Natylie Baldwin's Blog, page 122

Michael C. Desch: The Tragedy of Volodymyr Zelensky

By Michael C. Desch, Harper’s, October 2023

In December 2022, Time magazine named the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky its Person of the Year. The reasons seemed obvious: When Russia invaded in February of that year, few thought that Ukraine would survive more than a week, or that its president would remain at his post in Kyiv. But Zelensky, who had been a comedian and actor before his unlikely landslide election victory in 2019, defied Russian airstrikes and mobilized his countrymen, rebuffing Western offers of evacuation: “I need ammunition, not a ride.” His unexpected courage helped to rally Ukrainian forces against Russia’s northern thrust. He also reminded many of the two-time Man of the Year—in 1940 and 1949—Winston Churchill. Also known for defending his country against the aggression of an authoritarian leader, Churchill was, as Time’s tribute noted, “the historical figure to whom [Zelensky] has most often been compared in recent months.”

Comparisons between Zelensky and Churchill are apt, but not only for the reasons that those making them intend. The British Bulldog’s legacy is in fact quite mixed. His biographer Geoffrey Wheatcroft rightly reminds us that a balanced assessment of Churchill must acknowledge “the one irredeemably sublime moment in his life, when he saved his country and saved freedom.” But his actions in Britain’s “finest hour” do not negate the many missteps he made over the course of his political career. As more critical accounts of Churchill’s tenure have emerged—among the best are Robert Rhodes James’s Churchill: A Study in Failure, 1900–1939 and John Charmley’s Churchill: The End of Glory—it has become harder to ignore his many blunders. These include the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign during World War I (which resulted in around 200,000 casualties) and several miscalculations during the interwar years, when he took a relatively benign view of Mussolini, Franco, and even Hitler, then pursued a mostly one-sided relationship with Stalin (“I like him the more I see him,” he confessed to his wife). Notwithstanding his resolve in the face of a potential German invasion, even his strategizing during World War II was far from masterful. Churchill badly underestimated the Japanese threat and then, in the face of the siege of Singapore, demanded that British forces fight to the bitter end. His cold-blooded attack on the French fleet in Mers-el-Kébir in July 1940 not only constituted shabby treatment of an erstwhile ally but was based on the false assumption that Vichy France planned to turn its ships over to the Axis powers.

Like Churchill, Zelensky deserves a place in history for his actions during a perilous moment. The Ukrainian leader showed great physical courage by staying in Kyiv when it appeared that the Russian Army would seize the capital. But physical courage is not the only thing Zelensky will need to steer his country out of its current conflict. And like Churchill, Zelensky’s track record before and since his finest hour is checkered at best.

Born in the eastern Ukraine mining city of Kryvyi Rih in 1978, Zelensky is an improbable successor to Churchill. His father was a professor and his mother an engineer. As a teenager, he began competing in comedy contests modeled after the popular Russian television show KVN. This set the stage for his successful TV series Servant of the People, in which he played a simple schoolteacher who becomes a reformist president of Ukraine.

Zelensky has a history of defying the odds. When he announced his candidacy for president in 2018, few anticipated that he would defeat Petro Poroshenko, the incumbent, or edge out Yulia Tymoshenko, a former prime minister and the darling of the Orange Revolution. He not only prevailed over these veteran politicians but did so handily, winning more than 70 percent of the vote in the second round of elections. Before the ticker tape had settled, he dissolved parliament and called elections, in which his party—Servant of the People, named after the TV program—gained an outright majority. Zelensky went from dark horse to powerful president in the blink of an eye.

Three main factors account for Zelensky’s rapid rise. First, he was considered to be above the fray. Though anti-Semitism is still rampant in the post-Soviet states, the Zelenskys, as a Russian-speaking Jewish family, straddled the country’s ethnolinguistic fault lines. As a Russian speaker, Zelensky could communicate across the border with Russia and could point to his friends and relatives in the eastern, predominantly Russian-speaking region known as the Donbas as evidence of his ability to bridge that divide. Zelensky had also wisely stayed out of the contentious Maidan Revolution in 2014. Neither he nor his close colleagues were active in the movement to overthrow Ukraine’s Russia-friendly president Viktor Yanukovych, which deeply divided the country. Instead, Zelensky aimed his barbs at targets across the political spectrum, and even performed with his comedy troupe in the Donbas city of Horlivka during the post-Maidan uprising.

Zelensky’s second advantage was timing. His meteoric ascent reflected widespread disenchantment with business as usual—particularly corruption and the war in the Donbas, which had taken the lives of some thirteen thousand people. By 2019, public distrust of the elite was deep-seated. A vote for Zelensky was seen as both a repudiation of the establishment and an act of faith in a brighter future.

Finally, Zelensky was careful to keep his agenda quite vague, so as to avoid disturbing the image that voters had of him as an actor or backing himself into a corner. His biographer Serhii Rudenko has suggested that his voters imagined themselves electing the protagonist of Servant of the People, rather than Zelensky himself. Writing on the eve of the election in the New York Times, the journalist Alisa Sopova explained that keeping his political slate clean was “an asset for him—as well as a canvas onto which people can paint whatever they want.”

