By Mark Tubridy, Intellinews, 4/4/22

Walking through the mall in St Petersburg, Russia’s northern capital, these days is a bit like walking through a ghost town. Once greeted with bright lights and ambient music, shoppers now stroll past darkened display windows and signs reading “temporarily closed.” Only a fraction of the shops have remained open following the recent exodus of foreign brands following the invasion of Ukraine on February 24. Popular brands like Adidas, Calvin Klein and Uniqlo that all had branches in the former Tsarist capital have all shuttered their operations in the country.

The malls in St Petersburg are reporting that foot traffic is down by nearly 14% compared to the same period last year, while several newly constructed shopping centres in Moscow have postponed their grand openings due to a sudden lack of tenants.

As popular western clothing brands vanish, some Russians maintain a sense of irony, joking that now they’ll need to style their summer wardrobe with Belarusian threads. Others anticipate a return of Soviet-era fartsovka, or the illegal sale of hard-to-find or inaccessible goods from abroad.

But it’s not just Nike and Tommy Hilfiger. Even basic goods have gone missing from some store shelves. Videos posted on social media showing shoppers battling over packages of sugar and buckwheat have gone viral in recent weeks. In the Volga River city of Saratov, hundreds of residents gather in the central square at weekends, sometimes queuing for several hours to buy sugar that they can no longer find at the store.

“I asked a worker at my local supermarket why there isn’t any sugar. She said there is sugar, but a group of elderly women loitering in the store, waiting for the delivery, buy the stuff up like crazy when it appears,” says Sasha Petrov, a business consultant in Saratov. “I honestly don’t know why they need that much sugar. Maybe they’re witches making gingerbread houses or moonshine.”

“The disappearance of sugar is mostly a logistical problem,” explains a Moscow-based economist and entrepreneur, Dmitry Potapenko, in a recent interview. Producers cannot keep up with panic buying. So far, this kind of frenzied consumer behaviour is mostly affecting staple goods that Russia produces domestically, and therefore supplies are anticipated to normalise soon. As Potapenko notes: “there are other more worrying signs, namely printing paper and feminine hygiene products. All of these things are made from imported materials.”

Sanctions-induced disruptions to logistical chains are causing shortages of everything from receipt paper to aluminium beer cans. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has created a chaotic ripple effect across the entire economy, leaving few industries and sectors untouched. Even schools have been forced to reschedule the spring examination period to autumn, ostensibly because of coronavirus (COVID-19); however, many suspect the real culprit is a lack of paper.

There are some who believe doomsday reporting of barren shelves at the supermarket to be exaggerated. “I guess people outside of Russia are hearing that there are long lines at ATMs here, that we’ve run out of food,” says Natasha Obolova, a university researcher in Saint Petersburg. “My ex-boyfriend’s mother from Australia called me in a panic and said that I should grow sprouts, since they have all the nutrients a person needs! But I can still find everything I want at the store.”

In a survey published in Novaya Gazeta, sugar is the scarcest product, according to 84.5% of respondents. People from Western Siberia, the Volga region and even Moscow have reported its absence. It is being sold under the counter, on the internet, at inflated prices, one respondent said.

After sugar, respondents (22.2%) cited grain products and pasta as the second most difficult items to find. After these came coffee and tea (7.1%), cooking oil (5.2%) and alcoholic beverages (4.2%). Even when these products are still on the shelves, our study shows that the volume of product in a package is also decreasing. Grains – once sold in kilogram packages – are now sold in 800 gram amounts; certain brands of pasta are being sold in 400 gram, rather than 500 gram packages.

At the same time, soaring inflation is beginning to hit consumers’ wallets. Earlier this week Russia’s statistical agency RosStat reported that annual inflation for 2022 had already reached more than 15%, which is lower than earlier estimates. Inflation could reach a multi-year high of 20% in 2022. Some of the most impacted goods include sugar, salt, rice and black tea, all of which have seen prices increase in double digits in the last month alone. Onions, meanwhile, have increased in price by more than 18%, and carrots by over 11%.

