. Yet when asked if he supported greater protection for the news media, the White House would not endorse the legislation. 

And during the last week of Biden’s presidency, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller had guards drag a reporter out of a press briefing room. 

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Reporters Without Borders (RSF) offered an assessment in their 2024 World Press Freedom Index that applies to the Biden administration:

A growing number of governments and political authorities are not fulfilling their role as guarantors of the best possible environment for journalism and for the public’s right to reliable, independent, and diverse news and information. RSF sees a worrying decline in support and respect for media autonomy and an increase in pressure from the state or other political actors.

On top of Biden officials’ failure to create the “best possible environment for journalism,” they also cynically invoked freedom of the press to further U.S. foreign policy objectives. For example, officials were outspoken when Russia attacked journalists but nonchalant and tight-lipped when Israel killed, detained, or censored journalists. 

Not All Journalists Are Really Journalists

The Biden administration claimed the authority to determine who is and is not a journalist in order to deny them protection from prosecutions. Officials also applied criminal charges or other forms of lawfare to suppress journalism that they opposed. 

In June 2024, the biggest press freedom case of the century ended as Assange was finally released from London’s Belmarsh high-security prison. He flew to the Northern Mariana Islands and pleaded guilty to engaging in journalism in violation of the Espionage Act.

“Exposing government secrets and revealing them in the public interest is the core function of national security journalism. Today, for the first time, that activity was described in a guilty plea as a criminal conspiracy,” declared Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.

Assange was indicted during Trump’s first term. Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Biden Justice Department had a chance to heed the concerns of civil liberties, human rights, and press freedom groups and drop the charges. But the Biden administration sided with Trump officials like Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr, and Mike Pompeo, who had vengefully pursued the WikiLeaks founder, and bristled at reporters when questioned about the case.

FBI agents raided the home newsroom of Timothy Burke in 2023, and the following year, the Biden Justice Department charged Burke as an economic cybercriminal.

Burke’s crime, according to prosecutors, was that he “scoured” the internet for “electronic items and information” that were “deemed desirable” for news reporting. In particular, he obtained access to an unsecured stream that contained an uncut version of an interview Tucker Carlson conducted with rapper Kanye West for Fox News. (His trial was scheduled for June 2025.) 

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In Espionage Act prosecutions involving leaks, the Biden Justice Department continued the practice of treating the use of privacy tools, such as Tor or Tails, as evidence of criminal activity.

There were a few positive actions by the Biden administration. In 2021, the Commerce Department blacklisted the NSO Group, a Israeli spyware developer that was hired by countries like Bahrain, India, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The governments targeted journalists, human rights activists, and powerful regime opponents. Visa restrictions against individuals who “misused” commercial spyware were also imposed by the State Department in 2024.

In 2023, a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) judge stood up to Starbucks and deemed it unlawful for the corporation to pursue “extensive” and “verbose” requests for records of communications between unionized workers and news media organizations.

Garland adopted changes to “news media guidelines” in October 2022 that were lauded by press freedom groups. As the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) described, for the first time, guidelines prohibited the Justice Department “from using subpoenas or other investigative tools against journalists who possess and publish classified information obtained in newsgathering, with only narrow exceptions.”

Refusing To Advocate For A Reporter’s Shield Law

The change to guidelines came in response to news reports that the Trump administration had secretly subpoenaed the communications records of reporters at CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post as part of retaliatory leak investigations aimed at identifying sources.

However, the Biden Justice Department continued Trump’s retaliation in 2021 until the subpoenas became public. Officials even imposed a gag order against Times executives, which Times deputy general counsel David McCraw called “unprecedented.”  

The Biden administration gave journalists the cold shoulder as a coalition of groups urged the administration multiple times to codify the change to news media guidelines and back the PRESS Act—a national reporter’s shield legislation. 

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In June 2021, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki incuriously said, “I’d have to look into the specifics of the piece of legislation.” The legislation received no public support from the White House, and in December 2022, anti-press Republican Senator Tom Cotton successfully blocked the law. 

The PRESS Act was reintroduced in 2023, and it passed in the House of Representatives in January 2024. The shield law languished in the Senate for months as Democrats did nothing to move the bill for a vote. In April 2024, when White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked if Biden supported the PRESS Act, she uttered a platitude: “[J]ournalism is not a crime. We’ve been very clear about that.” But the White House refused to back legislation that would offer protect reporters from criminalization.  