No wonder Zelensky’s supporters initially believed he would bring an end to the two scourges plaguing the Ukrainian body politic: its rampant corruption and the festering civil war in the Donbas. That he has failed, so far, to solve either problem constitutes the great missed opportunity of the Zelensky presidency, and has much to do with the tragic predicament that Ukraine finds itself in today.

Zelensky’s resolve to root out corruption flagged early in his term. There are, to be sure, structural features of post-Soviet states—a dependence on only a few industries and natural resources; the legacy of state-owned enterprises—that have long empowered oligarchs to manipulate the political system. But a more recent development is just as central to Ukraine’s endemic corruption. In 2014, during the Maidan Revolution, Yanukovych was toppled by mass protests in which a small group of ultranationalists pushed an extreme agenda. These forces subsequently regarded any move against Yanukovych’s anti-Russian successor Poroshenko as a betrayal of the revolution. In turn, many Ukrainian oligarchs found that wrapping themselves in the Maidan battle flag helped to conceal their nefarious business activities.

On television, Zelensky played an incorruptible teacher turned president, but the reality is more complicated. One of his original backers was Ihor Kolomoisky, a Ukrainian billionaire with a controlling interest in the television channel that aired Zelensky’s show, who would later be placed on the U.S. sanctions list for alleged fraud. Despite attempting to distance himself from his former patron, Zelensky has never been able to make a clean break with him. Indeed, Zelensky and his associates have been linked by journalists to some $40 million in offshore accounts associated with Kolomoisky’s notorious PrivatBank.

Another sign that Zelensky was not going to clean out Ukraine’s Augean stables came in March 2020, when he fired the prime minister, Oleksiy Honcharuk, whose anticorruption efforts were creating waves. An assassination attempt on Zelensky’s adviser Serhiy Shefir, reportedly due to anticorruption efforts, seems to have further reinforced the steep cost of pursuing good governance. This January, amid continued allegations of corruption, several high-ranking ministers were forced out, along with a raft of regional governors.

Zelensky’s commitment to end the war in the Donbas has suffered a similar fate. While the prospect of settling things through peaceful negotiation looks increasingly remote after more than a year of all-out war, at the beginning of Zelensky’s administration conditions were far more favorable. According to research collected by the San Diego State University political scientist Mikhail Alexseev, around 70 percent of Ukrainian poll respondents in the years leading up to the 2019 presidential election said that ending the war in the Donbas was their “number one concern.” Voters in the eastern region turned out in droves for Zelensky in the second round of presidential voting in April 2019. That November, a poll administered by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation found that 73 percent of respondents supported a negotiated settlement.

Russia also seemed amenable to negotiations. A spokesman for the Russian president Vladimir Putin said that the country’s primary interest in the 2019 Ukrainian election was to see a candidate win who would work to settle the conflict. Putin maintained through 2021 that “the Donbas is an internal issue of the Ukrainian state,” and waited until the eve of the February 2022 “special military operation” to support the independence of the rebellious Donbas oblasts of Luhansk and Donetsk. This suggests that Putin’s initial strategy was to ensure that pro-Russian Ukrainians retained veto power to counterbalance Kyiv’s increasingly Western tilt. The New York Times quoted the former president of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev’s claim that Russia would have traded the Donbas for “other things”—the promise that Ukraine would not join NATO, for example.

Zelensky initially seemed inclined to pursue a negotiated settlement along lines worked out in a series of meetings in Minsk in 2014 and 2015. The so-called Minsk process began in the fall of 2014, once the war in the Donbas had shifted in favor of the separatist rebels (and their Russian backers). The Minsk agreements, signed in September 2014 and February 2015, mandated a ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons, the deployment of Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) monitors, the demobilization of militias, the departure of foreign fighters, and eventual Ukrainian control of the international border, following elections. It called for a decentralization of power, a special status for Luhansk and Donetsk, the holding of local elections within the self-proclaimed republics, and general amnesty for fighters on both sides. Economically, the agreements focused on the resumption of commercial ties between the Kyiv-controlled and rebellious provinces. Finally, they enumerated provisions for humanitarian aid and the exchange of civilian and military prisoners. After a rebel victory at Debaltseve in 2015, the parties returned to the negotiating table to discuss elections and decentralization in detail. The German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier then proposed that the regional elections be held under auspices of OSCE.

Soon after taking office, Zelensky took steps to implement this framework, agreeing to a prisoner-of-war exchange in early September 2019. He also embraced Steinmeier’s proposal to hold elections in October and was preparing to move Ukrainian forces back from the line of contact in the Donbas—a key Putin demand—in anticipation of a December summit in Paris. But that meeting would prove to be the zenith of Zelensky’s peace campaign, as he soon ran up against one of the forces that had also helped to stymie his anticorruption efforts: the nationalist far right.

