Ukraine and the Empire of Lies

The United States government and its unofficial state media—Fox, ABC, CBS, NYT, The Washington Post, etc.—are pushing war propaganda to enflame the situation in Ukraine. The corporate media is megaphoning government lies, fake news, misinformation, and irrational fear-mongering of anything Russian.

Truth is squashed in the Empire of Lies and paved over with official narratives.

Russia is determined to destroy Ukraine, mass murder its civilians, assassinate its president, and gobble up the entire country like its communist predecessor.

We hear this every day.

Putin is Hitler and the Russians are barbarians looking to re-establish the Soviet Union’s hold over Eastern European territory.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Jacques Baud isn’t an armchair warrior. He is a former colonel of the General Staff in Switzerland, an ex-member of Swiss strategic intelligence, and a specialist on Eastern countries. He served as Policy Chief for United Nations Peace Operations; in addition, he served with NATO and was assigned to work on stopping the proliferation of small arms in Africa. Baud was trained in the techniques of US and British intelligence services.

“He was involved in discussions with the highest Russian military and intelligence officials just after the fall of the USSR. Within NATO, he followed the 2014 Ukrainian crisis and later participated in programs to assist the Ukraine,” Baud’s bio posted on the Centre Français de Recherche sur le Renseignement website states.

Baud’s account of the military situation in Ukraine and the political motivation of the Russian Duma, or parliament—and not specifically Vladimir Putin—in regard to Ukraine are at complete odds with the sensationalistic propaganda put out by corporate-state media.

Thanks to an English translation of the original French of Baud’s “La Situation Militaire en Ukraine,” we learn that the US, France, Canada, and the UK, are indeed interested in a new Cold War (and the massive profit such murderous ventures accumulate for the elite and stockholder without a conscience). The fulcrum of this new “cold” war is the ethnic conflict in Ukraine, the poorest country in Europe.

Screenshot from cf2r.org

The central issue of Ukraine in the wake of the US State Department’s engineered “color revolution” regime change in 2014 is the status of autonomy for the two proclaimed Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk (referred to “Luhansk” in the West). The corporate media narrative, a bald-face lie, states that these two republics are demanding separation from Ukraine.

“In fact,” writes Baud, “these Republics were not seeking to separate from Ukraine, but to have a status of autonomy, guaranteeing them the use of the Russian language as an official language—because the first legislative act of the new government resulting from the American-sponsored overthrow of [the democratically-elected] President Yanukovych, was the abolition, on February 23, 2014, of the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko law of 2012 that made Russian an official language in Ukraine.”

This decision caused a storm in the Russian-speaking population. The result was fierce repression against the Russian-speaking regions (Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Lugansk and Donetsk) which was carried out beginning in February 2014 and led to a militarization of the situation and some horrific massacres of the Russian population (in Odessa and Mariupol, the most notable).

Another lie cooked up by the neolibs and their warmongering compatriots, the neocons (the Democrat version is rife within the Biden administration), was that Russia was arming the “terrorists” (as the Ukrainian government calls them).

The rebels were armed thanks to the defection of Russian-speaking Ukrainian units that went over to the rebel side. As Ukrainian failures continued, tank, artillery and anti-aircraft battalions swelled the ranks of the autonomists. This is what pushed the Ukrainians to commit to the Minsk Agreements.

Following the Minsk 1 Agreements to end the conflict in Donbas, then president, Petro Poroshenko, turned around and brazenly “launched a massive ‘anti-terrorist operation’ (ATO/Антитерористична операція) against the Donbass. Poorly advised by NATO officers, the Ukrainians suffered a crushing defeat in Debaltsevo, which forced them to engage in the Minsk 2 Agreements,” Baud writes.

Minsk 2 “did not provide for the separation or independence of the Republics, but their autonomy within the framework of Ukraine. Those who have read the Agreements (there are very few who actually have) will note that it is written that the status of the Republics was to be “negotiated between Kiev and the representatives of the Republics, for an internal solution within Ukraine.”

That is why since 2014, Russia has systematically demanded the implementation of the Minsk Agreements while refusing to be a party to the negotiations, because it was an internal matter of Ukraine.

On the other side, the West—led by France—systematically tried to replace Minsk Agreements with the “Normandy format,” which put Russians and Ukrainians face-to-face. However, let us remember that there were never any Russian troops in the Donbass before 23-24 February 2022. Moreover, OSCE [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe] observers have never observed the slightest trace of Russian units operating in the Donbass before then. For example, the U.S. intelligence map published by the Washington Post on December 3, 2021 does not show Russian troops in the Donbass.

