Natylie Baldwin's Blog, page 107

Alexander Hill: A year later and things are very different in Moscow

Monument to the Soviet Worker, Moscow, Russia; photo by Natylie S. Baldwin

By Alexander Hill, Canadian Dimension, 12/8/23

I used to have some respect for elements of the mainstream news media. While that respect has eroded gradually over time, it has been coverage of the war in Ukraine that has finally destroyed what hope I had for corporate journalism. When it comes to Ukraine and Russia, it is left to outlets like Canadian Dimension to question narratives that seem to be lifted straight out of government press releases in Washington or Kyiv.

One of those narratives claims that, bit by bit, a Western-backed Ukraine is bringing down its larger Russian neighbour in a David and Goliath struggle. As well-known historian and Yale professor Timothy Snyder recently implied in a piece for the Guardian, all the Ukrainians need is a few more ‘queens’ on the chessboard and they can win the day. The piece makes little mention of Russia—as if more equipment and willpower alone are enough to bring ‘victory’ regardless of the state of affairs on the other side of the frontline.

I can tell you now—both from a professional analysis of the situation as a military historian specializing in Russia and first-hand experience during multi-week trips there in both October 2022 and November 2023—that Russia is a long way from being beaten and in many ways is in a stronger position today than it was at the end of last year. But getting that information out into the mainstream press is becoming more and more difficult—perhaps suggesting that the Western crusade against Russia, using Ukraine as a proxy, is not going to plan. Meanwhile, both Ukrainians and Russians are being killed by the thousands in a war in which neither side is likely to achieve a clear ‘victory.’

One can analyze Russian media and opinion polls from afar all one wants, but the picture one gains of the situation in Russia is incomplete without actually spending any time there. The first time I visited Russia during the war was during a nearly three-week trip back in October 2022—just over a year ago. At that time things were very different than they are today. Back in September 2022 the Russian government had just announced a wave of mobilization in the face of Ukrainian battlefield successes, not only initially on the Kyiv axis, but also in the north-east near Kharkiv. In the face of realities on the ground Russian forces subsequently gave up territory on the Western bank of the Dnieper River. In the aftermath of these events the mood in Moscow—and indeed in Murmansk where I also spent some time last fall—was relatively sombre as Russians came to terms with the fact that the ‘Special Military Operation’ was more like a fully-fledged war than was initially portrayed—a war that had now provoked a call-up of reservists and was clearly not going to be over in the near future.

In the aftermath of the announcement of a mobilization thousands of younger urban Russians fled the country to avoid being called up and to join those who had already left in order to continue working for foreign companies forced to transfer their operations to neighbouring countries in the face of Western sanctions. Although in many ways life in both Moscow and Murmansk went on as normal—with a few shuttered Western shops and the absence of many Western brands on supermarket shelves being two noticeable realities—under the surface there was certainly a growing sense of unease. Now, however, just over a year later, much of that foreboding has dissipated.

Since the fall of 2022 Russia has fought off the much-vaunted Ukrainian counteroffensive, which was supported by some of the latest equipment that NATO could provide. The Russian armed forces that threw themselves forward with reckless abandon and insufficient preparation in the spring of 2022 on the Kyiv axis soon learned their lesson—the Ukrainian armed forces were not going to be steamrolled and a more methodical approach was called for. Very quickly, the Russian army regrouped, reorganized and much more methodically advanced—gaining significant territory in the east, most of which they still hold.

The mobilization of September 2022 turned out not to be on the scale that many Russians feared—it was quite clear that many young men were not going to be called up and many have now returned to the country. Some of them are opposed to the war on political and moral grounds, but it is difficult to gauge anti-war sentiment given the Russian government’s near total crackdown on dissent. To top up the tens of thousands mobilized in the fall Moscow decided to offer pay and conditions for those signing up for the armed forces that are enough to transform the lives of the families of those from the provinces and rural areas who have signed up in their thousands. As in Ukraine, how many are being killed remains a closely guarded secret.

Alongside high pay for soldiers (approximately 14 times higher than the median salary in some regions of Russia) Russian propaganda campaigns focus on ‘national projects,’ with new schools and hospitals being showcased in short infomercials on television. Where the money is coming from remains unclear. Inflation may be high, but there is abundant employment in the cities and for most life is far better than it was a couple of decades ago after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Vladimir Putin continues to enjoy sky-high public-approval ratings, and most Russians couldn’t care less about upstarts like Yevgeny Prigozhin or the oligarchs who got fat on the privatizations that followed the collapse of communism and who are occasionally picked off for stepping out of line.

Prigozhin’s abortive mutiny and subsequent demise seem to have contributed to a strengthening of Putin’s position. Even according to polling by the Levada Center, which is deemed a ‘foreign agent’ by the Russian government, the president’s approval rating is now above 80 percent, up from lows of around 60 percent immediately before the war. It doesn’t matter whether the pollsters are within or outside Russia—support for the war effort is evidently high.

Western sanctions were supposed to bring the Russian economy to its knees, but that clearly hasn’t happened. Although sanctions have hit the economy hard in some sectors (especially the high-tech industries), in others Russia has effectively found alternatives or successfully substituted Russian products. Fast-food chain McDonald’s has become ‘Vkusno i tochka’ (literally translatable as ‘Tasty and On Time’) with a logo reminiscent of an ‘M’ that not only reminds customers of its origins but in a way sticks a finger up at the West. The non-Western world can supply Russia with all the tea and coffee and other similar products it needs—and even many Western goods remain on the shelves as if there weren’t any sanctions.

There is a confidence in the air in Russia’s capital—and indeed in Ryazan, home of the Russian airborne forces in which I also spent a number of days last month—that was clearly lacking a year ago. Many Russians I have spoken to clearly believe that it is only a matter of time before the Ukrainian military collapses, as Russian television shows scenes of the Ukrainian authorities rounding up unwilling conscripts and pleas from Volodymyr Zelensky for more Western aid. Meanwhile, much of the Western press still continues to pretend that it is Russia that must be close to collapse—a wishful thinking that is increasingly far from the truth.

For many Russians the war now is an existential one. The Russian government has successfully argued that the war is aimed at a West intent on ‘cancelling’ Russia and its culture using Ukraine as a vehicle. The villain of the piece is undoubtedly the United States, towards which the vast majority of Russians polled by Levada continue to express negative attitudes. US focus on Israel’s war in Gaza has undoubtedly deflected some of the West’s attention from Ukraine—with the Russian press only too pleased to point out the hypocrisy of US support for an Israel only too willing to inflict casualties on the civilian population in Gaza at a rate far outstripping anything the Russian armed forces have committed in Ukraine.

Although it is specifically Russian language and culture that is seen to be being ‘cancelled’ in Ukraine and indeed the Baltic Republics as well, Russia itself has now started to focus much more on the idea of the Russian state as a vessel not only for Russian culture but all of the cultures of Russia—with a new racial tolerance apparent both in the media and on the street. This may to some extent reflect a cynical need for more troops, but it is nonetheless real. At a recent exhibition showcasing the activities and achievements of Russia’s regions in Moscow smaller regions such as Chechnya and Ingushetia have been given as much exhibition space as any other larger regions. The Russian media hails the heroism of soldiers from villages thousands of kilometres from the European part of the country who are serving a wider, ethnically diverse Russia. In St. Petersburg a recent conference promoting cultural diversity in the world—and the value of Russian culture as part of that diversity—was attended by hundreds of delegates from tens of countries, highlighting that Russia’s isolation from the West isn’t isolation from much of the remainder of the world.

That doesn’t mean that tolerance is now the order of the day in Russia. Obviously public opposition to the war is stamped out quickly, with the few celebrities who publicly display opposition soon being labelled ‘foreign agents.’ Even the famous singer Alla Pugacheva is not immune, although the Russian government has been wary of punishing her given her almost legendary status. The tolerance, even celebration, of Russia’s national minorities such as the Chechens has a corollary in that such ethnic groups are typically as, if not more, socially conservative than the Russian Orthodox Church, and willing to get behind the resurgence of ‘traditional values’ that means that Western-associated liberalism is in the crosshairs. A popular whipping boy is the LGBTQ movement, recently declared ‘extremist’ by the Supreme Court. ‘Anti-woke’ attacks on symbols of the culture war in the West seem to go down well with a vast majority of Russians, and contribute to a sense of Russia being a moral bastion again perceived Western ‘social decadence.’

As the bloodbath in Ukraine continues Russian morale clearly remains high. Russia has upped its game but is far from fully mobilized for war. In the face of the awoken bear some sort of mythical Ukrainian victory that would see it recapture territory lost since 2014 is increasingly unlikely, no matter how many tanks and fighter aircraft the West will deliver to Kyiv.

The more time passes the more urgent it becomes for the West to encourage Ukrainian leaders to restart negotiations with Russia that were cut short in the spring of 2022. Since then tens of thousands of lives have been lost on both sides. Many more may be lost for little change of the frontline in something akin to the later stages of the Korean War. It is now more than ever time to act to prevent the loss of tens of thousands more lives in a war that isn’t going anywhere soon, and in which there is unlikely to be a silver bullet for either side. It is unquestionably time to start talking about the sort of peace that will be a just one for all of those involved—whether they identify themselves as Ukrainian or Russian, and live in Lviv or Donetsk.

Andrew Korybko: The IL-76 Shootdown By A US Patriot Missile Could Lead To Zaluzhny’s Replacement With Budanov

Photo by Nati on Pexels.com

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 1/24/24

This is a developing story. – Natylie

Kiev shot down a Russian Il-76 military transport plane carrying 65 Ukrainian POWs as it was flying over the border region of Belgorod on Wednesday. Patriot missiles were reportedly used during the attack, which was carried out with the aid of American instructors. The regime was informed of the flight ahead of time and was aware that it was carrying its captive troops. The planned swap has now been called off and questions are swirling about why Kiev would kill its own POWs.