Though Russia’s claims of a neo-Nazi government in Kyiv were never credible, there remains a dark undercurrent in Ukrainian politics. Far-right parties, some with a clear neo-Nazi bent, include the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, Svoboda, the Ukrainian National Union, the Right Sector, and the National Corps. Ultra-right-wing forces have not done well electorally in recent years, but they have nonetheless proven influential, in part because they are willing to resort to extra-parliamentary action. Radical nationalist groups have also been successful in making alliances with influential political players, including several powerful oligarchs. Few of these oligarchs endorse the far right’s ideology, but some seem to regard it as less threatening to their interests than the anticorruption agenda embraced by Ukrainian liberals. In addition, ultranationalists are overrepresented in the armed and security forces, including movements with their own militias such as S14, the Misanthropic Division, the Carpathian Sich (associated with Svoboda), Aidar, and Azov (associated with the National Corps). These battalions proved themselves to be effective early in the Donbas uprising, at a time when Ukraine’s army was in disarray. As the army rebuilt with substantial aid from the West, several of these paramilitary groups were incorporated into the regular forces.

In October 2019, after Zelensky had proposed a ceasefire and the withdrawal of forces from the line of contact, he went to the front to persuade the various battalions to honor it. A widely circulated video from the visit shows Zelensky debating the leader of the National Corps, Denys Yantar, who warned that there would be protests if the president agreed to a ceasefire. This was just one of many such warnings passed along by veterans’ groups. The Poroshenko ally Volodymyr Ariev warned that “if the president signs anything granting Russian influence in Ukraine, it would cause riots.”

These were not idle threats. The right never accepted the Minsk process, and met Zelensky’s tentative steps toward peace with stiff opposition. This began with smaller protests in Kyiv in October 2019. Then, on December 8, around ten thousand hard-liners rallied on the Maidan to encourage the president to say “no” to Putin. Rudenko notes that their “speeches in the center of Kyiv were, of course, a warning to Zelensky himself.” The website Myrotvorets, which makes an infamous list of allegedly anti-Ukrainian journalists and public figures, briefly included the president’s wife Olena Zelensky, claiming that she had inadvertently revealed sensitive information about the movements of Ukrainian armed forces on her Facebook page.

Such opposition would be daunting for any leader, but Zelensky promised that he was the man for the job. “I am not afraid to make difficult decisions,” he declared. “I am ready to lose my popularity, my ratings if needed, or even my post as long as we achieve peace.” Yet his enthusiasm for the Minsk agreements quickly wilted in the face of hard-line opposition. In a statement following the December 2019 summit, Zelensky echoed many of the right wing’s red lines when laying out Ukraine’s position. At that meeting, Zelensky had established a new formula for peace that included a limited special status for the Donbas (no different than any other Ukrainian region), and proposed only a piecemeal military disengagement. In July 2020, he signaled a lack of interest in the OSCE-coordinated Trilateral Contact Group—which had been a central platform for the negotiations—by appointing the former president Leonid Kravchuk, who was then eighty-six, as Ukraine’s representative. In early 2021, Zelensky moved substantial numbers of troops back toward the line of contact, closed pro-Russian media outlets, and charged the leaders of the breakaway republics with treason. Soon after these moves, Russia began building up its military forces on the other side of the border.

A charitable view of Zelensky’s failure to end corruption or peacefully settle the Donbas conflict might be that he had little room to maneuver in either case. Corruption is deeply ingrained in the structure of post-Soviet states, and the sort of negotiated peace needed to finish the civil war could have compromised the country’s sovereignty to an extent that would have been anathema to large numbers of Ukrainians, some of whom had guns and a propensity to use them. Addressing these issues would have posed political and perhaps even personal risks. But Zelensky did have opportunities—and, for a time, an overwhelming political mandate—to do so. That he folded so swiftly contradicts his well-managed image of integrity and courage; more importantly, his failures of foresight and fortitude meant that Ukraine squandered its chance to avoid the current conflict. Indeed, if Zelensky could have stood down his domestic opponents, particularly in the honeymoon period after his 2019 victory, perhaps he would not have had to stand up to the Russians in February 2022.

What explains Zelensky’s failure? To begin with, he and his team always favored style over substance. The Economist, which had expressed ardent support for Zelensky during the campaign, voiced concern just before his landslide victory, noting that he had “offered little indication of what exactly he plans to do, beyond vague assurances to maintain Ukraine’s Western course, improve the investment climate and end the war in the east.” Roman Bezsmertny, whom Zelensky appointed and then fired from the Ukrainian delegation to the Trilateral Contact Group, said that when he met with the president in the summer of 2019, he asked him how he viewed the situation in the Donbas: “He replied that by the new year, i.e., by 2020, we have to resolve the issue with the Donbas. And I already realized that he had no idea what it was. Because the words ‘solve the issue with the Donbas’ sounded like ‘tackle corruption,’ ‘engage in economic reform’—that is, do nothing.”

While Zelensky’s career in show business taught him to craft inspiring narratives, it provided him with little in the way of practical political experience. The former economics minister Tymofiy Mylovanov told the New York Times that Zelensky and his advisers “think differently” than typical politicians. “They think in terms of dramaturgy. They think, Who is the villain, who is the hero, what is the roller coaster of emotions?” Rudenko explains in his biography that “Servant of the People just stood for a popular TV series in which Zelensky, in the guise of Vasyl Holoborodko, skillfully defeated the government that hated the people.” But there was a yawning chasm between that simplistic drama and the real situation in Ukraine.

