Natylie Baldwin's Blog, page 119

The president’s attention has wandered over the decades, even in wartime, but he keeps coming back to Marat Khusnullin

By Andrey Pertsev & Svetlana Reiter, Meduza, 10/5/23

In the 2010s, Marat Khusnullin nearly rebuilt the city of Moscow. Today, he’s maneuvered himself into a leading role as the overseer of Russia’s “restoration” of annexed Ukrainian territories. Meduza explains how this construction bureaucrat from Tatarstan won a prized position in the federal government and especially in Vladimir Putin’s circle of trusted underlings.

Last month, in early September, Vladimir Putin christened a new section of the “Vostok” expressway connecting Moscow and Kazan. “You’re cleared… Let’s go,” the president said with a smile. Joining him at the ceremony was Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin, who oversees construction projects for the federal government. He hurriedly and obsequiously noted that the highway would have been impossible without Putin, crediting the president with “all the comprehensive solutions” needed “to build such a beauty of a road!”

A source close to the presidential administration told Meduza that Putin’s expressway jamboree was staged as a campaign event. Indeed, the ceremony took place just a few days before a gubernatorial election in the Nizhny Novgorod region (where the new highway section was built), and United Russia candidate Gleb Nikitin later won the vote handily. But the Kremlin already had a bigger campaign on its mind, says Meduza’s source, who calls Marat Khusnullin a “key figure” in Putin’s re-election next spring.

The administration will reportedly rely on Khusnullin to serve as one of the leading “event suppliers” ahead of election day. Meduza has already written about the Kremlin’s plan to transform next year’s race into a “parade of holidays” celebrating the many “achievements of Putin’s Russia.” Some of these festivities will feature the opening of new infrastructural facilities, including new chunks of expressway.

Meduza’s sources with knowledge of the Kremlin’s election plans say that Khusnullin has become “one of Putin’s favorite subordinates.” For example, when the president made a brisk nighttime visit to occupied Mariupol in March 2023, it was Khusnullin who accompanied Putin on a drive around town, boasting about Russia’s “restoration” of a city it bombed and shelled to the ground in many places.

“A helicopter arrives, there were two escort cars, and he got behind the wheel. He even chose the route himself. Nobody saw it coming… People recognized him and started exiting their apartments… So, everything turned out very friendly,” Khusnullin later said, describing Putin’s tour of the city.

A source close to the federal government cabinet told Meduza that Putin first noticed Khusnullin when the latter oversaw Tatarstan’s Construction Ministry. (Before this job, Khusnullin worked for local construction companies and also served as a deputy in Tatarstan’s State Council.) Two decades ago, Putin frequented Kazan, which celebrated its millennium in 2005 and hosted the Universiade (now known as the FISU World University Games) in 2013. When Putin came to town, Khusnullin took him on tours of construction sites around the city. “He always knew how to present himself to his superiors and point out his role in the common cause,” recalls a long-time acquaintance who worked with Khusnullin in Tatarstan.

Meduza’s sources attribute Khusnullin’s rapid career rise to these encounters in Kazan. By 2010, he oversaw construction in Moscow as one of the city’s deputy mayors and intersected with Putin even more often as one of the officials leading renovations to the Luzhniki Olympic Complex ahead of the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Additionally, he was front and center in creating Moscow’s Zaryadye landscape urban park and renovating buildings throughout the city. Khusnullin was also involved in the Moscow Subway’s expansion between 2012 and 2019 when the Metro added another 47 stations.

Dozens of businesspeople from Tatarstan followed Khusnullin to Moscow, where they found leading positions in the city’s construction sector. An investigation in September 2018 by journalists at Novaya Gazeta identified 46 of these people. For example, Khusnullin’s former deputy at Tatarstan’s Construction Ministry, Mars Gazizullin, went on to manage Moscow City’s Mosinzhproekt civil engineering company, which oversaw the subway’s expansion.

From 2011 to 2018, companies from Tatarstan and firms connected to entrepreneurs from the region won Moscow City contracts worth almost half a trillion rubles (roughly $5 billion in today’s currency). Investigative reporters found that some of these businesses and their owners had ties to Khusnullin, but he denies any corruption allegations.

Khusnullin didn’t limit himself to just participation in such projects but labored to promote himself publicly in any way he could. A source who worked at Moscow City Hall told Meduza that Khusnullin reads the news media (“even opposition outlets”) and Telegram channels and tries to ensure that he’s mentioned. For example, while working for the Mayor, Khusnullin’s press office regularly compiled “positive news” about Moscow and pushed it on Telegram.

But he always stresses shared achievements and puts his bosses first. “Meaning, it was the mayor when he worked at City Hall, not Mr. Khusnullin. The top figure came first; he was just the good executor of the leadership’s will. Irreplaceable, perhaps, but a mere operator,” says Meduza’s source.

This tactic paid off. In 2020, Khusnullin reached the federal level, becoming a deputy prime minister charged with overseeing construction projects. He promptly announced plans to build a network of roads between Russia’s regions and to renovate housing across the country. “Construction is movement; it’s energy,” he said in 2021, describing his feelings about the job. “You can see the results of your work immediately. If everything is going well, your mood improves instantly. I even love the smell of paint, cement, and dust.”

Sources who know Khusnullin say he lacks any “special political views.” “He understands the planned economy of the Soviet era, but he’s also fine with the free market,” the individuals told Meduza, adding that Khusnullin “loves hands-on management” and takes “subordination” very seriously: “He understands who is above him and who is below him. There’s a real cult of personality on his team.”

A source close to United Russia’s Moscow branch leadership told Meduza that Khusnullin is “crude but effective.” “Mr. Khusnullin is an experienced vizier from the East,” says a source close to the Kremlin. “He always knows what to tell the Shah, how to interest him, and how to thank him. For the president, this style of communication has become comfortable lately.”

As Meduza reported in the fall of 2022, Putin lost almost all interest in civilian affairs and domestic issues in the early months of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Even construction projects receded from the president’s agenda. While others in the federal government cabinet tried to keep their distance from the war, Khusnullin dove head-first, traveling regularly to the “new territories” and becoming Russia’s de facto curator of “restoration” infrastructure projects in occupied Ukraine. This, of course, caught Putin’s attention again, says a source with ties to the Kremlin.

Today, Khusnullin and the Construction Ministry he controls are key in allocating Russia’s construction contracts in the occupied territories. The total cost of this work is unknown, but the Russian authorities have estimated that the “restoration of infrastructure” will require at least 1.5 trillion rubles (more than $15 billion).

A source close to the Russian government cabinet told Meduza that Khusnullin understands how vital this restoration work is to Putin, and he even tries to outperform the president’s expectations, setting speed records and overfulfilling plans. For example, Khusnullin was the official who reported on the early completion of repairs to Russia’s coveted Crimean Bridge, which a truck bomb damaged in October 2022. Khusnullin has also declared that “the people are returning to Mariupol” thanks to the Russian authorities’ efforts. (He’s careful not to emphasize the invasion assault that caused the city’s exodus and devastation in the first place.)

On multiple occasions, Putin has praised Khusnullin. With the front lines in Ukraine frozen in many places, the president “is gradually getting tired of military topics” and regaining his interest in domestic affairs, say sources close to the Kremlin. “It’s become important to prove [to the West] that the economy is holding up and everything is going like before,” explained Meduza’s sources. “Construction, roads, and bridges — this is stuff he gets. It brings back memories of the good ole days.”

A source with ties to Russia’s government says Khusnullin “knows what he’s doing,” but that doesn’t mean he harbors specific career ambitions. “He just knows how to grow,” said Meduza’s source. “He knows that the boss doesn’t like it when someone articulates some clear goal and then achieves it. The president knows better where and who is needed. If they tell [Khusnullin] to take over as prime minister, he’ll do it. He’ll be happy to do it. But it would be wrong to say he’s working toward his premiership.”

A journalist from Tatarstan who spoke to Meduza on condition of anonymity recalled that rumors circulated not so long ago about Khusnullin’s possible return to the region, this time as its leader. But that chance seems to have gone with the “zeroing out” of incumbent Rustam Minnikhanov’s term clock. A source close to the federal government told Meduza that Khusnullin going back to Tatarstan is off the table. “He now carries more weight than the whole republic.”

Gordon Hahn: ENDING THE NATO-RUSSIA UKRAINIAN WAR, UNTYING THE NATO-RUSSIA KNOT

By Gordon Hahn, Website, 10/3/23

Introduction

Russia and the West are locked in a scorpions’ embrace in Ukraine that threatens to explode into a major European, even world war. The consequences of such a war would certainly be hundreds of thousands and likely millions of military casualties and civilian victims. Such a war could be easily escalate to a nuclear confrontation that would push the world into disease, starvation, chaos, and perhaps oblivion. Even without a larger war, the presence of five nuclear power plants in Ukraine risks a grave nuclear accident, and there are radicals on both the Russian but especially the Ukrainian side that might seek to construct a ‘dirty’ bomb or some other means for delivering a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapon of mass destruction. Given these terrible dangers, there is a striking, criminal level of negligence in the nearly non-existent diplomatic efforts to end the NATO-Russia Ukrainian war.

Yet there are some very feasible ways, some already well-trodden paths, for putting an end to this conflict and restoring peace in Ukraine, Russia, and the West. Some are very simple: for example, talk.

Ceasefire First

The first order item is a ceasefire agreement that will stop the blood letting. An OSCE monitoring agreements and mission would control a no man’s land to create a broad ‘contact line’ separating the sides’ forces. The agreement should include mutual withdrawals in order to separate the forces and allow an OSCE Monitoring Mission to be deployed. All artillery pieces and mortars should be shuttered in OSCE controlled areas. All drone use will be banned, and only OSCE monitoring drones will be permitted to fly.

A more ambitious ceasefire plan could establish a UN peacekeeping force made up of peacekeeping troops from completely neutral countries from outside the region and that are not members of NATO, the CSTO, Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), BRICS, the Eurasian Economic Union, or European Union. Mexico, Malaysia, and Indonesia might be examples of candidates for such a mission. These peacekeeping troops would occupy the separation zone and have the right to intercept any diversionary groups sent by one side to attack the other.

Russian-Ukrainian treaty

Now that the Ukrainian Pandora’s box has been opened, there will be no peace in Europe or Russia until the Ukrainian question is resolved. The West has led Kiev down the road to destruction, and in order to save what remains of Ukraine the West, particularly Washington, and Ukraine must engage Russia in peace talks. In lieu of this, there are only two possible outcomes: Russia’s seizure of at least all Ukraine’s lands east of the Dnepr and along the Black Sea coast or a broader European war involving direct fighting between NATO, Russian, and perhaps other forces. The main cause of the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War was Washington’s and Brussels’ insistence on expansion of world history’s most powerful military bloc to Russia’s borders, especially to Ukraine. The Maidan revolt was cultivated by the West in order to achieve NATO expansion to Ukraine. Instead, it predictably sparked a reaction in southeastern Ukraine and Moscow, a civil war, and finally the ongoing larger Ukrainian war in which the West and Russia are poised to enter into conflict with each other, coming ever closer to that fateful day with each month’s escalations to new levels of violence and terror.

The genesis of NATO expansion was ‘lone superpower’ America’s unbridled post-Cold War ambitions to establish a U.S.-dominated ‘new world order.’ Moscow views the Maidan regime in Kiev as a dagger pointed by Washington at Russia’s heart. So for Moscow to be willing to engage in any peace talks, especially as Ukraine falters on the battlefield, is for Washington to make the first move and propose to sponsor and engage in ceasefire negotiations with Russia and Ukraine. Moscow will simply not trust or see any prospect for stability through direct talks with Kiev. Russian President Vladimir Putin knows who is calling the shots. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s recent statement that if Moscow proposes talks, Kiev will accept, and the U.S. will be right behind them signaled this dynamic as well as the curious antinomy of hubris and cowardice that prevails in Washington under the present administration. Something that limits hope that escalation of this war can be stopped, but let us forge ahead with the necessary, if misplaced optimism.

It is possible that Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy will balk at the idea of talks with Putin. After all, he is surrounded by ultra-nationalist and neofascist elements that bear a burning hatred for Russia and Russians and great ambitions to master Europe. But if West was able in March 2022 to convince Zelenskiy to end the Istanbul process talks and instead continue what obviously would have to be a supremely destructive war with Russia war, then it certainly can push Kiev to resume talks with Moscow. It is often said that Putin will never negotiate because he seeks restoration of the Soviet empire and domination over all Europe. This is an odd claim. Putin’s troops were with within 50 miles of Georgia’s capitol Tbilisi and had defeated the Georgian army in August 2008 Georgia-Russia Ossetiyan war, and yet he did not even consider taking the far easier opponent down in order to start his ‘rebuilding of the Soviet empire.’ Putin and Russians have neither the desire and know they lack the capability to dominate their neighbors. So talks are possible. The nut to crack is how to initiate them and what sorts of agreements with Moscow and Kiev are feasible.