CNN ridiculously suggested that it might have been a case of friendly fire by drawing attention to a prior air alert and drone interception an hour before the incident, while some Ukrainian sources circulated the conspiracy theory that the plane was allegedly carrying only S-300 air defense missiles onboard. The first narrative is meant to smear the reputation of the Russian Armed Forces while the second is a “face-saving” deflection from Kiev’s culpability for what happened.

A more realistic interpretation is that American proxy war tactics are shifting as the conflict began to wind down late last year after Kiev was pushed back on the defensive following its failed counteroffensive. That theory also has its faults, however, since five Russian military aircraft were reportedly shot down by Patriot missiles over the border region of Bryansk last May so there isn’t anything new this time except that 65 Ukrainian POWs were killed after Kiev knew they were on board.

The specifics of this incident therefore lead to suspicion that these captive troops were deliberately targeted by those American-advised Ukrainian air defense controllers who were operating the Patriot air defense systems on Wednesday for the reasons that will now be explained. The backdrop to what happened was that Russia’s foreign spy agency predicted an impending bureaucratic reshuffle on Monday a day before a former Pentagon official reported on rumors that Zelensky might oust Zaluzhny.

Stephen Bryen, who served as staff director of the Near East Subcommittee of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as deputy undersecretary of defense for policy and is currently a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and Yorktown Institute, published the article on his Substack. According to him, the Ukrainian leader wants to replace the Commander-in-Chief with military intelligence head Budanov, and he’s planning to do so by blaming Zaluzhny for recent battlefield losses near Avdeevka.

Zelensky’s top rival commands immense respect among the armed forces and civil society, the first of which are growing so angry with their leadership’s military plans that there was even a whiff of mutiny in the New York Times’ report last month about the Kyrnki debacle. Aware of how much Ukraine’s already fragile military-political dynamics had been destabilized by the failed counteroffensive, an expert from the influential Atlantic Council called on Zelensky to form a “government of national unity” a month ago.   

Adrian Karatnycky’s demand was made through his article for Politico and sold as the best way to preemptively avert potentially forthcoming protests with the innuendo being that it could also neutralize any possibly impending plans for a military coup that could occur independently of those protests. The dilemma that Zelensky found himself in is that complying with Karatnycky’s proposal could signal weakness and lead to the end of his political career while removing Zaluzhny could lead to a mutiny.

Delaying any action also has its detriments too since grassroots and military pressure could reach uncontrollable proportions in the coming future, further worsening the strategic situation that he found himself in. Russia’s foreign spy agency didn’t mention any military reshuffle plans in their statement earlier this week, however, which might be because they were unaware of them or wagered that it’s better not to comment since doing so could influence the process in ways adverse to their interests.  

In any case, the sequence of events from mid-December up until Wednesday’s IL-76 incident – especially the aforementioned statement that preceded Bryen’s report about Zelensky’s plans to replace Zaluzhny with the much more politically reliable Budanov by a single day – suggested deepening intrigue in Kiev. After what just happened following Kiev’s downing of a plane full of Ukrainian POWs by American-advised air defense operators, the public pretext has now been created for replacing him if he wants to.

That’s not to say that Zelensky will certainly do so since any such a move is fraught with the very real risk of blowback due to how popular Zaluzhny is among the armed forces and civil society, but both categories of his supporters might only put up mild resistance if he’s blamed for this incident. It’s not implausible that Zelensky will either directly blame him or do so via media surrogates since he himself wants to eschew responsibility and he definitely doesn’t want anyone pointing fingers at America.

All things considered, blaming Zaluzhny – perhaps by claiming that he should have verified alleged intelligence about the IL-76’s cargo before shooting it down in order to make this seem like an unfortunate accident – is the most politically convenient option at Zelensky and his US patron’s disposal. It could shift the blame from them to him and facilitate Zaluzhny’s replacement with Budanov without much resistance from the armed forces or civil society.

As for why the US might want him to go, it could be that he’s deemed more amendable to the peace talks that America’s leading liberal–globalist policymaking faction is still reluctant to relaunch, in which case they could fear that a possible coup would stop their proxy war plans and doom Biden’s re-election. They might of course also calculate that the risk of a coup, which could possibly be preceded by large-scale protests across the country in his support, would spike with his removal and thus call it off.

Whatever ultimately ends up happening, it’s important for observers not to extend credence to CNN and Ukraine’s conspiracy theories about Russia accidentally shooting down its own plane and it supposedly only carrying S-300s respectively, since Kiev definitely knew that there were POWs on board. It therefore remains to be seen why its American-advised air defense operators still shot it down, but more clarity is expected as time passes and the military and/or political consequences of this incident become known.

Poland covered up for Nord Stream attackers – WSJ

RT, 1/8/24

Polish officials withheld evidence and attempted to stall an international probe into the bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, making investigators “suspicious of Warsaw’s role and motives,” the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

The Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas lines – which linked Russia with Germany under the Baltic Sea – were destroyed in a series of explosions near the Danish island of Bornholm in September 2022. A joint inquiry by Germany, Denmark, and Sweden is ongoing, with investigators theorizing that a Ukrainian team rented a yacht in Germany from a Polish company, which they used to transport explosives to the blast sites.

When the investigators chased these leads in Poland, they found themselves stonewalled by government officials and law enforcement agents, the Journal reported, citing sources within the investigation.

Polish authorities failed to turn over testimony from eyewitnesses who encountered the yacht’s six-person crew in the Polish port of Kolobrzeg until pushed to do so by German police, the sources said. CCTV footage from the port was then withheld, and Poland’s internal security agency, the ABW, “failed to answer queries, obfuscated or gave contradictory information,” the newspaper stated.

Polish prosecutors said they found no traces of explosives on the yacht, despite never having boarded it to check, the investigators claimed. The investigation would later find explosive residue on the vessel, according to media reports.

The prosecutors reportedly told European investigators that the boat arrived in Kolobrzeg at 4pm September 19, when it actually moored seven hours earlier. Later in the investigation, the ABW told its sister agencies in Europe that the yacht “had links with Russian espionage,” the newspaper wrote, adding that investigators considered this “disinformation.”

According to all available information, no Western governments or intelligence agencies suspect that Russia was behind the bombings. Gas sold to Europe via the Nord Stream lines was a lucrative source of revenue for Moscow, and was seen as a powerful instrument of leverage for the Kremlin.

Poland’s efforts to hinder the investigators have made them “increasingly suspicious of Warsaw’s role and motives,” the Wall Street Journal noted. All of the alleged misdirection and obfuscation took place under Poland’s previous government, however, and unnamed “senior European officials” told the newspaper that they are considering contacting Poland’s new prime minister, Donald Tusk, in the hope that he will grant them access to police and security personnel who may have previously been pressured to stay silent.

According to an alternate theory put forward by American journalist Seymour Hersh, the CIA was responsible for the Nord Stream blasts. Citing sources within the intelligence community, Hersh argued that CIA divers working with the Norwegian Navy planted remotely-triggered bombs on the lines last summer, using a NATO exercise in the region as cover.

Bolstering this theory was a tweet by former Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, who within hours of the explosions shared an image of a giant gas leak at the blast site along with the caption “Thank you, USA.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin has backed this explanation, stating last month that the sabotage operation “was done, most likely, by the Americans or someone at their instruction.”

Ben Aris: Europe still hooked on Russia gas as US threatens to sanction LNG

By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 1/7/24

Russian gas exports to Europe have tumbled since the Nord Stream 1&2 pipelines were blown up last September but EU imports of Russian LNG have jumped by 40% since the invasion of Ukraine and are currently at record levels, according to a report by Global Witness. Europe remains Russia’s biggest customer for gas – both piped and as LNG – as the EU countries continued to spend $1bn a month on Russian Arctic LNG in 2023.

Russia is working very hard to make up what it lost from the collapse of piped gas by growing its LNG business, which remains unsanctioned – for now.

“Between January and July 2023, EU countries bought 22mn cubic metres of LNG, compared with 15mn cubic metres during the same period in 2021 – a jump of 40%,” the report said.

“This is a much sharper rise than the global average increase in Russian LNG imports, which stands at 6%. EU countries now buy the majority of Russia’s supply, propping up one of the Kremlin’s most important sources of revenue. Between January and July 2023 the EU bought 52% of Russia’s exports, compared to 49% in 2022 and 39% in 2021,” the report adds.

A similar report released by the Helsinki-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air came to the same conclusion: the EU remains the leading consumer of Russia’s pipeline gas and LNG, buying in 41% and 50% of Moscow’s exports respectively. In the third quarter of 2023 Russia supplied about 12% of total EU gas imports, according to Eurostat, and about 8% of its LNG.

The biggest loser from the change was Germany, the biggest net importer of Russian gas in the EU, with 55 bcm in 2021 from the circa 150 bcm total exported to Europe, making up over 65% of the country’s gas imports.

The start of the war in Ukraine didn’t affect Russia’s gas exports to Europe in the first half of 2020 and the billions of euros paid into Kremlin coffers bailed out the sanctioned economy. But the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines meant the total amount of Russian gas sold to Europe in 2022 tumbled to 80 bcm for the full year.

In 2023 the amount of gas Russia has sold to Europe will fall again to an estimated 25 bcm, partly due to Europe’s ongoing efforts to diversify its supply and because part of the Ukrainian pipeline was turned off due to the war. Nevertheless, Ukraine’s gas transit deal with Russia remains in place until the end of 2024, earning Kyiv a cool $4bn a year.

While Europe increased purchases of LNG from global producers in 2023 to start diversifying away from Russian LNG, it also sharply cut its imports of Russian pipeline gas.

Overall LNG exports from Russia were down 6% in 2023 year on year at 31mn tonnes, of which 15.8mn tonnes went to Europe, down by 1.9% on the previous year. 

LNG to the rescue

Europe’s energy market has been totally remade by the outbreak of war in Ukraine. Russia used to send 70% of its gas westwards via pipelines that were built as far back as the 1970s. Now it has to find new customers, but that system can’t be remade overnight. Many landlocked Central European countries have no access to LNG terminals and remain dependent on Russian gas imports.

And those with coastlines have become partly dependent on Russian LNG imports, as the deficit caused by the end of Russian piped gas can’t be fully replaced by just US and Qatari LNG.