In a strikingly similar fashion to Churchill, Zelensky seems to be at his best during periods of chaos. Zelensky’s former press secretary Iuliia Mendel told the Financial Times that he was “a person of chaos. In war, it is chaos, he feels at home.” War, as the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously teaches, is a realm of disorder and uncertainty, and great wartime leaders are often those who thrive in such an environment. In his philosophical treatise On War, Clausewitz distinguishes between physical courage, which Zelensky may be said to have shown during the early days of the Russian invasion, and moral courage, or “courage before responsibility, whether it be before the judgement-seat of external authority, or of the inner power, the conscience.” Zelensky’s foreign supporters like to describe him as the conscience of the West, but there are many instances in which he has lacked moral courage in this sense.

This has been evident not only in his failure to stand up to extremist forces at home, but also in his dealings with Ukraine’s allies, as exemplified by his infamous phone call with Donald Trump in July 2019 when he was asked to investigate the Bidens. Zelensky’s efforts to ingratiate himself with Trump were bad enough, but perhaps can be explained by virtue of America’s importance to Ukraine and Trump’s transactional approach to politics. More troubling was Zelensky’s eagerness to denigrate others for little discernible reason. A transcript of the call records him carping about how the German chancellor Angela Merkel and the French president Emmanuel Macron were not doing enough for Ukraine, telling Trump that he was “absolutely right. Not only one hundred percent, but actually one thousand percent” when he said of European leaders that “all they do is talk.” He likewise echoed Trump’s view that the recently recalled American diplomat Marie Yovanovitch was “a bad ambassador.” As the French journalist Sylvie Kauffmann put it in the New York Times:

This popular maverick comedian turned real-life politician after playing one in a TV series, this promising reformer that President Emmanuel Macron of France had hosted at the Élysée even before he was elected, was in fact another spineless, unprepared leader jumping into President Trump’s every trap.

The lack of moral courage Zelensky displayed during the exchange was not only personally embarrassing; it also boded poorly, as Kauffmann noted, for his ability to deal with the domestic problems he had been elected to confront.

While Russia is of course a major actor in Ukraine’s tragedy, the West, and the United States particularly, bears its own share of responsibility for Zelensky’s failures. America has done little since 2013 to advance a peaceful settlement of the conflict, and its most recent actions have only inflamed tensions. Under Barack Obama, the United States was guilty, in the judgment of the Brookings Institution scholar Alina Polyakova, of “absenteeism” in the Minsk process. Trump, meanwhile, seemed interested in Ukraine only so far as it could advance his own political fortunes. And soon after taking office, Joe Biden began undermining the Minsk agreements. Speaking in Washington on February 7, 2022, Biden’s secretary of state Antony Blinken grumbled about Minsk’s “sequencing,” a sign that the United States was unlikely to play a constructive role in the peace process.

Once the Russians launched their attack, of course, U.S. policy turned decisively against a negotiated settlement, even as the Zelensky government was talking with the Russians. In March 2022, Biden mused publicly about regime change, saying of Putin that “for God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” Putin complained in September of that year that peace talks with Ukraine had been going well until the West ordered Kyiv to “wreck all these agreements,” a charge that Western analysts and politicians have essentially confirmed. Though head of a NATO member country, the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan complained that “the West has only made provocations and failed to make efforts to be a mediator in the Ukraine-Russia war,” which is likely why Turkey assumed a mediator role in 2022.

During the early days of the conflict, it briefly appeared that Russia and Ukraine were converging on a peace deal. In an interview with ABC News on March 7, 2022, Zelensky even said that he had “cooled down” on joining NATO. But later that month, he abruptly adopted a hard-line position, stepping back from compromise in the Donbas. At this point, any suggestion of territorial or diplomatic concessions to Russia were, in Zelensky’s increasingly Churchillian mindset, nothing more than a rerun of the 1938 French and British surrender in Munich (brokered by Churchill’s rival and predecessor Neville Chamberlain).

Meanwhile, Zelensky’s ambitions keep growing. Last December, he told the U.S. Congress, quoting FDR, that he intends to achieve an “absolute victory.” This victory would entail not only reclaiming territory seized by Russia since 2022, but also liberating the Donbas and Crimea. Following the dramatic Ukrainian counterattacks in the fall of 2022, which liberated large chunks of Russian-occupied territory, Zelensky’s star reached its zenith. This July, during the NATO summit in Vilnius, Zelensky struck a very different tone than he had sixteen months earlier, tweeting that it was “unprecedented and absurd” that Ukraine had not been provided with a time frame for joining NATO.

Zelensky and his advisers are now hoping to do more than make the Russian bear bleed for attacking Ukraine; they imagine they can rout Russia’s army and bring about Putin’s demise. Zelensky has increased his demands for sophisticated weaponry—including tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and cluster munitions—and continues to insist on sanctions against Russia. He is also pushing to expand the geographical focus of the war. Ukrainian drone and artillery strikes on pre-2014 Russian territory have been increasing. Most alarmingly, in November 2022 the Ukrainian president doggedly maintained, with no evidence, that a missile that struck Polish territory and killed two Poles was a Russian attack rather than an accidental strike by a Ukrainian anti-aircraft battery. Had there been evidence for Zelensky’s claims against Russia, he might have triggered NATO’s Article 5 collective defense clause, widening and escalating the war.

