By Igor Burdyga, Open Democracy, 8/25/23

On a cool morning, the silence of Kherson’s old city centre is broken by a huge rubbish bin being overturned on the pavement. Two men in bulletproof vests calmly scoop the contents onto the road. Dima, a local volunteer coordinator, observes the fetid heap from his porch. “Don’t worry, they’re from the council,” he says, cutting short my rising indignation.

A tractor turns the corner, followed by a dozen men and women with shovels, also wearing bulletproof vests. A few minutes later, the rubbish is in the tractor’s trailer. The group moves on as the first Russian shelling of the day starts up.

There’s a simple explanation for this strange sight: the owners of Kherson’s main garbage collection company have been arrested and their trucks seized. Alena and Dmitry Dubrovsky, who ran the company for 20 years, are facing charges of wartime collaboration for continuing to work between March and November 2022, when Kherson was under Russian occupation.

The regional police department and prosecutors claimed that last summer the Dubrovskys supported Russia’s introduction of the ruble, opened company accounts in a Russian bank and paid taxes to the occupying administration. In other words, they “carried out economic activities in close cooperation with the aggressor state” and “transferred material resources to the occupiers”. This is regarded as wartime collaboration and aiding the aggressor state, the penalties for which are up to five and 12 years in prison, respectively.

The Dubrovskys’ case is one of thousands that are testing Ukraine’s new collaboration law – a law that is currently being challenged by politicians for being too blunt in its punishment of people in occupied territories.

Kherson city court reopened in June, and the Dubrovskys’ case is the first to be heard. They’ve been in custody for four months and have pleaded not guilty. Their legal counsel refused to forward openDemocracy’s questions to the Dubrovskys or to comment on the case, which is ongoing. The prosecutor’s office also declined to comment.

Their garbage trucks remain under lock and key. The city has not been able to secure their release – even for temporary use after the Kakhovka dam explosion flooded Kherson in June.

Kherson: ‘not many collaborators’

According to the Kherson prosecutor’s office, more than 1,000 investigations into collaboration had been filed by the end of June, though only 50 sentences have been handed down so far. Another 234 investigations involve allegations of aiding Russia.

Most of these investigations were started while Kherson was still under Russian occupation, before Ukrainian forces retook control of parts of the east bank of the Dnipro river directly opposite Kherson. The local branch of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has been investigating residents – primarily those who cooperated publicly with the Russians – and trying them in absentia.

When the city was liberated, leading collaborators such as Vladimir Saldo, head of the regional occupation administration, fled alongside the Russian army. But not everyone left. Law enforcement officers have been reporting daily about their detention of policemen, public officials, head doctors of hospitals, teachers who adopted the Russian curriculum, organisers of the so-called ‘referendum’ in September 2022 on joining the Russian Federation, and other suspected collaborators.

So far, only one in every six investigations has resulted in charges, totalling 159 for collaboration and 33 for complicity with the aggressor.

Many more suspects are listed on Kherson’s ‘traitor database’, an anonymous Telegram channel that publishes data on citizens accused of ties with the Russian authorities. Between one and five new “dossiers” are released on the channel daily.

The channel administrator, nicknamed Nulledo, told openDemocracy that by the end of July the channel had identified at least 2,000 collaborators – “but as a percentage of the total population, there aren’t that many.” (There are one million people in the Kherson region.)

He finds most of his information via social media or networks associated with the occupation. Subscribers to the channel – some 35,000 of them – also send him information.

Nulledo evaded openDemocracy’s questions about payment and refused to clarify whether he works officially for Ukrainian law enforcement or security services. “I’m just helping the SBU speed up the processes a bit,” he said – but he did give us an example of his cooperation with an official investigation.

In February, Nulledo asked subscribers to help him collect evidence against a city resident, Rza Rzayev, who allegedly worked as the supply manager of Kherson’s main market during the Russian occupation. Nulledo does not explain what evidence was collected, but two weeks later police arrested Rzayev and another market worker. In June, they were accused of collaborating and aiding the aggressor, in collusion with the market’s director and chief accountant, who have fled the city. Rzayev denies the charges.

Why did people like Rzayev remain in Kherson after it was liberated? Nulledo said some stayed to look after their property, some hoped to buy their way out of any investigation, and others simply didn’t realise they had committed a crime. He hopes the Ukrainian courts will deliver justice and “everyone will get what they deserve”.

No clear definition of collaboration

Wartime collaboration was added to Ukraine’s criminal code a few days after the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022.

Andriy Osadchuk MP, the first deputy chair of the parliamentary committee that oversees all amendments to the criminal code, told openDemocracy the process of passing the new collaboration law was “historic”. It was only the second time Ukrainian MPs had been able to gather after the invasion a week before, and 300 deputies adopted the laws without discussing them. Ukraine’s parliamentary opposition had its own proposal on the new collaboration law, but there was no time for political disputes under urgent conditions of war.