Buckwheat – a Russian staple – is rapidly increasing in price, rising from an average of RUB70 to RUB80-RUB90, and in some places, even to RUB110-RUB130, one respondent to the Novaya Gazeta survey said. 680 respondents also reported that the prices of cereal and pasta have risen by more than 30%. Pet food has also been affected, with one respondent commenting that Grandorf dog food has risen in price by 100%, and in some stores the price has soared by 200-400%. Purina cat food has climbed by 50%. RosStat also noted significant price increases for laundry detergent and personal hygiene products.

“I’m definitely preparing for the worst,” says Oleg Kozlov, who operates a small advertising firm. “I stocked up on some items like cleaning products beforehand, when the prices were still low.”

For his own business, Kozlov faces challenges selling a range of products, like leaflets and flyers, after a number of foreign manufacturers temporarily suspended operations in the country. “I would say that 80-90% of my clients stopped buying products that they used to buy all the time. I’ve received almost no orders for printing materials this past month. Nobody can afford it.” 

Anastasia Kazmina, a medical worker in Saint Petersburg, can still buy the same kind of groceries as before, albeit at a higher price. However, she hasn’t had the same luck with the imported contact lenses she normally uses. “I found out that there are Russian alternatives, but I’ve never seen them in the stores, and I haven’t yet figured out where to buy them.”

Perhaps the most concerning reports are those of the absence of vital medicines in pharmacies. Those for thyroid diseases, epilepsy, diabetes – and other diseases – are missing from the shelves. The medicines that are available have become more expensive. One respondent in the Novaya Gazeta survey reported: “The price of Maxidex (a Finnish drug that treats eye infections) has increased significantly. It was about RUB350, and is now RUB530. Sulfasalazine (an American drug that treats rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn’s disease, among other conditions) has increased from RUB400 rubles to RUB520. The price of Movalis (another American drug that treats arthritis) also increased a lot: it was RUB800 rubles, now it RUB1,300.”

The state has put pressure on retailers to hold prices down but most have abandoned the 5% limit on sugar trade margins introduced at the start of March as unworkable. The Auchan and Atak supermarket chains are now pricing sugar based on market forces, as they argue the price caps were only making shortages worse.

The Federal Antimonopoly Services (FAS) explained that retailers made such a decision “to expand the supply of goods and eliminate local shortages.” And the Ministry of Industry and Trade noted that the refusal of voluntary obligations, “may have signs of a violation of antitrust laws,” Kommersant reports.

Together with these networks, other leading supermarket chains, including X5 Group (Pyaterochka, Perekrestok), as well as Dixy and Magnit agreed to voluntarily limit the margin to 5% for socially significant products in March. The latter stated that it would continue to fulfil its previously assumed obligations, but the position of the others is unclear – they did not respond to Kommersant’s request for information. 

Despite growing economic hardship, many in Russia appear determined to weather the storm. As Svetlana Dubinina, a homemaker from Saratov, puts it plainly: “Everything’s fine. We won’t starve to death. I always have enough to last half the year.”

Older generations familiar with past economic crises may express an almost business-as-usual attitude about a worsening economy, especially those that have a dacha vegetable garden, but younger urban Russians who take an abundance of goods and services for granted face a steep learning curve.

Katya Ostrovskaya, a nursing student who runs a small side business out of her apartment baking cakes, says that she’s had to rethink future plans. “I’m starting to earn less. That’s really not good because my growth depends on profits. Now I can’t open my own bakeshop like I was planning.”

The rising costs of goods has also forced Ostrovskaya to adjust her business model. “A lot of bakers are switching to smaller-sized cakes because you can make them quicker and in larger quantities, which makes up for the higher costs. It’s a kind of anti-crisis option, since people still want cake.”