Is Volodymyr Zelensky the right leader to settle this conflict? Here the comparison to Churchill may once again be apt, though not in a way that reflects well on Zelensky. Churchill’s Conservative Party was voted out of power in July 1945, two months after the end of fighting in Europe and before the surrender in the Pacific. Churchill seemed out of touch with British voters, who were disturbed by his distaste for social reform after six years of war. Zelensky has at times, like Churchill, become a hero outside of his country while his standing is diminishing at home. Where he once merely kowtowed to the far right during the Minsk process, he now seems to be embracing some of its leading figures, like the Azov commander Denys Prokopenko. And while it is not uncommon during wartime for democracies to restrict the press, the Zelensky Administration is doing so to such an extent that some claim journalism in the country has devolved into a “marathon of propaganda.” According to the Financial Times, Ukrainians are “already debating whether their leader, like his illustrious British predecessor, may be the right man for a war of national survival but the wrong one for the peace that follows.”

Reflecting on Poroshenko’s lack of enthusiasm for the Minsk framework, The Economist suggested that Zelensky’s predecessor came to see the Donbas conflict as a diversionary war, removing the pressure for domestic reforms. The nightmare scenario is that Zelensky will similarly recognize the frustration of his domestic agenda and find, like many other wartime leaders before him, that the only thing harder than conducting a war is governing in peace. Indeed, given the likelihood of a prolonged military stalemate between Ukraine and Russia—and the fact that, the longer the war drags on, the longer elections can be delayed under martial law—Zelensky may feel less pressure to consider diplomatic measures than he did in the early days of the conflict. Perhaps Zelensky’s biggest moral failure will prove to be prolonging a war that in a year or two won’t look any different on the ground, save for much larger cemeteries on both sides.

Neocon Hate For Russia Makes A European Settlement With Moscow Impossible – Interview with Dr. Anatol Lieven (1/2)

Link here.

Part 2 of the interview is here.

Dmitri Lascaris: Ukraine’s worst enemies are those who demand Russia’s strategic defeat

Photo by Nati on Pexels.com

By Dmitri Lascaris, Canadian Dimension, 9/15/23

“There is certainly a moral component to the question of supporting a war that almost certainly cannot be won. It is troubling to know there are some in the West who remain content knowing thousands of someone else’s sons and daughters will be sacrificed in the vague hope of weakening Russia.”

—Former US Army Lt. Colonel Daniel L. Davis

On June 4, at the insistence of Western governments clamouring for Russia’s strategic defeat, Ukraine’s military launched its much-anticipated counteroffensive. Since then, Ukrainian casualties have soared, leaving the country in a weak position on the battlefield and with little leverage at the still empty negotiating table.

Western officials and media commentators have gradually acknowledged that the counteroffensive is not going to plan. At the same time, they have sought to focus attention on Ukraine’s meagre territorial gains along the 700 mile front, suggesting the military effort is “gaining momentum” and “could yet pay off.”

By framing the narrative in this way, they are obscuring the reality of an existentially dangerous war where the risks of escalation—either nuclear use or an attack on NATO—are rising fast. Indeed, even if Ukraine achieves the goals of its ill-fated counteroffensive, it will still lose the war.

What has the counteroffensive achieved, and at what cost?

Despite the Ukrainian army’s relentless attacks on Russian defences, its gains to date have been insignificant.

A map produced by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) shows that, as of September 8, the territory retaken by the Ukrainian military so far is negligible.

Since the counteroffensive began, and despite repeated attacks on Crimea, Ukrainian forces have recaptured no part of the peninsula.

In some areas, such as the Kupiansk region, not only has Ukraine failed to retake any territory, but Russian forces have advanced, as shown in a map published on September 8, 2023 by CNN.

According to investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, “in the first two weeks of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, Ukraine seized only 44 square miles of territory previously held by the Russian army, much of it open land. In contrast, Russia is now in control of 40,000 square miles of Ukrainian territory.”

Ukraine’s minimal territorial gains have also come at an enormous human cost.

Based on publicly available information, numerous reports confirm that Ukraine has suffered massive losses, possibly in the range of 40,000 casualties in little under four months.

Evidence that Ukraine has sustained severe losses is also consistent with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s desperate efforts to reconstitute his army.

Six weeks after Ukraine launched its counteroffensive, Zelensky extended martial law and general mobilization for three months.

Three weeks later, he dismissed all of Ukraine’s regional military commissars and announced that Ukrainian authorities had launched 112 criminal proceedings against 33 regional officials, alleging corruption in the process of military conscription.

Since the beginning of the invasion, Ukrainian authorities have apprehended approximately 20,000 military-aged men who sought to leave the country, either by avoiding border checkpoints or by attempting to pass through them with forged documents.

Many other Ukrainian men succeeded in avoiding conscription, often by paying bribes.

Now, a representative of Zelensky’s Servant of the People party has declared that Ukraine expects all Western European countries that have accepted Ukrainian refugees to send men of military age back home so that they can be drafted into the army and sent to the front.

Several days ago, Ukrainian media reported that Poland might extradite Ukrainian ‘draft dodgers’ back to Ukraine, where they could be compelled to participate in near-suicidal assaults on heavily fortified Russian positions.