If you scan the headlines in the US, you get the picture of brave Ukrainian soldiers and citizens fighting against the advancing Russians, led by the mad autocrat Putin determined to wipe Kyiv off the map. In fact, as Baud points out, the Ukrainian military has long been in shambles, “undermined by the corruption of its cadres and no longer enjoy[ing] the support of the population.”

According to a British Home Office report, in the March/April 2014 recall of reservists, 70 percent did not show up for the first session, 80 percent for the second, 90 percent for the third, and 95 percent for the fourth. In October/November 2017, 70% of conscripts did not show up for the “Fall 2017” recall campaign. This is not counting suicides and desertions (often over to the autonomists), which reached up to 30 percent of the workforce in the ATO area. Young Ukrainians refused to go and fight in the Donbass and preferred emigration, which also explains, at least partially, the demographic deficit of the country. (See links to sources in original.)

Because of this situation, the government resorted to using its nationalist and racist militias to wage war against the people in Donbas and elsewhere in eastern and southern Ukraine. NATO attempted to clean up the violent and fascist nature of the nationalist militias—and presumably cover up their terror activities against ethnic Russians—but this was a mission impossible.

In 2020, the militias comprised around 40 percent of Ukraine’s military forces and numbered about 102,000 men, according to Reuters. “They were armed, financed and trained by the United States, Great Britain, Canada and France. There were more than 19 nationalities.”

These militias had been operating in the Donbass since 2014, with Western support. Even if one can argue about the term “Nazi,” the fact remains that these militias are violent, convey a nauseating ideology and are virulently anti-Semitic…[and] are composed of fanatical and brutal individuals. The best known of these is the Azov Regiment, whose emblem is reminiscent of the 2nd SS Das Reich Panzer Division, which is revered in the Ukraine for liberating Kharkov from the Soviets in 1943, before carrying out the 1944 Oradour-sur-Glane massacre in France. [….]

The war propaganda media has avoided or played down the fact the nearly half of the forces fighting in the Donbas are avowed racist nationalists determined to ethnically cleanse all Russians from Ukraine. When Putin talked about the “de-nazification” of Ukraine, he was talking about these militias.

Minsk 1 and 2 were thrown in the dustbin of history. On March 24, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the current president, a former actor and comedian, “issued a decree for the recapture of the Crimea, and began to deploy his forces to the south of the country,” Jacques Baud continues, mapping the outbreak of the war.

Both NATO and Russia conducted large military exercises. The war propaganda media in the West portrayed the Russian exercises as a preparation for an invasion of Ukraine. At the same time, in direct violation of the Minsk Agreements, “Ukraine was conducting air operations in Donbass using drones, including at least one strike against a fuel depot in Donetsk in October 2021. The American press noted this, but not the Europeans; and no one condemned these violations.”

During a February trip to Moscow, the French leader, Emmanuel Macron, said he would relay Russian concerns to Zelenskyy the following day.

But on February 11, in Berlin, after nine hours of work, the meeting of political advisors to the leaders of the “Normandy format” ended without any concrete result: the Ukrainians still refused to apply the Minsk Agreements, apparently under pressure from the United States. Vladimir Putin noted that Macron had made empty promises and that the West was not ready to enforce the agreements, the same opposition to a settlement it had exhibited for eight years.

A few days later, the enfeebled president of the United States, Joe Biden, declard Russia would most certainly invade Ukraine. “How did he know this?” Baud asks.

It is a mystery. But since the 16th, the artillery shelling of the population of Donbass had increased dramatically, as the daily reports of the OSCE observers show. Naturally, neither the media, nor the European Union, nor NATO, nor any Western government reacted or intervened. It would be said later that this was Russian disinformation. In fact, it seems that the European Union and some countries have deliberately kept silent about the massacre of the Donbass population, knowing that this would provoke a Russian intervention.

“On 18 January, Donbass fighters intercepted saboteurs, who spoke Polish and were equipped with Western equipment and who were seeking to create chemical incidents in Gorlivka. They could have been CIA mercenaries, led or “advised” by Americans and composed of Ukrainian or European fighters, to carry out sabotage actions in the Donbass Republics,” Baud notes. (Emphasis mine.)

For many, the documented involvement of the CIA and its commandeered US Army special forces represents a red flag something is fishy about the narrative coming out of Washington and Langley. (See “Exclusive: Secret CIA training program in Ukraine helped Kyiv prepare for Russian invasion.” Yahoo News, March 16, 2022.)