Asked how he’s preparing for more austere economic conditions, Andrei Guriev, a delivery driver, responds dryly “I’m not.” Guriev recalls hours of waiting for basic goods during the late 1980s and early 1990s. “We’re used to this. We lived with constant shortages in the Soviet Union, so we’ll get by somehow. It might be like the 90s, but we’re not going back to the Soviet Union.”

Three U.S. officials tell NBC News that U.S. claims based on “intelligence” on Russia were made up simply to “preempt the Russians”

One U.S. official: “It doesn’t have to be solid intelligence when we talk about it..” pic.twitter.com/Yv9udq05ex

— Camila (@camilapress) April 6, 2022

US Publicizing Bad Intelligence in Information War Against Russia

By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, 4/6/22

In recent weeks, US officials, including President Biden, claimed that Russia was considering using chemical weapons in Ukraine. But three US officials told NBC News this week that there is no evidence Russia had moved any chemical weapons near Ukraine and that the claims were part of an information war against Moscow.

The US officials said that the Biden administration has been sharing declassified intelligence that wasn’t “rock solid.” The NBC report said that multiple US officials acknowledged that the US has used information as a weapon against Russia “even when confidence in the accuracy of the information wasn’t high.”

The report said the US has used “low confidence” information, like the chemical weapons claims, as a “deterrent effect.” One official told NBC that by sharing the information, the US is just “trying to get inside Putin’s head.”

Another example of the US sharing bad intelligence is the claim that Putin is being misinformed by his advisors about the war in Ukraine, which first surfaced in media reports last week. Two US officials told NBC that the intelligence about Putin’s inner circle lying to him “wasn’t conclusive” and was “based more on analysis than hard evidence.”

In another deceptive intelligence release, the US said Russia would view providing MiG fighter jets to Ukraine as escalatory, which bolstered the Pentagon’s position not to transfer the planes to Kyiv. But two US officials said that was also true for Stinger missiles, which the US and its allies have given to the Ukrainians.

A European official and two US officials said that the claim that Russia asked China for military help “lacked hard evidence.” Both Beijing and Moscow strongly denied the claim after it spread through Western media.

The NBC report said that by declassifying so much intelligence, the Biden administration was able to publicly predict Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But during the lead-up to the invasion and since, Western media reports have been full of other unsubstantiated claims about Russia and Ukraine.

by Kit Klarenberg, The Grayzone, 4/3/22

A key witness to the widely publicized incident at the Mariupol maternity hospital has punctured the official narrative of a Russian airstrike on the facility, and raised serious questions about Western media ethics. Meanwhile, news of a massacre in the city of Bucha contains suspicious elements.

On March 9th, shocking news of a deliberate Russian airstrike on a maternity hospital in Mariupol, eastern Ukraine, began spreading widely via social media and news outlets.

Fiery condemnation from Western officials, pundits, and journalists was immediate. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, for his part, claimed the act was proof of the “genocide” Russia was perpetrating against the civilian population, and urged European leaders to condemn the “war crime” and “strengthen sanctions” to stop the Kremlin’s “evil” deeds in the country. NPR suggested the attack was part of Russia’s “terrible wartime tradition” of purposefully targeting health facilities and medics during conflicts, dating back to Chechnya.

But newly released testimony from one of the incident’s main witnesses punctures the official narrative about a targeted Russian airstrike on the hospital. The witness account indicates the hospital had been turned into a base of operations by Ukrainian military forces and was not targeted in an airstrike, as Western media claimed. Her testimony also raised serious questions about whether at least some elements of the event were staged for propaganda purposes – and with the cooperation of the Associated Press.

The new testimony (watch below) comes on the heels of evidence strongly suggesting that the destruction of a dramatic theater in Mariupol on March 16 was staged by the Azov Battalion, and that nearly all civilians had evacuated a day before. And as we will see below, new reports of a Russian massacre of scores of civilians in the town of Bucha also contain suspicious details suggesting a pattern of information manipulation aimed at triggering Western military intervention.

“They said it was no airstrike. So our opinion got confirmed. We didn’t hear the airplane, they didn’t hear it either.”