“The occupiers were not only on the outskirts of Kyiv, but in eight of our regions. And there were people who were helping them, and we didn’t have a separate punishment for them,” Osadchuk said. “Unfortunately, before the big war, no one wanted to work on this. That’s why we passed what we had prepared in extreme conditions.”

Since then, Osadchuk said, nearly 6,000 cases of collaboration have been opened across Ukraine, more than 1,700 charges have been filed, and about 1,000 have already been submitted to the courts – although about half of them have been heard in absentia, without the accused present.

“All this is the result of our work that day,” Osadchuk said.

The hastily adopted law did not introduce a clear definition of what constitutes wartime collaboration. Instead, it lists eight forms of collaboration, from denying foreign aggression online to serving in the Russian armed forces – which is considered a particularly serious crime. Punishments also vary widely.

Examples of the varying punishments under Ukraine’s collaboration law:

For working an ordinary public job on behalf of the occupying forces, there’s a temporary ban on working for Ukrainian state institutions; for a managerial post, the penalty is up to ten years in prison; for working in the judicial system or the police, up to 15 years. Teachers who promoted the occupation and used the Russian curriculum can receive up to three years in prison. Referendum organisers face up to ten years behind bars, and organisers of pro-occupation rallies up to 12 years.

Just three weeks after the new law was adopted, amendments allowed those accused to be tried in absentia, or kept in custody without bail or house arrest.

Another serious offence was also added to Ukraine’s criminal code: “complicity with the aggressor state”. This is defined as any deliberate activity to help the invaders to the detriment of Ukraine. It includes implementing or simply supporting the decisions of the occupation administration, or the collection and transfer of material resources or any other assets to them.

Osadchuk admitted the wording of the two new laws against collaboration and complicity are too general, echoing each other and other national security offences, including treason.

Various authorities have since tried to explain to the Ukrainian public what kind of activity would be considered criminal, but their explanations have often been contradictory, leaving citizens confused.

Inconsistency and dissatisfaction

In the first investigations against pro-Russian politicians who met the invaders with bread and salt, the case for collaboration seemed clear.

But as Ukrainian law enforcement arrived back in liberated territories across the country, their approaches have begun to differ greatly, with charges and penalties varying considerably from region to region.

Last year, a coalition of Ukrainian human rights organisations analysed how collaboration cases are prosecuted – and found some shocking examples. In Kharkiv, social media posts supporting Russian aggression were treated as ‘mild’ collaboration (punishment: a ban on taking public sector jobs), while in Chernihiv similar episodes were considered “glorification of the aggressor” (punishment: five to eight years in prison).

The application of charges and penalties also vary at the more serious end of the spectrum. The head of the “state bank of the Luhansk People’s Republic” faced five to ten years in prison for “collaboration”; the head of a Russian bank in Kherson faced ten to 12 years for “aiding the aggressor”. The commander of a firefighting brigade in occupied Berdyansk was charged with serious collaboration (12 to 15 years), his colleague in Starobilsk with high treason (15 years to life).

“These cases run the risk of becoming a conveyor belt for statistics, which does not correspond to the demand for justice in society, nor does it prevent these crimes,” one of the authors of the report, lawyer Daria Sviridova, commented.

In a series of publications by the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union, lawyers, judges and even prosecutors concluded that Ukrainian law enforcement often simply fits the actions of suspects to the wording of the criminal code.

One judge in Lviv has even urged her colleagues to stop accepting plea bargains in collaboration cases, because it means they are not evaluating evidence or delving into the motives of defendants.

“Collaboration trials can become a platform for restoring justice, public understanding and laying the foundations for future reconciliation, if these trials are held publicly and openly,” judge Kateryna Kotelva wrote in December last year.

In turn, a leading prosecutor recommended separating “humanitarian” collaboration with Russian forces – e.g. working in housing, transport or other public services, which supports basic necessities under occupation – from “deliberate” collaboration.

The case of Crimea

It is residents of Crimea – who believe that the war with Russia will end with the de-occupation of their peninsula – who have most actively opposed Ukraine’s new law on collaboration, because it potentially affects them all. If Crimea was liberated tomorrow, at least 200,000 Crimeans would face collaboration charges, according to Tamila Tasheva, the Ukrainian president’s representative on Crimea.

“All these years, we have been talking to Crimeans, explaining that they are not traitors and that a significant proportion of them are victims of an armed conflict,” explained Ihor Ponochovny, head of the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office for Crimea and Sevastopol. As of June, Ponochovny’s team has been responsible for only around 100 collaboration investigations.

By contrast, Tasheva’s de-occupation strategy proposes only individuals who actively contributed to the occupation of Crimea should face charges.