Since NATO expansion was the cause of the conflict, the issue of NATO and Ukraine will be central to any peace settlement, and Washington calls the shots in NATO. Some noise was made a while back when a NATO official suggested Ukraine might trade Russian-occupied territories for NATO membership. NATO, by itself, will never forego its expansion to Ukraine. That decision can only come from higher up—from Washington. For that to happen it must be realized on the Potomac that Russia will never accept Ukraine in NATO even if it is offered all Ukraine east of the Dniepr. The only way Moscow would accept NATO in Ukraine is for Moscow’s full defeat in the Ukrainian war or an entirely new order having been installed in Moscow. By now it must be becoming clear to some in Washington that this is a bridge exceedingly too far and was never a realistic goal. More likely would be Russia taking all Ukraine east of the Dniepr and then offering all but the four oblasts plus Crimea back to Kiev in return for an international agreement on no NATO membership and Ukrainian neutrality. That level of Russian magnanimity regarding the West and Ukraine is a pipedream.

It is worth repeating: There will be no peace treaty signed by Russia that does not guarantee Ukraine’s neutrality. Therefore, for any proposal of a Russian-Ukrainian peace treaty to be viable it must stipulate that Kiev is a neutral state and will not join any military bloc. Moreover, NATO and the CSTO will be banned from carrying out any activity with the Ukrainian military. This treaty should have international status and be signed by Russia, Ukraine, NATO, and the UN. Regarding Ukraine’s territory and territorial integrity, Russia, should it choose, shall retain all territory it holds as of implementation of the ceasefire agreement. Ukraine’s future territorial integrity and any future exchange of territory agreed upon by Russia and Ukraine will be anchored in a separate treaty signed by both states, the OSCE, and the UN.

There have been some small, stumbling steps towards a framework that might form the foundation for a Russo-Ukrainian agreement. Kiev reportedly was forced to agree unofficially it would have to abandon its position of a withdrawal of all Russian troops from 1991 Ukraine’s territories at Saudi Arabia’s August 5-7 informal peace conference, As a result of its failing counter-offensive. The same day Russia’s presidential spokesman said Russia only “wants to control those territories fixed in its constitution” (“Russia wants to control territories fixed in its constitution — Kremlin spokesman,” TASS, 6 August 2023, https://tass.com/politics/1657225). This means that Ukraine would have to recognize Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and its 4 October 2022 annexation of Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye, and Kherson Oblasts. A further complicating factor is that Russian forces still not occupy all of these latter four regions. A point of compromise could be an agreement by Moscow to retain only the areas in those oblasts whch it occupies as of any ceasefire agreement and the beginning of peace talks. This would require amendments to Russia’s constitution, which is unlikely to be much of an obstacle for Putin to push through Federal Assembly’s two houses just as the amendments stipulating their accession were easily passed.

NATO-Russian treaty

NATO and Russia ought to sign a separate treaty along with Ukraine repeating and thus reinforcing the stipulation of Ukraine’s neutral status contained in the Russian-Ukrainian peace treaty outlined above. Under this kind of a more global treaty or in a separate agreement, Russia, the EU, the US, and the OSCE must hold negotiations on a treaty or set of treaties that would regulate the explosive situation in Moldova and its breakaway region of Transdnestria, including a withdrawal of Russian troops from Moldovan territory. The Moldovan Treaty or Treaties must stipulate Moldova’s neutral status and the Russian troop withdrawal. At the same time, a treaty between Moldova and breakaway Transdnestria and an amended Moldovan constitution should include Kishinev’s neutral and sovereign independent state status and afford Tiraspol and the Gagauz territory broad autonomy within the Moldovan state. After these treaties are signed and implemented, Russia will withdraw all its troops and weapons from Moldova, including Transdnestria. Beyond the more explicit statement on the inviolability of Moldova’s state sovereignty and independence, Kishinev would be obligated to sign a treaty with the OSCE pledging it will not seek to unify with Romania. It cannot be excluded that Russia will demand a treaty clause holding that NATO cannot expand to any more countries directly adjacent to its borders, as the issue is relevant for Georgia especially given August 2008 but also Azerbaijan and Georgia’s breakaway region of Abkhaziya, which Russia recognizes it and North Ossetiya as independent states. Moreover, the U.S. continues to poke around in Central Asia – witness the recent and first US-Central Asian summit – and NATO is establishing an office in Japan.

In addition, there must be a reaffirmation and strengthening of the OSCE’s commitment to the principle of non-interference of the organization’s member-states in the domestic politics of other member-states. Western commentators have made much of Russia’s violation of the Budapest Memorandum when it incorporated Crimea into the federation, as the memorandum had been signed by Moscow, Kiev, and the West as part of a deal exchanging Kiev’s surrender to Moscow of nuclear weapons on its territory inherited from the USSR for Moscow’s pledge to renounce its right to Crimea and honor Ukraine’s territorial integrity. What is lost on those who make such superficial comments is that the West egregiously violated the OSCE Founding Act’s Helsinki Accords’ stipulation that commits OSCE members from interfering in co-members politics. US senators, congressmen, deputy secretary of state, and billions of dollars spent to network anti-Yanukovych Ukrainians in the nurturing of the Maidan revolt committed violation of the OSCE’s mutual non-interference clause.

Reviving the Late Cold War Treaties and Security Architecture

More globally, the perestroika-era arms control and verification treaty architecture must be revived in order to restore strategic stability to Europe and central Eurasia. This would include NEW Start as well as new INF, CFE, ABM, and Open Skies agreements should be concluded and should be signed and adhered to by all NATO and CSTO members. The INF treaty and particularly the CFE treaty will have to be renegotiated and amended given the drastic shifts in the deployments of intermediate range missiles and conventional forces since the early 2000s and even more so since February 2022.

Conclusion

Thus, there is a multi-tier structure for reviving strategic stability in Europe: Russo-Ukrainian agreement, Russo-European agreements for eastern Europe and western Eurasia’s frozen conflicts, Russo-Western agreements on arms and mutual non-interference in domestic politics, and a more global infrastructure of interlocking strategic nuclear and conventional forces treaties for Russia and NATO member countries. These are the basic building blocks for any future stability in Europe, but at some point China will need to be brought into this or a similar understanding and security architecture for Asia.

Mick Hall: New Zealand’s ‘Russian Edits Scandal’ — How a National Broadcaster Demonized the Truth

By Mick Hall, Consortium News, 10/7/23

In this tumultuous time of war and global conflict, where pervasive propaganda campaigns mask geopolitical machinations of the powerful and serve their interests, mainstream journalists’ ability to counter these campaigns have never been more limited.

Gone are the days when John Pilger was able to have a story attacking George W. Bush and Tony Blair’s invasion of Iraq on the front page of the British tabloid, the Daily Mirror.

We live in a time of state surveillance and creeping restrictions on freedom of speech, where whistleblowers are criminalised and publishers like Julian Assange face persecution and life imprisonment.

Self-censorship is strictly adhered to by media outlets as narratives are shaped by a technocratic elite. Mainstream stories are packaged with a kind of hermeneutic seal, keeping out vital context that would allow readers to interpret the meaning of events happening in the world.

Yet so much is currently taking place of profound importance that the public needs to know about. For those of us living in New Zealand and the wider Pacific region, these matters include the potential of being caught up in a proxy war with China at the behest of its peer rival, the United States, with all the horror that would involve.

‘Rules-Based’ Domination

For a long time, the U.S. has dominated the global economy using its petrodollar, instruments of economic coercion like sanctions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, as well as C.I.A. interference in nations’ internal affairs, including the fermentation of opposition groups and violent coups.

As a last resort, it has exercised raw military might, invading countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, or directed its will through NATO, bombing Serbia and Libya in the interests of its corporate state.

Contemporary history shows at the core of its so-called “rules-based international order” lies a very destructive neo-colonial system of domination, one that pays lip service to democratic values and institutions only when corporate schemes for profit are not being threatened.

It is in the interests of democratic participation and accountability that citizens of countries aligned with U.S. power understand this, so they can hold their governments to account for foreign policy positions.

They should also understand that this unipolar power, exercised by the U.S. since the fall of the Soviet Union, is being challenged by an emerging multipolarity, particularly through the growing strength of trading bloc BRICS.

BRICS’ New Development Bank headquarters in Shanghai. (Donnie28, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Nations are breaking free from the U.S.-dominated global system, trading in their own currencies, and seeking greater economic sovereignty to avoid sanctions, the predatory practices of Western financial institutions. BRICS leaders have stated an intent to build an alternative, more equitable and just global framework for trade and co-operation.

Current U.S. foreign policy strategies that push proxy war as a means of ‘containing’ those nations leading this charge towards multipolarity, namely Russia and China, pose an unprecedented danger of nuclear exchange and the annihilation of life on Earth.

Within Western mainstream media, striving to present a contextual framework for world news stories that reflect these overarching realities is an onerous task and one fraught with risk. I’m very much aware of the price journalists face for attempting to do so.

In June, I was publicly cast as a Russian propagandist by my employer Radio New Zealand (RNZ) and thrown to the wolves over my subediting of a Reuters story on the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine.

The gross mischaracterisation created a scandal and widespread hysteria amid speculation that the national broadcaster — New Zealand’s most trusted source of news — had been infiltrated by a Russian agent. It led to weeks of intense national and international media coverage. It also left me jobless, with a 20-year career in tatters. Others around the world are being smeared in a similar fashion.

Edits ‘Pro-Kremlin Garbage’

I had worked on the RNZ digital team since September 2018. Part of my job involved selecting and processing news stories from international wires for website publication. I had approached such copy critically, finding that Reuters copy on occasions blatantly leaned towards a U.S. State Department position, while BBC copy reflected a U.K. government bias.

In both cases it led to unbalanced and distorted stories. Addressing political or cultural bias usually involved deleting or reframing the paragraph that carried it, or adding counter-factual context to achieve greater balance.

Reuters building entrance in New York City, 2007. (Eternalsleeper and Broadbeer, Wikimedia Commons,CC BY-SA 3.0)

As the Ukraine war kicked off, instances of such bias and imbalance increased, as did what I saw as a journalistic duty to remove it.

On June 8 a story on the Russian-Ukraine conflict I had subedited and then published was flagged on Twitter by New York-based lawyer and media commentator Luppe B. Luppen. He claimed it presented a propagandised version of events during the Maidan protests of 2014 and contacted Reuters.

The original paragraph had read:

“The conflict in eastern Ukraine began in 2014 after a pro-Russian president was toppled in Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution and Russia annexed Crimea, with Russian-backed separatist forces fighting Ukraine’s armed forces.”

The edited version instead stated:

“The conflict in Ukraine began in 2014 after a pro-Russian elected government was toppled during Ukraine’s violent Maidan colour revolution. Russia annexed Crimea after a referendum, as the new pro-Western government suppressed ethnic Russians in eastern and southern Ukraine, sending in its armed forces to the Donbas.”

When adding references in news copy to the Maidan coup that ousted the then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, I would have usually attributed the position to Russia as a matter of prudence. On this occasion, I didn’t. Leaving in the Reuters reporter’s byline didn’t help my case and it would be used to push the false idea my editing was surreptitious ‘tampering’, even though this was an isolated error.

My immediate boss approached me after Reuters sent an email to RNZ pointing to a breach of contract over the edited story. She emphasised the matter was “really, really serious” as I’d changed the intended meaning of the story. I took responsibility for the changes and accepted paid leave while an investigation took place, alongside the implementation of an external strategy to minimise reputational damage to the company.

In my mind, I was guilty of procedural errors and believed I may be looking at a verbal or written warning after explaining to furious bosses the reasons for the copy edits. Instead, that evening an audit of my work spanning five years was launched after RNZ informed the public it was investigating how “Russian propaganda” had been inserted into its international wires online content.

The late U.S. Sen. John McCain addressing crowds in Maidan square, Kiev, Dec. 15, 2013. (Mr.Rosewater, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

In framing the matter this way, the RNZ leadership maximised reputational damage to its organisation, as well as to myself. International coverage of the unfolding “Russian edits scandal” really took off after RNZ CEO Paul Thompson increased the maelstrom by calling the edits “pro-Kremlin garbage.”

A Political Show Trial

The broadcaster began publishing a list of other stories it found “inappropriately” edited and in breach of its editorial standards.

Three days after being put on leave, the audit had identified 16 stories of concern, prompting right-wing politicians to demand a government inquiry. Instead, the RNZ board of directors set up an independent review panel to determine what had gone wrong, re-establish public trust and ensure such “breaches” could never happen again.

The active audit was published at the top of the RNZ website, ostensibly to reassure the public and demonstrate transparency. It in effect became a type of political show trial. I felt the pressure every time it was updated with new stories, complete with editorial notes at the bottom of each. But the audit also betrayed where RNZ management stood ideologically — firmly and explicitly behind a skewed Anglo-American worldview.

It would eventually flag 49 world news stories out of a total of 1319 world stories checked. Less than half relating to Russia and Ukraine. The audit demonstrated that, when it came to Palestinian rights, class struggles and coups in Latin America, U.S. provocations against China involving Taiwan, Julian Assange’s plight, and even U.K. workers’ right to strike, no deviation from U.S. State Department or Westminster positions would be tolerated.