After Vice President Kamala Harris lost the presidential election to Trump, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and other Democrats suddenly recognized the need to pass the PRESS Act. However, it was too late. Trump came out against the shield law, Cotton blocked the bill (again), and the Biden White House maintained its silence.

Tempering Support For Press Freedom When Client States Repress Journalists

During a debate among Democratic presidential candidates in November 2019, candidate Biden pledged to make the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia “pay the price” for murdering Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and make them “the pariah that they are.” Yet by 2023, as the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) outlined in their “Global Impunity Index,” Biden had embraced the Saudi kingdom and “stymied” justice for Khashoggi. 

“The failure to pursue justice for Khashoggi, a U.S. permanent resident, signals to repressive regimes that even the most powerful Western democracies will temper their fervor for the protection of journalists if they perceive political and economic interests are at stake,” CPJ Director Robert Mahoney wrote.

“In November [2022], his administration went as far as to declare that the crown prince was shielded by sovereign immunity. That effectively killed a civil lawsuit filed in U.S. district court by Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, that sought to hold Mohammed bin Salman and two of his senior aides liable for the death.”

“Secure in the knowledge that Western governments would take no action against him,” Mahoney added, “Prince Mohammed set about rebranding himself as a tech-friendly millennial and political reformer.”

BBC India produced a documentary, “The Modi Question,” about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role in the 2002 Gujarat riots, which resulted in the death of over 1,000 people. In response, the Modi regime censored the film, and in February 2022, officials raided the BBC’s offices in New Delhi and Mumbai. “Documents and phones of several journalists were taken and the offices sealed.”

After the raid, Agence France-Presse journalist Shaun Tandon asked State Department spokesperson Ned Price for comment. Rather than unequivocally condemn what happened, Price suggested that Tandon direct his question to Indian authorities. Price then spoke about the “importance of freedom of expression, which led Tandon to followup. “[D]o you think that this action went against that spirit or the banning of the documentary?”

“I couldn’t say. I couldn’t say. We’re aware that these – we are aware of the fact of the searches, but I’m just not in a position to offer a judgement,” Price stammered.

On the same day that Indian authorities engaged in this act against BBC India, Biden had a phone call with Modi. Biden and Modi discussed a “historic agreement for Air India to purchase over 200 American-made aircraft from Boeing.”

Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, a correspondent for Al Jazeera, was killed by an Israeli sniper on May 11, 2022, when military forces opened fire on reporters who were covering a raid on a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. 

Akleh’s family demanded that the Biden administration support their efforts for justice, however, officials resisted calls for an independent investigation. In fact, the Biden administration sided with Israel and contended that Akleh was not “intentionally” killed.

After Israel launched an intense bombing campaign against Gaza in October 2023, Biden officials continued to whitewash or ignore attacks on freedom of the press by the Israeli government. 

The Biden administration planned and authorized around $26 billion in arms shipments to Israel, which included weapons that were used to kill journalists. By January 18, 2024, at least 217 journalists had been killed, and many of them were specifically targeted by military forces.

According to the CPJ, in 2023, the Israeli government became one of the world’s worst jailers of journalists. That distinction continued in 2024 as the U.S.-backed government detained or imprisoned 43 journalists.  

Journalists in Gaza were detained under a law that allowed for long periods of detention without charge and “limited access to legal counsel.” Several detained journalists were held in confinement because they “had contacted or interviewed people Israel wanted information about.” They were kept in “inhuman conditions” that included “frequent acts of severe, arbitrary violence; sexual assault; humiliation and degradation; [and] deliberate starvation,” according to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.

The jailing of Palestinian journalists was symptomatic of a censorship regime that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials enforced. Thousands of international correspondents were prohibited from entering Gaza, and Al Jazeera was shut down in Israel and the occupied West Bank. 

In October 2024, the Israeli government attempted to prosecute Grayzone reporter Jeremy Loffredo for “aiding the enemy during wartime and providing information to the enemy.” All he had done is travel to the impact sites where Iranian missiles had landed and report on the damage that was done. He was eventually allowed to leave the country, but the Biden administration was extremely quiet as a U.S. journalist faced detention and potential prison time.

