Western media’s take on the Ukraine-Russia conflict depicts Russia as the aggressor and Putin as Hitler. But as with the climate change doomsayers, perception is everything when cherry-picking a start date.
Measure the Russia-Ukraine conflict from a starting point of February 2022 and Russia is the aggressor. Take the starting point as 1991, 1994 or the 2014 coup/revolution and Russia, having watched the world stand by while 14,400 – 22,000 lost their lives in the Donbass region, is acting as defender, responding to a plea from the people of the Donetsk and Lugansk Republics who requested assistance from Russia after an increase in shelling and a build-up of Ukrainian troops at their border.
Just as the French government would surely act if Canada outlawed the French language and began shelling the residents of Quebec, so the UK Government acted when Argentina invaded the Falklands. Likewise, Russia responded to the repeated shelling of the Donbass invoking Article 51 of the United Nations Charter (Donetsk and Lugansk regions are not recognised by Ukraine as an autonomous territory as the Falklands Islands/Malvinas are not recognised as a British Overseas Territory by Argentina who consider the islands occupied) which allows for the provision for mutual military assistance in the framework of a defensive alliance.
An early peace deal was drafted, both sides claiming the other walked away. Zelensky considers Putin a terrorist while Lavrov considers Zelensky a drug addict. Whatever the truth, you won’t get it from the mainstream western media, which is jingoistic, nowhere near the combat zone and addicted to escalation.
‘Ukraine is on the precipice of a nuclear disaster’ (Telegraph) ‘Will Putin Use Nuclear Weapons?’ (Times) ‘Vladimir Putin to Use Nuclear Weapons If He Suffers Further Embarrassment, Expert Warns’, the expert being an ex-NATO employee who once deputised under Jens Stoltenberg. More fear porn from the same UK Press which brought us WMDs, 9/11 and Black Plague 2: The Covid Years.
‘After the first flush of the horrors of war it doesn’t take long for narrative creep to set in’, says journalist turned filmmaker Jon Stewart, ‘Sieges are static. Journalists want movement, action, escalation. Nobody’s asking, “What would it take to de-escalate this situation?” Journalists are trapped in a business model which creates news as narratives. This is where careers are made’.
Western MSM mostly hangs out in Kiev or Lviv relying on ‘Zelensky says’ as news. The Telegraph’s senior foreign correspondent who was in Ukraine at the time, only found out there was a war on when a London radio station called him at 4am asking for a comment on the invasion. Those who do venture to the Donbass, such as Patrick Lancaster, Graham Phillips and Alina Lipp, get their assets frozen, PayPal accounts closed, are threatened with prosecution for war crimes and branded terrorists. Lipp was handed a three-year jail term by her own German government for committing the ultimate crime: Going against the official western narrative. She has also been added to the myrotvorets kill list which includes Scott Ritter and Roger Waters.
One Daily Telegraph story claiming women and children had been raped by Russian soldiers was accompanied by video footage of Russian soldiers handing out supplies to locals while another managed to get the Ukrainian flag upside-down. ‘Russian opposition activist beaten up and raped by police’ claimed the DT again even though paramedics called to the scene ‘could not confirm’ any reported rape. The Sun opts for ‘Evil Vladimir Putin ramping up attacks on Civilians’ providing a link which in fact takes the reader to another Sun article about the AFU/NATO bombing of a municipal building in Kherson which killed several ethnic-Russian Ukrainian officials, including the head of the election commission who was organising a referendum.
The western press had already solidified the narrative of the Bucha Massacre before photographs began emerging of Bucha residents executed next to their Russian food packs. Even Wikipedia’s Bucha Massacre page shows ‘collaborators’ tied with their Russia-friendly armbands. In spite of a ‘Clearing Operation’ of ‘saboteurs and accomplices of Russia’ announced by the Ukrainian National Police, Great Britain opposed the convening of the UN Security Council which had been requested by Russia in order to analyze what Moscow described as Bucha ‘fabrications’.