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My own original stories were also put under the microscope. In July 2022 I’d written a story “NZ entering Ukraine conflict ‘at whim of govt’ – former Labour general-secretary,” featuring ex-senior politicians, who said the New Zealand government was risking nuclear catastrophe by giving material support to the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine at the expense of diplomacy.

It was removed from the website and screened for Russian bias, before being republished without a byline and with a note incorrectly telling readers an earlier version of the story had lacked balance.

Resignation

Amid public scrutiny, which also included disinformation experts being invited on national media platforms to comment on foreign interference in relation to my work, as well as online threats and speculation over my motives, I resigned.

Coming to terms with the loss of a job with a young family was one thing. The circumstances of the loss was causing much more immediate anxiety.

With New Zealand part of the Five Eyes Western intelligence apparatus, I expected the security services would be knocking on my door. Isolated and feeling vulnerable, I began to catastrophize, believing there was a chance I could be removed from the country and estranged from my Kiwi children. As an Irish national I had resided in the country since 2009.

In times of crisis, I’d always prayed for help and this time was no exception.

Rendering of the “Five Eyes” intelligence network that includes Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K., the U.S. (@GDJ, Openclipart)

People Begin Rallying

I stopped reading media reports as the toxic groupthink of my former colleagues became too taxing to process. I also ignored media requests. Instead, my energy went into writing up a 14,000-word substantive statement as part of plans to meet with the review panel, which was now seeking to interview RNZ staff, as well as myself.

As I did so, light began breaking through the darkness. People who understood what was going on began to reach out. A reformed Ukrainian nationalist got in contact and offered to assist, thankful for what he said I had helped point to — the plight of his fellow countrymen who were being cynically used, many unwillingly, as cannon fodder to forward U.S. strategic interests.

Award-winning cartoonist Malcolm Evans, an outspoken critic of Israel’s occupation of Palestine who had himself been ousted from The New Zealand Herald decades before, suggested I ring lawyer Deborah Manning. I did so. The power differential between RNZ and myself troubled Manning enough that she offered to guide me through the inquiry process, alongside her colleague Simon Lamain, on a pro-bono basis.

Manning had gained a high public profile after her prolonged, but successful battle against the imprisonment and persecution of Algerian refugee Ahmed Zaoui after he arrived in New Zealand in 2002, accused by intelligence agencies of being a terrorist.

She also represented Afghan villagers during a 2019 government inquiry following a raid by members of New Zealand’s special forces in 2010 that left five dead and 15 wounded. Manning had proven herself a formidable advocate.

My sense of isolation lessened further after a supportive call from investigative journalist Nicky Hager, co-author of Hit & Run, a book detailing that NZ Special Air Service (SAS) Afghan operation. He assured me time would attest to the fact that RNZ had called it wrong.

Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs and University of Chicago Professor John J Mearsheimer, alongside other highly regarded scholars and political scientists, agreed to write letters of support to the review panel. Both men took a keen interest in the unfolding drama.

In his letter to the review panel, Sachs wrote:

“It may be that the RNZ leadership is simply trying to keep in step with official U.S. and U.K. policies, rather than to help its readers and listeners to understand the dramatic events of our time…

The claim that the edits are pro-Russian propaganda is nonsense. The edits add depth of historical context and understanding, and open minds to a deeper inquiry.”

Commenting on various elements of context I’d added to the Ukraine stories, Mearsheimer wrote:

“I think that his characterization of the Azov battalion and how it was portrayed in the West before the recent war is correct. I think his views on how Russian leaders thought about NATO enlargement and how that helped cause the war is correct. I think his identification of American involvement in the events on the Maidan and his description of it as both a color revolution and a coup is correct…

Someday, historians are going to look back at this period in amazement, wondering how the West allowed itself to engage in such an all-encompassing and vicious propaganda campaign – that is so at odds with the truth as well as liberal values. Hopefully, RNZ will correct its mistake with Mr. Hall, so those historians do not point to this incident as prime evidence of how the West lost its mind.”

Facing the Panel

Buoyed by the fact I was in good company I prepared to meet the review panel, my statement outlining the circumstances of the wires copy editing now completed.

Seated inside the ground floor of a soulless, nondescript corporate hotel in central Auckland, I nervously scanned the faces of those descending the staircase to the cold marble foyer next to our lounges, where immigrant staff served coffee, hoping to identify the person I thought might bring the group of three to the inquiry’s interview room.

Manning stood up as Willie Akel, a media law expert and the panel chairman, suddenly appeared a few metres away, greeting us with a smile and handshakes. A tall, studious-looking man in his early 60s, Akel had a history of battling for corporate media freedoms. He would be the most personable of the panel, yet the most importunate during intense cross-examinations that would take place over two days.

It became clear from my initial meeting with the three-person panel that I would not convince them that all my Russia-Ukraine edits were accurate or appropriate.

The panel did not intend to assess all stories flagged by RNZ but wanted to look at a sample to establish that inappropriate editing had indeed taken place. In my view, exchanges that followed pointed to an inability to discuss the Ukraine conflict without deference to Western orthodoxies, an implicit bias that trumped empirical evidence.

One story discussed was “UN again trying to evacuate civilians from Ukraine’s Mariupol,” published on May 6, 2022. It included a comment from an Azov Regiment commander, after which I had added: “The Azov Battalion was widely regarded before the Russian invasion by Western media as a neo-Nazi military unit.” [Related: ROBERT PARRY: When Western Media Saw Ukraine’s Neo-Nazis]

A march of Azov veterans and supporters in Kiev, 2019. (Goo3, Wikimedia Commons)

A panel member argued it had been inappropriate to add the line without also giving further balancing context, namely, that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had brought the Azov private militia into Ukraine’s regular army and in doing so had “reigned” the group in.

I pointed out that even Reuter’s own commentator Josh Cohen had said Azov’s inclusion within Ukraine’s interior ministry did not necessarily mean this and that the group continued to push its neo-Nazi ideology through non-profit activities and children’s camps.

In its subsequent report, the panel found the line’s “uncritical and unexplained inclusion” had unbalanced the story without attribution to Russia and more balancing context added. It noted a “contested and complex debate about the origins of the battalion some years earlier and the extent to which they were and still are influenced by neo-Nazi elements.”

It remains unclear why the panel believed the line needed to be attributed to Russia, while offering a Ukrainian counter position would have only amounted to adding false balance, in the absence of any real evidence Azov had renounced its fascism.

‘One-sided, Politically Coloured and Unbalanced’

The panel’s main scrutiny was directed at reporting, as uncontested fact, the Maidan events as a U.S.-backed coup that had sparked a civil war and had led to Russia’s annexation of Crimea after a referendum.

I argued that, although I had not attributed this context to the Russian position – alongside Reuter’s ‘Maidan Revolution’ U.S.-aligned narrative which I had instead removed – in mitigation the paragraph did not contain misinformation. It contained key historical antecedents to the Russian invasion.

Yanukovych was removed from office by a Parliamentary vote that the Ukrainian constitution did not allow, a move backed by the U.S. He had in any case already left Kiev the day before amid violence and threat of arrest, or worse.

The panel continued to listen intently, but with palpable scepticism, as I mentioned the intercepted phone conversion [LISTEN] between the State Department’s Victoria Nuland and diplomat Geoffrey Pyatt, where the two U.S. officials discuss who should make up the next administration, several weeks before Yanukovych was driven from power.

Oct. 8, 2014: Pyatt and Nuland at a Ukrainian State Border Guard Service Base in Kiev. (U.S. Embassy Kyiv, Flickr)

I referred to academic Ivan Katchanoski’s Revelations from Ukraine’s Maidan Massacre Trial and Investigation and Ukraine-Russia War Origins, a peer-reviewed study that presented compelling evidence snipers positioned in hotels controlled by far-right groups killed dozens of protesters and police during a false flag operation at Maidan Square, putting pressure on Yanukovych after he was accused of ordering the shootings.

[Related:  The Buried Maidan Massacre and Its Misrepresentation by the West ]

None of it mattered much. In its report, the panel found the edits to the June 8 story flagged by the New York commentator were “one-sided, politically coloured and unbalanced.” The finding came as no surprise.

I maintain this instead accurately describes Reuter’s original copy, not the version I edited. The logic used by the panel seemed to dictate that anything contested by the Western powers cannot be stated as fact, regardless of the evidence.

Inquiry Scathing of RNZ for Causing Alarm

On the other hand, the panel did show commendable fairness. It found many of the stories flagged by RNZ’s audit had not been edited inappropriately. It also took on board my reasons for not “referring up” to management when making the edits – that my managers lacked expertise in world news and that I had been siloed in a dysfunctional editorial system. They were scathing of the organisation’s structural inadequacies.

The report found no evidence I set out to introduce misinformation or disinformation, “never mind run a Russian propaganda campaign.” It was also highly critical of RNZ management for alarming the public. It found language used by the broadcaster “unhelpful in maintaining public trust” in that “listeners and others may have believed the editing had been a deliberate and orchestrated exercise in propaganda.”

The report stated: “We consider that had RNZ’s own language about the incident been more restrained, the resulting coverage might have been too.”

In response, RNZ board chairman Jim Mathers promised to implement its recommendations, which included a major restructure, improved editorial systems and the establishment of an editorial “standards” enforcer.

There were signs that RNZ was not happy with the findings over my editing. Its flagship programme Morning Report wheeled out a belligerent mainstream media figure to reassert the discredited view the edits were in fact pro-Kremlin garbage, while an RNZ manager falsely reported that the review panel had “said the ‘rogue actor’ would not have gotten away with it had RNZ’s systems and oversights been up to scratch”. The report explicitly rejected the suggestion I was a “rogue actor.”

‘Frightened, Compliant Censorship’

The panel’s inquiry gave me some closure, while putting to bed New Zealand’s fears of Russian disinformation. I was thankful for that.

But it did not address the deeper systemic malaise within RNZ and the wider corporate media ‘eco-system’. Although it questioned the veracity of the RNZ’s audit, it did not see it for what it was. That was left to veteran journalist John Pilger, who called it “frightened, compliant censorship.” That assessment was echoed by others, including Joe Lauria at Consortium News and Max Blumenthal at The Grayzone.

Should we expect it any other way, given the societal role critics like Noam Chomsky assign to media – a place where stenographers to power, gatekeepers of what can be considered reasonable discourse, shape public opinion?

My attitude had always been at the very least that we should be held to our promise of balance, fairness and accuracy and be pushed to express a preferential option for peace and justice in international news reporting. I believed approaching international news copy critically to address potential issues of bias and accuracy to be an integral part of the editorial process at any public news service.

Unfortunately, the review panel’s position seemed to align with RNZ’s view stated during the inquiry process – that international wire copy should be treated as sacrosanct.

Yet, when Associated Press journalist James La Porta last November used an unnamed “senior U.S. intelligence official” to falsely point the finger at Russia after a Ukrainian rocket crossed into NATO country Poland killing two people, he demonstrated the dangers of this position. There are numerous other examples.

Just because a story is written and edited within a well-resourced, professional international news organisation does not mean it is accurate or balanced, particularly as war rages and that organisation’s country is a party to it.

RNZ’s new editorial standards enforcer will presumably oversee an uncritical publication of this copy, conflating editorial standards with narrative control. In my view, it will not be to benefit a public that RNZ’s charter states the broadcaster is duty-bound to supply with “comprehensive, independent, accurate, impartial, and balanced regional, national and international news and current affairs.”

Most seriously, this position will not benefit informed, much-needed debate about the supposed ‘threat’ of China, as the spectre of proxy war looms ever more clearly over Asia-Pacific.

In the words of imprisoned publisher and journalist Julian Assange, if wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by the truth. It is incumbent on journalists that they get this truth out and that wider society offers them support and protection to do so.

However, given the structural restraints on journalists and the apparent chill factor around questioning narratives of power at present, it will remain difficult to do so within New Zealand’s mainstream media.

Mick Hall is an independent journalist based in New Zealand. He is a former digital journalist at Radio New Zealand (RNZ) and former Australian Associated Press (AAP) staffer, having also written investigative stories for various newspapers, including the New  Zealand Herald.

Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of  Consortium News.

Dave DeCamp: Report Details How the CIA Is Backing Ukraine’s Assassinations Inside Russia

By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, 10/23/23

A report published by The Washington Post on Monday revealed how the CIA has supported covert Ukrainian attacks inside Russia, including the killing of Darya Dugina, daughter of the prominent Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin.

The report said the killing of Dugina was carried out by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and that it was one of many operations inside Russian territory involving special units the CIA helped form in the wake of the 2014 coup in Kyiv that ousted former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

The report reads: “The missions have involved elite teams of Ukrainian operatives drawn from directorates that were formed, trained, and equipped in close partnership with the CIA, according to current and former Ukrainian and US officials. Since 2015, the CIA has spent tens of millions of dollars to transform Ukraine’s Soviet-formed services into potent allies against Moscow, officials said.”

The CIA support since 2015 has included advanced surveillance systems, training both inside Ukraine and inside the US, the building of new headquarters for Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, and intelligence sharing thought unimaginable pre-2014. Officials told the Post that the CIA still maintains a significant presence in Kyiv to this day.