One year after the Israeli military launched its assault, according to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS), Israeli forces had “destroyed all media institutions” in Gaza.” Airstrikes had “demolished 73 media facilities, including 21 local radio stations, 15 local and international news agencies, 15 TV stations, 6 local newspapers, 3 broadcasting towers, 8 printing presses, and 13 journalistic service institutions.”

“In the early days of the genocidal war on Gaza, the Israeli military targeted most of the high-rise buildings in Gaza that housed both local and international media offices. For example, the Al-Shawa and Al-Haseeri towers in Gaza City, which contained 15 floors of media offices, were completely destroyed by an Israeli airstrike on December 18, 2023, causing extensive damage to the surrounding area,” PJS additionally recalled. 

Student journalists in the U.S. faced violence from police and so-called counter-protesters as they attempted to cover a groundswell of protests against Biden’s support for Israel’s assault on Gaza. 

At Cal Poly Humboldt in California, a reporter named Adelmi Ruiz livestreamed the moment when police detained her for “interfering with a crime scene.” She told police that she was press, and it was her job to cover the police response to protesters. “Find a different job if this causes you to break the law,” an officer replied.

Such repression was representative of a rising crackdown in the U.S. against routine journalism, especially against reporters that attempted to cover protests or homeless encampments. Freedom of the Press Foundation U.S. Press Freedom Tracker documented in 2023 and 2024 how U.S. journalists were punished for “asking questions of public officials, publishing leaked information, and documenting breaking news in the field.” 

The U.S. Congress, with the support of Biden, also banned TikTok in April 2024. Subsequently, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law that banned the social media app.

As the Freedom of the Press Foundation warned, the law could be applied to “online news outlets based abroad, as long as they offer some kind of interactivity (for example, user comments).” The ACLU described the Supreme Court’s decision as a “disturbing precedent” and one that “increase[s] the risk that sweeping invocations of ‘national security’ will trump our constitutional rights.”

Despite staggering examples of the Biden administration’s role in making the U.S. and the world more unsafe for journalists, officials clung to their press freedom platitudes. 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken in his farewell remarks to the press corps said he had a great appreciation for journalists who ask “tough questions” and hold officials like him to account. “Being on the receiving end, sometimes that’s not always the most comfortable thing; not always the most enjoyable thing. But it is the most necessary thing in our democracy.”

Yet as laudable as that may have sounded, Blinken had steered clear of the briefing room for a number of months. When he appeared, two credentialed reporters—Max Blumenthal and Sam Husseini—were tired of hearing speeches. They were fed up with spokespeople like Matthew Miller, who had smirked and berated reporters who confronted officials with important questions about Israel, which the State Department typically evaded or refused to answer.

Husseini claimed that Miller had “blackballed” him. He interrupted Blinken with two different questions before Miller had guards at the State Department drag Husseini out of the briefing room. Blumenthal was escorted out of the briefing room after he interrupted Blinken. 

“Days before the inauguration of an anti-press President, the Biden administration handed Trump a gift by normalizing punishing journalists for asking questions officials don’t like,” declared Freedom of the Press Foundation advocacy director Seth Stern.    

The moment was emblematic of Biden’s presidency when it came to press freedom. Biden officials supported journalists—except when it was politically inconvenient or they made officials look bad. 

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*Full series on Biden’s legacy can be found here.

By Ian Proud, Strategic Culture Foundation, 1/8/25

Ian Proud was a member of HM Diplomatic Service from 1999 to 2023. From July 2014 to February 2019 Ian was posted to the British Embassy in Moscow. He was also Director of the Diplomatic Academy for Eastern Europe and Central Asia and Vice-Chairman of the Board of the Anglo-American School of Moscow.

There has been an enormous cancellation of debate on Ukraine in the mainstream western media. Google does its part too, making it very difficult in the west to search for and find genuinely independent reporting on what is happening. When you search for key issues, such as Ukrainian casualty rates, ultra-nationalism in Ukraine, presidential elections or the state of Ukraine’s economy, the computer will normally say no.

Let’s look at those areas where independent information and analysis is actively withheld from western citizens.

The number of Ukrainian casualties

In a war that has killed or injured, by most accounts, over a million people, the issue of which side has suffered most may appear academic. Why can’t we stop the killing, would be my first question?

But the western media often claims that Russia has suffered far greater casualties than Ukraine. They do this to maintain the argument that, even though Ukraine is losing on the battlefield, it could still win the war. This is completely false.