At that moment we heard an explosion. Instinctively I personally put a duvet on myself. That’s when we heard the second explosion. I got covered by glass partially. I had small cuts on my nose, under my lips and at the top of my forehead but it was nothing serious…

Mariana Vishegirskaya, a pregnant resident of Donetsk who was present at the maternity hospital during the widely reported incident, has evacuated from Mariupol and is now speaking out. Photos showing a bloodied Vishnevskaya fleeing the building with her personal belongings became a centerpiece of coverage of the attack, along with a photo of another woman being carried away pale and unconscious on a stretcher.

In the wake of the incident, Russian officials falsely claimed the pair were the same person, citing Vishegirskaya’s background as a blogger and Instagram personality as evidence she was a crisis actor and the incident a false flag. Though that assertion was not true, as we shall see, the hospital had been almost completely taken over by the Ukrainian military.

In a video (above) reviewed by The Grayzone which began circulating via Telegram April 1st, Vishegirskaya offers a clear and detailed account of what took place on and in the days leading up to March 9th. The witness begins by noting how many residents of Mariupol attempted to evacuate following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, but says authorities ensured it was “impossible to leave.”…

Read full article here.

By Jordan G. Teicher, The New Republic, 3/31/22 (excerpts)

….While the satellite images of other companies have also made their way into the press coverage of Ukraine, none have been as ubiquitous as Maxar’s. The same photos that appeared on CNN on February 20 appeared in dozens of other outlets, including The New York Post, The New York Times, and Reuters. Since then, hardly a day has gone by without a national outlet featuring Maxar images, most prominently of the bombing of Mariupol (NPR, USA Today, The Guardian) and the destruction of a theater where civilians allegedly were sheltering (NBC News, Business Insider, The Washington Post). Axios has frequently featured Maxar images in its coverage of Ukraine, with stories often bearing the headline “Satellite images show.…” “If you’ve seen high-resolution satellite imagery published in connection with an important story, that image was more than likely taken by a Maxar satellite,” Maxar president and CEO Dan Jablonsky said recently.

….Maxar’s defense capabilities—including satellite imagery, mobile access terminals, precision 3D registration technology, and artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities—were developed with the needs of the U.S. government and its allies in mind. Today, the U.S. government remains a critical Maxar customer. According to Maxar, the company provides 90 percent of the “foundational geospatial intelligence used by the U.S. government for national security.” For nearly a decade, Maxar was the sole supplier of commercial high-resolution satellite imagery for the Defense Department’s National Reconnaissance Office, which paid Maxar $300 million per year for access to its satellites as well as its behemoth image archive.

As a Maxar customer, the Department of Defense isn’t just a passive consumer of Maxar images; it is, in a way, a co-producer of those images. “These satellites don’t just go around and around the world taking pictures and adding them to their archive,” said Laura Kurgan, the director of the Center for Spatial Research at Columbia University. Maxar’s satellites often take photos when—and where—they are tasked by the company’s customers to do so. “Once tasked, those images are archived, and anyone can purchase them,” Kurgan said. Maxar can also share those images with the press. But crucially, Kurgan says, the media organizations in Maxar’s News Bureau network will “never know who tasked the image,” including when the tasking customer is the U.S. government. In other words, media outlets can unwittingly funnel images to the public that were specifically ordered by the U.S. government, without those outlets, or the public, knowing it for certain.

According to industry experts, this is not an accidental by-product of the U.S. government’s need for geospatial intelligence but a key benefit of working with commercial providers, since the images the government takes with its own satellites are classified. “What they love about commercial providers is that the images are freely shareable,” Chris Quilty of the market research firm Quilty Analytics told SpaceNews. That’s especially useful in times of war. For instance, Quilty said, “if commercial imagery didn’t exist, you would have had the U.S. administration waving their hands about the Russians massing troops around Ukraine,” and they would have been unable to provide the visual evidence to back up the claim.