Next up, Izyum. While the western press was being notified about a series of marked graves, a logo depicting a dead hand with a yellow and blue bracelet above the word ‘Genocide’ was hastily cobbled together. ‘Under the pine trees of Izyum’, began the BBC’s Orla Guerin ‘…the earth…starting to give up its secrets’. But Orla's doom-laden overtones were given short measure by a circumspect Jeremy Bowen. ‘…Over the years as a journalist I’ve seen quite a few massacres in places and it's quite rare that they would bury people who were killed illegally, unlawfully in individual graves like that and mark...keep a record…you don’t really know, unless there’s been a proper investigation’.
An investigation by an organisation such as Amnesty International perhaps? No. Because Amnesty International already had their accreditation revoked for having the temerity to accuse Kiev/Kyiv authorities of endangering civilians by stationing soldiers and munitions in residential areas including schools and hospitals. Having challenged the official narrative, Amnesty has been refused access to the Izyum grave site. The ICC has now launched an investigation with prosecutor Karim A. A. Khan promising to encompass any new alleged crimes which are committed ‘by any party to the conflict on any part of the territory of Ukraine’.
Western media’s lies of omission fuel the flames of division and of the conflict itself. They report on the hundreds who turned up in Moscow to protest Russia’s partial mobilization, yet willfully ignore the 50,000 who rallied in support of the referenda. Western media reports that Russian border guards are preventing men of fighting age from leaving the country and that Putin is raiding the prison population to flesh out the army – yet this is also what Ukraine has been doing from early on in the conflict. Russia is blamed for switching off the gas to Europe, yet this is down to sanctions, while damage to both pipes looks increasingly like sabotage. ‘That’s clearly in no one’s interest’, protested Blinken as accusing fingers pointed towards America. No matter that the US became the world’s largest LNG exporter this year due in part to the embargo against Russian LNG or that Poland has its own newly opened pipeline as well as military ops warships in the area around Bornholm or that Russia will take the financial hit, The Daily Telegraph is convinced: It was Putin what did it. Because he doesn’t want to sell 55 billion cubic metres per year of LNG to Europe.
While the flag-waving UK and EU taxpayers add their ‘I Stand With Ukraine’ logos to their Twitter feed and the craven, captured press drools at the feet of Zelensky, air strikes continue over the market towns and civilian areas of the Donbass. These are acts of terror. And they’ve been going on for eight years.
Yet in spite of evidence of war crimes by some Kiev/Kyiv AFU militias who perversely like to record and post their actions, Zelensky is feted by the Hollywood glitterati, western leaders and belligerent underlings such as von der Leyen, Blinken and ex-GAVI board member Jens Stoltenberg. Those on-side get a plaque on the Kyivwood walk of fame. Those failing to wholeheartedly embrace the narrative (such as The Pope and the Red Cross) get a hard slap on social media. With a whistle-stop video tour of foreign parliaments and coverage from 60-minutes to Vogue, Zelensky increased his profile considerably, helped along by an army of Twitter bots. According to a study published by the University of Adelaide, between February 23 and March 8, Twitter bots pumped out 5.2 million posts, 60-80 percent shared by fake accounts of which 90 percent were pro-Ukraine. You wouldn’t know it listening to Radio 4’s Moral Maze which decided to zero in on Russian propaganda and Russian state sponsored TV. No such propaganda occurs in the US or at the BBC, who brought in a spokesperson from Chatham House to prove it.
Not everybody has been won over by Zelensky’s charm offensive. Ex-Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov accused Zelensky of having elbows ‘deep in blood’ because the military utilizes civilians as hostages on his command. Brazilian frontrunner Lula da Silva is too long in the tooth to be impressed: ‘OK, you were a nice comedian, but let us not make war for you to show up on TV’ while Hungary’s Viktor Orban suggested that the conflict would have been local, but the west intervened and made it global, adding that the conflict could ‘drag on until 2030 with the threat of Kiev losing a third or half its territory’. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is willing to listen to both sides and has criticised EU visa bans on Russians, while Israel is unwilling to send military aid to Ukraine and has not imposed sanctions on Russia.