The CIA helped the SBU form a new unit known as the “Fifth Directorate.” Recruits for the new unit were trained by the CIA outside of Kyiv with the purpose of forming groups “capable of operating behind front lines and working as covert groups.”

The CIA also gave major support to Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, known as the GUR. “We calculated that GUR was a smaller and more nimble organization where we could have more impact,” a former US intelligence official who worked in Ukraine told the Post. “GUR was our little baby. We gave them all new equipment and training.”

Officials insisted that the CIA was not involved in targeted killings carried out by Ukrainian intelligence and said the focus was on “bolstering those services’ abilities to gather intelligence on a dangerous adversary.” The report said the SBU and the GUR have been involved in dozens of assassinations against Russian officials in Russian-controlled Ukraine, alleged Ukrainian collaborators, and Russian officials and civilians deep inside Russia.

Darya Dugina was killed in a car bombing outside of Moscow in August 2022, but officials said her father was the real target. Despite the fact that they are civilians, Ukrainian officials justify Dugina’s killing because she was a supporter of Russia’s war in Ukraine, telling the Post she was no “innocent victim.” One security official called her the “daughter of the father of Russian propaganda.” The official said the car bombing and other operations inside Russia are “about narrative” and showing enemies of Ukraine that “punishment is imminent even for those who think they are untouchable.”

The report, which was based on conversations with more than two dozen current and former Ukrainian, US, and Western intelligence and security officials, said the CIA has objected to some of the Ukrainian operations but never withdrew support. Other assassinations inside Russia have included Stanislav Rzhitsky, a former Russian submarine commander who was killed while jogging in a park in the southern Russian city of Krasnodar, and Maksim Fomin, known as Vladlen Tatarsky, a military blogger killed in a bombing at a cafe in St. Petersburg.

The SBU was also behind the two attacks on the Kerch Bridge, which connects Russia to the Crimean Peninsula. The first attack in October 2022 was a truck bombing that killed five people. According to the Post, the driver of the truck, who was killed in the explosion, was unaware the SBU had planted a bomb in his vehicle. The second attack on the Kerch Bridge involved naval drones that, according to the Post, were “developed as part of a top-secret operation involving the CIA and other Western intelligence services.”

A former CIA official compared the CIA-backed Ukrainian intelligence services to Israel’s Mossad, which is known for being behind assassinations in Iran. “We are seeing the birth of a set of intelligence services that are like Mossad in the 1970s,” the official said, adding there are risks for NATO. “If Ukraine’s intelligence operations become even bolder — targeting Russians in third countries, for example — you could imagine how that might cause rifts with partners and come into serious tension with Ukraine’s broader strategic goals.”

Gilbert Doctorow: Are the talk shows on Russian state television just yes-men to power?

By Gilbert Doctorow, Website, 10/3/23

To those who are totally ignorant of Russia, meaning all of the American political elites and most of the foreign policy expert community, Russia is easy to comprehend, an easy target for labels like “autocracy” and “imperialist.” But then these folks don’t care much about the peculiarities of friends and allies abroad, so long as they are totally subservient to Washington. Why should they bother themselves with the realities of a country that stretches across 11 time zones, accounts for nearly 15% of the Earth’s land mass and has 145 million people drawn from a multitude of ethnic groups or “nationalities”?

Sunday night’s edition of the Vladimir Solovyov talk show gave an unequivocal negative answer to both questions in my title thanks to some extraordinary statements by one panelist, deputy chairman of the State Duma Aleksandr Mikhailovich Babakov.

Leaders and representatives of the Duma parties outside the governing United Russia group have been a permanent fixture of the Solovyov show going back years. Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov used to be an invitee, but he was not a good conversationalist and has disappeared from view. Instead, the Communist parliamentarian and chair of the Duma committee on relations with the Community of Independent States [former Soviet Union republics] Leonid Kalashnikov is a regular panelist. He and Solovyov engage in sparring, the one standing for Communism in general and a full war economy today, the other for the free market. Their contests are as predictable as televised American wrestling used to be.

The founder and leader of the right wing Liberal Democrats (LDPR), Vladimir Zhirinovsky, was a frequent guest on the Solovyov show till his death in the midst of the Covid pandemic. Solovyov shared many of Zhirinovsky’s nationalist, anti-Western views and allowed him to verbally whiplash other panelists. I know this from the receiving end when I was denounced by Zhirinovsky as a spy during my one invitation to the show back in 2016. But then again, most any Western visitor was a spy in Zhirinovsky’s lexicon and it always would draw a laugh from the audience. 

Zhirinovsky’s serious contributions to the panels were often in connection with his expert knowledge of Turkish affairs as a speaker of the language. He also roundly criticized the Putin government for its gently-gently approach to foreign relations. If Zhirinovsky had his way, the Russians would have bombed Berlin long ago. As for foreign aid, Zhirinovsky did not believe in the way it was practiced in the past by the Soviet Union with blank checks to the friends of Russia. Instead he called upon the government to use its diplomatic efforts to establish relations abroad that brought net revenues to Moscow, in emulation of the United States. As you will see below, I think this part of Zhirinovsky’s policy platform has influenced the Putin government. However, it would be better if Russia’s senior statesmen did not openly show their intentions.

 Zhirinovsky’s successor as chair of the party bloc in the Duma, Leonid Slutsky, is dull as dull can be and never appears on the talk show. However, a fellow LDPR deputy, former KGB operative Andrei Lugovoy, who is wanted by UK police on suspicion of the murder of Litvinenko, is invited fairly frequently by Solovyov and adds some spice to the discussions of relations with the West. He is no friend of London and is pushing a much more aggressive line than the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Now I turn to the panelist last night who so impressed me: Babakov. Let us begin with what he said.

The main topic he pursued was a very harsh critique of the work of the head of the Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, who is one of the relatively few survivors of the Liberal group of economic advisers at the center of power for well more than a decade. She worked under Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin. She worked under minister, later Sberbank chief executive German Gref. Both were/are Putin protégés. And, most importantly, she clearly enjoys the protection of Vladimir Putin today. In that regard, Babakov’s criticism of her is ….a direct criticism of Putin himself. And since what Babakov was saying is also being said by many ordinary Russians, its airing on state television is politically important.

Babakov told us that Nabiullina is leading the economy into the desert by its current policy of very high interest rates to combat inflation, all of which results in falling investments and stagnating production that, in turn, will set off a new round of inflation as output does not keep pace with buying power and demand. Babakov has every right to challenge the country’s financial management: he holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Moscow State University and is a successful entrepreneur who made his fortune by companies he co-founded in Ukraine in the energy sector and diverse interests including a major hotel in Kiev.

Babakov explained at length last night why Russia should look more closely at the Chinese model of economic and financial management, wherein the equivalent of Russia’s Central Bank, the Bank of China, is not an independent actor but works in close coordination with the government to support its growth plans and sets out different interest rates and conditions for the different levels of business, from small enterprises to medium and very large enterprises. Moreover, Babakov praised the Chinese rules on currency management and especially the controls on currency transfers abroad. Whereas in Russia anyone with the funds in his account can transfer up to one million dollars abroad each month, in China the limit is a thousand times less.

These remarks by Babakov are in direct contradiction with Nabiullina’s public rejection of the Chinese model as unsuitable to Russia last week at a meeting on finance at which other heavy hitters in the field, including the chairman of VTB bank (the former Foreign Trade Bank) Andrei Kostin also spoke. Kostin, by the way, had been advocating for a Chinese like bifurcation of the foreign exchange market between domestic and foreign transaction exchange rates.

Babakov also had his spear out for Finance Minister Siluanov. He repeated Siluanov’s stupid sounding advice to the two hundred parliamentarians from most Latin American countries who gathered in Moscow last week as guests of the Russian State Duma. Per Babakov, who as Duma deputy chair took part in all the proceedings, the visitors included many speakers of their national parliaments and all had made the trip to Moscow in defiance of heavy lobbying by the U.S. embassy in their country to keep them away from Russia’s embrace. What impressed him most was that the Latin Americans all expressed their support for Russia, their correct understanding of the causes of the war in Ukraine and their rejection of any sanctions against Moscow. They enthusiastically embraced Putin’s speech to them.

Of course, implied Babakov, during their stay the visitors hoped to hear about Russian investment plans in their region. Instead, Siluanov told them that money is not the essential thing in life, that what you need is to be smart and to have good hands so that you can get along on less money. To Babakov’s thinking, Siluanov was singing from the wrong scores in the wrong opera.

Will the attacks on the government’s bank chief and finance minister by Babakov and others like him bring them down? Quite possibly. The ruble’s slipping below 100 to the dollar yesterday has unnerved middle class Russians. If they listened to Kostin’s projection that in the coming year the ruble’s value in dollar terms may fall further by half, then they will be an unstoppable force against Nabiullina and the other free market defenders in Putin’s circle.

I have watched Babakov on the Solovyov show many times and he always was dapperly dressed. His demeanor is avuncular. You understand at once that he is not in anyone’s pocket. He has changed his party affiliations several times over the years. For a time he headed the very patriotic Rodina (Homeland) party that was founded by the maverick politician Dmitry Rogozin. Then he spent several years in the left-of-center A Just Russia party headed by Sergei Mironov. He quit that and took a position in a public activism organization under the aegis of the governing United Russia party. Next he was a founder of the Za pravdu (For truth) party which eventually formed an alliance with Mironov in a hyphenated joint organization.

From 2003 to 2016 Babakov was an elected member of the Duma. From 2016 to 2020, he served in the upper chamber of the Russian legislature with the title of Senator. But that was an appointive position. Next he took what is nominally a step down to run again for a seat in the State Duma, won and rose to deputy speaker there. Meanwhile, he has served on a number of Presidential missions, including responsibility for relations with organizations of compatriots abroad and on a council overseeing implementation of the country’s National Projects.

Clearly Babakov is an insider in the Russian power elite while always having freedom of movement, and as Sunday night indicated, freedom of expression. Notwithstanding his financial declarations before standing for election to the Duma showing that he owns almost nothing and has annual revenues of perhaps $20,000 per year, his Wikipedia entry tells us that he owns an estate in France said to be worth $16 million and an apartment on the Rue de l’Université in Paris. Since he is on the EU sanctions list, it is doubtful he gets much pleasure from these properties today.

To understand the complexity of Russia’s power structure, it pays to take a look at the pre-political biography of Babakov. He was born in 1963 and grew up in the capital, Kishinev (today’s Chișinău), of what is today the poorest state in Europe, Moldova (then the Moldavian SSR). So how did this boy from the far provinces get into Moscow State University and then make his way to the top of Russian-Ukrainian business and political elites?

First, it happened because Soviet society and now Russian society was and is very mobile, with many social ladders for kids with brains and talent. To those who doubt this because it does not jibe with the concept of a corrupt, autocratic regime, I say: rethink the latter, not the former.

Secondly, it happened because at the time when young Babakov was ready to enroll in a university Moldova was doing very well. It was home base of party leader Leonid Brezhnev and received priority investment into its agrarian economy and also into industry. It was closely linked to Moscow by many daily flights, more, for example than to Soviet Georgia. I know: I was there at the time. In 1978 I visited the orchards and vegetable farms of Moldova in the company of Castle & Cooke Inc. top management for furtherance of their plans to grow iceberg lettuce in the USSR. I wrote about this in my Memoirs of a Russianist, Volume I.

The agricultural machinery company FMC had very extensive farm projects in Moldova at the time to grow tomatoes and process them for puree. In another domain, the American pharmaceutical company Abbott Labs built the first infant formula factory (Similac) in the Soviet Union in Moldova in the mid-1970s. I saw that the shops in Kishinev were better stocked than those in Moscow. It was this Moldova that was the launching pad for Mr. Babakov.

Surely it was this personal experience of how a distant and formerly poor land can become prosperous under state planning and then revert to dire poverty under free market management and adverse geopolitical developments that shapes Mr. Babakov’s beliefs on the benefits of state dirigisme today. There are many others with similar experience and critical views of the now inappropriate Liberal economic policies being pursued under Vladimir Putin. They will probably win out.

ACURA Announcement: Statement on the Arrest and Detainment of American Journalists in Russia

American Committee for US-Russia Accord (ACURA), 10/23/23

In April, The American Committee for US-Russia Accord (ACURA) released a statement condemning the arrest and detainment of the American journalist Evan Gershkovich by Russian authorities on espionage charges.

Sadly, 6 months later, we are compelled to protest yet another arrest and detainment of an American journalist, Alsu Kurmasheva, an editor for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Upon her arrest, RFE/RL president Jeffrey Gedmin released a statement saying Ms. Kurmasheva, “Needs to be released so she can return to her family immediately.”

We agree.

The arrests of Mr. Gershkovich and Ms. Kurmasheva are an affront to the values of free inquiry and will only increase the already dangerous level of tension between the United States and Russia.

We call for their unconditional release.

We further call for all parties to the war in Ukraine to engage in meaningful dialogue to put an end to this conflict which has cost the lives of so many.