The go-to figure used by western journalists is that 1,500 Russian troops are being lost on the front line every day. This number has no basis in analysis but is rather plucked from a Ukrainian military intelligence report of early November. Recognising that it is in the interests of both sides in a conflict to embellish the other side’s casualty figures, western officials and journalists nevertheless take numbers from the Ukrainian Defence Ministry as truer than the Gospel.

What the Ukrainian side almost never does is to admit the shocking number of Ukrainian casualties so far. In a rare announcement on the subject, Zelensky suggested in December 2004 that 43,000 Ukrainian troops had died. No serious analysts believes that figure. I have seen estimates of upwards of 700,000 Ukrainian dead or injured. Looking at the six separate exchanges of dead bodies between the Russian and Ukrainian side during 2024 which have been reported in the press, six times more bodies were returned to Ukraine (1611) compared to Russia (273). That doesn’t mean that Ukraine has suffered six times as many deaths, as Russia has been advancing and Ukraine retreating. But few serious analysts really believe that Russia is suffering a higher rate of casualties than Ukraine, quite the opposite.

Yet talking about Ukrainian casualties in the western media would reaffirm the assessment many realists have made, that Ukraine is losing on the battlefield, suffering greater casualties than Russia, and urgently needs to sue for peace.

The ‘Russia is suffering more’ narrative is merely a PR tool to bolster Zelensky’s never-ending quest to keep fighting and to receive additional billions in support from the west in a battle he can’t win.

Ultra-nationalism in Ukraine

I have never believed that most Ukrainians are Nazis, but there is a huge body of evidence to suggest that Nazi-sympathising groups have a disproportionate influence on state policy in Ukraine. Western media seldom discusses this.

A recent ultra-nationalist torch parade in Lviv to commemorate the birthdate of the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera received no western coverage, for example. Nor the extinguishing of a Jewish menora statue. Any suggestion that there is a deeply unpleasant ultra-nationalist core at the heart of decision making in Kiev is written off as pro-Russian propaganda.

It didn’t used to be like this. In the run up to the Polish and Ukrainian hosting of the Euro 2012 Football championship, there was widespread reporting in UK media about the risk of anti-Semitism among Polish and Ukrainian football fans. The Kyiv Post reported on Svoboda’s anti-Semitic and racist tendencies when, in 2012, the marginal ultra-nationalist party form western Ukraine gained seats in the Verkhovna Rada. In the aftermath of the 2014 coup to remove Viktor Yanukovych, the western press cautiously reported on the prevalence of ultranationalists like Right Sector in the Maidan protests; they instead minimise their role, particularly in the killing of 100 protestors by snipers, despite evidence suggesting their possible involvement or complicity. In 2015, Politico was still describing Svoboda, Patriot of Ukraine and the Social-Nationalist Assembly as neo-Nazi organisations. A 2019 photo essay in the Guardian newspaper suggested the Azov battalion was also neo-Nazi and had propagated white supremacist views. Yet this same group was welcomed with open arms into the Reform Club in London by Boris Johnson in the spring of 2024, who greeted them as ‘heroes’.

It is now entirely commonplace to see black and red flags of the neo-Nazi Ukraine Insurgent Army displayed at Ukrainian military ceremonies, even at the passing out parade of the Anna of Kyiv Battalion that was trained in France. A cross-chest fascist salute is commonplace in photographs of Ukrainian army formations. The term ‘Slava Ukraini’ slips off the tongues of western political leaders more easily that ‘Heil Hitler’, as they don’t obviously seem to appreciate it’s neo-Nazi associations.

The most corrosive aspect of Ukrainian ultra-nationalism has been the relentless quest since 2014 for Ukrainian to be the sole and only language spoken in Ukraine. This first manifested itself in the declaration of the Verkhovna Rada on 24 February 2014, two days after Yanukovych’s ouster, to cancel the Kolesnichenko language law which allowed for Russian to be considered one of Ukraine’s state languages, among others. Perhaps more than other reckless moves by the Ukrainian side, attempting to deny the Russian language to a significant proportion of Ukraine’s population that speaks Russian as a first language, was the act that provoked Russian intervention.