Under this plan, officials and teachers would have to go through “lustration” (an examination of their actions to ensure they were not active collaborators), while business people, accountants, doctors and so on would not be punished simply for staying in Crimea, working and paying taxes to the Russian state. That proposal has since been kicked back on the basis that Ukraine should not have a separate criminal law for each region.

Proposed amendments

Several further amendments have been suggested since Ukraine’s collaboration law was first adopted in spring 2022. Serhiy Ionushas MP, head of the parliamentary committee that oversees the criminal code, proposed reducing punishments for “non-serious” acts to community service or fines, while others have argued for increasing prison terms for lawyers who worked with Russian occupiers.

The Ukrainian government, in turn, has proposed that providing or supporting medical care, pensions, critical infrastructure, public utilities, retail, catering and agriculture should not be considered collaboration. Agriculture is a key concern, as millions of hectares of farming land remain under Russian occupation.

Ionushas and Osadchuk’s committee has now written its own amendments bill, but refuses to disclose any details, saying it is waiting for legal assessment. This new bill has been written in conjunction with the former mayor of Melitopol, businessman and MP Serhiy Minko. In conversation with openDemocracy, Minko said the existing legislation “had fulfilled its main function” – preventing people from collaborating with Russia. The new version, he said, would be less radical.

Indeed, Osadchuk claimed the intention now is to scare away collaborators from remaining in the liberated territories. “We’re going to narrow down the liability, so that punishment turns from a cannon into a sniper rifle,” he told openDemocracy.

MPs will no longer be able to adopt new amendments in a single vote, so Osadchuk predicts fierce discussions in Parliament and beyond. If Parliament does not consider them in the first reading before the end of August, then the law will not be changed until the end of the year.

By Anatol Lieven, Responsible Statecraft, 8/31/23

In an interview with Le Figaro published on August 16 and based on his new book, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy laid out what has been missing from Western thinking on the war in Ukraine: a diplomatic Plan B in case the present Ukrainian offensive fails.

If it does fail, as seems increasingly probable, the most likely alternative to a diplomatic solution is an indefinite and bloody war of attrition along roughly the present battle lines.

Quite apart from the threats of disastrous escalation and a NATO-Russia war described by Sarkozy, Westerners who are or claim to be friends of Ukraine should consider the consequences of an unending war on that country. These include a continuation of dreadful human losses and continued destruction of the Ukrainian economy, with no certainty at all over who will pay to rebuild it. They would also entail the indefinite postponement of the process of EU accession, which would have offered Ukraine its best chance of truly joining the West and the inability of Ukrainian refugees to return home, leading to a catastrophic and permanent decline in Ukraine’s population.

In addition to all of this: the possibility that a Ukrainian army exhausted and bled white by years of failed offensives will eventually fall victim to a Russian counter-attack, leading to territorial losses far greater than Ukraine has suffered so far.

This being so, one might think that even those who disagree with Sarkozy’s specific recommendations would welcome the chance to hold a serious public debate on ways forward. Instead, the response from the great majority of Western (including French) politicians and commentators has followed the wearisomely familiar path of denunciations of the former president as a “Russian influencer” and “friend of Putin” whose remarks were “shameful” and “shocking.”

A survey of Western “news” reports (mostly in fact veiled and hostile opinion pieces) is interesting in this regard. Of the ten top stories about the interview resulting from a Google search, only two focused on Sarkozy’s remarks themselves. All the others, in their content and headlines (like “’Shameful’ Nicolas Sarkozy Under Fire for Defending Putin” in The Guardian), highlighted and quoted at length the angry attacks on Sarkozy.

What Sarkozy actually said is the following:

“Without compromise, nothing will be possible and we run the risk that the situation will degenerate at any moment. This powder keg could have frightful consequences…

“The Ukrainians… will want to reconquer what has been unjustly taken from them. But if they can’t manage it completely, the choice will be between a frozen conflict… or taking the high road out with referenda [in territories occupied by Russia since 2014] strictly overseen by the international community… any return to the way things were before [ie Ukrainian rule over Crimea] is an illusion. An incontestable referendum… will be needed to solidify the current state of affairs.”

On the question of NATO membership for Ukraine, Sarkozy said that:

“Russia has to renounce all military action against its neighbors … Ukraine must pledge to remain neutral … NATO could at the same time affirm its willingness to respect and take into account Russia’s historic fear of being encircled by unfriendly neighbors.”

“He also described as unrealistic and hypocritical suggestions that Ukraine can join the European Union in the foreseeable future, comparing this to Turkey’s hopeless decades-long efforts: “We are selling fallacious promises that will not be kept to.”

On French President Emmanuel Macron’s previous efforts to negotiate with Putin, Sarkozy said that these had been correct, but that Macron had failed to follow up with any concrete proposals for compromise, partly “due to pressure from eastern Europeans.”