Russia used to account for a third of Europe’s total gas imports, but as uncertainty over gas supplies to Europe sent prices skyrocketing in 2022, Europe successfully replaced most of the piped Russian gas imports with 130 bcm of LNG imports, largely supplied by Qatar, the US and Russia.

The US has only exported LNG since 2016 but at the start of 2023 it overtook Qatar to become the world’s largest exporter of LNG and available volumes will only grow now there are two more big projects in the pipeline to increase supplies.

Qatar could also step up supplies with the huge North field project that includes six mega LNG trains and is supposed to come online in 2025 that will massively increase its output, if enough customers willing to sign long-term supply contracts can be found.

Increases in LNG production between 2017 and 2022 led to a threefold increase in exports from 11mn tpy to 33mn tpy by 2022, of which half goes to the EU.

Russia was planning to triple its production again by the end of this decade to 100mn tpy and raise its market share from 8% to 20% at the same time, according to Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak.

“Russia has already become the fourth largest LNG producer with an 8% share [of] the global market. The plan is to increase LNG production from 33mn tonnes now to 100mn tonnes by 2030, with the share on the global market [having] increased to 20%,” he said when addressing the Federation Council in November.

But that ran into trouble after the US slapped fresh sanctions in December on its Arctic LNG-2 project.

Novatek, Russia’s LNG champion and the owner of the LNG-2 project, warned customers in December that it would not be able to meet all its delivery obligations in 2024 due to force majeure caused by sanctions imposed by the US.

The Arctic LNG-2 project involves the construction of three gas liquefaction lines with a total capacity of 19.8mn tpy based on the Utrenneye field on the Gydan Peninsula. The first line was planned to have been launched before the end of 2023, with shipments to begin in the first quarter of 2024.

Novatek has 60% of Arctic LNG-2. Other participants such as the French TotalEnergies, the Chinese CNPC and CNOOC, as well as the Japanese consortium of Mitsui and JOGMEC, each own 10%.

Russia may have lost its piped gas business, but the LNG business is growing fast. Global trade in LNG will grow by another 25% to 500mn tpy in five years, according to the International Energy Forum (IEF). China has overtaken Japan to become the world’s largest LNG importer, and the US will have become the biggest LNG exporter in 2023.

LNG currently accounts for about 15% of the world’s total volume of gas supplies. The US was the world’s largest LNG exporter in the first six months of 2023, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), and hopes to capture a large share of the burgeoning LNG market.

In Europe, LNG’s share of the demand mix has expanded from 12% ten years ago to more than 50%, and European regasification capacity is predicted to grow by another 48% by 2030.

Russian LNG supplies

Despite the reduction in the amounts, Europe remained the biggest importer of Russian gas in 2023 and Russia’s best customer, as supplies shifted from piped gas to LNG.

LNG currently represents 45-50% of the EU’s total gas imports and in November Russia’s LNG exports to the EU hit an all-time high of more than 1.75mn tonnes.

In 2023, the US supplied the largest share of the EU’s LNG (40%), followed by Russia and Qatar, which both have a market share of around 13%. Throughout 2023 Russia’s LNG exports to the EU have amounted to 15.5mn tonnes, on a par with exports in 2022.

Conversely Europe remains Russia’s biggest buyer of LNG, accounting for half its total sales, with Spain, Belgium and France being by far the largest customers. EU ports receive in excess of 200 shipments per year from Russia’s Yamal LNG facility. The volume of imported LNG is now so significant that it has surpassed other forms of Russian fossil fuels.

Russian LNG is still not subject to sanctions, as Europe still cannot find enough LNG from elsewhere to meet all its needs. Imports of Russian LNG, mostly via tankers, jumped 40% in the period between January and July 2023 compared to the prewar levels, according to environmental watchdog Global Witness.

And some of Russia’s LNG arrives in the EU via third country intermediaries. Bulgaria, for example, was cut off from Russian gas in 2022 when it refused to pay for its gas in rubles, but it still receives Russian LNG indirectly, buying it from Greeks that are in turn customers of Gazprom.

Germany also bought 23% of its natural gas imports from Belgium in the first three months of 2023, which, during the same time period, imported 60% of its LNG supply from Russia, according to the Center for the Study of Democracy. And ardent Kyiv supporters Lithuania and Estonia secretly purchased €6.1bn worth of LNG from Russia in 2023 despite the promise to refuse its fuel, The Telegraph reported in December citing Eurostat service data.

As a result, Russia’s share in the EU gas supplies is likely to be a lot higher than the official 13% of the total reported by Eurostat.

LNG sanctions

As part of the ongoing efforts to deny the Kremlin access to revenues it can earn from oil and gas exports, the US is now pushing for sanctions on Russia’s LNG exports – and clashing with the EU as a result.

Since the advent of the shale revolution in the US it has become a net exporter of oil and LNG since 2016. In January this year it became the world’s biggest exporter of both, with its crude exports overtaking those of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and its LNG exports overtaking those of Qatar.

However, because of their deficiency in oil and gas, some of the EU member states are reluctant to go along with a ban on buying Russian LNG, as even the US’ increased output is not enough to replace Russia’s supplies in the EU’s fuel mix.

But the European Commission executive is continuing its campaign to tighten the noose around Russia’s neck. The EC is preparing to give its member states powers to block Russian gas imports in a bid to curb Moscow’s energy revenues, the Financial Times reported on December 8, citing a draft document seen by the outlet.

The proposed powers provide a way for European firms to break energy contracts without paying penalties, as they can cancel deals that allow Russian and Belarusian companies to buy capacity in pipelines and LNG terminals.

The restrictions on access to pipeline capacity are similar to the oil price cap sanctions insomuch as they don’t ban purchases of gas outright, but instead seek to use a market mechanism to limit Russia’s ability to sell its gas.

The Netherlands and UK have already banned the transhipment of Russian LNG, but Belgium, Spain and France have permitted the import and re-export of Russian LNG to continue, arguing that it is difficult for their companies to extract themselves from existing contracts.

Like the Greek tanker fleet that continues to transport Russian crude oil from its ports in the Baltic Sea to Asia, European companies are reshipping a fifth of their imports of Russian LNG to other parts of the world, helping Russia maximise its fossil fuel revenues, the Financial Times reported on November 29.

The EU imported 17.8 bcm of Russian LNG between January and September 2023, 21% of which was transferred to ships headed to countries such as China, Japan and Bangladesh, the FT said, citing data from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

The practice allows Russia to make more efficient use of its Arctic fleet, as its icebreaking tankers can offload their cargoes of gas from the Siberian Yamal LNG plant to warm-water LNG tankers that take it on to countries around the world, allowing the icebreakers to return to Russia’s frozen Barents Sea sooner.

Yamal LNG has a 20-year contract with Belgian natural gas company Fluxys that ends in 2039, the FT said. Yamal LNG also has a contract with SEFE, a formerly Russian firm that was nationalised by the German government. However, even the new German management of SEFE refused to cancel its Russian contracts in October, saying that pulling out would cost German taxpayers over $10bn.

Still hooked on Russian piped gas.

Russia’s share in Europe’s overall gas supplies has been reduced dramatically after the Nord Stream 1 & 2 pipelines were destroyed, but it remains a major supplier – and its share in European supplies is very likely to start climbing again as more LNG capacity is built and new planned pipelines via Turkey come online in the coming years.

Russia supplied as much as 95% of Hungary’s gas in 2021 but less than 10% of Spain’s in the same year. Hungary continues to be almost entirely dependent on Russian piped gas.

In 2021, Prime Minister Victor Orban’s government negotiated a 15-year contract, under which Gazprom would ship 4.5 bcm of natural gas to Hungary annually, via TurkStream and via Ukraine.

In 2022, after Russia’s invasion, Budapest signed a new deal with Moscow for additional quantities of Russian gas. Three-quarters of the deliveries (3.5 bcm) flow through TurkStream, with a smaller portion (1.5 bcm) being delivered through Ukraine.

Likewise, Serbian President Aleksander Vucic has signed off on long-term Russian gas supply deals and is attempting to navigate between an EU membership bid and maintaining good business relations with Russia.

Austria is also still 80% dependent on Russian gas. Austrian energy company OMV signed off on a new long-term gas supply deal until 2040 with Gazprom after the war in Ukraine had broken out.

Slovakia, Italy and Croatia also receive Russian gas through Ukrainian transit routes under long-term contracts with Gazprom, according to the Centre on Global Energy Policy. However, these countries have alternative supply route options and are likely to switch to other sources in the future.

Spain has never been dependent on piped gas, which it imports as LNG. Spain and Belgium both have the largest regasification terminals for the liquid fuel in Europe and have become the biggest importers of Russian LNG behind China. As a result, Spain has seen its dependence on Russian gas soar in the last year, becoming one of Novatek’s best LNG customers in the process, and Russia is now Spain’s biggest supplier of LNG. The fact that the EU is set to import a record volume of LNG from Russia in 2023 has been largely due to the LNG trade going through Belgium and Spain.

Unlike the US, the EU has not yet imposed any sanctions on liquefied gas imports. From December 2022 to October 2023 half of Russian LNG exports, worth €8.3bn, were directed to the EU market.

Russia secured the top position among gas suppliers to Spain in June 2023, up from fourth at the start of the year and behind the United States, Algeria and Nigeria, according to Spanish energy company Enagas. In 2023 as a whole, Russia’s supplies to Spain expanded by 39% y/y.

Turkish gas hub

Gas deliveries to Europe could start rising again in the near future if a mooted Turkish gas hub plan is put in place. The scheme, cooked up by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Putin, would see up to 100 bcm of gas from Algeria, Azerbaijan, Russia as well as LNG delivered to a hub in Turkey before being distributed to the rest of Europe.

The idea is that once molecules of methane arrive in the hub they lose their nationality; the upshot is that Russia would be able to export large amounts of its gas to Europe again, as its gas would account for the vast majority of the 100 bcm transiting the hub.