“As the battle lines hardened in Donbas, a small, select group of veteran CIA paramilitaries made their first secret trips to the frontlines to meet with Ukrainian counterparts there, according to former U.S. officials,” Yahoo reported. In other words, the CIA had direct contact with ethnic cleansing nationalist fanatics, same as a previous administration had direct contact with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan during the Soviet presence in that country.

“The Ukrainian military has [allegedly] claimed to have killed three Russian generals, including at least one reportedly eliminated by sniper fire. Yahoo News could not independently verify whether the Russian commanders were killed by CIA–trained troops. (Emphasis added.)

Prior to the “invasion,” during a period of escalated shelling of civilians, the Russian Duma recognized the independence of the two Donbas Oblast republics, and this resulted in the republics asking for assistance against the ethnic cleansing and terror operation by the Neo-Nazi militias and a reluctant, conscription evading regular army.

The Empire of Lies, guilty of unheard of murder and sabotage unleashed around the world after the end of WWII, has pushed its false narrative fast and hard, as it did with its offensive operations against Iraq, Syria, and Libya. The corporate propaganda media excels at the art of war propaganda, misinformation, and outright lies.

In order to make the Russian intervention seem totally illegal in the eyes of the public, Western powers deliberately hid the fact that the war actually started on February 16. The Ukrainian army was preparing to attack the Donbass as early as 2021, as some Russian and European intelligence services were well aware…

In fact, as early as February 16, Joe Biden knew that the Ukrainians had begun intense shelling the civilian population of Donbass, forcing Vladimir Putin to make a difficult choice: to help Donbass militarily and create an international problem, or to stand by and watch the Russian-speaking people of Donbass being crushed.

Baud goes on to explain how the Russian military is going about demilitarizing the country—one of Russia’s main objectives, the second being “de-nazification,” that is to say military action against fanatical Ukrainian nationalists attempting to ethnically cleanse Ukraine of its ethnic Russian minority. Much of the Ukrainian army was deployed to the south in preparation for military action to retake the Crimea. Due to this, the Russians were able to encircle much of Ukraine’s military and its ideologically rabid nationalist militias.

Image on the right: The bombing of Maternity Hospital in Mariupol (Source: OneWorld)

The author explains in detail the de-nazification plan and the bombing of the Maternity Hospital in Mariupol. “According to CNN, 17 people were wounded, but the images do not show any casualties in the building and there is no evidence that the victims mentioned are related to this strike. There is talk of children, but in reality, there is nothing. This does not prevent the leaders of the EU from seeing this as a war crime. And this allows Zelensky to call for a no-fly zone over Ukraine.”

According to Baud’s report, the militias had occupied the building, ran off the staff at gunpoint, and used the hospital as an observation post and anti-tank firing position (likely using US-supplied Javelin missiles).

The problem is that the paramilitary militias that defend the cities are encouraged by the international community not to respect the rules of war. It seems that the Ukrainians have replayed the scenario of the Kuwait City maternity hospital in 1990, which was totally staged by the firm Hill & Knowlton for $10.7 million in order to convince the United Nations Security Council to intervene in Iraq for Operation Desert Shield/Storm.

Western politicians have accepted civilian strikes in the Donbass for eight years without adopting any sanctions against the Ukrainian government. We have long since entered a dynamic where Western politicians have agreed to sacrifice international law towards their goal of weakening Russia.

Baud is correct to conclude the US and its “partners” in Europe are deliberately distorting the picture for ideological reasons. The plan is very similar to what was used in the past.

Some Western politicians obviously wanted there to be a conflict. In the United States, the attack scenarios presented by Anthony Blinken to the UN Security Council were only the product of the imagination of a Tiger Team working for him—he did exactly as Donald Rumsfeld did in 2002, who “bypassed” the CIA and other intelligence services that were much less assertive about Iraqi chemical weapons. (Emphasis in original.)

Saddam Hussein did have chemical and biological weapons—provided by US corporations, as I documented two decades ago. However, he had no intention of targeting the United States, and instead concentrated on restless Kurds. As for the fallaciously touted weapons of mass destruction, George W. Bush made a comedy routine out of the widely debunked claims that resulted in the extermination of more than a million Iraqis.

“What makes the conflict in Ukraine more blameworthy than our wars in Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya?” Jacques Baud finally asks of complicit politicians and a tone-deaf and ignorant public.

What sanctions have we adopted against those who deliberately lied to the international community in order to wage unjust, unjustified and murderous wars?… Have we adopted a single sanction against the countries, companies or politicians who are supplying weapons to the conflict in Yemen, considered to be the “worst humanitarian disaster in the world?”

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Kurt Nimmo is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Countercurrents