Sarkozy asked Europeans to remember that, like it or not, Russia will always remain part of Europe and a neighbor of the EU, with which it will be necessary to co-exist. Therefore, “European interests aren’t aligned with American interests this time.”

Despite the near-universal vilification Sarkozy’s interview has provoked, much of what he said has in fact been stated on background by some U.S. and European officials, and quoted in the Western media. In February, unnamed Biden administration officials told the New York Times that the U.S. goal should not be for Ukraine to retake Crimea (something that they judged both extremely difficult military and a risk for Russian escalation towards nuclear war) but instead to “credibly threaten” the Russian military hold on the peninsula, so as to “strengthen Kyiv’s position in future negotiations.”

This however leads – or should lead – to the obvious question: Future negotiations about what? Unlike Sarkozy, these U.S. officials and their European counterparts have not been willing to state the obvious conclusion: that if Ukraine could achieve such a military success without actually reconquering Crimea, the resulting negotiations would have to be about returning to Ukraine the territories it has lost since last year, while leaving Crimea (and probably the eastern Donbas, also in practice held by Russia since 2014) in Russian hands.

Nor have they addressed the question of how such a peace settlement could be internationally legitimized. Here Sarkozy has suggested a democratic solution that has also been proposed by Thomas Graham and others, but has been rigorously ignored by the governments of Western democracies: to place the decision in the hands of the populations of the areas concerned through internationally supervised referenda.

At present however — and as the Pentagon correctly in advance warned was likely — the Ukrainian army is still very far from being able to retake Crimea, and will very likely never be in that position. The probable failure of the present Ukrainian offensive is now being widely discussed by Western official and unofficial analysts. Once again, however, few have drawn the obvious conclusion that the result will be a prolonged war of attrition, leading either to an eventual ceasefire along present lines or — possibly — to a new Russian victory.

Even fewer have echoed Sarkozy in arguing that the eventual result will have to be a compromise peace, and suggested what the terms of that peace should be.

As to Ukrainian EU membership, EU officials and analysts with whom I talked in Brussels last autumn echoed in private Sarkozy’s profound skepticism that this would be possible for a very long time to come. This is partly because the costs of Ukrainian reconstruction would place unprecedented and colossal strain on EU budgets. Six months ago, the World Bank estimated that the cost of this reconstruction would already be around $411 billion — two and a half times Ukraine’s GDP for 2022 and more than twelve times the EU’s entire present annual spending on aid to its poorer members.

Severe doubts were also expressed to me about Ukraine’s ability to achieve the kind of internal reforms that would enable it to even begin to meet the conditions of the EU’s Acquis Communautaire. President Macron believes that even if peace can be achieved, it will take Ukraine “several decades” to qualify. In these unfavorable circumstances for Ukraine and the West, to reject Sarkozy’s remarks reflexively and without discussion seems the height of irresponsibility, hypocrisy and moral cowardice, and also does not serve the real interests of Ukraine.

In 1916 and 1917, as the Western front congealed into a horrendously bloody stalemate and Russia sank into revolution and civil war, dissident voices began to be raised in the European combatants calling for a compromise peace. And in all these countries, these voices were also described as “shameful” and silenced by accusations of “treason” and “surrender.”

The result was that three great European states were destroyed, that even the victors (with the exception of the United States) were irrevocably crippled, and that the grounds were laid for Fascism, Stalinism, and the even greater calamity of World War II.

One hundred and six years later, very few historians today would describe those advocates of peace as “shameful,” or their critics as correct. What are historians one hundred years from now likely to say about present Western witch hunts against those who propose peace in Ukraine?

Link here.

By Joe Lauria, Consortium News, 8/30/23

The whitewashing of the historical context for the war in Ukraine has resulted in a profoundly embarrassing episode for the United States embassy in Prague.  

An Aug. 21 Tweet from the embassy with a message roughly translated from Czech to mean “Aggression always comes from the Kremlin,” showed two photographs: the first displayed Soviet tanks in the streets of Prague in 1968.  The second showed fire burning in front of a building and was marked “Odesa 2023.”  

Twitter users were quick to point out the embassy’s error. “The bottom photo is from 2014 Odessa Clashes where pro federalism (mostly pro Russian) got burned alive in clash with Ukrainian nationalist(s) while police and fireman stood watching. To this day no one was jailed,” wrote one commenter.  

Someone else wrote: “You vile people, twisting the history to whitewash the crimes of the Ukrainian far-right against peaceful Ukrainians, and in fact using their crimes with the diametrically opposite meaning!”

The embassy got the message. “Thanks for the heads up and apologies for the incorrect use of the graphic. We wanted to illustrate the ongoing Russian aggression against Ukraine and we chose the wrong photo,”  it wrote.

That prompted another Twitter user to sarcastically respond: “You wanted to illustrate the Ukrainian aggression against the Russian people and you chose the right photo.”