Erdogan also wants to see the capacity of the TurkSteam pipeline doubled. It came online in January 2020 with a nameplate capacity of 35 bcm, but just under half of that volume is dedicated to serving the Turkish market. Plans are now under discussion to build a second pipeline to lift its total capacity to 60 bcm and transport gas to the EU via Bulgaria. TurkStream continues to supply Serbia, Hungary, North Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Greece through its network of pipelines.

Gilbert Doctorow: Are there any winners in the Russia-Ukraine war?

By Gilbert Doctorow, Website, 1/8/24

Yesterday I was reading a speech about the Russia-Ukraine war that was recently delivered by one of America’s most experienced and independent-minded diplomats who is now in semi-retirement. The speech exemplified both the merits and the drawbacks of his profession.

By nature, diplomats look for compromises that can result in negotiated settlements to conflicts. In the given instance, the logic of diplomacy is to say that none of the protagonists in the Russia-Ukraine war, both those named and those unnamed, meaning the foreign backers of the Zelensky regime, has achieved its maximal goals, and so all should sit down at a table and reach a settlement that satisfies none but puts an end to the killing.

However, sometimes there are clear winners and losers

If one has to look for a loser, Ukraine is the stand-out. It has lost in every dimension: lost territory; more than 500,000 killed and maimed soldiers; destroyed military hardware, including the Wunderwaffe received from the USA and Europe; economic collapse; heavy losses of population as millions of refugees fled West and East. This irremediable disaster is every day acknowledged by more mainstream media in the West and explains the reluctance of politicians in Washington and Brussels to continue funding the war.

As for winners, most commentators in the West, including the referenced diplomat in his recent speech, are reluctant to admit the obvious. The big winners from this war are the United States and Russia.

These commentators measure the success or failure of the United States in this latest foreign adventure against its stated aim at the outset: to deal devastating blows to the Russian armed forces and to the Russian economy, thereby ensuring that the country would be unable to unleash an aggressive war against any of its neighbors for decades to come. If I may translate this into standard English: to eliminate Russia from the short list of world powers and enable the United States to move on to its greater task of vanquishing China, and so ruling the roost unchallenged.

Of course, the United States has failed in this mission as we will see in a moment when we look at the other side of the coin, namely how Russia has fared.

But it would be an unforgivable mistake to take Washington at its word. I venture to say that the greater objective, which could not be stated publicly, was to reinforce American subjugation of Europe for the sake of financial gain and to bulk up for the showdown with China.

In this regard, the Ukraine war has paid off handsomely for Washington. The destruction of Nord Stream with the complicity of the German government completed the severance of Europe from cheap Russian pipeline gas that had been a steadfast American objective since the mid-1990s. Instead, Europe became dependent on American LNG, propelling the United States into a world beating position on energy markets and yielding windfall profits from sales to the Old Continent.

Inflated energy costs hastened the deindustrialization of Europe and redirection of investments in industrial capacity by European firms to the United States, where energy costs are three or four times lower. Meanwhile, cleaning out the stores of military weaponry in Europe to assist Kiev under Washington’s direction has meant that all European NATO countries are utterly dependent on new U.S. weaponry to refill their arsenals. Without such deliveries, they cannot presently resist a Russian ground offensive for more than a few days of intensive artillery battles. The European leadership understands this fatal weakness very well and it makes them utterly compliant with Washington’s wishes in all matters.

However, I believe this subjugation of Europe is against the laws of nature and is untenable. In the foreseeable future, there will be a revolt against Washington and/or the collapse of the European Union over its role as facilitator of American domination. We may expect the political forces now categorized by Western media as the ‘Extreme Right’ to lead the fight for national liberation and overthrow the shackles that Washington has forged. The June 2024 Europe-wide elections will be an important test.

What about Russia?

Serious commentators in the West all recognize that the Russian economy has shown unexpected resilience and that the war economy has yielded positive growth, while Europe stagnates or enters recession. Curiously, attention is drawn to the important role of military orders in Russia’s expanding economy as if that were a negative factor for predicting Russia’s future economic prospects. But if the military industrial complex has been for decades and remains today a major sponsor of research and industrial innovation in the United States, which is obvious as day to any investor in Boeing, for example, then why should it be any different for the Russian economy. To those with eyes to see and with minds open to the facts, it is clear that Russia is going through very fast paced reindustrialization in all sectors.

Observers of China have long told us that the country cannot easily be replaced by Vietnam or India as the world’s factory because they have learned to optimize the organization of production on the factory floor and in this regard they have gone well beyond the Western companies whose designs they turn into goods.

Meanwhile Russia has made its own breakthroughs. The time spent from establishing new product requirements for the armed forces in the field through the time needed to design and manufacture suitable products en masse was reduced from 7 years to 7 months during 2023 and this energy is spreading across the economy. The links between basic science, applied science and serial production were always very weak in Russia. No longer.

Import substitution has been a slogan in Russia ever since the West imposed harsh sanctions on the economy in the summer of 2014. Now, with the generalized reindustrialization of Russia, the notion has grown legs.

At the same time, Russia has continued its program of heavy investments in civilian infrastructure. The emphasis, of course, is on European Russia, which is being knit ever more closely together by newly opened world class intercity highways, high speed trains and new airports served by Russian built civilian planes. But more and more funding has been assigned to logistical solutions for the Far North, Eastern Siberia and the Pacific Maritime regions in support of the Northern sea route and in support of the extractive industries. All of this lays the groundwork for a fast growing national economy in the future.

And what about Russia’s military strength?

At the level of strategic weapons systems, the past couple of years have witnessed the completion of a modernization program for Russia’s nuclear triad that puts the country well ahead of the United States in this domain. Among the strategic weapons that are now being put into regular service are a new ICBM that carries multiple hypersonic attack missiles that can pulverize whole nations at a go.

But let us recall that even in the 1990s Russia’s status as a nuclear superpower was not doubted even if loudmouth American politicians insisted that the nukes were useless since a nuclear exchange would yield no winners. Instead, they pointed to the utterly demoralized and underequipped Russian conventional forces that performed so poorly in the Chechen wars at the end of the last century and were said to remain underpowered and unimpressive during the Georgian war of 2008.

The situation today is vastly different. The challenges of the Ukraine war have compelled Russia to equip and train what are arguably the strongest conventional armed forces on the Continent if not in the world.

A lot of Russian IT geniuses may have emigrated to the United States since the 1990s to work for Google and others in Silicon Valley. Still more fled abroad in the opening months of the Special Military Operation. But there is always a surfeit of talent in a field like this, and the loyal souls who stayed at their work desks have created Electronic Warfare technologies, reconnaissance and attack drones, as well as other essential instruments of defense and offense for the battlefield that even Russophobes at The Financial Times are compelled to recognize as world beating, as we saw on their pages several days ago. Russian tanks, armored personnel carriers, attack helicopters every day prove their superiority to NATO analogues on the battlefield, and this helps explain the 8:1 or 10:1 advantage in the kill rate of the Russian armies against the combined Ukraine-NATO troops today.

Until very recently, it was commonplace to find our mainstream commentators speaking of China as having the world’s second strongest military after the United States. Now I am reading on the pages of the FT that endemic corruption has been a blight on the Chinese military. It would appear that by trashing China, the editorial board is preparing the way for stating what is there for all to see: that Russia is now the number two military in the world.

Why is Russia not number one? Because Russia’s leadership has its mind on the ball. The Soviet Union sought to be a superpower, meaning capable of projecting force all across the globe. The Russian Federation has no such ambition. It seeks to be a hegemon in its own part of the world, meaning the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and to be a major player at the global Board of Governors alongside peers that include the USA and China, among others. To do this Russia has almost no need for military bases abroad, and it has no more than you can count on one hand. It has no need of aircraft carriers, which it does not build, concentrating instead on corvette sized naval vessels that are armed with hypersonic and other devastating missiles, as well as nuclear submarines carrying ICBMs and also hypersonic missiles for use in regional hotspots. These are being turned out and commissioned in the shipyards at a fast rate, as we heard and saw over the past couple of months of official commissioning. Those shipyards, are, by the way, now run by one of the most capable managers in the country, VTB Bank CEO Andrei Kostin.

The lecturer whose speech I read yesterday spoke of Russia’s cutting ties with Western Europe as the end of 300 years of immersion in European culture, and the present pivot of Russian foreign policy to China and the Global South as driven by necessity, a kind of forced isolation.

To be sure, the current split from Europe may last a generation, since feelings are very bitter on both sides. However, even in present conditions, the ‘cancel Russia’ policies in Europe that we saw at the start of the Ukraine war are fading. In the domain of culture above all Russia is indispensable if audiences are not to die of boredom, and Russian divas are once again on our opera stages. I have little doubt that Russian stars of other performing arts will soon reappear here. When some kind of settlement to the war finally occurs, Russia will slowly make a comeback in Europe.

However, it is a false and under-informed opinion to see Russia’s pivot to what we used to call the Third World as something new. The foreign policy orientation of the Soviet Union was internationalist in the broadest sense. It made fast and true friends across Africa by supporting the national liberation movements. It did the same by supporting Castro and other leaders in Latin America striving to get out from under the boot of Washington in their hemisphere. As for East Asia, apart from China, with which relations blew hot and cold, there was active cultivation of relations with Indonesia, with the countries of Indochina during Soviet times. But whereas the objective of Soviet policy was formation of blocs where possible, the RF objective is to release countries from control by Washington and its allies so that they may pursue their own national interests, which may diverge from Russia’s in many ways.

The single most flagrant error in the analysis of the enlightened and independent minded diplomat whose lecture caught my attention was to measure Russia’s success or failure in the Ukraine war by what we impute to Russia and not what Russians themselves define as their aims. In this war, Vladimir Putin listed three tasks at the outset: to demilitarize Ukraine, to denazify the country and to ensure it does not join NATO. The most important among them is, of course, ‘demilitarization’ which means crushing the Ukrainian armed forces. From this the other two follow necessarily. And destruction of the Ukrainian army is now a realistic expectation in the foreseeable future.

I have little doubt that this war will end, quite possibly in the coming six months, with a peace settlement that amounts to Ukrainian and Western capitulation to Russia’s demands. Winners take all!