—The Board of the American Committee for US-Russia Accord

Jeffrey Sachs: Beyond the Neocon Debacle in Ukraine

By Jeffrey Sachs, CommonDreams, 10/3/23

We are entering the end stage of the 30-year U.S. neoconservative debacle in Ukraine. The neocon plan to surround Russia in the Black Sea region by NATO has failed. Decisions now by the U.S. and Russia will matter enormously for peace, security, and wellbeing for the entire world.

Four events have shattered the neocon hopes for NATO enlargement eastward, to Ukraine, Georgia, and onward. The first is straightforward. Ukraine has been devastated on the battlefield, with tragic and appalling losses. Russia is winning the war of attrition, an outcome that was predictable from the start but which the neocons and mainstream media continue to deny.

The second is the collapsing support in Europe for the U.S. neocon strategy. Poland no longer speaks with Ukraine. Hungary has long opposed the neocons. Slovakia has elected an anti-neocon government. E.U. leaders—including Macron, Meloni, Sanchez, Scholz, Sunak, and others—have disapproval ratings far higher than approvals.

The third is the cut in U.S. financial support for Ukraine. The grassroots of the Republican Party, several GOP Presidential candidates, and a growing number of Republican members of Congress, oppose more spending on Ukraine. In the stop-gap bill to keep the government running, Republicans stripped away new financial support for Ukraine. The White House has called for new aid legislation, but this will be an uphill fight.

The fourth, and most urgent from Ukraine’s point of view, is the likelihood of a Russian offensive. Ukraine’s casualties are in the hundreds of thousands, and Ukraine has burned through its artillery, air defenses, tanks, and others heavy weapons. Russia is likely to follow with a massive offensive.

Biden foolishly refused to negotiate with Putin in December 2021. It’s time to negotiate now.

The neocons have created utter disasters in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and now Ukraine. The U.S. political system has not yet held the neocons to account, since foreign policy is carried out with little public or congressional scrutiny to date. Mainstream media have sided with the slogans of the neocons.

Ukraine is at risk of economic, demographic, and military collapse. What should the U.S. government do to face this potential disaster?

Urgently, it should change course. Britain advises the U.S. to escalate, as Britain is stuck with 19th-century imperial reveries. U.S. neocons are stuck with imperial bravado. Cooler heads urgently need to prevail.

President Joe Biden should immediately inform President Vladimir Putin that the U.S. will end NATO enlargement eastward if the U.S. and Russia reach a new agreement on security arrangements. By ending NATO expansion, the U.S. can still save Ukraine from the policy debacles of the past 30 years.

Biden should agree to negotiate a security arrangement of the kind, though not precise details, of Putin’s proposals of December 17, 2021. Biden foolishly refused to negotiate with Putin in December 2021. It’s time to negotiate now.

There are four keys to an agreement. First, as part of an overall agreement, Biden should agree that NATO will not enlarge eastward, but not reverse the past NATO enlargement. NATO would of course not tolerate Russian encroachments in existing NATO states. Both Russia and the U.S. would pledge to avoid provocations near Russia’s borders, including provocative missile placement, military exercises, and the like.

Second, the new U.S.-Russia security agreement should cover nuclear weapons. The U.S. unilateral withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, followed by the placement of Aegis missiles in Poland and Romania, gravely inflamed tensions, which were further exacerbated by the U.S. withdrawal from the Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) Agreement in 2019 and Russia’s suspension of the New Start Treaty in 2023. Russian leaders have repeatedly pointed to U.S. missiles near Russia, unconstrained by the abandoned ABM Treaty, as a dire threat to Russia’s national security.

Third, Russia and Ukraine would agree on new borders, in which the overwhelmingly ethnic Russian Crimea and heavily ethnic Russian districts of eastern Ukraine would remain part of Russia. The border changes would be accompanied by security guarantees for Ukraine backed unanimously by the UN Security Council and other states such as Germany, Turkey, and India.

Fourth, as part of a settlement, the U.S., Russia, and the E.U. would re-establish trade, finance, cultural exchange, and tourist relations. It’s certainly time once again to hear Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky in U.S. and European concert halls.

Border changes are a last resort, and should be made under the auspices of the UN Security Council. They must never be an invitation to further territorial demands, such as by Russia regarding ethnic Russians in other countries. Yet borders change, and the U.S. has recently backed two border changes. NATO bombed Serbia for 47 days until it relinquished the Albanian-majority region of Kosovo. In 2008, the U.S. recognized Kosovo as a sovereign nation. The U.S. government similarly backed South Sudan’s insurgency to break away from Sudan.

If Russia, Ukraine, or the U.S. subsequently violated the new agreement, they would be challenging the rest of the world. As President John F. Kennedy Jr. once observed, “even the most hostile nations can be relied upon to accept and keep those treaty obligations, and only those treaty obligations, which are in their own interest.”

The U.S. neocons carry much blame for undermining Ukraine’s 1991 borders. Russia did not claim Crimea until after the U.S.-backed overthrow of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Nor did Russia annex the Donbas after 2014, instead calling on Ukraine to honor the UN-backed Minsk II agreement, based on autonomy for the Donbas. The neocons preferred to arm Ukraine to retake the Donbas by force rather than grant the Donbas autonomy.

The long-term key to peace in Europe is collective security as called for by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). According to OSCE agreements, OSCE member states “will not strengthen their security at the expense of the security of other States.” Neocon unilateralism undermined Europe’s collective security by pushing NATO enlargement without regard to third parties, notably Russia. Europe—including the E.U., Russia, and Ukraine—needs more OSCE and less neocon unilateralism as key to lasting peace in Europe.

The Dissenter: Consortium News Sues NewsGuard, US Government For Alleged Defamation

By Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter, 10/23/23

Consortium News sued the United States government and NewsGuard Technologies for allegedly defaming the independent media organization and violating the organization’s First Amendment rights.

A complaint [PDF] filed in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York claims that the Pentagon’s U.S. Cyber Command and NewsGuard are “carrying out a governmental program” under a contract known as “Misinformation Fingerprints” that involves the public labeling, targeting, and stigmatizing of news organizations that “differ or dissent from U.S. policy in connection with Russia or Ukraine.”

Media organizations that differ with U.S. official policy are labeled not “trustworthy,” purveyors of “false content,” or treated as “Russian propagandists” that are “anti-U.S.” 

To remedy the alleged defamation and attack on freedom of the press, Consortium News seeks $13.6 million in “punitive” damages—twice the capital raised by NewsGuard in its push for investors.

Consortium News also requests an injunction to bar NewsGuard from continuing their practice of censorship that involves affixing false “nutrition labels” to their published articles. 

“The First Amendment rights of all American media are threatened by this arrangement with the Defense Department that defames and threatens to abridge the speech of U.S. media groups,” declared Bruce Afran, an attorney representing Consortium News.

Afran added, “When media groups such as Consortium News are condemned by the government as ‘anti-U.S.’ and are accused of publishing ‘false content’ because they disagree with U.S. policies, the result is self-censorship and destruction of the public debate intended by the First Amendment.”

According to the complaint, the Defense Department granted NewsGuard a nearly $750,000 contract for tracking “misinformation” in September 2021. 

“Our work for the Pentagon’s Cyber Command is focused on the identification and analysis of information operations targeting the US and its allies conducted by hostile governments, including Russia and China,” NewsGuard co-CEO Gordon Crovitz acknowledged in March 2023. “Our analysts alert officials in the U.S. and in other democracies, including Ukraine, about new false narratives targeting America and its allies, and we provide an understanding of how this disinformation spreads online.”

NewsGuard’s board of directors as well as its advisory board include former Homeland Security director Tom Ridge, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden, and former NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

While Crovitz and the startup’s other CEO Steven Brill are veterans of the news media, Consortium News contends that NewsGuard is far from a “journalistic endeavor.” Its “reviewers” contact organizations they intend to “target” and act as if they are “reporters.” However, at any given time, they are effectively collecting intelligence that will be shared with Cybercom involving media organizations that supposedly spread Russian “misinformation.”

If NewsGuard takes issue with a handful of articles from a media organization, then every article published by that entity will have a “warning label.” It does not matter if the vast majority of this content has not been disputed by the company.

The company has only disputed six articles out of more than 20,000 articles, according to Consortium News. When subscribers use NewsGuard’s browser tool, all articles on the site carry warnings.

More specifically, Consortium News asserts that NewsGuard’s defamation began on August 11, 2022, when they attached the following “red flag” (now a blue flag) and warning described the organization as a “website that covers international politics from a left-wing, anti-U.S. perspective that has published false claims about the Ukraine-Russia war and other international conflicts.”

NewsGuard’s reviews involve attaching “nutrition labels” that tell subscribers of their service that Consortium News “repeatedly” publishes “false content,” refuses to “correct or clarify errors,” and declines to “gather and present information responsibly.”

Exhibit filed along with the amended complaint filed in the United States District Court of the Southern District of New York

Additionally, the label is affixed to content that Consortium News republishes to their website. That means that an article published by Common Dreams on the war in Ukraine can have a 100% rating on Common Dreams but a 47.5% rating when the “identical text” is posted to Consortium News.

Before the “nutrition labels” first appeared on Consortium News’ articles, NewsGuard employee Zachary Fishman contacted the media organization to conduct a “review” of the site’s “publication of false content.” For example, Fishman singled out a February 2022 article headlined, “Ukraine: Guides to Reflection” and called attention to this portion of the article.

Hence, the inflation of Russian behavior in Ukraine (where Washington organized a coup against a democratically elected government because we disliked its political complexion) and Syria (where Russia’s intervention is at the request of the established government while the U.S. commitment to occupying parts of it has no legal basis).

NewsGuard took issue with holding the U.S. government responsible for the role that U.S. officials played in the coup in Ukraine in 2014.

Consortium News editor-in-chief Joe Lauria showed NewsGuard that many of the details questioned by NewsGuard could be found in reports published by BBC, The Guardian, Christian Science Monitor, and The Progressive. But those sites do not have labels that cast doubt on the veracity of their journalism.

Such false claims about Consortium News, as the complaint asserts, violate the media organization’s First Amendment rights because NewsGuard is working jointly with Cybercom and receives payment to “punish or discourage speech that is contrary to U.S. policy positions.”

NewsGuard has an initiative with public libraries and libraries of public universities. On the company’s website, they highlight a “case study” from Cienega High School in Vail, Arizona, which is a public school.

“With NewsGuard, the information is there for the students,” said Chris Salvagio, a Cienega High School teacher [PDF]. “Kids don’t really know the meaning of credibility and transparency, so having NewsGuard’s criteria for each listed in a way that’s accessible and easy to use helps, too, by helping us come up with a clear definition of what a reliable source is. NewsGuard really helped me buttress the things I’ve already taught before.”

In January 2019, the New York Times published a profile of the company that described its plans to fight “fake news.” Crovitz seemed to pose the type of government involvement in news labeling that Cybercom has encouraged his company to perform.

“We’d be very uncomfortable if the government were mandating anything with regard to news,” Crovitz declared, when asked if they wanted to see an equivalent to Food and Drug Administration (FDA) labeling for media. “That would violate free speech values. You have the First Amendment.”

In May 2022, PayPal banned Consortium News from using their service but provided little to no explanation for their decision. It is unclear to what extent NewsGuard’s labeling may have influenced PayPal’s censorious action.

Finally, NewsGuard has also abused its influence over journalism and fact-checking online by labeling WikiLeaks with a red warning.

“This website fails to meet several basic standards of credibility and transparency,” NewsGuard deceitfully stated. A “nutrition label” described WikiLeaks as a “publisher of confidential documents, often acquired from leakers and hackers. WikiLeaks published hacked emails, traced to the Kremlin, that hurt Democrats ahead of the 2016 presidential election.”

NewsGuard acknowledged that WikiLeaks did not “repeatedly publish false content” and, in fact, revealed who is in charge, including “any possible conflicts of interest.” It did not publish “deceptive headlines.”

Yet the tracking tool maintained the site failed to gather and present information responsibly and did not handle the “difference between news and opinion responsibly,” which are common responses from the US national security state to undermine the credibility of independent media organizations that challenge dominant narratives. 

While the U.S. Justice Department prosecutes WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (a case that Consortium News has extensively covered), NewsGuard seeks to scare students, academics, and the general public into avoiding the transparency website as a resource, even though news media like the Washington Post and New York Times have frequently cited documents from WikiLeaks in their coverage of U.S. foreign policy.

Full press conference with Bruce Afran and Joe Lauria on the new lawsuit:

Chas Freeman: The Many Lessons of the Ukraine War

By Chas Freeman, Website, 9/26/23

The Many Lessons of the Ukraine War
Remarks to the East Bay Citizens for Peace

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Visiting Scholar, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University
The Barrington Library, Barrington, Rhode Island, 26 September 2023

I want to speak to you tonight about Ukraine – what has happened to it and why, how it is likely to emerge from the ordeal to which great power rivalry has subjected it; and what we can learn from this.  I do so with some trepidation and a warning to this audience.  My talk, like the conflict in Ukraine, is a long and complicated one.  It contradicts propaganda that has been very convincing.  My talk will offend anyone committed to the official narrative.  The way the American media have dealt with the Ukraine war brings to mind a comment by Mark Twain: “The researches of many commentators have already thrown much darkness on this subject, and it is probable that, if they continue, we shall soon know nothing at all about it.”