But just as the U.S. government can work through commercial satellite imagery companies to reveal information strategically to the public, it can also use its power over those companies to conceal information. One way it can do that is through “checkbook shutter control.” In the fall of 2001, after reports of heavy civilian casualties from American bombing in Afghanistan, the federal government spent millions to buy the rights to all Ikonos image data over the country for two months. Since Ikonos had the only high-resolution photographs of the area on the U.S. market, according to Wired, the government’s purchase made it “functionally impossible for anyone else to use commercial US imagery [to] surveil the area.” The media, like everyone else outside the U.S. intelligence community looking to get a high-resolution satellite view of the war, was largely out of luck. (The Pentagon allowed select Ikonos images to be sold to the media.)

Maxar’s images don’t need to be censored, necessarily, for the company to provide an incomplete view of global conflict to the press. While Maxar’s status as a defense contractor lends its content a certain legitimacy, the images it provides to the media are not, in fact, “as precise or as timely” as the images the U.S. military itself collects, retired Navy Admiral James Stavridis told the Associated Press. When U.S. military and intelligence agencies do turn to Maxar images, they corroborate them with intelligence from human sources, real-time video, and information collected by spy planes. With Maxar images alone, you can “see something on a base that looks like a base that has a lot of activity,” Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, told the AP. “But in terms of what’s being done there, and what the units are—that takes a lot more intel.” News audiences looking to Maxar’s images to understand war will likely never view them in the fuller context to which military analysts are privy.

Those viewers will also never see a complete picture of global military activity. Maxar does not show U.S. troop movements to the public but often releases images of U.S. adversaries like China and Iran. The result is an asymmetrical view of geopolitics—one that, according to Cory Wimberly, an associate professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley who wrote a book about corporate propaganda, is a kind of manufactured siege mentality. In this scenario, news consumers are led to believe that the U.S. is constantly under threat and in need of military solutions—which, not incidentally, requires the military to use more of Maxar’s services. Jablonsky has said that the company is “hopeful for a peaceful resolution” in Ukraine. But it is also positioning its offerings to support the Defense Department’s pivot “from anti-terror missions” to confrontations with “large, near-peer adversaries”—namely, Russia and China. “If the way that you make your money is through conflict and war, then you’re going to be looking for opportunities to become involved in conflict and war,” Wimberly said….

Read full article here.

By Joe Lauria, Consortium News, 4/4/22

Within hours of news Sunday that there had been a massacre at Bucha, a town 63 kms north of the Ukrainian capital, the verdict was in: Russian troops had senselessly slaughtered hundreds of innocent civilians as they withdrew from the town, leaving their bodies littering the streets.

Unlike their judicial systems, when it comes to war, Western nations dispense with the need for investigations and evidence and pronounce guilt based on political motives: Russia is guilty. Case closed.

Except the case hasn’t even been opened yet and the sentence is already being proposed. French President Emmanuel Macron, for instance, has called for Russian coal and oil to be banned from Europe. “There are very clear indications of war crimes,” he said on France Inter radio Monday. “What happened in Bucha demands a new round of sanctions and very clear measures, so we will co-ordinate with our European partners, especially with Germany.”

Other voices are now perilously calling for the U.S. to go to war with Russia over the incident. 

“This is genocide,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told Face the Nation on CBS. “Mothers of Russians should see this. See what bastards you’ve raised. Murderers, looters, butchers,” he added on Telegram.

Russia has categorically denied it had anything to do with the massacre.

Where to Start

If there were to be a serious probe, one of the first places an investigator would begin is to map out a timeline of events.

Last Wednesday, all Russian forces left Bucha, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.

This was confirmed on Thursday by a smiling Anatolii Fedoruk, the mayor of Bucha, in a video on the Bucha City Council official Facebook page. The translated post accompanying the video says:

“March 31 – the day of the liberation of Bucha. This was announced by Bucha Mayor Anatolii Fedoruk. This day will go down in the glorious history of Bucha and the entire Bucha community as a day of liberation by the Armed Forces of Ukraine from the Russian occupiers.”