MK Bhadrakumar: Decoding Iran’s Missile & Drone Strikes

By MK Bhadrakumar, Consortium News, 1/19/24

After stunning missile and drone strikes on three countries — Syria, Iraq and Pakistan — over a period of 24 hours, Tehran then took the extraordinary step of claiming responsibility for the attacks. 

This conveyed a very big message to Washington that its stratagem of creating a coalition of terror groups in the region surrounding Iran will be resolutely countered. 

That the U.S. strategy against Iran was taking new forms began emerging after the Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the consequent erosion of its standing as the regional supremo.

The China-brokered Iran-Saudi rapprochement and the induction of Iran, Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E. and Egypt into BRICS put U.S. strategists in panic mode. (See my analysis “US embarks on proxy war against Iran,” on Nov. 20, 2023.) 

There were already signs  by the latter half of 2023 that the U.S.-Israeli axis was planning to use terrorism as the only viable means to weaken Iran and restore the regional balance in favour of Tel Aviv.

That is critically important for Washington’s prioritisation of the Asia-Pacific while it continues to need to control the oil-rich Middle East. Indeed, a conventional war with Iran is no longer feasible for the U.S., as it risks the potential destruction of Israel. 

Future historians are sure to study, analyse and arrive at sober conclusions as regards the attacks on Israel by Palestinian resistance groups on Oct. 7.

In classic military doctrine, they were quintessentially a pre-emptive strike by resistance groups before the U.S.-Israeli juggernaut of terrorist groups — such as ISIS and Mujahideen-e-Khalq  — turned into a rival platform matching the Axis of Resistance.

Iranians celebrate the Al Aqsa Flood attack by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. (Ahamadreza Madah, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

Tehran is cognisant of the urgent necessity to carve out strategic depth before the wolves close in. It has been pressing Moscow to expedite a bilateral strategic pact but Russians, unsurprisingly, took time over it.

One key agenda item during President Ebrahim Raisi’s “working visit” to Moscow on Dec. 7 to meet with President Vladimir Putin was finalising the pact. 

On Monday, finally, the Russian Defence Ministry disclosed in a rare statement that Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu had called his Iranian counterpart Mohammad-Reza Ashtiani to convey that Moscow has agreed to sign the pact. The MoD statement stated:

“Both sides stressed their commitment to the fundamental principles of the Russian-Iranian relations, including unconditional respect for each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, which will be confirmed in the major intergovernmental treaty between Russia and Iran as this document is being finalised already.” 

Iran’s Ashtiani, on right, in May 2023. (Fars Media Corporation, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

According to Iranian news agency IRNA, Shoigu conveyed that Russia’s commitment to Iran’s sovereignty and territorial integrity will be explicitly stated in the pact.

The report added that “the two ministers also pointed out the importance of issues related to regional security and emphasised that Moscow and Tehran will continue their joint efforts in establishing a multipolar world order and negating the unilateralism of the United States.” [Emphasis added.] 

On Wednesday, Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, told reporters in Moscow that the new treaty would consolidate the strategic partnership between Russia and Iran and cover the full range of their ties. “This document is not just timely, but also overdue,” said Zakharova. 

“Since the signing of the current treaty, the international context has changed and relations between the two countries are experiencing an unprecedented upswing,” she said. Zakharova added that the new treaty was expected to be signed during an upcoming contact between the two presidents. 

Separately, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted by the TASS state news agency as saying that an exact date for a meeting between Putin and Raisi is to be determined. Clearly, something of profound significance to the geopolitics of the Middle East is happening in front of our eyes. 

A New Milieu

 Raisi with Putin in Moscow on Dec. 7, 2023. (Sergei Bobylev, TASS)

Iran’s missile and drone strikes against terrorist targets on Wednesday are a vivid demonstration of its assertiveness to act in self-defence in the new regional and international milieu. 

Iran’s so-called proxies — be it Hezbollah or Houthis — have reached adulthood with a mind of their own, who decide their own strategic positioning within the Axis of Resistance. They don’t require a life-support system from Tehran.

It may take some time for the Anglo-Saxon strategists to get used to this new reality, but eventually they will. 

Clearly, it is an underestimation to regard Iran’s missile and drone strikes as merely counter-terrorist operations. Even with regard to the strike on Baluchistan, interestingly, it took place within a month of the weeklong trip to Washington in mid-December by Pakistan’s chief of army staff, Gen. Asim Munir. 

Munir met senior U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, U.S. Forces Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown and U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Jonathan Finer — and, of course — the redoubtable Acting Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, the driving force behind the Biden administration’s neocon policies. 

From left: Nuland, Munir and, on right, Blinken at the State Department in Washington on Dec. 14, 2023. (State Department, Freddie Everett)

An official statement in Islamabad Dec. 15 on Munir’s high-flying tour stated that Pakistan and the U.S. “intend to increase interactions” for “mutually beneficial” engagements. It said the two sides discussed the ongoing conflicts in the region and “agreed to increase interactions between Islamabad and Washington.”

The statement said, 

“Matters of bilateral interests, global and regional security issues, and ongoing conflicts were discussed during the meetings. Both sides agreed to continue engagement for exploring potential avenues of bilateral collaboration in pursuit of shared interests.” 

The statement added that during the meeting between the top defence officials of the two countries, “counter-terrorism cooperation and defence collaboration were identified as core areas of cooperation.” 

On his part, Munir underscored the importance of “understanding each other’s perspectives” on regional security issues and developments affecting strategic stability in South Asia, according to the Pakistani statement. 

Pakistan [which launched retaliatory strikes on Iran on Thursday] has an entire history of serving American interests in the region and the General Headquarters of the Pakistan Army in Rawalpindi has been the charioteer of such collaboration. 

What is evident today is that the forthcoming elections in Pakistan did not discourage the Biden administration from rolling out the red carpet for Munir. But the good part is that both Iran and Pakistan are smart enough to know each other’s red lines. 

U.S. intentions are clear: outflank Tehran in the west and east with failing states that are easy to manipulate. The hastily arranged meetings in Davos between U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and top Iraq officials (here and here) in the downstream of the Iranian strikes underscored 

“the importance of (Kurdistan) resuming oil exports (to Israel) and Washington’s support for “the Kurdistan region’s strong partnership with the United States;” the importance of stopping attacks against U.S. personnel in Iraq and Syria;U.S. commitment to “enhancing security cooperation as part of a long-term, sustainable defence partnership;” U.S. support for Iraqi sovereignty; and,  Biden’s invitation for Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shyaa Sudani to visit the White House “soon.”

In a nutshell, Sullivan has voiced the U.S. intention to strengthen its presence in Iraq — and it has similar objectives to pursue in Pakistan too. Washington trusts Munir to ensure that Imran Khan languishes in jail no matter the outcome of the Pakistani elections.

[See: US Urged Ouster of Khan, Cable Shows]

This strategic realignment comes at a time when Afghanistan has conclusively slipped out of the Anglo-American orbit and Saudi Arabia shows no interest in being a cog in Washington’s wheel or dabbling with forces of extremism and terrorism. 

M.K. Bhadrakumar is a former diplomat. He was India’s ambassador to Uzbekistan and Turkey. Views are personal.

This article originally appeared on Indian Punchline.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of  Consortium News.

John Pilger: Silencing the Lambs: How Propaganda Works

John Pilger passed away earlier this month.

By John Pilger, Consortium News, 9/7/22

In the 1970s, I met one of Hitler’s leading propagandists, Leni Riefenstahl, whose epic films glorified the Nazis. We happened to be staying at the same lodge in Kenya, where she was on a photography assignment, having escaped the fate of other friends of the Führer.
She told me that the “patriotic messages” of her films were dependent not on “orders from above” but on what she called the “submissive void” of the German public.

Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? I asked.  “Yes, especially them,” she said. 

I think of this as I look around at the propaganda now consuming Western societies. 

Of course, we are very different from Germany in the 1930s. We live in information societies. We are globalists. We have never been more aware, more in touch, better connected. 

Or do we in the West live in a Media Society where brainwashing is insidious and relentless, and perception is filtered according to the needs and lies of state and corporate power? 

The United States dominates the Western world’s media. All but one of the top 10 media companies are based in North America. The internet and social media – Google, Twitter, Facebook – are mostly American owned and controlled.

In my lifetime, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, mostly democracies. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenceless. It has attempted to murder the leaders of 50 countries.  It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries. 

The extent and scale of this carnage is largely unreported, unrecognised, and those responsible continue to dominate Anglo-American political life.

Harold Pinter Broke the Silence

In the years before he died in 2008, the playwright Harold Pinter made two extraordinary speeches, which broke a silence.

“U.S. foreign policy,” he said, is

“best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it’s so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do.”

In accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pinter said this: 

“The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

Pinter was a friend of mine and possibly the last great political sage – that is, before dissenting politics were gentrified. I asked him if the “hypnosis” he referred to was the “submissive void” described by Leni Riefenstahl. 

“It’s the same,” he replied. “It means the brainwashing is so thorough we are programmed to swallow a pack of lies. If we don’t recognise propaganda, we may accept it as normal and believe it. That’s the submissive void.”

Leni Riefenstahl and a camera crew stand in front of Hitler’s car during 1934 rally in Nuremberg. (Bundesarchiv, CC-BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

In our systems of corporate democracy, war is an economic necessity, the perfect marriage of public subsidy and private profit: socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. The day after 9/11 the stock prices of the war industry soared. More bloodshed was coming, which is great for business.

Today, the most profitable wars have their own brand. They are called “forever wars” — Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and now Ukraine. All are based on a pack of lies.

Iraq is the most infamous, with its weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. NATO’s destruction of Libya in 2011 was justified by a massacre in Benghazi that didn’t happen. Afghanistan was a convenient revenge war for 9/11, which had nothing to do with the people of Afghanistan. 

Today, the news from Afghanistan is how evil the Taliban are — not that U.S. President Joe Biden’s theft of $7 billion of the country’s bank reserves is causing widespread suffering. Recently, National Public Radio in Washington devoted two hours to Afghanistan — and 30 seconds to its starving people.