It is said that, in war, truth is the first casualty.  War is typically accompanied by a fog of official lies.  No such fog has ever been as thick as in the Ukraine war.  While many hundreds of thousands of people have fought and died in Ukraine, the propaganda machines in Brussels, Kyiv, London, Moscow, and Washington have worked overtime to ensure that we take passionate sides, believe what we want to believe, and condemn anyone who questions the narrative we have internalized.  No one not on the front lines has any real idea of what has been happening in this war.  What we know is only what our governments and other supporters of the war want us to know.  And they have developed the bad habit of inhaling their own propaganda, which guarantees delusional policies.

Every government that is a party to the Ukraine War – Kyiv, Moscow, Washington, and other NATO capitals – has been guilty of various degrees of self-deception and blundering misfeasance.  The consequences for all have been dire.  For Ukraine, they have been catastrophic.  A radical rethinking of policy by all concerned is long overdue.

Whence and Whither NATO?

First, some necessary background.  NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) came into being to defend the European countries within the post-World War II American sphere of influence against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and its satellite nations.  NATO’s area of responsibility was the territory of its members in North America and Western Europe, but nowhere beyond that.  The alliance helped maintain a balance of power and keep the peace in Europe during the four-plus decades of the Cold War.  In 1991, however, the USSR dissolved, and the Cold War ended.  That eliminated any credible threat to NATO members’ territory and raised this issue: if NATO was still the answer to something, what was the question?

The U.S. armed forces had no problem responding to that conundrum.  They had compelling vested interests in the preservation of NATO.

NATO had created and sustained a post-World War II European role and presence for the U.S. military,This justified a much larger U.S. force structure and many more highly desirable billets for flag officers[1] than would otherwise exist,NATO enhanced the international stature of the American armed forces while fostering a unique U.S. competence in multinational alliance and coalition management, andIt offered tours of duty in Europe that made peacetime military service more attractive to U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines.

Then, too, the 20th century had appeared to underscore that U.S. security was inseparable from that of other north Atlantic countries.  The existence of European empires ensured that wars among the great powers of Europe – the Napoleonic wars, World War I and World War II – soon morphed into world wars.  NATO was how the United States dominated and managed the Euro-Atlantic region in the Cold War.  Disbanding NATO or a U.S. withdrawal from it would, arguably, just free Europeans to renew their quarreling and start yet another war that might not be confined to Europe.

So, NATO had to be kept in business.  The obvious way to accomplish that was to find a new, non-European role for the organization.  NATO, it came to be said, had to go “out of area or out of business.”  In other words, the alliance had to be repurposed to project military power beyond the territories of its Western European and North American member states.

In 1998, NATO went to war with Serbia, bombing it in 1999 to detach Kosovo from it.  In 2001, in response to the ‘9/11’ terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, it joined the U.S. in occupying and attempting to pacify Afghanistan.[2]  In 2011, NATO fielded forces to engineer regime change in Libya.

The Coup in Kyiv, Crimea, and the Rebellion of Russian Speaking Ukrainians

In 2014, after a well-prepared[3] US-sponsored anti-Russian coup in Kyiv, Ukrainian ultranationalists banned the official use of Russian and other minority languages in their country and, at the same time, affirmed Ukraine’s intention to become part of NATO.  Among other consequences, Ukrainian membership in NATO would place Russia’s 250-year-old naval base in the Crimean city of Sebastopol under NATO and hence U.S. control.  Crimea was Russian-speaking and had several times voted not to be part of Ukraine.  So, citing the precedent of NATO’S violent intervention to separate Kosovo from Serbia, Russia organized a referendum in Crimea that endorsed its reincorporation in the Russian Federation.  The results were consistent with previous votes on the issue.

Meanwhile, in response to Ukraine’s banning of the use of Russian in government offices and education, predominantly Russian-speaking areas in the country’s Donbas region attempted to secede.  Kyiv sent forces to suppress the rebellion.  Moscow responded by backing Ukrainian Russian speakers’ demands for the minority rights guaranteed to them by both the pre-coup Ukrainian constitution and the principles of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).  NATO backed Kyiv against Moscow.  An escalating civil war among Ukrainians ensued.  This soon evolved into an intensifying proxy war in Ukraine between the United States, NATO, and Russia.

Negotiations at Minsk, mediated by the OSCE with French and German support, brokered agreement between Kyiv and Moscow on a package of measures, including:

a ceasefire,the withdrawal of heavy weapons from the front line,the release of prisoners of war,constitutional reform in Ukraine granting self-government to certain areas of Donbas, andthe restoration of Kyiv’s control of the rebel areas’ borders with Russia.

The United Nations Security Council endorsed these terms.  They represented Moscow’s acceptance that Russian-speaking provinces in Ukraine would remain part of a united but federalized Ukraine, provided they enjoyed Québec-style linguistic autonomy.  But, with U.S. support, Ukraine refused to carry out what it had agreed to.  Years later, the French and Germans admitted that their mediation efforts at Minsk had been a ruse directed at gaining time to arm Kyiv against Moscow and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (like his predecessor in office, Petro Poroshenko) confessed that he had never planned to implement the accords.

Moscow and NATO Enlargement

In 1990, in the context of German reunification, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and Russia’s abandonment of its politico-economic sphere of influence in Central and Eastern Europe, the West had several times somewhat slyly but solemnly promised not to fill the resulting strategic vacuum by expanding NATO into it.  But as the 1990s proceeded, despite a lack of enthusiasm on the part of some other NATO members, the United States insisted on doing just that.  NATO enlargement steadily erased the Eastern European cordon sanitaire of independent neutral states that successive governments in Moscow had considered essential to Russian security.  As former members of the Warsaw Pact entered NATO, U.S. weaponry, troops, and bases appeared on their territory.  In 2008, in a final move to extend the U.S. sphere of influence to Russia’s borders, Washington persuaded NATO to declare its intention to admit both Ukraine and Georgia as members.

The eastward deployment of U.S. forces placed ballistic missile defense launchers in both Romania and Poland.  These were technically capable of rapid reconfiguration to mount short-range strikes on Moscow.  Their deployment fueled Russian fears of a decapitating U.S. surprise attack.  If Ukraine entered NATO and the U.S. made comparable deployments there, Russia would have only about five minutes’ warning of a strike on Moscow.  NATO’s role in detaching Kosovo from Serbia and in U.S. regime-change and pacification operations in Afghanistan and Libya as well as its support of anti-Russian forces in Ukraine, had convinced Moscow that it could no longer dismiss NATO as a purely defensive alliance.

As early as 1994, successive Russian governments began to warn the U.S. and NATO that continued NATO expansion – especially to Ukraine and Georgia – would compel a forceful response.  Washington was aware of Russian determination to do this from multiple sources, including reports from its ambassadors in Moscow.  In February 2007. Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaking at the Munich Security Conference, declared: “I think it is obvious that NATO expansion … represents a serious provocation …  And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?”  On February 1, 2008, Ambassador Bill Burns, now the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), warned in a telegram from Moscow that, on this subject Russians were united and serious.  Burns felt so strongly about the consequences of NATO expansion into Ukraine that he gave his cable the subject line, “Nyet Means Nyet” [“No means no.”]

In April 2008, NATO nonetheless invited both Ukraine and Georgia to join it.  Moscow protested that their “membership in the alliance is a huge strategic mistake which would have most serious consequences for pan-European security.”  By August 2008, as if to underscore this point, when an emboldened Georgia sought to extend its rule to rebellious minority regions on the Russian border, Moscow went to war to consolidate their independence.

Civil and Proxy War in Ukraine

Less than a day after of the US-engineered coup that installed an anti-Russian regime in Kyiv in 2014, Washington formally recognized the new regime.  When Russia then annexed Crimea and civil war broke out with Ukraine’s Russian speakers, the United States sided with and armed the Ukrainian ultranationalists whose policies had alienated Crimea and provoked the Russian-speaking secessionists.  The United States and NATO began a multi-billion-dollar effort to reorganize, retrain, and re-equip Kyiv’s armed forces.  The avowed purpose was to enable Kyiv to reconquer the Donbas and eventually Crimea.  Ukraine’s regular army was then decrepit.  Kyiv’s initial attacks on Russian speakers in the Ukrainian eastern and southern regions were largely conducted by ultranationalist militias.[4]  By 2015, Russian soldiers were fighting alongside the Donbas rebels.  An undeclared US/NATO proxy war with Russia had begun.

Over the course of the next eight years – during which the Ukrainian civil war continued – Kyiv built a NATO-trained army of 700,000 – not counting one million reserves – and hardened it in battle with Russian-supported separatists.  Ukrainian regulars numbered only slightly less than Russia’s then 830,000 active-duty military personnel.  In eight years, Ukraine had acquired a larger force than any NATO member other than the United States or Türkiye, outnumbering the armed forces of Britain, France, and Germany combined. Not surprisingly, Russia saw this as a threat.

Meanwhile, as tensions with Russia escalated, in early 2019 the United States unilaterally withdrew from the Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) Treaty, which had barred ground-launched missiles with ranges of up to 3,420 miles from deployment in Europe.  Russia condemned this as a “destructive” act that would stoke security risks.  Despite ongoing misgivings on the part of some other NATO members, at American insistence, NATO continued periodically to reiterate its offer to incorporate Ukraine as a member, doing so once more on September 1, 2021.  By that time, after billions of dollars of U.S. training and arms transfers, Kyiv judged it was finally ready to crush its Russian speakers’ rebellion and their Russian allies.  As 2021 ended, Ukraine stepped up pressure on the Donbas separatists and deployed forces to mount a major offensive against them timed for early 2022.

Moscow Demands Negotiations

At about the same time, in mid-December 2021, twenty-eight years after Moscow’s first warning to Washington, Vladimir Putin issued a formal demand for written security guarantees to reduce the apparent threats to Russia from NATO enlargement by restoring Ukrainian neutrality, banning the stationing of U.S. forces on Russia’s borders, and reinstating limits on the deployment of intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles in Europe.  The Russian foreign ministry then presented a draft treaty to Washington incorporating these terms – which echoed similar demands put forward by former Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1997.  At the same time, apparently both to underscore Moscow’s seriousness and to counter Kyiv’s planned offensive against the Donbas secessionists, Russia massed troops along its borders with Ukraine.

On January 26, 2022, the U.S. formally responded that neither it nor NATO would agree to negotiate Ukrainian neutrality or other such issues with Russia.  A few days later, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov laid out his understanding of the American and NATO positions at a meeting of Russia’s Security Council as follows:

“[Our] Western colleagues are not prepared to take up our major proposals, primarily those on NATO’s eastward non-expansion. This demand was rejected with reference to the bloc’s so-called open-door policy and the freedom of each state to choose its own way of ensuring security. Neither the United States, nor [NATO] … proposed an alternative to this key provision.”

Moscow wanted negotiations but, in their absence, was prepared to go to war to remove the threats to which it objected.  Washington knew this when it rejected talks with Moscow.  The American refusal to talk was an unambiguous decision to accept the risk of war rather than explore any compromise or accommodation with Russia.  U.S. and allied intelligence services immediately began releasing information purporting to describe impending Russian military operations[5] in what they described as an attempt to deter them.

Russia Invades Ukraine

In mid-February, fighting between Ukrainian army and secessionist forces in Donbas intensified, with OSCE observers reporting a rapid rise in ceasefire violations by both sides but with most allegedly initiated by Kyiv.  Perhaps disingenuously, the Donbas secessionists appealed to Moscow to protect them and ordered a general evacuation of civilians to safe havens in Russia.  On February 21, Russian President Putin recognized the independence of the two Donbas “people’s republics” and ordered Russian forces to secure them against Ukrainian attacks.

On February 24, 2022, in an address to the Russian nation, Putin declared that “Russia cannot feel safe, develop, and exist with a constant threat emanating from the territory of modern Ukraine” and announced that he had ordered what he called a “special military operation” “to protect people who have been subjected to bullying and genocide . . . for the last eight years” and to “strive for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.”  He added that:

“It is a fact that over the past 30 years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries regarding the principles of equal and indivisible security in Europe. In response to our proposals, we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts at pressure and blackmail, while the North Atlantic alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns. Its military machine is moving and, as I said, is approaching our very border.”

The official narrative put forward in U.S. and NATO information warfare against Russia contradicts every element of this statement by President Putin, but the record affirms it.