The embassy then deleted the Tweet.  It never acknowledged the event depicted in the bottom photo. That signifies either ignorance of the event or intentional suppression of it. The massacre in Odessa is a key point in understanding the cause of the war and has been buried by the West, creating a propagandized narrative about Russia’s intervention.

May 2, 2014

Demonstrators in Odessa on May 2, 2014 were protesting the violent overthrow two and a half months earlier on Feb. 21, 2014 of the democratically-elected President Viktor Yanukovych. U.S. involvement in the coup is revealed in a leaked telephone conversation between Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine at the time. 

On May 2, football hooligans and far-right groups deliberately set fire to a labor union building in Odessa where protestors against the coup had taken refuge.  As many as 48 people were killed. Police did not intervene. Video footage shows at least one police officer and others firing their guns into the building. The crowd is cheering as many of the people trapped inside jumped to their deaths.

Pleas at the time from the United Nations and the European Union for Ukraine to investigate were ignored. Three Ukrainian local government probes were stymied by the withholding of secret documents.

Click on photo for video showing atack against pro-Russian protestors on May 2, 2014, including policeman firing on them.

A report on the incident from the European Council (EC) at the time makes clear it did not conduct its own investigation but relied on local probes, especially by the Verkhovna Rada’s Temporary Investigation Commission.

The EC complains in its reports that it too was barred from viewing classified information. The EC said the Ukrainian government probes “failed to comply with the requirements of the European Human Rights Convention.”

Relying only on the flawed local inquiries, the EC reports that pro-Russian, or pro-federalist, protestors attacked a pro-unity march in the afternoon, prompting street battles. Then:

“At around 6.50 p.m. pro-federalists broke down the door [of the trade union building] and brought inside various materials, including boxes containing Molotov cocktails and the products needed to make them. Using wooden pallets which had supported tents in the square, they blocked the entrances to the building from the inside and erected barricades. When they arrived at the square at around 7.20 p.m., the pro-unity protesters destroyed and set fire to the tents of the Anti-Maidan camp. The remaining pro-federalism protesters entered the Trade Union Building, from where they exchanged shots and Molotov cocktails with their opponents outside. …

At about 7.45 p.m. a fire broke out in the Trade Union Building. Forensic examinations subsequently indicated that the fire had started in five places, namely the lobby, on the staircases to the left and right of the building between the ground and first floors, in a room on the first floor and on the landing between the second and third floors.

Other than the fire in the lobby, the fires could only have been started by the acts of those inside the building. The forensic reports did not find any evidence to suggest that the fire had been preplanned. The closed doors and the chimney effect caused by the stairwell resulted in the fire’s rapid spread to the upper floors and a fast and extreme rise in the temperature inside the building.”

https://youtube.com/watch?v=vy-YrTdt7RE%3Ffeature%3Doembed

The local investigation thus blamed the anti-Maidan protestors for starting the fire throughout the building. But this video, which shows events on that day leading to the fire, depicts the main blaze in the lobby. It shows Right Sector extremists lobbing Molotov cocktails into the building and a policeman firing his gun at it.

It does not show any cocktails thrown from the building. It doesn’t show clashes earlier in the day, though one pro-unity protestor says they were attacked at Cathedral Square and they’ve come to burn the anti-Maidan protestors in the building for revenge.  

The Fallout

Eight days after the Odessa massacre, coup resisters in the far eastern provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk, bordering on Russia, voted in a referendum to become independent from Ukraine. 

The U.S.-backed coup government had launched a military attack two weeks earlier, on April 15, 2014 against ethnic Russians in Donbass protesting against the coup, including seizing government buildings, in defense of a democratic election. This phase of the war continued for nearly eight years, killing thousands of people before prompting Russian intervention in the civil war on Feb. 24, 2022.

Russia says it had proof that the Ukrainian military, which had amassed 60,000 of its troops at the line of contact, was on the verge of an offensive to retake the Donbass provinces. OSCE maps showed a dramatic increase of shelling from the government side into the rebel areas in February last year.

Russia invaded Ukraine with the stated purpose of “de-Nazifying” and “de-militarizing” Ukraine to protect Russian-speakers and the people of Donbass. The events in Odessa on May 2, 2014 played a role. In a televised address three days before the invasion, Russian President Vladimir Putin said: 

“One shudders at the memories of the terrible tragedy in Odessa, where peaceful protesters were brutally murdered, burned alive in the House of Trade Unions. The criminals who committed that atrocity have never been punished, and no one is even looking for them. But we know their names and we will do everything to punish them, find them and bring them to justice.”

Western Media Coverage

Entrance to The New York Times. (Niall Kennedy, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

The New York Times buried the first news of the massacre in a May 2, 2014 story, saying “dozens of people died in a fire related to clashes that broke out between protesters holding a march for Ukrainian unity and pro-Russian activists.”