At its summit in Madrid in June, NATO, which is controlled by the United States, adopted a strategy document that militarises the European continent, and escalates the prospect of war with Russia and China. It proposes “multi domain warfighting against nuclear-armed peer-competitor.” In other words, nuclear war.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, left, and Spain’s Prime Minster Pedro Sánchez on June 28 in Madrid. (NATO)

It says: “NATO’s enlargement has been an historic success.” 

I read that in disbelief. 

The news from the war in Ukraine is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, omission.  I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket propaganda. 

In February, Russia invaded Ukraine as a response to almost eight years of killing and criminal destruction in the Russian-speaking region of Donbass on their border. 

In 2014, the United States had sponsored a coup in Kiev that got rid of Ukraine’s democratically elected, Russian-friendly president and installed a successor whom the Americans made clear was their man. 

Dec. 7, 2015: U.S. Vice President Joe Biden meets with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Kiev. (U.S. Embassy Kyiv, Flickr)

In recent years, American “defender” missiles have been installed in eastern Europe, Poland, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, almost certainly aimed at Russia, accompanied by false assurances all the way back to James Baker’s “promise” to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1990 that NATO would never expand beyond Germany. 

NATO on Hitler’s Borderline

Ukraine is the frontline. NATO has effectively reached the very borderland through which Hitler’s army stormed in 1941, leaving more than 23 million dead in the Soviet Union. 

Last December, Russia proposed a far-reaching security plan for Europe. This was dismissed, derided or suppressed in the Western media. Who read its step-by-step proposals? On Feb. 24, President Volodymyr Zelensky threatened to develop nuclear weapons unless America armed and protected Ukraine.  

[Related: John Pilger: War in Europe & the Rise of Raw Propaganda]

On the same day, Russia invaded — an unprovoked act of congenital infamy, according to the Western media. The history, the lies, the peace proposals, the solemn agreements on Donbass at Minsk counted for nothing. 

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On April 25, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin flew into Kiev and confirmed that America’s aim was to destroy the Russian Federation — the word he used was “weaken.” America had got the war it wanted, waged by an American bankrolled and armed proxy and expendable pawn.

Almost none of this was explained to Western audiences.

[Read:  Joe Lauria: Biden Confirms Why the US Needed This War]

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wanton and inexcusable. It is a crime to invade a sovereign country. There are no “buts” — except one.

When did the present war in Ukraine begin and who started it? According to the United Nations, between 2014 and this year, some 14,000 people have been killed in the Kiev regime’s civil war on the Donbass. Many of the attacks were carried out by neo-Nazis. 

Watch an ITV news report from May 2014, by the veteran reporter James Mates, who is shelled, along with civilians in the city of Mariupol, by Ukraine’s Azov (neo-Nazi) battalion.

In the same month, dozens of Russian-speaking people were burned alive or suffocated in a trade union building in Odessa besieged by fascist thugs, the followers of the Nazi collaborator and anti-Semitic fanatic Stepan Bandera.  The New York Times called the thugs “nationalists.”

“The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment,” said Andreiy Biletsky, founder of the Azov Battaltion, “is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival, a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”

Since February, a campaign of self-appointed “news monitors” (mostly funded by the Americans and British with links to governments) have sought to maintain the absurdity that Ukraine’s neo-Nazis don’t exist. 

Airbrushing, once associated with Stalin’s purges, has become a tool of mainstream journalism.

 “I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket propaganda.” 

In less than a decade, a “good” China has been airbrushed and a “bad” China has replaced it: from the world’s workshop to a budding new Satan.  

Much of this propaganda originates in the U.S., and is transmitted through proxies and “think-tanks,” such as the notorious Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the voice of the arms industry, and by journalists such as Peter Hartcher of The Sydney Morning Herald, who has labeled those spreading Chinese influence as “rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows” and suggested these “pests” be “eradicated.” 

Andriy Beletsky, commanding officer of the special Ukrainian neo-Nazi police regiment Azov, with volunteers in 2014. (My News24, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

News about China in the West is almost entirely about the threat from Beijing. Airbrushed are the 400 American military bases that surround most of China, an armed necklace that reaches from Australia to the Pacific and south east Asia, Japan and Korea. The Japanese island of Okinawa and the Korean island of Jeju are like loaded guns aimed point blank at the industrial heart of China. A Pentagon official described this as a “noose.”

Palestine has been misreported for as long as I can remember. To the BBC, there is the “conflict” of “two narratives.” The longest, most brutal, lawless military occupation in modern times is unmentionable. 

The stricken people of Yemen barely exist. They are media unpeople.  While the Saudis rain down their American cluster bombs with British advisers working alongside the Saudi targeting officers, more than half a million children face starvation.

This brainwashing by omission is not new. The slaughter of the First World War was suppressed by reporters who were given knighthoods for their compliance.  In 1917, the editor of The Manchester Guardian, C.P. Scott, confided to Prime Minister Lloyd George: “If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow, but they don’t know and can’t know.”

The refusal to see people and events as those in other countries see them is a media virus in the West, as debilitating as Covid.  It is as if we see the world through a one-way mirror, in which “we” are moral and benign and “they” are not. It is a profoundly imperial view.

The history that is a living presence in China and Russia is rarely explained and rarely understood. Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler. Xi Jinping is Fu Man Chu. Epic achievements, such as the eradication of abject poverty in China, are barely known. How perverse and squalid this is.

“The news from the war in Ukraine is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, omission.”

When will we allow ourselves to understand? Training journalists factory style is not the answer. Neither is the wondrous digital tool, which is a means, not an end, like the one-finger typewriter and the linotype machine.

In recent years, some of the best journalists have been eased out of the mainstream. “Defenestrated” is the word used. The spaces once open to mavericks, to journalists who went against the grain, truth-tellers, have closed.  

Julian Assange in 2014. (David G Silvers, Wikimedia Commons)

The case of Julian Assange is the most shocking.  When Julian and WikiLeaks could win readers and prizes for The Guardian, The New York Times and other self-important “papers of record,” he was celebrated. 

When the dark state objected and demanded the destruction of hard drives and the assassination of Julian’s character, he was made a public enemy. Vice President Joe Biden compared him to a “hi-tech terrorist.” Hillary Clinton asked, “Can’t we just drone this guy?” 

The ensuing campaign of abuse and vilification against Julian Assange — the U.N. rapporteur on torture called it “mobbing” — brought the liberal press to its lowest ebb. We know who they are. I think of them as collaborators: as Vichy journalists. 

When will real journalists stand up? An inspirational samizdat  already exists on the internet: Consortium News, founded by the great reporter Robert Parry, Max Blumenthal’s  The Grayzone, Mint Press News, Media Lens, DeclassifiedUK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, CounterPunch, Independent Australia, the work of Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone and others who will forgive me for not mentioning them here. 

And when will writers stand up, as they did against the rise of fascism in the 1930s? When will film-makers stand up, as they did against the Cold War in the 1940s? When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation ago? 

Having soaked for 82 years in a deep bath of righteousness that is the official version of the last world war, isn’t it time those who are meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda? The urgency is greater than ever.

This article is based on an address the author delivered at the Trondheim World Festival, Norway.

John Pilger has twice won Britain’s highest award for journalism and has been International Reporter of the Year, News Reporter of the Year and Descriptive Writer of the Year. He has made 61 documentary films and has won an Emmy, a BAFTA and the Royal Television Society prize. His ‘Cambodia Year Zero’ is named as one of the ten most important films of the 20th century. He can be contacted at www.johnpilger.com

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of  Consortium News.

Russia Matters: Russia in Review, Jan. 12-19, 2024

Russia Matters, 1/19/24

5 Things to Know

1. In the past month, Russian forces have gained 57 square miles of Ukrainian territory, while Ukrainian forces have re-gained 1 square mile, according to the Jan. 16, 2024, issue of the Russia-Ukraine War Report Card. In an article on the war entitled “Russia Regains Upper Hand in Ukraine’s East as Kyiv’s Troops Flag,” NYT noted this week that “[n]ow Russian troops are on the attack, especially in the country’s east. The town of Marinka has all but fallen. Avdiivka is being slowly encircled. A push on Chasiv Yar, near Bakhmut, is expected.” A new Russian offensive could occur sometime between Jan. 12 and Feb. 2, ISW reported, citing estimates of Russian war watchers. For Ukraine to survive Russian offensives in 2024, it needs to pursue the strategy of active defense, according to Western officials cited by FT. Pursuing this strategy, toward which the Ukrainian government has recently allocated $466 million, could be vital, given the ammunition and personnel shortages the Ukrainian armed forces are suffering from, the former partially blamed on delays in disbursements of military aid by the U.S. and EU:

Russian artillery fire now exceeds Ukrainian artillery fire at ratios between five-to-one and ten-to-one, ISW reported this week, citing Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov. “Today we had two shells, but some days we don’t have any in these positions,” a commander of a Ukrainian artillery crew told NYT. “I have two tanks, but only five shells,” a deputy Ukrainian battalion commander told this newspaper.Russian forces can generate forces at a rate equal to Russian monthly personnel losses, while Ukrainian forces struggle to find adequate personnel reinforcements, according to the Ukrainian MoD’s military intelligence cited by ISW and  NYT, respectively. “Three out of 10 soldiers who show up are no better than drunks who fell asleep and woke up in uniform,” a Ukrainian soldier confided to NYT in reference to new recruits that arrive at his brigade. Ukrainian MPs are expecting to receive a revised version of the mobilization bill, which is expected to allow a mobilization of half a million Ukrainians, in the first week of February, according to Ukrainska Pravda.