By refusing to talk about the challenge of ultra-nationalism in Ukraine, western commentators are potentially contributing to its growth and for the maintenance of a war posture in Kiev. It is also holding back prospects for Ukraine to emerge from war and continue on its road to potential future EU membership.

The absence of democratic elections

The issue of ultra-nationalism is perhaps not seen as a pressing challenge right now, as Ukraine itself is going through a markedly undemocratic phase, given the constraints of war. Because western commentators also seldom talk about the pause in presidential elections in Ukraine.

These elections in Ukraine should have taken place in Ukraine in March 2024, but were postponed sine die because the country is under martial law. This is not necessarily an illegitimate move. Elections didn’t take place in the United Kingdom for ten years between 1935 and 1945 because of the intervention of World War II. However, in the United Kingdom, the government was comprised of a coalition representing the two main political parties, the Conservatives and Labour. This was despite the Conservative party having a very large majority in Parliament. During the war, political power in Britain was shared in the interests of the nation.

However, in Ukraine, no such division of power exists. Zelensky has centralised all power into the office of President. By edict, he can rule on any topic, for example, making it illegal for any official to hold talks with Russia about peace. For now, any decision to negotiate with Russia an end of the war appears entirely to be in his power.

Ukraine, though, has found itself in the perfect storm of losing the war slowly yet continuing to receive billions of dollars’ worth of aid and loans each year. If Ukraine was losing in a more dramatic way on the battlefield, there would be more internal pressure for Zelensky to sue for peace. But, for now, western sponsors appear happy to keep paying for slow defeat. Western leaders treat Zelensky like a superhero when he visits, yet Ukrainian opinion polls suggest that he would lose a Presidential election to Zaluzhny, and that many Ukrainians believe Zelensky shouldn’t even stand for office again. Zelensky has now started using excuses such as that it would be impossible to hold elections with so many Ukrainians living outside the country; although that didn’t seem to be a problem in the recent elections in Moldova, where diaspora voters tipped the vote in favour of Maia Sandu. The real issue here, I suggest, is that with over one million Ukrainians having moved to Russia, that Zelensky would not wish for them to vote.

Zelensky has fallen into the same trap that many dictators fall into, in believing that he is the state, and therefore indispensable. So, it is not in Zelensky’s interests to negotiate an end to the war, as that would almost certainly mean an end to his political career.

Even Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence – Tulsi Gabbard – has described Zelensky as an unelected dictator. But you will never hear the western media talk about that. They have spent three years lionising Zelensky and it would be damaging to their credibility to suggest that, rather then being part of the solution, he may be part of the problem.

The state of Ukraine’s economy

As war grinds on, there is considerable western reporting of the state of Russia’s economy. Despite Russia forecast to grow by over 3% in 2024, when final figures are released, western journalists portray an imminent meltdown on the back of admittedly high inflation and interest rates caused by the massive fiscal stimulus of war spending. However, Russia’s foundations remain strong with state debt at only 14% and international reserves topping $620bn (including that part which is currently frozen by sanctions). There’s no evidence to suggest Russia will be unable to continue to prosecute a war for the foreseeable future.

On the other hand, Ukraine’s economy is entirely dependent on foreign handouts. Of the $93bn budget that was set for 2024, almost fifty percent of that cost was to be met by lending, either from western donors or domestic bonds to Ukrainian citizens. Another $12.5bn would be provided in the form of free handouts from the west, the biggest donor being the U.S. So, Ukraine racked up over $44bn in new debt in 2024 – or almost one quarter of GDP – and will do the same in 2025. The economic cost of the war is completely unsustainable for Ukraine with debt soaring above 100% of GDP and no plan to repay it. Indeed, it is far from clear that any donor government will receive back the money they have lent to Ukraine. And the worst part is, there is no plan to keep paying the bills in Ukraine after 2026. So, in the entirely plausible – though hopefully unlikely – eventuality that western leaders are persuaded by Zelensky to keep fighting into 2026, they may be shocked to discover that they will need to pay for it.

If this was covered in the western media, there would be far more pressure among western voters to bring the war to its resolution, because Ukraine isn’t winning but Zelensky is still writing cheques at our expense.

By Jon Henley, The Guardian, 1/14/25

European anxiety about Donald Trump’s return to the White House is not shared in much of the world, a poll has shown, with more people in non-western powers such as China, Russia, India and Brazil welcoming his second term than not.