The Times then published a video report that said dozens were killed in a fire, “and others were shot dead when fighting between pro- and anti-Russian groups broke out on the streets of Odessa.” The video narrator says “crowds did their best to save lives.” It quotes Ukrainian police saying a “pro-Kiev march was ambushed … petrol bombs were thrown” and gun battles erupted on the streets. 

The late Robert Parry, who founded Consortium News, reported on Aug. 10, 2014:

“The brutality of these neo-Nazis surfaced again on May 2 when right-wing toughs in Odessa attacked an encampment of ethnic Russian protesters driving them into a trade union building which was then set on fire with Molotov cocktails. As the building was engulfed in flames, some people who tried to flee were chased and beaten, while those trapped inside heard the Ukrainian nationalists liken them to black-and-red-striped potato beetles called Colorados, because those colors are used in pro-Russian ribbons.

‘Burn, Colorado, burn’ went the chant.

As the fire worsened, those dying inside were serenaded with the taunting singing of the Ukrainian national anthem. The building also was spray-painted with Swastika-like symbols and graffiti reading ‘Galician SS,’ a reference to the Ukrainian nationalist army that fought alongside the German Nazi SS in World War II, killing Russians on the eastern front.”

Consequences of Suppressing Information

Though they were reported at the time, the events of May 2, 2014 have virtually vanished from Western media. It was one of the seminal events that led to Russia’s eventual intervention in the Ukrainian civil war.  

Similarly the role Ukrainian neo-Nazis played in the 2014 coup and the 8-year war on Donbass — which had been widely reported on at the time in Western mainstream media — disappeared, erasing the context of Russia’s invasion. The December 2021 Russian offer of treaties with the U.S. and NATO to avoid war was forgotten too. After Russian intervention, a campaign was launched by so-called disinformation monitors to try to suppress alternative media from reporting on these facts.  

The consequences of these efforts is clear. The aggression of Kiev’s coup regime against ethnic Russians in Ukraine, which led to Russia’s intervention, has been airbrushed from history.  

What’s left is a cartoon version that says the conflict began, not in 2014, but in February 2022 when Putin woke up one morning and decided to invade Ukraine. There was no other cause, according to this version, other than unprovoked, Russian aggression against an innocent country.

Thus the U.S. Embassy in Prague either deceptively used that photo, or more likely, had no idea what happened in Odessa in 2014, as it has hardly been reported on since, thinking that a prime example of Ukrainian aggression against ethnic Russians was instead a photo showing Russian aggression against Ukrainians.  

This is what happens when you believe your own propaganda. 

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe

By Edward Lozansky, Antiwar.com, 8/9/23

For the record: I was born in Ukraine, studied in Russia, and worked in America as a laser fusion researcher and Professor of Mathematics and Physics. I have relatives and friends in all three countries, and for the last 35 years, I have been trying to do my best to make them friends, partners, or even allies. Instead, all three are now at war, even if some call the U.S. war only a war “by proxy.”

This looks like a total failure of my efforts, but I hope this short summary clears a bit the fog of war, which might help in the search for avoiding a worst-case scenario.

I think I was the first one to recognize the independence of Ukraine from the Soviet Union back in December 1976, i.e., 15 years before Ukraine got its actual independence after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. This happened at the U.S. Embassy in Vienna, Austria during my application for an entrance visa. Vienna was my first stop after expulsion from the Soviet Union for dissident activities. My major “crime” was the distribution of the underground literary magazine “Kontinent,”  which was a leading publication of Russian pro-democracy forces. It was founded by Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, edited by writer Vladimir Maximov, and both had been expelled earlier. Magazine was printed by German publisher Axel Springer, and then smuggled into the USSR where at that time distribution of such literature could get you thrown in prison, mental institution or out of the country. In my case it was the latter, due to high-level family connections — but this is another story.

The visa application form included a question about my place of birth, to which I answered “Kiev, Ukraine.” Embassy officials didn’t object, and this information was later used in all subsequent documents, including my first U.S. passport after I got my citizenship.

The end of the Soviet Union also ended the Cold War, the smell of freedom could be felt all over the new Russia. But in my case, it happened even a few years earlier, when in October 1988 I got a call from Soviet President Gorbachev’s science advisor Yuri Ossipyan, who was also a Vice-President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and Member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. Yuri and I knew each other back in Moscow, where I was working as a nuclear physicist. He invited me to discuss various ideas for improving relations between the two countries. Taking into account my background, including TV interviews and publications in the U.S. media highly critical of the Soviet Union, this was quite unexpected. Nevertheless, I decided to accept, and in Moscow, I was introduced to many Soviet VIPs, and later to Gorbachev himself. The summary of these meetings can be expressed as follows: Moscow is constantly sending proposals to Washington asking to significantly expand the agenda for cooperation beyond arms control, but it doesn’t get an adequate response, only bureaucratic verbiage. Therefore, they made a decision to engage in what is called two-track diplomacy, sometimes called “people’s diplomacy” or “back channels.”