2. Several top figures in NATO’s staff and alliance members’ governments have asserted this week that they believe a war with Russia is possible, with some warning that it could possibly erupt as soon as 5 years from now. Among them are Germany’s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius and Britain’s defense secretary Grant Shapps. “We have to take into account that Vladimir Putin might even attack a NATO country one day,” Pistorius—whose country’s military is reportedly gaming out a Russian-NATO conflict in 2025—told Tagesspiegel. “Our experts expect a period of five to eight years in which this could be possible,” he added, according to Politico. As for Shapps, he has said that Western countries need to prepare for further conflicts involving Russia over the next five years, according to FT. In the view of NATO military committee chief Rob Bauer, a conflict could occur in the next 20 years. The alliance needs to be on high alert for war, and “that’s why we are preparing for a conflict with Russia,” Bauer said. Putin and his top ministers have repeatedly rejected predictions that Russia might attack a NATO country.

3. Around 90,000 troops will participate in NATO’s largest exercise in decades, known as Steadfast Defender 2024, which will kick off next week, the alliance’s top commander Chris Cavoli was quoted by Reuters as saying on Jan. 18. Steadfast Defender 2024 will run to late May and involve units from all 31 NATO member countries, plus Sweden, according to AFP. The drills will include at least 1,100 combat vehicles, 80 aircraft and 50 naval vessels and will be taking place in the Baltics and Poland, according to Axios and Stripes.com. The exercise will be the biggest since the 1988 Reforger drill during the Cold War, according to AFP.

4. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has rejected U.S.-Russian arms control talks because of U.S. support for Ukraine and warned about the risks of a direct confrontation, according to Reuters and  Bloomberg. “There is already more and more talk of a direct clash of nuclear powers” while “there are fewer and fewer restraining factors in the West,” he claimed at a Jan. 18 press conference meant to sum up Russian diplomats’ work in the past year. Lavrov—who will travel to New York for UNSC meetings next week—said Washington had proposed separating the issues of Ukraine and the resumption of talks on arms control, but Russia found the proposal unacceptable. Lavrov’s warning of a nuclear clash comes one week after Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Security Council Dmitry Medvedev’s threat to carry out nuclear strikes if Ukraine tried to target “our missile launchers across the entire territory of Russia.” Speaking in Washington on Jan. 18, Pranay Vaddi, senior director for arms control at the White House national security council, expressed hope that Russia may change its mind as the February 2026 expiration of New START approaches.

5. Security officials from 83 countries have discussed the terms of Ukraine’s Peace Formula in Davos this week, with Switzerland agreeing to host the next meeting even as its foreign minister said it would be an “illusion” to think that Russia would participate on such terms. These include the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity within its 1991 borders and the withdrawal of Russian troops from the Ukrainian territories. In a setback to Ukraine, China chose not to attend the Jan. 14 meeting, which took place ahead of the World Economic Forum, even though Chinese Premier Li Qiang was attending WEF. In addition, officials from some non-Western states that did attend the meeting reiterated their position that a settlement should address Moscow’s security concerns, such as Ukraine’s desire to join NATO, according to FT. In remarks made this week, Putin and his foreign minister Lavrov rejected Kyiv’s peace formula again, with Lavrov reiterating Russia’s maximalist demands, including Ukraine’s “backing out of joining of NATO.”

Tarik Cyril Amar: Russophrenia: The West can’t decide whether Russia is a pussycat or a lion

By Tarik Cyril Amar, RT, 1/5/24

Here’s a little experiment that you can replicate at home: Type ‘Russia Danger’ into Google (or Bing, or whatever search engine you like, but it probably has to be in English or another NATO-affiliated language; say German or French or Polish). Peruse the results.

Then type ‘Russia Weak’ and repeat.

Funny, isn’t it? Both searches will net you a rich catch of links and titles, of opinion pieces, longform articles, surveys and so on, depicting a dangerous or a weak Russia, as the case may be. And many of those sources will be high-quality or, at least, thoroughly mainstream: Reuters, The Telegraph, The New York Times, NPR, reputable think tanks, institutes, and experts – that sort of thing.

In other words, the West is producing two roughly equally prominent narratives about Russia that are mutually exclusive. True, there are some attempts – vaguely reminiscent of medieval scholasticism – to reconcile them. Almost a year ago now, Reuters, for instance, ran the headline that “even a weak Russia is a problem for Europe.”

How convenient from a Western point of view! That way, you can have your triumphalism (because the phrase “Russia weak” here, of course, implies “West strong”) and, at the same time, you can still spread the fear of big bad Russia, with all that means for intra-NATO politics (i.e. US dominance), military budgets, and arms manufacturers. The latter have been doing very well out of yet another war that has – surprise, surprise – turned out to be a racket, in the famous words of US Marine Major General Smedley Butler.

Yet, on the whole, we are looking at a stark contrast. You may think that this is simply reflecting a healthy debate, with two opposing opinions clashing or that differences are due to time passing and things, especially in Ukraine, changing on the ground. To an extent, you’d be right: It is obvious, for instance, that the Western mood has become more pessimistic after the failure of Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive had to be acknowledged.

But the above is far from the whole explanation for the striking Western bipolarity (to use a term from clinical psychology) about Russia. For as so often with Western narratives about that country, they may not help you much to understand the real Russia, but if you read them against the grain, they can tell you a lot about the West’s imaginary Russias (yes, there is more than one). And that, in turn, offers some timely insights into the real West.

Let’s look at a sample of points habitually made about Russia in the two big Western narratives.

For ‘Russia Danger’ we get: obsessively imperial (wants the Soviet Union back or, at least, something similarly dominant); supremely devious (never means what it says and not even the opposite, either); very subversive (able to make or break American presidents, for instance); militarily powerful and ruthless (its forces are battle-hardened and learning, its weapons advanced and adaptable, and, worst of all, its war economy is effective – unlike the West’s); well-connected (it gets ammunition from North Korea, sells oil to India, China just won’t stop siding with it, and, exasperatingly, much of the world is not heeding the West’s command to isolate it); and last but not least, politically “totalitarian,” of course (just disregard here that that term makes absolutely no sense with regard to Russia now).

For ‘Russia Weak’ we find: Not all it’s cracked up to be and really just a fraud (this is where almost no one can resist that deadly tired cliche about “Potemkin” this and “Potemkin” that); primitive in terms of, well, really, everything: values, politics, organization, technology (Remember German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock’s Wayward Washing Machine Theory regarding how Russians get their microchips? No? Lucky you.); savage (This one easily blends with “primitive,” of course – see under “Russian soldiers without guns but with sharpened shovels”); isolated (at least by the very proper crowd in the West), and, last but not least, always brimming with repressed popular discontent and, potentially at least, on the verge of color revolution and regime change (so to speak, authoritarian enough to condemn, but terribly bad at that, too – see under “Potemkin” and “primitive”).

We could refine the picture, but the outlines should be clear enough. And here is what it reveals: what is behind the West’s two Russias is not merely a debate or differences of opinion and assessments, but the latest iteration of a deep cultural pattern with a long history, reaching back to, at least, the moment when Peter the Great gate-crashed the European Great Power club in the early 18th century.

On one side, the West loves to imagine Russia in what – after the great Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said – we have learned to call an Orientalist framing, as a Backward Other: a part of that perennial fantasy ‘East’ that the West simply can’t imagine – or accept – as its equal. That’s the root of all those descriptions of today’s Russia as a kind of shovel-wielding gas station running on empty (if you will forgive a metaphor as muddled as the thinking it designates).

But there is another powerful register in the West’s Russia imagination: the Sinister Other. Whereas in the Orientalist key, Russia is ultimately always seen as reassuringly weak, the Sinister Other is different: a kind of evil mirror image of the West’s self-idealization, this Russia appears as modern, wielding up-to-date means of power across multiple domains from information, to the economy, to the battlefield. The Sinister Other can also mobilize its population well; it has, like the West, solved the political challenge of bringing the masses into politics, only in a way the West likes to imagine as morally inferior to its own brand of manufacturing consent.

Consider the issue of how Russia has been fighting the current war between it, on one side, and Ukraine and (de facto) NATO on the other. Initial – and gleeful – Western observations about Moscow’s mistakes and predictions that, with its call-up of September 2022, Moscow would fall flat on its face and even trigger large-scale rebellion, if not revolution, were a classic example not only of wishful groupthink but of the Orientalist, Backward-Other register. Put crudely: “Those Russians just can’t hack it, because – they are Russians.”

Yet, when Russia did succeed in mobilizing and also adjusted its military tactics, at least some Western perceptions shifted into the Sinister-Other key: as Barry R. Posen, an unusually perceptive Western observer wrote in Foreign Affairs, “the most alarming thing about Russia’s bombing campaign is that Moscow knows what it is doing.” Indeed. But where’s the news?

It is crucial to understand that this Western pattern is not merely about passive observation. On the contrary, there is a proactive aspect to it: We can read the last decades, essentially since the end of the Soviet Union, as marked by the West’s obstinate attempt to not only imagine Russia as backward and weak. Rather, Russia – and Russians – were supposed to fit that image: Under Western eyes, Russia was to be relegated in the real-existing hierarchy of international politics – a big country (and market), sure, but still one that, when push comes to shove, can be coerced and even defeated. And because Moscow has resisted this demotion successfully, Russia is now the Sinister Other again.

That shift illustrates the single most depressing thing about the West’s views of Russia: the West may change its tone from time to time, it may even produce two very different, mutually exclusive narratives about Russia at the same time, when stuck in a moment of transition or confusion. But it never actually learns. All it does, collectively and with all too few exceptions, is alternate between different frameworks of stereotypes. What a missed opportunity. Again and again.

Jeremy Kuzmarov: Fake Intellectuals Working For Think Tanks Funded By the Arms Industry Are Driving Support For War After War After War

By Jeremy Kuzmarov, Covert Action Magazine, 1/2/24

A few days after the October 7 attacks in northern Israel, The Atlantic Council ran an inflammatory article on its website by Jonathan Panikoff, a former deputy national intelligence officer, entitled “It doesn’t matter whether Iran planned the Hamas attack—Tehran is still to blame.”[1]

The article referenced a Wall Street Journal article that claimed unfoundedly that Iran was responsible for planning the attacks, and expressed belief that even if Iran didn’t directly plan it, Iran was still responsible because it had supported Hamas in the past.