Austria’s government then rejected extradition, stating “That would be a massive encroachment on our statehood, we would never do that. That would be an attempted intervention in our asylum system and in our statehood, Austria could not entertain that.”

Germany followed Austria’s lead, as did Hungary.

Zelensky’s plan to reconstitute his army by means of extradition might now be in tatters.

To mitigate the effects of draft evasion, Ukraine’s government has also imposed harsh penalties on conscientious objectors. As the New York Times recently reported: “Conscientious objection to military service is an internationally recognized right, one enshrined in Ukraine’s Constitution. But when Russia invaded Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky instituted martial law. With that, the right to alternative service related to conscientious objection effectively evaporated.”

Not only is conscientious objection a “human right,” said Eli S. McCarthy, a professor of justice and peace studies at Georgetown University, it is “critical to commitments that Ukraine has made” to international bodies and aspirations to join the European Union.

Why Ukraine’s counteroffensive is sputtering

Emboldened by the success of its counteroffensive operations last year in the regions of Kharkiv and Kherson, Ukraine and NATO boldly projected the swift attainment of Ukraine’s latest military objectives. Zelensky’s chief of military intelligence went so far as to proclaim publicly that Ukraine would retake Crimea by the end of spring.

There were at least three fatal flaws in this reasoning.

First, the Russian army that Ukraine faced in the autumn of 2022 is not the same army that it now confronts. Late last year, Russia completed the mobilization of nearly 300,000 soldiers. Moreover, as Russian forces accumulated experience on the battlefield, they inevitably fought with greater sophistication and lethality.

Second, Ukraine’s supporters exaggerated the scale of the army’s success in its counteroffensives of December 2022. As explained recently by Professor John Mearsheimer, a former US Air Force officer and West Point graduate:

“We [in the West] misread what happened in Kharkiv and Kherson… These were not great Ukrainian victories… Before the Russians withdrew [from Kherson], they really hammered the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians suffered enormous casualties on the West Bank of the Dnieper River in Kherson before the Russians evacuated. The Russians were not ‘pushed out.’ And you see a similar situation in Kharkiv. So these were not great victories that presaged what was going to happen in the counteroffensive.”

In a recent, detailed analysis of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, Mearsheimer described it bluntly as a “colossal failure.”

Third, months before the counteroffensive began, Western military experts telegraphed Ukraine’s plans to the Russians by accurately predicting that Ukrainian forces would attempt to sever the land bridge from mainland Russia to Crimea by thrusting southward to the Russian-controlled city of Melitopol, near the Sea of Azov.

Their advanced warning gave Russia’s military command both the incentive and opportunity to prepare heavily fortified positions in the south, particularly between the line of contact and Melitopol.

Ukraine’s forces stood little chance of advancing beyond Russia’s dense minefields, which lie to the north of its main fortifications. Under ideal conditions, navigating these minefields would be a significant challenge, but conditions for Ukraine were far from ideal: its beleaguered forces were obliged to cross these minefields while operating at a huge disadvantage in both air power and artillery.

What’s more, Ukraine’s army has had to depend on a daunting array of diverse and often outdated Western weapons, each presenting its own specifications, strengths and weaknesses.

A grim New York Times assessment highlights the problem:

“Ammunition is in short supply, and there is a mixture of munitions sent from different countries. That has forced Ukrainian artillery units to use more ammunition to hit their targets, Ukrainian soldiers said, because accuracy varies widely between the various shells. In addition, some of the older shells and rockets sent from abroad are damaging their equipment and injuring soldiers. “It’s a very big problem now,” said Alex, a Ukrainian battalion commander.”

Finally, Ukrainian soldiers received inadequate training from NATO forces. Not only was their training too brief, but it was also administered by instructors with no real-world experience of fighting a peer enemy in a large-scale land war. Leaked documents from the end of February revealed that nine Ukrainian brigades being equipped and trained abroad in Poland, Romania, and Slovenia had less than half their equipment and, on average, were only 15 percent trained.

There is a world of difference between fighting the rag-tag Taliban—which possessed little more than Soviet-era small arms—and the Russian military, a modern force equipped with an extensive array of artillery systems, hypersonic missiles, fighter jets and bombers, advanced air defence systems, satellite imagery, and electronic warfare capabilities.

It is probably fair to suggest that, at this stage of the conflict, Ukrainian combat veterans likely know a lot more about fighting Russians than just about any NATO instructor.

What if the counteroffensive succeeds?

Let’s imagine that Ukraine’s army miraculously takes Melitopol before the autumn rains impede the movement of armoured vehicles. What then?

From Melitopol, which is close to the Sea of Azov, Ukrainian forces would acquire fire control over the narrow strip of land between the city and the coastline, thereby severing Russia’s land bridge to Crimea.

At that stage, Russia would still control all of Crimea, sizeable chunks of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, and most of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, including Donetsk City and Mariupol.

Zelensky’s government has consistently defined ‘victory’ as the recovery of all territories that formed part of Ukraine when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. When a senior NATO official recently suggested that Ukraine might have to make territorial concessions in exchange for NATO membership, Zelensky was outraged. One of his senior advisors complained that “Trading territory for a NATO umbrella? It is ridiculous. That means deliberately choosing the defeat of democracy, encouraging a global criminal, preserving the Russian regime, destroying international law and passing the war on to other generations.”