I liked the idea, and we agreed to exchange visits by Russian and American delegations to formulate concrete proposals. It was a huge effort that included many back and forth trips, exploring areas starting from business, science, education, culture, medicine, agriculture to space, security, military, etc.

The mayor of Moscow provided a downtown mansion for our office, while in Washington money was raised to buy a townhouse in Dupont Circle area for the same purpose.  Both buildings placed American and Russian flags on their outside walls, and in Washington it was named “Russia House” where we installed on its front a bust of Andrei Sakharov, the famous Russian nuclear physicist, Nobel Peace Laureate who was praised in the West but persecuted by the Soviet authorities until pardoned by Gorbachev.

Drafts of our “Track Two” proposals were discussed during regular U.S.-Russia forums on Capitol Hill and at the Russian Academy of Sciences, with participation of Members of Congress and the Russian Duma deputies, as well as with government officials, and experts in particular fields of both countries.

Some of us had direct talks in the White House with President George Bush, Sr., his Vice President, Dan Quayle, and in the Kremlin with Gorbachev and Yeltsin, who became Russian President after Gorby resigned on December 25, 1991.  Even the U.S. mainstream media, including the New York Times and the Washington Post wrote laudatory articles about our activities at the time,

To celebrate 1992 New Year’s Eve, we brought about 300 American businessmen, some with their families, to the Kremlin where they were joined by the Russians Who’s Who and U.S. Ambassador James Collins. The following day the Americans were invited to different Russian homes to continue our celebrations and pledge friendship and cooperation.  U.S. ratings among Russians at that time were well over 80%. In a symbolic gesture, Moscow State University transferred their Communist Party office to the recently registered American University in Moscow (AUM). Moreover, the mayor of Moscow transferred to AUM a downtown mansion which had previously housed the Communist Party’s young leaders’ school, plus a 200-acre estate that held previously country houses (dachas) of Members of Politburo, including Brezhnev’s, for our future campus.

Vice-President Quayle sent me a personal congratulation letter on behalf of President Bush, and in Congress a large bipartisan coalition was working on a bill to fund this university. I didn’t forget my home country, and at the same time, was working on the establishment of American University in Ukraine as well.

The good times had arrived, the sky was the limit, and my dreams were coming true. Many exiles, including Solzhenitsyn and Maximov were returning to Russia, so did magazine “Kontinent”, where it got direct financial support from both, Moscow Citi government, and the U.S. Embassy.  My wife and I were placed on the Embassy’s receptions guest list.

As it turned out – whoops, not so fast. While some Americans, whom I shall call the “good guys,” were ready to turn former foes into friends, partners, and allies, the “bad guys” from other powerful groups had different ideas, which had been described a few years earlier by a less naive and more realistic thinker, a distinguished American diplomat, and former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow George Kennan: “Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy,” – said Kennan.

Still, with George H.W. Bush in the White House the “good guys” had some leverage, but after Bill Clinton won the 1992 elections the Washington foreign policy establishment, sometimes called the “deep state,” was not interested in our work. The euphoria about winning the Cold War, and the dawning of what they saw as an era of a unipolar world under total American leadership, some called it hegemony, made them believe that Russia and her interests were no longer relevant.  In their calculations, from now on, Moscow would have no choice but to obey orders from Washington since it had nowhere else to go. As Kennan predicted, our ideas of mutually beneficial business and security cooperation were largely ignored.

Worse than that, under the leadership of Clinton-Gore and their top Russian advisor, Strobe Talbott, the greatest robbery of the 20th Century under the “Bandit Capitalism” system had begun. There are many stories with the details of this robbery, including Congressional Report “Russia’s Road to corruption,” prepared by a group of Members of Congress.   This is what one of the most outspoken critics of Russia, who can be hardly called a Putin apologist, said in his article titled “Who Robbed Russia?”: “What makes the Russian case so sad is that the Clinton administration may have squandered one of the most precious assets imaginable — which is the idealism and goodwill of the Russian people as they emerged from 70 years of Communist rule. The Russia debacle may haunt us for generations.”

Even worse than that, at the same time, Clinton and Talbott also started the push for NATO expansion, including Ukraine, to which many strategically thinking Americans strongly objected. Among them was the above-mentioned George Kennan, who called it a “fatal foreign policy mistake,” majority of members of the Arms Control Association, 19 U.S. Senators, and many others. New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that “NATO expansion would open the door to future nuclear war.”

Our Ukrainian friends had a different agenda which we’ve been trying to publicize in Washington. The summary of this agenda is as follows: Free from the communist yoke, having strong industrial and agricultural sectors, a favorable climate and fertile land, Ukraine had great potential to become one of the most prosperous European countries.  Effective anti-corruption reforms, a certain level of autonomy for the regions with large Russian ethnic population, and neutral status with no membership in any military blocs would have made Ukraine definitely a happy and prosperous state.