All of the Russian troops are gone and yet there is no mention of a massacre. The beaming Fedoruk says it is a “glorious day” in the history of Bucha, which would hardly be the case if hundreds of dead civilians littered the streets around Fedoruk.

“Russian Defence Ministry denied accusations by the Kiev regime of the alleged killing of civilians in Bucha, Kiev Region. Evidence of crimes in Bucha appeared only on the fourth day after the Security Service of Ukraine and representatives of Ukrainian media arrived in the town. All Russian units completely withdrew from Bucha on March 30, and ‘not a single local resident was injured’ during the time when Bucha was under the control of Russian troops,” the Russian MOD said in a post on Telegram.

What Happened Next?

What happened then on Friday and Saturday? As pointed out in a piece by Jason Michael McCann on Standpoint Zero, The New York Times was in Bucha on Saturday and did not report a massacre. Instead, the Times said the withdrawal was completed on Saturday, two days after the mayor said it was, and that the Russians left “behind them dead soldiers and burned vehicles, according to witnesses, Ukrainian officials, satellite images and military analysts.”

The Times said reporters found the bodies of six civilians. “It was unclear under what circumstances they had died, but the discarded packaging of a Russian military ration was lying beside one man who had been shot in the head,” the paper said. It then quoted a Zelensky adviser, who said:

“’The bodies of people with tied hands, who were shot dead by soldiers lie in the streets,’ the adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, said on Twitter. ‘These people were not in the military. They had no weapons. They posed no threat.’ He included an image of a scene, photographed by Agence France-Presse, showing three bodies on the side of a road, one with hands apparently tied behind the back. The New York Times was unable to independently verify Mr. Podolyak’s claim the people had been executed.’”

It is possible that on Saturday the full extent of the horror had yet to emerge, and that even the mayor was unaware of it two days before, though photos now show many of the bodies out in the open on the streets of the town, something that presumably would be difficult to miss.

In Bucha, the Times was close to the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, whose soldiers appear in the newspaper’s photographs. In his piece, McCann suggests that Azov may responsible for the killings:

“Something very interesting then happens on [Saturday] 2 April, hours before a massacre is brought to the attention of the national and international media. The US and EU-funded Gorshenin Institute online [Ukrainian language] site Left Bank announced that:

‘Special forces have begun a clearing operation in the city of Bucha in the Kyiv region, which has been liberated by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The city is being cleared from saboteurs and accomplices of Russian forces.’

The Russian military has by now completely left the city, so this sounds for all the world like reprisals. The state authorities would be going through the city searching for ‘saboteurs’ and ‘accomplices of Russian forces.’ Only the day before [Friday], Ekaterina Ukraintsiva, representing the town council authority, appeared on an information video on the Bucha Live Telegram page wearing military fatigues and seated in front of a Ukrainian flag to announce ‘the cleansing of the city.’ She informed residents that the arrival of the Azov battalion did not mean that liberation was complete (but it was, the Russians had fully withdrawn), and that a ‘complete sweep’ had to be performed.”

Ukraintsiva was speaking a day after the mayor had said the town was liberated.  

By Sunday morning, the world learned of the massacre of hundreds of people. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said: “We strongly condemn apparent atrocities by Kremlin forces in Bucha and across Ukraine. We are pursuing accountability using every tool available, documenting and sharing information to hold accountable those responsible.” President Joe Biden on Monday called for a “war crimes” trial. “This guy is brutal, and what’s happening in Bucha is outrageous, and everyone’s seen it. I think it’s a war crime.”

The Bucha incident is a critical moment in the war. An impartial investigation is warranted, which probably only the U.N. could conduct. The Azov Battalion may have perpetrated revenge killings against Russian collaborators, or the Russians carried out this massacre. (Once again the Pentagon is dampening the war hysteria, saying it can’t confirm or deny Russia was responsible.)

A rush to judgment is dangerous, with irresponsible talk of the U.S. directly fighting Russia. But it is a rush to judgment that we are getting.