Even if Ukrainian forces managed to sever the land bridge to Crimea, Ukraine would remain far from its own standard of victory.

Some might argue that a rupture in Russia’s land bridge could precipitate a rapid collapse in Russian control over Crimea and the Donbas. Based upon recent history, however, there’s no reason to expect such a collapse to occur.

From 2014 (when Russia annexed Crimea) to the launch of Russia’s invasion in early 2022, Russian forces controlled the peninsula without the benefit of a land bridge. Despite this, Ukraine was unable to mount any serious challenge to Russia’s hold over Crimea during that period. It is even less likely to do so now, because Ukraine’s military is in a far weaker state than it was before Russia’s invasion began.

Similarly, from 2014 to 2022, pro-Russian rebels controlled much of Donetsk and Luhansk without the benefit of any land bridge from mainland Russia to Crimea. During that period, few regular Russian forces were entrenched in these regions. Today, they would be far harder for Ukraine’s battered army to recover, given the extent of Russian military formations and defensive fortifications.

In June of last year, I predicted that Ukraine would lose this war. At the time, I was by no means the only person who had come to that conclusion, yet those who dared utter it were dismissed as Putin stooges and conveniently ignored.

There is not now, nor has there ever been, a realistic scenario in which Ukraine can achieve victory, as Zelensky defines it, by recapturing the territory lost to the Russians since 2014. Anyone possessing a modicum of objectivity understood this long ago.

A proxy war fuelled by disinformation

Critics of the West’s arming of Ukraine insist that this conflict is, in essence, a US-led proxy war against Russia.

American casualties in the Vietnam War, which were far lower than those being sustained by Ukraine now, generated so much public backlash in the US that the government increasingly resorted to the use of proxy forces that could sustain the hardships of war while fighting with American-made weapons. The war in Ukraine constitutes the apotheosis of this morally depraved strategy.

Predictably, those of us who have accused NATO of waging a proxy war have been derided as pro-Russian propagandists. Yet, even Leon Panetta, the former director of the CIA, recently acknowledged that the war in Ukraine is indeed a “proxy war with Russia, whether we say so or not.” Many other leading foreign policy experts including former American Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock and Quincy Institute President Andrew Bacevich share this view. As Lily Lynch wrote recently in The New Statesmen, “The realists were right.”

To generate and sustain public support for the war, Western governments and most of the mainstream press have engaged in what Al Jazeera’s Marwan Bishara calls “official deception” with “little or no attempt at balance or objectivity.”

How this deception is playing out is worth examining closely.

Foreign policy hypocrisy

If recent history demonstrates anything, it is that the US and its allies hold democracy and international law in contempt.

To dispense with the fiction that Western powers are motivated by such ideals, one has only to recall the US-led wars on Iraq, Vietnam and Afghanistan, the myriad of elected governments that the US and Britain have subverted, or the acts of torture that CIA operatives committed (with total impunity) at black sites around the world.

The historical record leaves no doubt that Western powers cynically invoke democracy and international law when it furthers their agenda, but casually ignore these same ideals when they become inconvenient to their geopolitical interests.

Whatever one may think of Russia and its invasion of Ukraine, we should at least be able to agree that the West’s motivation for provoking and sustaining this war has little (if anything) to do with democracy and international law.

Moreover, whatever the West’s true motivation may be, Ukraine is a flawed and corrupt democracy at best.

Zelensky suspended eleven opposition parties (including Ukraine’s largest). He ‘nationalized’ opposition television stations. He imposed martial law, suppressed religious freedom, linguistic rights and press freedom, and openly mused about deferring Ukrainian elections until the war (which could go on for many years) is finally over.

Even before Russia’s invasion, the CATO Institute and other knowledgeable observers warned of Ukraine’s accelerating slide into authoritarianism. Since the invasion began, conditions have deteriorated dramatically.

Defenders of Zelensky often argue that he has had to resort to authoritarian measures to protect the Ukrainian state from alleged pro-Russian collaborators. Yet a recently leaked report by Swiss intelligence concluded that Zelensky “is showing authoritarian traits” by attempting to ‘eliminate politically” a key rival, Vitali Klitschko.

Klitschko is the mayor of Kyiv. No serious observer would claim that he is pro-Russian or a potential collaborator.

Western elites have implored us to believe that Zelensky is a ‘Churchillian’ colossus bestriding the world stage. The truth is that he is behaving in a fashion similar to most autocrats, and we in the West are funding his government at the expense of our own societies.

How reliable are polls in wartime Ukraine?

Time and again, proponents of NATO’s proxy war have argued that, as long as the Ukrainian people prefer war over a negotiated peace, the West has a duty to arm Ukraine.

In support of that argument, they cite polls which purport to show widespread opposition in Ukraine to any concessions to Russia.

How reliable are those polls? Do they seek the views of the millions of Ukrainians who have fled the country, or the millions more who live (many of them voluntarily) in parts of Ukraine that are now under Russian control?

