Link here.

Earlier this month, two infamous Russian pranksters tricked former French president Francois Hollande into an interview under the pretense that he was speaking to former Ukrainian leader Petro Poroshenko. The whole 15 minute interview is worth watching, but at around the 7-1/2 minute mark Hollande begins discussing the Minsk agreements. He confirms that they were a ruse to buy time for Ukraine to build up its military and he also proceeds to admit that the west overthrew the Yanukovich government in 2014 with Poroshenko’s assistance.

Link here.

By Joe Lauria, Consortium News, 4/17/23

A Washington Post headline last week was a bombshell for someone who has only been reading about the Ukraine war in The Washington Post and other Western media: “U.S. doubts Ukraine counteroffensive will yield big gains, leaked document says.”

The story admits that Western media audiences have been misled about the course of the war, that essentially what mainstream media has been reporting about Ukraine has been a pack of lies: namely that Ukraine is winning the war and is poised to launch an offensive that will lead to a final victory. 

Instead, the second paragraph of the piece makes clear the leaked documents show the long-planned Ukrainian offensive will fail miserably — “a marked departure from the Biden administration’s public statements about the vitality of Ukraine’s military.”  

In other words, U.S. officials have been lying about the state of the war to the public and to reporters who have faithfully reported their every word without a hint of skepticism.

The Post said, as if it’s a bad thing, that the leaks will likely “embolden critics who feel the United States and NATO should do more to push for a negotiated settlement to the conflict.”

That has begun to happen. Writing in the uber-Establishment Foreign Affairs, former State Department official Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, write that “it is difficult to feel sanguine about where the war is headed.”

In “The West Needs a New Strategy in Ukraine: A Plan for Getting From the Battlefield to the Negotiating Table,” they say:

“The best path forward is a sequenced two-pronged strategy aimed at first bolstering Ukraine’s military capability and then, when the fighting season winds down late this year, ushering Moscow and Kyiv from the battlefield to the negotiating table.”  

The article does not mention the leaks, though it was published after the disclosures made clear that the Ukrainian offensive, intended to  break through Russia’s land bridge to Crimea, would fail.

Filled with the usual talk about Ukraine having better “operational skill” than Russia, and that the war will end in a “stalemate,” the piece represents an emerging strategy in the West: namely that before negotiating, Ukraine needs to launch its offensive to gain back some territory, “imposing heavy losses on Russia, foreclosing Moscow’s military options, and increasing its willingness to contemplate a diplomatic settlement.”

But that is a tall order. Moscow would be unlikely to negotiate at the end of the Ukrainian offensive, particularly as the article admits the “Russian military’s numerical superiority” and that Ukraine is “facing growing constraints on both its own manpower and help from abroad.” 

Moscow was ready to cut a deal with Kiev one month after Russia’s intervention but the West, with its strategy of lengthening the war to weaken Russia, quashed it. Why would Moscow accept a deal now when Ukraine is at its weakest and Russia is poised to make significant gains on the battlefield?

The Foreign Affairs piece admits, “This diplomatic gambit may well fail. Even if Russia and Ukraine continue to take significant losses, one or both of them may prefer to keep fighting.”

“Come the end of this fighting season,” the article says, “the United States and Europe will also have good reason to abandon their stated policy of supporting Ukraine for ‘as long as it takes,’ as U.S. President Joe Biden has put it.”

And what comes next? “NATO allies would start a strategic dialogue with Russia on arms control and the broader European security architecture.”  

Incredibly this is what Russia was asking for before its February 2022 intervention and it was rebuffed by NATO and the U.S.  Now a Foreign Affairs article is recommending it.

Is there no better sign that Ukraine has lost this war?

Going Ahead With the Offensive Anyway

The strategy of Ukraine going ahead with an offensive it knows will achieve little is Kiev’s last gasp — unless delusional neocons continue to outmaneuver the realists in Washington.

Most importantly for the West, the failure of this last-gasp attempt would serve as a way for it to escape the disaster it has created for itself: namely, the backfiring of the economic war on Russia; the failure of the information war in the non-West and ultimately defeat on the battlefield in its proxy war.   

Already in February, French President Emmanuel Macron, who is also pushing this strategy, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy that the game was up.  This news was brought to us by the establishment Wall Street Journal. 

And then ten days later U.S. intelligence provided a story to The New York Times that a pro-Ukraine “group,” and possibly the Ukrainian government itself, was behind the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, a way of distancing the U.S. from Kiev as the exit ramp looms into sight. 

Why Did the MSM Publish the Leaks?

Why did the Times, the Post and other establishment outlets publish stories about these leaks if they severely undermined their own credibility? There are three possibilities.   

The first is simply competition.  The Times or the Post may have gotten word that their rival had their hands on the leaks and did not want to be beat. There is almost nothing worse for an editor or reporter (in the petty world of journalism) then having to “match” a competitors’ story.