The 24-country poll, which also included Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Indonesia and Turkey, found that Switzerland, the UK, 11 EU nations surveyed and South Korea were alone in feeling Trump 2.0 would be bad for their country and for peace in the world.

“In short, Trump’s return is lamented by America’s longtime allies but almost nobody else,” stated the report by the European Council on Foreign Relations thinktank, adding that his re-election left Europe in particular “at a crossroads” in its relations with the US.

The report also found that many people outside Europe believed the incoming president was committed to ending wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and saw a Trump-led US as just one leading power among several – including the EU.

“Europeans need to recognise the advent of a more transactional world. Rather than attempt to lead a global liberal opposition to Trump, they should understand their own strengths and deal with the world as they find it,” the report said.

Respondents fell into five groups, ranging from “Trump welcomers”, most common in India (75%), Russia (38%), South Africa (35%), China (34%) and Brazil (33%), to “never Trumpers”, prevalent in the UK (50%), Switzerland and the EU (28%).

Optimism about Trump’s second term was especially pronounced in India – where 82% saw it as a good thing for peace in the world, 84% as good for their country, and 85% as a good thing for US citizens – and Saudi Arabia (57%, 61% and 69% respectively).

Among long-term US allies, responses were very different: 22% in the 11 EU countries surveyed, 15% in the UK and 11% in South Korea said they thought Trump would be good for their country, while only slightly more felt he would be good for peace.

Large proportions in several countries also felt Trump’s return would make peace more likely in Ukraine and the Middle East specifically, including India (65% and 62%), Saudi Arabia (62% and 54%), Russia (61% and 41%) and China (60% and 48%).

Ukrainians were much more reserved, with 39% believing Trump would help bring peace to their country and 35% saying this was less likely, while in Europe and South Korea there was widespread scepticism that Trump 2.0 would make any difference.

Only 24% in the UK, 31% in South Korea and 34% in the 11 EU countries said Trump’s return would make peace in Ukraine more likely, while even fewer (16% in the UK, 25% in the 11 EU countries and 19% in South Korea) felt it would have that effect in the Middle East.

The report’s authors argued that their findings confirmed a general “weakening of the west” and the emergence of a far more transactional, à la carte world, pointing to a strong acceptance in many countries of Russia as an ally or a necessary partner.

Despite Moscow’s brutal war on Ukraine, the survey found that the number of Indian and Chinese people who considered Russia to be their country’s ally had actually grown marginally in the past year, while average US opinion of Russia had also improved.

By contrast, faced with Trump’s return, just one in five Europeans (22%) said they viewed the US as an ally, which is significantly fewer than the 31% who did so two years ago, and half the relatively unchanged proportion of Americans who considered the EU an ally.

Most people in countries including Brazil, Indonesia, China, India, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Turkey expect Russia’s global influence to grow, but majorities in all those countries plus the EU and UK think China will be the strongest power in 20 years.

US influence is expected to increase, but few believe “Make America Great Again” (Maga) will lead to global dominance. “US geopolitical exceptionalism is beginning to recede,” the authors said, with the US expected to act in future as a “normal” large power.

People around the world also saw the EU as a major global power, with majorities in most countries considering it capable of dealing on equal terms with the US and China. (Ironically, those least likely to share that view were Europeans.)

Majorities in India (62%), South Africa (60%), Brazil (58%) and Saudi Arabia (51%), and pluralities in Ukraine (49%), Turkey (48%), China (44%), Indonesia (42%) and the US (38%), believed the EU would wield “more influence” globally in the next decade.

Moreover, the bloc was widely seen as an “ally” or “necessary partner”, including in countries such as Brazil, India and South Africa. The recent EU-Mercosur trade agreement “shows the kind of deals” a more united EU could make, the report said.

The authors stressed, however, that the west was clearly divided as Trump returns, not just between the US and Europe (and other allies such as South Korea), but also within the EU: some member states were far more welcoming of Maga than others.

“What the EU must do to be taken seriously by Trump’s White House resembles what it must do to make friends and influence people globally,” the report’s authors, foreign policy experts Mark Leonard, Ivan Krastev and Timothy Garton Ash, wrote.

Rather than trying to shape liberal resistance to Trump and “posing as a moral arbiter of everyone else’s behaviour”, Europe should “build its domestic strength and seek new bilateral partnerships to defend its own values and interests”, they said.