Egged on by rhetoric from Washington, Brussels and ex-PM Boris Johnson, Zelensky is perhaps convinced he is ‘liberating’ Ukraine. If by liberating he means allowing large swathes of Ukraine’s agricultural lands to be GMO’d by US behemoths DuPont, Cargill and Bayer (makers of Zyklon B), he is well on target. The ‘liberated’ area, 170,000 square kilometres of the world’s most fertile soil, is larger than Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Kharkiv and Crimea combined. Ukraine’s Central bank has also ‘liberated’ $12.7 billion of gold towards Ukraine’s IMF debt, which is some achievement considering Ukraine’s Central Bank only held $1.6 billion. Ukraine sits on 3,000 tonnes of gold worth $46.5 million per tonne with 500 tonnes lying in the Donbass. It is literally a goldmine.
No wonder the US has its tentacles deep into Ukraine. There are plans to develop four nuclear power plants and renewed contracts for DTRA-funded bio-labs which have carried out experiments on army personnel in Ukraine and Georgia. Zelensky claims he needs $9 billion per month towards public-sector pay and governmental costs plus (another Zelensky-estimate) of $550 billion for restructuring which the US thinks the EU should pay for. Factoring in NATO’s lend-leasing arrangement, Ukraine could be in hock to the US/EU/IMF for years to come. Which is exactly where they want them. Just ask Greece, Hungary, Poland, Serbia and Italy. ‘If things go in a difficult direction’ warned Ursula von der Leyen ‘we have tools’.
If history is anything to go by, Zelensky's new western ‘friends’ will dump him once the violation of his country is complete or when Ukraine no longer serves their strategic or financial interests. As Kissinger said, ‘It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal’.
In spite of the bombing of bridges, civilians and the murder of an election official, referenda went ahead in Donetsk, Lugansk and the regions of Kherson and Zhaporozhye, overseen by international observers. The turnout in each region was well over the over 50 percent required by Russia (no such requirement in the EU which in 2014 was below 43 percent) with the overwhelming majority opting for reunification: DPR (98.69 percent), LPR (98.42), Zhaporozhye (93.11) and Kherson (87.05). None of which was good enough for the unelected US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who told CBS on Sunday that the regions ‘will never be recognized’ as part of the Russian Federation. Which is pretty much the opinion of Native Americans whose land the Anglo-Saxon settlers requisitioned.
Recognised or not, the referenda/referendums could provide a get out for both Russia and Ukraine. If Zelensky truly believes ‘Ukrainians and Russians are the same people’ and that Donbass is Ukraine, then he must respect equally the wishes of the people of the Donbass who in 2014 voted for autonomy from a country which they clearly felt did not respect their language, right to vote, way of life or even right to life. To not respect their wishes, is to admit their wishes do not carry the same weight as other Ukrainians, giving legitimacy to their wish for autonomy. Had the Ukrainian government accepted the autonomy of the breakaway regions following the 2014 coup/revolution, no reunification referendum would have been needed.
For Russia, there can be no going back. Now that the residents of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporozhye have tied their white, blue and red colours to the mast, any exodus by Russian forces will inevitably lead to the kind of reprisal killings carried out in Bucha and Kharkiv and reported via Telegram channels. Russia isn’t going anywhere. Ukraine had eight years to guarantee the safety of Ukraine’s ethnic Russian population and they failed.
Unlike the West, Russia has much to gain from a stable, prosperous, neutral Ukraine on its border, providing a buffer from the inch-by-inch eastern encroachment of the ‘defensive’ alliance of NATO. Which explains why, after a mass exodus of the Ukrainian workforce, economic contraction and a halving of GDP following Ukrainian independence in 1991, Russia pumped billions into the Ukrainian economy.
All citizens of Ukraine of any ethnicity should surely have equal rights to build their economies in peace, retaining both their language and culture. There is plenty of land to go around and an abundance of natural resources, enough to create a sovereign wealth fund that could keep US hegemony at bay. But Zelensky and his advisors are looking in the wrong direction. If Ukrainians wish to save their country and prosper, they need to wake up - and fast - to who their real enemy is.
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