The second reason has to do with keeping up appearances. These leaks were eventually to come out somewhere and may not have been easily ignored. What would it have looked like if the big papers didn’t have it first?

More importantly, corporate journalism needs to keep up the pretense that it is actually doing journalism, i.e. that it will publish material from time to time that makes their governments look bad, and in this case, even themselves. They have to convince the public that they haven’t entirely given up on adversarial journalism if they are to survive.  

It was the same when corporate outlets partnered with WikiLeaks in 2010 to publish leaks that exposed U.S. war crimes. But eventually the media turned on Assange and WikiLeaks, and fell into line with the state. 

Why the Media Went After the Leaker

And that it is indeed what has happened here. After splashy stories about the leaks, the Times and the Post, teaming with Western intelligence-backed Bellingcat, turned their attention to finding the leaker, in what Elizabeth Vos in an article today on Consortium News argues makes corporate media the anti-WikiLeaks.

Rather than protecting the source of leaks, vital to the public, they hunted down the alleged leaker, 21-year old Air National Guardsman Jack Texiera, who was arrested by military-clad F.B.I. agents outside his Massachusetts home. 

So what is the third reason why the major media published the leaks?

Very likely for the same reason they published the stories about Macron and Scholz telling Zelensky he’s lost the war, and that the Ukrainian government may have been responsible for the Nord Stream sabotage:  to lay the ground work for the U.S. and its allies to pull the plug on their Ukrainian adventure by finally admitting Ukraine is losing.

Towards that end, there is speculation that Texiera did not act alone with the motive of impressing his teenage followers on the Discord chat forum, as the press has reported. 

Former C.I.A. analyst Larry Johnson believes Texiera was set up, possibly by a senior officer.  Johnson thinks this because among the documents Texiera allegedly leaked was one from the Central Intelligence Agency Operations Center, where Johnson used to work.

“CIA Operations Center produces two daily reports — one in the morning and one in the afternoon. It is not a ‘Community’ product, i.e., it is not distributed to the other intelligence agencies. It is an internal CIA document (of course, it is available to the Director of National Intelligence), ” Johnson wrote on his website Son of the New American Revolution.

Texiera was not in the C.I.A. so there is no way he’d have access to an Operations Center document, Johnson wrote. So how did he get his hands on it?

The implication is that Texiera may have been a patsy for someone within the realist wing of the U.S. military or intelligence establishment who opposes the neocons’ obsession with continuing the war at all costs.  

The neocons are not going down without a fight. John Bolton, the former U.S. national security advisor and chief neocon, wrote a desperate piece in The Wall Street Journal last week, titled, “A New American Grand Strategy to Counter Russia and China.”  

Bolton gets it that the world is changing, and not in America’s favor. So his response is not to reverse failed U.S. policy, for the U.S. to become part of the rest of the world rather than trying to dominate it, but to double down like a riverboat gambler.  His solution: raise military spending to Reagan-era levels; resume underground nuclear bomb testing and taking “the North Atlantic Treaty Organization global, inviting Japan, Australia, Israel and others committed to NATO defense-spending targets to join.”

Bolton laughingly says the U.S. must “exclude” Moscow and Beijing from the Middle East, where both capitals are orchestrating the most dramatic diplomatic transformation in decades.

But Boltons saves his best laugh for Ukraine:

“After Ukraine wins its war with Russia, we must aim to split the Russia-China axis. Moscow’s defeat could unseat Mr. Putin’s regime. What comes next is a government of unknowable composition. New Russian leaders may or may not look to the West rather than Beijing, and might be so weak that the Russian Federation’s fragmentation, especially east of the Urals, isn’t inconceivable.”

Even if the ludicrous Bolton is dismissed, there’s still a major obstacle in the realists’ way: Biden’s re-election campaign. He says he’s going to announce soon. He’s already thrown his lot in with the neocons.

Is there any conceivable way that he could accept Ukraine losing this war, after all the blue and yellow flag-waving, without also losing the election? 

The Biden team’s aim was to bleed Russia. But it is Ukraine that is hemorrhaging. Will reality at last overcome delusion in Washington?

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 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 can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe   

By Paul Robinson, Canadian Dimension ,4/5/23

A few years back, at the University of Ottawa’s summer convocation, I was startled to see a student come forward to collect his degree whose first name was Brezhnev. One suspects that his parents were African communists who named him after Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev as a mark of gratitude for the Soviets Union’s assistance in their country’s national liberation struggle against Western colonialism. It’s a striking example of how other people don’t see the world quite as we do.

In the eyes of most Westerners, their countries are bastions of liberalism, democracy and human rights. The Soviet Union, by contrast, was, as Reagan said, an “evil empire.” In the eyes of many others, however, Western countries are colonial oppressors who conquered and enslaved their ancestors. The Soviet Union—and by extension modern Russia—was free of guilt in this regard. It was even an ally in the fight against imperialism.

Consequently, the intense dislike of Russia that has gripped much of the West in recent years is largely absent elsewhere. This provides Russia with an opportunity that it is proving adept at exploiting.