The Run-up to the U.S.-Russian Proxy War in Ukraine

In the post-Soviet era:

NATO – the U.S. sphere of influence and military presence in Europe – constantly expanded toward Russia’s borders despite escalating Russian warnings and protests.By contrast, Moscow was in constant retreat. It had abandoned its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.  It made no effort to reestablish it.Moscow repeatedly warned that NATO enlargement and U.S. forward deployment of forces that might threaten it, especially from Ukraine, were a grave threat to it to which it would feel compelled to react.Given NATO’s transformation from a purely defensive, Europe-focused alliance into an instrument for power projection in support of U.S. regime-change and other military operations beyond its members’ borders, Moscow had a reasonable basis for concern that Ukrainian membership in NATO would pose an active threat to its security. This threat was underscored by U.S. withdrawal from the treaty that had prevented it from stationing intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe, including in Ukraine.Moscow consistently demanded neutrality for Ukraine. Neutrality would make Ukraine both a buffer and bridge between itself and the rest of Europe, rather than part of Russia or a platform for Russian power projection against the rest of Europe.By contrast, the United States sought to make Ukraine a member of NATO – part of its sphere of influence – and a platform for the deployment of U.S. military power against Russia.Moscow agreed at Minsk to respect continued Ukrainian sovereignty in the Donbas region, provided the rights of Russian speakers there were guaranteed. But, with support from the U.S. and NATO, Ukraine declined to implement the Minsk agreement and redoubled its effort to subjugate the Donbas.When Washington refused to hear the Russian case for mutual accommodation in Europe and instead insisted on Ukrainian membership in NATO, the U.S. government knew that this would produce a Russian military response. In fact, Washington publicly predicted this.Early in the resulting war, when third-party mediation achieved a draft peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine, the West – represented by the British – insisted that Ukraine repudiate it.

This sad incident brings me to the war aims of the participants in the war.

War Aims in Ukraine

Kyiv has not wavered from its objectives of:

Forging a purely Ukrainian national identity from which Russian and other languages, cultures, and religious authorities are excluded.Subjugating the Russian speakers who rebelled in response to this attempt at their forced assimilation.Obtaining U.S. and NATO protection and integrating with the EU.Reconquering the Russian-speaking territories Moscow has illegally annexed from Ukraine, including both the Donbas oblasts and Crimea.

Moscow clearly stated its maximum and minimum objectives in the draft treaty that it presented to Washington on December 17, 2021.  Core Russian interests have been and remain:

(1) to deny Ukraine to the American sphere of influence that has engulfed the rest of Eastern Europe by compelling Ukraine to affirm neutrality between the United States / NATO and Russia, and(2) to protect and ensure the basic rights of Russian speakers in Ukraine.

Washington’s objectives – which NATO has dutifully adopted as its own – have been much more open-ended and unspecific.  As National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan put it in June 2022,

“We have . . .  refrained from laying out what we see as an endgame. . .. We have been focused on what we can do today, tomorrow, next week to strengthen the Ukrainians’ hand to the maximum extent possible, first on the battlefield and then ultimately at the negotiating table.”

Inasmuch as the first principle of warfare is to establish realistic objectives, a strategy to achieve them, and a plan for war termination, this is a perfect description of how to brew up a “forever war.”  As Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and Yemen attest, this has become the established American way of war.  No clear objectives, no plan to achieve them, and no concept of how to end the war, on what terms, and with whom.

The most cogent statement of U.S. objectives in this war was offered by President Biden as it began.  He said his goal with Russia was to “sap its economic strength and weaken its military for years to come” – whatever it takes.  At no point has the United States government or NATO declared that the protection of Ukraine or Ukrainians, as opposed to exploiting their bravery to take down Russia, is the central American objective.  In April 2022, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin reiterated that U.S. aid to Ukraine was intended to weaken and isolate Russia and thereby deprive it of any credible capacity to make war in future.  Quite a few American politicians and pundits have extolled the benefits to having Ukrainians rather than Americans sacrifice their lives for this purpose.  Some have gone farther and advocated the breakup of the Russian Federation as a war aim.  If you are Russian, you don’t have to be paranoid to see such threats as existential.  Russian President Putin assesses U.S. war aims as directed at humbling the Russian Federation strategically and, if possible, overthrowing its government, and dismembering it.[6]  The United States has not disputed this assessment.

Peace Set Aside

In mid-March 2022, the government of Turkey and Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett mediated between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators, who tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement.  The agreement provided that Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.  A meeting between Russian President Putin and Ukrainian President Zelensky was in the process of being arranged to finalize this agreement, which the negotiators had initialed ad referendum – meaning subject to the approval of their superiors.

On March 28, 2022. President Zelensky publicly affirmed that Ukraine was ready for neutrality combined with security guarantees as part of a peace agreement with Russia.  But on April 9 British Prime Minister Boris Johnson made a surprise visit to Kyiv.  During this visit, he reportedly urged Zelensky not to meet Putin because (1) Putin was a war criminal and weaker than he seemed.  He should and could be crushed rather than accommodated; and (2) even if Ukraine was ready to end the war, NATO was not.

Zelensky’s proposed meeting with Putin was then called off.  Putin declared that talks with Ukraine had come to a dead end.  Zelensky explained that “Moscow would like to have one treaty that would resolve all the issues. However, not everyone sees themselves at the table with Russia. For them, security guarantees for Ukraine is one issue, and the agreement with the Russian Federation is another issue.”  This marked the end of bilateral Russian-Ukrainian negotiations and thus of any prospect of a resolution of the conflict anywhere but on the battlefield.

What Happened and Who’s Winning What

This war was born in and has been continued due to miscalculations by all sides.  NATO expansion was legal but predictably provocative.  Russia’s response was entirely predictable, if illegal, and has proven very costly to it.  Ukraine’s de facto military integration into NATO has resulted in its devastation.

The United States calculated that Russian threats to go to war over Ukrainian neutrality were bluffs that might be deterred by outlining and denigrating Russian plans and intentions as Washington understood them.  Russia assumed that the United States would prefer negotiations to war and would wish to avoid the redivision of Europe into hostile blocs.  Ukrainians counted on the West protecting their country.  When Russian performance in the first months of the war proved lackluster, the West concluded that Ukraine could defeat it.  None of these calculations have proved correct.

Nevertheless, official propaganda, amplified by subservient mainstream and social media, has convinced most in the West that rejecting negotiations on NATO expansion and encouraging Ukraine to fight Russia is somehow “pro-Ukrainian.”  Sympathy for the Ukrainian war effort is entirely understandable, but, as the Vietnam War should have taught us, democracies lose when cheerleading replaces objectivity in reporting and governments prefer their own propaganda to the truth of what is happening on the battleground.

The only way you can judge the success or failure of policies is by reference to the objectives they were designed to achieve.  So, how are the participants in the Ukraine War doing in terms of achieving their objectives?

Let’s start with Ukraine.

From 2014 to 2022, the civil war in Donbas took nearly 15,000 lives.  How many have been killed in action since the US/NATO-Russian proxy war began in February 2022 is unknown but is certainly in the several hundreds of thousands.  Casualty numbers have been concealed by unprecedentedly intense information warfare.  The only information in the West about the dead and wounded has been propaganda from Kyiv claiming vast numbers of Russian dead while revealing nothing at all about Ukrainian casualties.  It is known, however, that ten percent of Ukrainians are now involved with the armed forces and 78 percent have relatives or friends who have been killed or wounded.  An estimated 50,000 Ukrainians are now amputees.  (By comparison, only 41,000 Britons had to have amputations in World War I, when the procedure was often the only one available to prevent death.  Fewer than 2,000 U.S. veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions had amputations.)  Most observers believe that Ukrainian forces have taken much heavier losses than their Russian enemies and that hundreds of thousands of them have given their lives in their country’s defense and efforts to retake territory occupied by the Russians.

When the war began, Ukraine had a population of about thirty-one million.  The country has since lost at least one-third of its people.  Over six million have taken refuge in the West.  Two million more have left for Russia. Another eight million Ukrainians have been driven from their homes but remain in Ukraine.

Ukraine’s infrastructure, industries, and cities have been devastated and its economy destroyed.  As is usual in wars, corruption – long a prominent feature of Ukrainian politics – has been rampant.  Ukraine’s nascent democracy is no more, with all opposition parties, uncontrolled media outlets, and dissent outlawed.

On the other hand, Russian aggression has united Ukrainians, including many who are Russian speaking, to an extent never seen before.  Moscow has thereby inadvertently reinforced the separate Ukrainian identity that both Russian mythology and President Putin have sought to deny.  What Ukraine has lost in territory it has gained in patriotic cohesion based on passionate opposition to Moscow.

The flip side of this is that Ukraine’s Russian-speaking separatists have also had their Russian identity reinforced.  Ukrainian refugees in Russia are the hardest of hardliners demanding retribution from Kyiv.  There is now little to no possibility of Russian speakers accepting a status in a united Ukraine, as would have been the case under the Minsk Accords.  And, with the failure of Ukraine’s “counteroffensive,” it is very unlikely that Donbas or Crimea will ever return to Ukrainian sovereignty.   As the war continues, Ukraine may well lose still more territory, including its access to the Black Sea.  What has been lost on the battlefield and in the hearts of the people cannot be regained at the negotiating table.  Ukraine will emerge from this war maimed, crippled, and much reduced in both territory and population.

Finally, there is now no realistic prospect of Ukrainian membership in NATO.  As NSC Advisor Sullivan has said, “everyone needs to look squarely at the fact” that allowing Ukraine to join NATO at this point “means war with Russia.”  NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has stated that the prerequisite for Ukrainian membership in NATO is a peace treaty between it and Russia.  No such treaty is anywhere in sight.  In continuing to insist that Ukraine will become a NATO member once the war is concluded, the West has perversely incentivized Russia not to agree to end the war.  But, in the end, Ukraine will have to make its peace with Russia, almost certainly largely on Russian terms.

Whatever else the war may be achieving, it has not been good for Ukraine.  Ukraine’s bargaining position vis-à-vis Russia has been greatly weakened.  But then, Kyiv’s fate has always been an afterthought in U.S. policy circles.  Washington has instead sought to exploit Ukrainian courage to thrash Russia, reinvigorate NATO, and reinforce U.S. primacy in Europe.  And it has not spent any time at all thinking about how to restore peace to Europe.

How about Russia?

Has it succeeded in expelling American influence from Ukraine, forced Kyiv to declare neutrality, or reinstating the rights of Russian speakers in Ukraine?  Clearly not.

For now, at least, Ukraine has become a complete dependency of the United States and its NATO allies.  Kyiv is an embittered, long-term antagonist of Moscow.  Kyiv clings to its ambition to join NATO.  Russians in Ukraine are the targets of the local version of cancel culture.  Whatever the outcome of the war, mutual animosity has erased the Russian myth of Russian-Ukrainian brotherhood based on a common origin in Kievan Rus.  Russia has had to abandon three centuries of efforts to identify with Europe and instead pivot to China, India, the Islamic world, and Africa.  Reconciliation with a seriously alienated European Union will not come easily, if at all.  Russia may not have lost on the battlefield or been weakened or strategically isolated, but it has incurred huge opportunity costs.

Then, too, NATO has expanded to include Finland and Sweden.  This does not change the military balance in Europe.  Western portrayal of Russia as inherently predatory notwithstanding, Moscow has had neither the desire nor the capability to attack either of these two formerly very Western-aligned and formidably armed but nominally “neutral” states.  Nor does either Finland or Sweden have any intention of joining an unprovoked attack on Russia.  But their decision to join NATO is politically wounding for Moscow.

Since the West shows no willingness to accommodate Russian security concerns, if Moscow is to achieve its goals, it now has no apparent alternative to battling on.  As it does so, it is stimulating European determination to meet previously ignored NATO targets for defense spending and to acquire self-reliant military capabilities directed at countering Russia independently of those of the United States.  Poland is reemerging as a powerful hostile force on Russia’s borders.  These trends are changing the European military balance to Moscow’s long-term disadvantage.

What about the United States?

In 2022 alone the United States approved $113 billion in aid to Ukraine.  The Russian defense budget then was then less than half of that — $54 billion.  It has since roughly doubled.  Russian defense industries have been revitalized.  Some now produce more weaponry in a month than they previously did in a year.  Russia’s autarkic economy has weathered 18 months of all-out war against it from both the U.S. and the EU.  It just overtook Germany to become the fifth wealthiest economy in the world and the largest in Europe in terms of purchasing power parity.  Despite repeated Western claims that Russia was running out of ammunition and losing the war of attrition in Ukraine, it has not, while the West has.  Ukrainian bravery, which has been hugely impressive, has been no match for Russian firepower.

Meanwhile, the alleged Russian threat to the West, once a powerful argument for NATO unity, has lost credibility.  Russia’s armed forces have proven unable to conquer Ukraine, still less the rest of Europe.  But the war has taught Russia how to counter and overcome much of the most advanced weaponry of the United States and other Western countries.

Before the United States and NATO rejected negotiations, Russia was prepared to accept a neutral and federalized Ukraine.  In the opening phase of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia reaffirmed this willingness in a draft peace treaty with Ukraine which the United States and NATO blocked Kyiv from signing.  Western diplomatic intransigence has failed to persuade Moscow to accommodate Ukrainian nationalism or accept Ukraine’s inclusion in NATO and the American sphere of influence in Europe.  The proxy war seems instead to have convinced Moscow that it must gut Ukraine, keep the Ukrainian territories it has illegally annexed, and likely add more, thus ensuring that Ukraine is a dysfunctional state unable either to join NATO or to fulfill the ultranationalist, anti-Russian vision of its World War II neo-Nazi hero, Stepan Bandera.