The article went on to support an aggressive military response by the U.S. and Israel that could potentially entail bombing Iran. The latter was a long-held dream of neoconservatives who have wanted to overthrow the regime of the Ayatollahs since it took over from the Shah, a U.S. and Israeli client, in a 1979 revolution.

Glenn Diesen, The Think Tank Racket: Managing the Information War With Russia (Clarity Press, 2023) looks at the influence of think tanks like The Atlantic Council in driving gargantuan U.S. military budgets and endless wars that have no end in sight.

The Atlantic Council has been particularly hawkish with regards to Russia, helping to fuel a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia in Ukraine that has decimated a generation of Ukrainian and Russian youth and left us on the threshold of World War III.

Diesen is an associate professor at the University of Southeast Norway and an associate editor of the journal Russia in Global Affairs.

His book emphasizes the undue influence that think tank pseudo-intellectuals play because of their ubiquitous presence in the mainstream media as well as academia and because of their authorship of policy reports that often guide government policy.

Rather than being even-handed or in any way objective in their analysis, the think tank fellows follow a preordained narrative.

According to Diesen, their job is to manufacture consent for the goals of their paymasters—weapons manufacturers and oil companies who profit off of war along with foreign governments courting more U.S. military aid.

Diesen writes that “think-tanks have become a symptom of hyper-capitalism in which all aspects of society have become an appendage to the market. Even political influence is regulated by the free-market, in which think tanks are an important component.”

Diesen notes that a brilliant achievement of propaganda has been to convince the population that propaganda is only an instrument of authoritarian states—that the U.S. is supposedly combating—and not liberal democracies.

The think tanks help condition the public to fear foreign threats and support wars of aggression under the veneer of providing independent expert analysis.

Paul Craig Roberts, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under Ronald Reagan, has called The Atlantic Council the “marketing arm of the military-security complex,” while Diesen calls it “NATO’s Propaganda Wing.”

The Atlantic Council’s financial report from 2019/2020 reveals that it received over $1 million from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), according to Diesen. It also received major contributions from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, The Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), U.S. State Department, a Saudi oil billionaire (Bahaa Hariri), Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk, Crescent Petroleum, and Burisma, an energy company owned by Ukrainian oligarchs which appointed Hunter Biden to its board along with former CIA counter-terrorism director Cofer Black.

The Atlantic Council’s close ties to the CIA were further evident when its former executive vice-president, Damon Wilson, was appointed CEO of the NED, a CIA offshoot that promotes propaganda and supports dissidents in countries whose governments have been targeted by the U.S. for regime change.

Former CIA Director James R. Woolsey is listed as a lifetime director of the Atlantic Council, while former CIA Directors Leon Panetta, Robert Gates and David Petraeus are listed on its Board, along with such war criminals as Henry Kissinger, and Condeleezza Rice.

Over the past decade, the Atlantic Council has published countless reports on Russia’s kleptocracy and disinformation being spread allegedly by Vladimir Putin, and has hosted anti-Russian dissidents and Belarusian opposition figures such as Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who called for more aggressive intervention by the U.S. in Belarusian politics.

One of The Atlantic Council’s fellows, Michael Weiss, spreads his anti-Russia invective as an editor at the popular online media outlet, The Daily Beast. He helps run a neo-McCarthyite website, PropOrNot that promotes the worst kind of fear mongering imaginable, attacking independent media outlets, including the Ron Paul Institute, for allegedly advancing Russian propaganda.

In 2015, the Atlantic Council helped prepare a proposal for arming the Ukrainian military with offensive weaponry like Javelin anti-tank missiles—the same year that it presented its Distinguished Leadership Award to Marillyn Adams Hewson, then the CEO of Lockheed Martin, which produces Javelin missiles and many other lethal weapons.

Since the commencement of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, The Atlantic Council has doubled down on its long-standing Russophobia, calling for bombing Russia and starting World War III.

Last February, Matthew Kroenig, the Deputy Director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, argued for consideration of the U.S. preemptive use of ’tactical’ nuclear weapons.[2] This would not only kill thousands of people directly but likely cause what scientists characterize as a “nuclear winter” by injecting so much smoke and debris into the air that it will block sunlight and cause a precipitous drop in global temperatures, affecting food production across the globe.

Triggering New Cold and Hot Wars

The Atlantic Council’s support for war with Russia is characteristic of think tanks which played a crucial role in pushing the decision to expand NATO after the Cold War.

George F. Kennan and other foreign policy experts had warned against this because NATO was perceived as a hostile military alliance by Russia and it would undermine new European security initiatives involving Russia. Vietnam War architect Robert S. McNamara at the time also called for a new “peace dividend” by which the U.S. would reduce its military budget and address social needs with taxpayer dollars.

The overriding imperative of the weapons industry, however, was to revitalize cold war thinking to ensure continuously high military budgets and the expansion of NATO and the think-tanks were enlisted to fulfill that end.

Diesen points out that the Brookings Institute, one of the oldest American think tanks, played an instrumental role in the Russia Gate hoax, which greatly contributed to the spread of Russophobia underlying the U.S. proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

A primary researcher and contributor to the Steele dossier, the seminal document in Russia Gate which spread false information about Donald Trump being blackmailed because of an alleged encounter with Russian prostitutes, was an employee of the Brookings Institute named Igor Danchenko, who was indicted by Special Counsel John Durham for lying to the FBI.

Working under Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and renowned anti-Russian hawk, Danchenko claimed to have accrued incriminating information against Trump from a meeting with Russian-American Chamber of Commerce President Sergey Millian, who said that this meeting never actually took place.[3]

The Atlantic Council was another false purveyor of Russia Gate whose revenues increased tenfold from 2006-2016 when it began demonizing Vladimir Putin and smearing politicians like Tulsi Gabbard who advocated for cooperative diplomacy between the U.S. and Russia.

Leaving out the fact that Putin revitalized Russia’s economy after the failed privatization and shock therapy initiatives of the 1990s, The Atlantic Council made people believe that Putin invaded Ukraine on a whim and would destabilize all of Europe if he was not stopped.

This kind of analysis obscures the true origins of the conflict in Ukraine and the Western role in supporting NATO expansion and a 2014 coup against Ukraine’s legally elected government led by Viktor Yanukovych, which led to the outbreak of civil war.

The Atlantic Council continues today along with other think-tanks to whitewash Ukrainian war crimes, corruption and close ties with the far-right and neo-Nazis.

A person in a suit smiling

Michael McFaul of the Hoover Institute even celebrates Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s crackdown on opposition politicians and media, while hypocritically framing the struggle against Russia as one of authoritarianism versus democracy.

McFaul and others have made clear that a primary U.S. foreign policy goal is to try and delink Ukraine and the rest of Europe from Russia while expanding U.S. natural gas sales in Europe.

In 2019, the RAND Corporation, the think tank of the intelligence agencies, issued a report calling for threatening NATO expansion and the arming of Ukraine in order to draw Russia into a conflict that would facilitate its overextension militarily and economically and cause the Russian government to lose domestic and international support.

The same report advocated for intensifying the ideological and information war against Russia to weaken the legitimacy and stability of its government, and voiced support for the anti-corruption crusade of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, whom Diesen identifies as a British intelligence asset supportive of policies designed to weaken the Russian Federation.

RAND earlier had advocated for provoking civil war within Syria through covert action and informational warfare and by capitalizing on the sustained Shia-Sunni conflict in order to undermine the nationalist Assad regime and draw Russia into the conflict there.

RAND also advocated for the destabilization of the Caucuses in order to cause a fissure between Russia and its traditional ally, Armenia, hence weakening Russia.

This latter goal was achieved when Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan expressed no-confidence in Russia’s ability to protect it after Azerbaijan—heavily armed by the U.S. and Israel—invaded the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

RAND had also issued policy recommendations for reducing Russian influence in Moldova and undercutting Russian trade with Central Asia and promoted regime change in Belarus to destabilize a Russian ally and alter the country’s orientation westward.

Following this prescription, the NED and other U.S. agencies provoked an uprising in 2020 against Belarus’ socialist leader Alexander Lukashenko, who was demonized in western media though he helped curb inequality and poverty considerably while resisting the rapid privatization initiatives carried out by other post-Soviet leaders.

CNAS and Team Biden

One of the most influential think tanks today is the Center For a New American Security (CNAS), which received huge sums from oil companies like Chevron and BP, financial giants like Bank of America, and J.P. Morgan Chase, and Amazon and Google from Big Tech.

CNAS’s former CEO, Victoria Nuland, was a former adviser to Dick Cheney and a key architect behind the 2014 coup in Ukraine.[4]

CNAS’ founder, Michèle Flournoy, was a board member of the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton who as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy helped develop counterinsurgency policy for Afghanistan and contributed to convincing Barack Obama to invade Libya. More recently, she has advocated for an aggressive military buildup in the South China Sea to counter a rising China.

When Joe Biden became president, at least 16 CNAS alumni were selected for foreign policy positions. CNAS had pushed heavily for making Kamala Harris Vice President as her foreign policy team consisted of an army of CNAS think-tankers—including Flournoy.

The appointment of CNAS alumni to prestigious positions and their lobbying influence epitomizes the so-called revolving door in which high level White House and Pentagon officials who serve corporate-military interests while in power are rewarded with lucrative paying jobs in which they continue to serve the same underlying interests.

Diesen emphasizes at the end of his book that think tanks in the modern U.S. have helped to subvert democracy and obstruct U.S. foreign policy in the interests of wealthy corporations that profit from endless wars. He sees as a solution more public disclosures about the sources of think tank funding and public pressures that could help reduce their influence.

Another more radical solution is a socialist revolution that would result in the nationalization of the weapons industry, taking profit out of war, and reorganizing research, development and production toward fulfilling human needs.

Panikoff is the Atlantic Council’s Director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative. ↑In John Bellamy Foster, John Ross, and Deborah Veneziale, Washington’s New Cold War: A Socialist Perspective (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023), 42. ↑The New Knowledge think-tank fabricated a story of Russian interference in the 2017 Alabama state election with the intent of causing the defeat of Republican candidate Roy Moore. ↑Nuland was also a fellow at the Brookings Institute. ↑