In May 1993 we organized a trilateral meeting on Capitol Hill with legislators from the U.S. Congress, Russia’s Duma, and Ukraine’s Rada to discuss what the U.S. were prepared to do to help Russia and Ukraine in their difficult transition from communism to democracy thus bringing them to our fold.

Congressman Tom Lantos of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who chaired this meeting, said that had Gorbachev told us in 1989 that he was prepared to dissolve USSR and the Warsaw Pact – and requested a trillion dollars to do it – Congress would most likely have agreed, authorizing 100 billion annually for a period of 10 years. However, as it turned out, the Russians did it all by themselves. So why spend U.S. taxpayers’ money when the job is already being done? “You are on your own, guys,” said Lantos. CIA director James Woolsey and other Members of Congress who spoke afterward more or less repeated the same lines.

If that message sounded cynical, well, foreign politics always is.  But it was also a bit misleading since the U.S. did not leave Russia and Ukraine alone, Yankees didn’t go home. Billions of American tax dollars were poured in Ukraine, not to boost its economy but to reformat public opinion that was predominantly in favor of neutral status and against joining NATO.

It was Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland who admitted that “We have invested over $5 billion to assist Ukraine in these and other goals that will ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine.” In reality the purpose of this money was to drive a wedge between the two Slavic nations, and push Ukraine into NATO.

This money, plus funding from George Soros, Canada, and other Western countries, helped to instigate the “Orange” color revolution in 2004 to bring a pro-NATO government into power. They succeeded but the anti-NATO mood in the country remained strong. Therefore, a second revolution was needed. This time its name was “Maidan,” and it was Victoria Nuland who coordinated it on location in Kiev while constantly reporting and getting input from then-Vice President Joe Biden, to whom Obama gave the Ukrainian portfolio.

All the media attention in her leaked phone call with the U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt discussing the details of the coup two weeks before it actually happened on February 22, 2014, was concentrated on her expletive language insulting the EU. However, almost totally ignored is that a few seconds later she also mentioned that she is constantly discussing her work with Sullivan, and added that “Biden willing.”

Needless to say, that the new Ukrainian government that was selected by Washington immediately declared its intention to join NATO.

There is no doubt, that if not for this coup, there would be no war in Ukraine today but in line with the disgraced “Russiagate” narrative it’s no surprise that the White House, a bipartisan majority in Congress, and think tanks that are funded by the military-industrial complex are blaming it all on Russia.

One should note that the position of the U.S. mainstream media is especially disgraceful. Ashley Rindsberg in “The Spectator” called the anti-Russian hysteria the “media’s Vietnam.” She bitterly writes that the crusade against Russia has become “the raison d’etre of the mainstream, so important that it has forced some of the most famous publications in the country to openly renounce cherished journalistic values such as objectivity and neutrality.”

I think that what is happening now in Ukraine is worse than American wars in Vietnam and the Middle East, starting with Iraq and on. At that time, one at least could use a fight with communism or terror as a pretext. Here we see a policy of provoking, funding, and prolonging a war between two Christian nations that lived together for over three centuries and are bound together by close historical, religious, economic, cultural, and family ties.

If not for the Biden-Nuland coordinated coup to remove the democratically elected Ukrainian president in February 2014, that country would still retain its full territory, including Crimea.

Despite constant use of the word “unprovoked” the current war was indeed provoked by the U.S. and NATO. It denigrates not only the principles of a democratic country but contradicts the basic spirit and soul of America itself.  There is no democracy in Ukraine, which Washington pledges to protect as long as it takes, and Russia is not planning to invade any other country. As any other nation, it does want to take its security interests seriously. In this particular case to insist that the pledge given to Gorbachev “not to expand NATO one inch East” is honored.

One phone call from Biden to Putin prior to February 24, 2022, with a pledge to guarantee Ukraine’s neutral status would have ensured there would be no war. Russia’s other security concerns could be then negotiated in a calm working atmosphere.

It is obvious, and no one is hiding the fact that collective West under current U.S. leadership wants to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia without going to war directly but rather by using Ukrainians as cannon fodder. How all this corresponds to Western, or in broader terms Judeo-Christian, values are hard to explain. Besides, according to Russian military doctrine, in case of the approaching of such a defeat Moscow would use nuclear weapons.

Frankly, being an optimist by nature, in this case I don’t feel too many glimpses of hope in avoiding what Senator Sam Nunn, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, along with many other leading American experts, the process of “sleepwalking into nuclear catastrophe”

All of the above might be viewed as “voice in the bewilderment” but I hope it will at least add a few new folks to the “good guys” list, and this subject will take precedent in the upcoming presidential campaign.

Edward Lozansky is President of the American University in Moscow.