The war has led to the superficial unity of NATO but there are obvious fissures among members.  The sanctions imposed on Russia have done heavy damage to European economies.  Without Russian energy supplies, some European industries are no longer internationally competitive.  As NATO’s recent summit at Vilnius showed, member countries differ on the desirability of admitting Ukraine.  NATO unity seems unlikely to outlast the war.  These realities help explain why most of America’s European partners want to end the war as soon as possible.

The Ukraine War has clearly put paid to the post-Soviet era in Europe, but it has not made Europe in any respect more secure.  It has not enhanced America’s international reputation or consolidated U.S. primacy.  The war has instead accelerated the emergence of a post-American multi-polar world order.  One feature of this is an anti-American axis between Russia and China.

To weaken Russia, the United States has resorted to unprecedentedly intrusive unilateral sanctions, including secondary sanctions targeting normal arms-length commercial activity that does not involve a U.S. nexus and is legal in the jurisdictions of the transacting parties.  Washington has been actively blocking trade between countries that have nothing to do with Ukraine or the war there because they won’t jump on the U.S. bandwagon.  As a result, much of the world is now engaged in pursuit of financial and supply-chain linkages that are independent of U.S. control.  This includes intensified international efforts to end dollar hegemony, which is the basis for U.S. global primacy.  Should these efforts succeed, the United States will no longer be able to run the trade and balance of payments deficits that sustain its current standard of living and status as the most powerful society on the planet.

Washington’s use of political and economic pressure to compel other countries to conform to its anti-Russian and anti-Chinese policies has clearly backfired.  It has encouraged even former U.S. client states to search for ways to avoid entanglement in future American conflicts and proxy wars they do not support, like that in Ukraine.  To this end, they are abandoning exclusive reliance on the United States and forging ties to multiple economic and politico-military partners.  Far from isolating Russia or China, America’s coercive diplomacy has helped both Moscow and Beijing to enhance relationships in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that reduce U.S. influence in favor of their own.

To summarize:

In short, U.S. policy has resulted in great suffering in Ukraine and escalating defense budgets here and in Europe but has failed to weaken or isolate Russia.  More of the same will not accomplish either of these oft-stated American objectives.  Russia has been educated in how to combat American weapons systems and has developed effective counters to them.  It has been militarily strengthened, not weakened.  It has been reoriented and freed from Western influence, not isolated.

If the purpose of war is to establish a better peace, this war is not doing that.  Ukraine is being eviscerated on the altar of Russophobia.  At this point, no one can confidently predict how much of Ukraine or how many Ukrainians will be left when the fighting stops or when and how to stop it.  Kyiv just failed to meet more than a fraction  of its recruitment goals.  Combating Russia to the last Ukrainian was always an odious strategy.  But when NATO is about to run out of Ukrainians, it is not just cynical; it is no longer a viable option.

Lessons to be Learned from the Ukraine War

What can we learn from this debacle?  It has provided many unwelcome reminders of the basic principles of statecraft.

Wars do not decide who is right. They determine who is left.The best way to avoid war is to reduce or eliminate the apprehensions and grievances that cause it.When you refuse to hear, let alone address an aggrieved party’s case for adjustments in your policies toward it, you risk a violent reaction from it.No one should enter a war without realistic objectives, a strategy to achieve them, and a plan for war termination.Self-righteousness and bravery are no substitutes for military mass, firepower, and stamina.In the end, wars are won and lost on the battlefield, not with propaganda inspired by and directed at reinforcing wishful thinking.What has been lost on the battlefield can seldom, if ever, be recovered at the negotiating table.When wars cannot be won, it is usually better to seek terms by which to end them than to reinforce strategic failure.

It is time to prioritize saving as much as possible of Ukraine.  This war has become existential for it.  Ukraine needs diplomatic backing to craft a peace with Russia if its military sacrifices are not to have been in vain.  It is being destroyed.  It must be rebuilt. The key to preserving Ukraine is to empower and back Kyiv to end the war on the best terms it can obtain, to facilitate the return of its refugees, and to use the EU accession process to advance liberal reforms and institute clean government in a neutral Ukraine.

Unfortunately, as things stand, both Moscow and Washington seem determined to persist in Ukraine’s ongoing destruction.  But whatever the outcome of the war, Kyiv and Moscow will eventually have to find a basis for coexistence.  Washington needs to support Kyiv in challenging Russia to recognize both the wisdom and the necessity of respect for Ukrainian neutrality and territorial integrity.

Finally, this war should provoke some sober rethinking here, in Moscow, and by NATO of the consequences of diplomacy-free, militarized foreign policy.  Had the United States agreed to talk with Moscow, even if it had continued to reject much of what Moscow demanded, Russia would not have invaded Ukraine as it did.  Had the West not intervened to prevent Ukraine from ratifying the treaty others helped it agree with Russia at the outset of the war, Ukraine would now be intact and at peace.

This war did not need to take place.  Every party to it has lost far more than it has gained.  There’s a lot to be learned from what has happened in and to Ukraine.  We should study and learn these lessons and take them to heart.

[1] Generals and admirals.

[2] Ukraine contributed troops to this NATO operation despite not being a member of the alliance.

[3] Reportedly, by 2014, various agencies of the U.S. government had committed a cumulative total of $5 billion or more to political subsidies and education in support of regime change in Ukraine.

[4] Prior to the U.S. and NATO decision to aid Ukraine against its Russian-backed separatists, these militias were commonly identified as neo-Nazi in the Western media.  They professed to be followers of Stepan Bandera – who has now been adopted as a revered national figure by Kyiv.  Bandera was famous for his extreme Ukrainian nationalism, fascism, antisemitism, xenophobia, and violence.  He and his followers were allegedly responsible for massacring 50,000 – 100,000 Poles and for collaborating with the Nazis in the murder of an even larger number of Jews.  After the US/NATO proxy war broke out, despite their continuing display of Nazi regalia and symbols on their uniforms and their ties to neo-Nazi groups in other countries, Western media ceased to characterize these militias as neo-Nazis.

[5] The “special military operation’ mounted by Russia bore little resemblance to the specific predictions put forward in this information warfare, which appears have been designed as much to rally support for Ukraine and boost its morale as to deter Russia.

[6] See, e.g., https://jamestown.org/event/watch-the...

Politico: Leaked U.S. strategy on Ukraine sees corruption as the real threat

By Nahal Toosi, Politico, 10/2/23

Biden administration officials are far more worried about corruption in Ukraine than they publicly admit, a confidential U.S. strategy document obtained by POLITICO suggests.

The “sensitive but unclassified” version of the long-term U.S. plan lays out numerous steps Washington is taking to help Kyiv root out malfeasance and otherwise reform an array of Ukrainian sectors. It stresses that corruption could cause Western allies to abandon Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s invasion, and that Kyiv cannot put off the anti-graft effort.

“Perceptions of high-level corruption” the confidential version of the document warns, could “undermine the Ukrainian public’s and foreign leaders’ confidence in the war-time government.”

That’s starker than the analysis available in the little-noticed public version of the 22-page document, which the State Department appears to have posted on its website with no fanfare about a month ago.

The confidential version of the “Integrated Country Strategy” is about three times as long and contains many more details about U.S. objectives in Ukraine, from privatizing its banks to helping more schools teach English to encouraging its military to adopt NATO protocols. Many goals are designed to reduce the corruption that bedevils the country.

The quiet release of the strategy, and the fact that the toughest language was left in the confidential version, underscores the messaging challenge facing the Biden team.

The administration wants to press Ukraine to cut graft, not least because U.S. dollars are at stake. But being too loud about the issue could embolden opponents of U.S. aid to Ukraine, many of them Republican lawmakers who are trying to block such assistance. Any perception of weakened American support for Kyiv also could cause more European countries to think twice about their role.

When it comes to the Ukrainians, “there are some honest conversations happening behind the scenes,” a U.S. official familiar with Ukraine policy said. Like others, the person was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.

Ukrainian graft has long been a concern of U.S. officials all the way up to President Joe Biden. But the topic was deemphasized in the wake of Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion, which Biden has called a real-life battle of democracy against autocracy.

For months, Biden aides stuck to brief mentions of corruption. They wanted to show solidarity with Kyiv and avoid giving fuel to a small number of Republican lawmakers critical of U.S. military and economic aid for Ukraine.

More than a year into the full-scale war, U.S. officials are pressing the matter more in public and private. National security adviser Jake Sullivan, for instance, met in early September with a delegation from Ukrainian anti-corruption institutions.

A second U.S. official familiar with the discussions confirmed to POLITICO reports that the Biden administration is talking to Ukrainian leaders about potentially conditioning future economic aid on “reforms to tackle corruption and make Ukraine a more attractive place for private investment.”

Such conditions are not being considered for military aid, the official said.

A spokesperson for Ukraine’s foreign ministry did not respond to requests for comment. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has fired several top defense officials in a recent crackdown on alleged graft — a message to the United States and Europe that he’s listening.

The Integrated Country Strategy is a State Department product that draws on contributions from other parts of the U.S. government, including the Defense Department. It includes lists of goals, timelines for achieving them and milestones that U.S. officials would like to see hit. (The State Department produces such strategies for many countries once every few years.)

A State Department official, speaking on behalf of the department, would not say if Washington had shared the longer version of the strategy with the Ukrainian government or whether a classified version exists.

William Taylor, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, said many ordinary Ukrainians will likely welcome the strategy because they, too, are tired of the endemic corruption in their country.

It’s all fine “as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the assistance we provide them to win the war,” he said.

The document says that fulfilling American objectives for Ukraine includes making good on U.S. promises of equipment and training to help Ukraine’s armed forces fend off the Kremlin’s attacks.

The confidential version also describes U.S. goals such as helping reform elements of Ukraine’s national security apparatus to allow for “decentralized, risk-tolerant approach to execution of tasks” and reduce “opportunities for corruption.”

Although the NATO military alliance is not close to allowing Ukraine to join, the American strategy often cites a desire to make Ukraine’s military adopt NATO standards.

One hoped-for milestone listed in the confidential version is that Ukraine’s Defense Ministry “establishes a professionalized junior officer and non-commissioned officer corps with NATO standard doctrine and principles.”

Even the format and content of Ukrainian defense documents should “reflect NATO terminology,” a confidential section of the strategy says.

One target includes creating a “national level resistance plan.” That could allude to ordinary Ukrainians fighting back if Russia gains more territory. (The State Department official would not clarify that point.)

The U.S. also wants to see Ukraine produce its own military equipment by establishing a “domestic defense industry capable of supporting core needs” as well as an environment that boosts defense information technology start-ups, according to one of the confidential sections.

U.S. officials appear especially concerned about the role of an elite few in Ukraine’s economy.

“Deoligarchization, particularly of the energy and mining sectors, is a core tenet to building back a better Ukraine,” the public part of the strategy declares. One indicator of success, the confidential version states, is that the Ukrainian government “embraces meaningful reforms decentralizing control of the energy sector.”

The United States appears eager to help Ukrainian institutions build their oversight capacities. The goals listed include everything from helping local governments assess corruption risks to reforms in human resources offices.

As one example, the strategy says the U.S. is helping the Accounting Chamber of Ukraine enhance its auditing and related work in part so it can track direct budget support from the United States.

The strategy describes ways in which the United States is helping Ukraine’s health sector, cyber defenses and organizations that battle disinformation. It calls for supporting Ukrainian anti-monopoly efforts and initiatives to spur increased tax revenue for the country’s coffers.

The confidential portion calls for Ukraine’s financial systems to “increase lending to encourage business expansion” and a reduction in the state’s role in the banking sector.

One envisioned milestone for that section is that “Alfa Bank is transparently returned to private ownership.” That appears to be a reference to an institution now known as Sense Bank, which was previously Russian-owned but nationalized by Ukraine.

The U.S. strategy appears intent on ensuring that Ukraine not only retains its orientation toward the West but that it develops special ties with America.

One way Washington believes that will happen is through the English language. The strategy indicates the United States is offering technical and other aid to Ukraine’s education ministry to improve the teaching of English and that it believes offering English lessons can help reintegrate Ukrainians freed from Russian occupation.

U.S. officials also are helping Ukraine build its capacity to prosecute war crimes in its own judicial system. The desired milestones include the selection of more than 2,000 new judges and clearing up a backlog of over 9,000 judicial misconduct complaints.

The strategy also calls for rebuilding the U.S. diplomatic presence in Ukraine, expanding beyond Kyiv to cities such as Lviv, Odesa, Kharkiv and Dnipro.

Due to earlier staff drawdowns spurred by the full-scale Russian invasion, “the embassy remains in crisis mode,” one of the public sections states. (The State Department official would not discuss the current Embassy staffing numbers.)

As they have in past communications reported on by POLITICO, U.S. officials note inventive ways in which the United States is providing oversight of American aid to Ukraine despite facing limitations due to the war. Those efforts have included using an app called SEALR to help track the aid.