As I mentioned in a previous article for Canadian Dimension, the Russian leadership is nowadays framing its political struggle with the Western world in terms of what one might call “civilizational theory.” This rejects the Western model of history as progressing inevitably towards a common future, normally defined in terms of liberalism, and juxtaposes to it the idea that history consists of multiple different civilizations each advancing according to its own logic. This concept provides a justification for why not just Russia, but also other parts of the world, can resist Western hegemony and assert their right to develop in their own way.

Over the past decade, civilizational theory has been gradually appearing more and more in official Russian rhetoric. Last week proved the point, with the publication of a new foreign policy concept for the Russian Federation, along with an executive order by Russian President Vladimir Putin approving the concept.

In his order, Putin firmly nailed his colours to the civilizational mast. Russia, he declared, was an “original state-civilization, a vast Eurasian and Euro-Pacific power that bound together the Russian people and other peoples who make up the cultural and civilizational community of the Russian world.” This itself was nothing particularly new, but some of what then followed was.

For Putin’s decree specifically pointed to Russia’s status as the “legal successor of the Soviet Union” and as such a state with a “long role in the creation of the contemporary system of international relations and in the liquidation of the global system of colonialism.” Putin continued: “Humanity is passing through a period of revolutionary change. … It is impossible to return to the past, unequal model of global development, which for centuries guaranteed the rapid economic growth of the colonial powers by exploiting the resources of dependent territories and states in Asia, Africa, and the Western hemisphere.” Power was shifting, said Putin, but “some states… refuse to recognize the reality of a multipolar world… and try to hold back the natural march of history.”

These statements mark an important shift in Russian strategy, as Putin has never before played the anti-colonial card with quite such fervour. This shift reflects the factor that the centre of gravity in the struggle with the West has now moved to the Global South. Russia needs the support, or at least the neutrality, of states of the developing world in order to stymie the West’s efforts to isolate it. The civilizational rhetoric and the appeal to the Soviet Union’s record in fighting colonialism are useful tools in this regard, and so far they seem to be quite successful. Outside of Europe, North America, Australasia, Japan, and South Korea—what one might call the “collective West”—few states are actively declaring themselves Russia’s supporters, but almost none are lining up to join the West as active enemies. Not even Mexico has levied sanctions against Russia.

The Russians are enjoying particular success in Africa. In February, for instance, South Africa hosted the Russian and Chinese navies for joint exercises. And in March, representatives of 40 African countries attended a meeting in Moscow held in preparation for the Russia-Africa summit that is to take place in St. Petersburg in July, and that most African heads-of-state are expected to attend. At the Moscow meeting, Putin told the African delegates that it was “common knowledge that the Soviet Union provided significant support to the peoples of Africa in their fight against colonialism, racism and apartheid, how it helped many African countries to gain and protect their sovereignty, and consistently supported them in building their statehood, strengthening defence capabilities, laying the foundations of their national economies and workforce training.” In response, the delegates applauded.

Putin’s message fell on fertile ground. Russia won many friends in the Third World during the COVID crisis by providing them with its Sputnik vaccine. It is also investing heavily in the African continent, while the Wagner private military company is active in a number of African countries, whose governments have hired it to help fight domestic insurgencies. All this is having an effect. A report issued last month by the Economist Intelligence Unit noted that one year after the start of the war in Ukraine “an increasing number of countries are siding with Russia.” The report assesses that only 15 percent of the world’s population lives in countries condemning Russia, and another 21 percent in countries that are “West-leaning.” Just 5.6 percent live in countries “supportive of Russia,” but 27.5 percent are “Russia-leaning,” with 30 percent neutral. Overall, therefore, the numbers pro- and anti-Russia are roughly even, but the tide seems to be drifting slightly in favour of the former. Russian foreign policy vis-à-vis the West is in tatters. Elsewhere, however, its diplomacy is proving quite effective. It is a fact with which the West sooner or later is going to have to come to terms.

By Devlin Barrett, Washington Post, 4/18/23

Federal authorities charged four Americans on Tuesday with roles in a malign campaign pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda in Florida and Missouri — expanding a previous case that charged a Russian operative with running illegal influence agents within the United States.

The FBI signaled its interest in the alleged activities in a series of raids last summer, at which point authorities charged a Moscow man, Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov, with working for years on behalf of Russian government officials to fund and direct fringe political groups in the United States. Among other things, Ionov allegedly advised the political campaigns of two unidentified candidates for public office in Florida.

Ionov’s influence efforts were allegedly directed and supervised by officers of the FSB, a Russian government intelligence service.

Now, authorities have added charges against four Americans who allegedly did Ionov’s bidding through groups including the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement in Florida, Black Hammer in Georgia, and an unidentified political group in California — part of an effort to influence American politics.

Authorities said Ionov sought to use the groups to promote Russia’s occupation of part of Ukraine, and the eventual invasion of that country in 2022…

Read full article here.