One such example is a poll conducted in August 2023 by the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives foundation and the Razumkov Center think tank. According to that poll, less than five percent of Ukrainians are ready to make territorial concessions for peace, and only 18 percent are ready to concede Ukraine’s future membership in NATO. That poll, however, did not include Ukrainians who had fled the country or who were situated in Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhya, Kherson, and those areas where “active hostilities are taking place.”

Moreover, are Ukrainians living in Kyiv-controlled regions truly free to express their support for a negotiated peace? The Ukrainian government’s persecution of peace activists suggests otherwise.

As reported last month by German independent media outlet AcTVism Munich, Ukraine’s secret service recently raided the home of Yurii Sheliazhenko of the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement. Mr. Sheliazhenko is now under house arrest and faces up to five years in prison. His ‘crime’ is that he advocated for a ceasefire and diplomacy—and did so while fiercely condemning Russia’s invasion.

In an environment where anti-war activism has been criminalized and political dissent has been all but eliminated, polls purporting to show majority opposition to a negotiated peace are plainly unreliable.

Myths about Russian grand strategy

Time and again, Western audiences have been told that Ukraine is but the first domino in Putin’s alleged plan to reconstitute the Russian empire. If the Ukrainian domino falls, then other European dominoes will follow. Ukraine, we are told, is fighting not only for its freedom—it is also fighting for our freedom.

Yet, as Mearsheimer has argued, there is no evidence to support this theory:

“With Ukraine, it’s very important to understand that, up until 2014, we did notv envision NATO expansion and EU expansion as a policy that was aimed at containing Russia. Nobody seriously thought that Russia was a threat before February 22, 2014. NATO expansion, EU expansion, and turning Ukraine and Georgia and other countries into liberal democracies were all about creating a giant zone of peace that spread all over Europe and included Eastern Europe and Western Europe. It was not aimed at containing Russia. What happened is that this major crisis broke out, and we had to assign blame, and of course we were never going to blame ourselves. We were going to blame the Russians. So we invented this story that Russia was bent on aggression in Eastern Europe. Putin is interested in creating a greater Russia, or maybe even re-creating the Soviet Union.”

Neither Putin nor any other representative of the Russian government has ever expressed an intention to conquer the territory of a NATO country. Given the alliance’s obligation of reciprocal defence and its possession of thousands of nuclear weapons, any attempt to do so would be suicidal for Russia. Putin and other senior Russian officials undoubtedly understand this.

If Russia’s government ever had motivation to attack a NATO country, it has such motivation now, because neighbouring NATO countries (particularly Romania and Poland) have become transit and repair hubs for massive flows of Western weaponry into Ukraine. That weaponry is used not only to kill Russian soldiers in Ukraine, it is also increasingly wielded to strike targets deep within Russia’s borders.

Supporters of the Russian empire theory selectively invoke a speech in which Vladimir Putin described the fall of the Soviet Union as a “geopolitical catastrophe.” They conveniently ignore countervailing statements by Putin, for example: “Anyone who doesn’t regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.”

As Russia expert and professor Mark Galeotti has explained, Putin’s “comment about a ‘geopolitical catastrophe’… was made in a very specific context, about the way the partition of a country left large communities of ethnic Russians or Russian-speakers effectively stranded in other countries.” In other words, the “catastrophe” was not that Russia had lost the ability to dominate Eastern European countries. Rather, it was that tens of millions of ethnic Russians suddenly found themselves in newly independent countries whose governments were, to varying degrees, hostile to Russians.

To save Ukraine, this war must end

Ukraine’s situation has become so dire that former British Army Colonel Richard Kemp—previously one of Ukraine’s most vociferous boosters—recently authored an op-ed in The Telegraph in which he warned that the West “must prepare for humiliation.”

With all due respect to Mr. Kemp, this is not the time for Western leaders to worry about humiliation. Ukrainian solders are dying on an industrial scale. We must do all we can to stop the killing. Western leaders can massage their bruised egos later.

At this stage, the humane and rational thing to do is to oppose the escalation of this war, and to advocate for reasonable, mutual compromises to achieve a lasting peace. This is a war that Ukraine cannot win in any meaningful sense of the word. The best that Ukraine can hope for is a bloody, horrific stalemate that will gradually sap the state’s remaining lifeblood.

With each passing minute, more Ukrainians become permanently disabled. More become displaced. More Ukrainian children become fatherless. More Ukrainian infrastructure is destroyed. More landmines, other unexploded munitions and long-lasting contaminants proliferate among Ukraine’s rich agricultural lands, and more towns and cities become uninhabitable.

The hole out of which Ukraine must eventually dig itself is becoming only deeper. At some point, that hole will become so deep that Ukraine will never come out of it. We are rapidly approaching that point, if we have not passed it already.

By insisting upon Russia’s strategic defeat and excluding any possibility of meaningful compromise with Russia, we doom Ukraine to destruction. To save Ukraine, we must stop this war.

Novaya Gazeta Europe: Russia’s brain gain

By Ilya Andreev, Novaya Gazeta Europe, 9/17/23

The number of international students attending Russian universities reached a new high of 351,500 last year, an 8% increase on the figure from 2021. This rise, no small feat given Russia’s increasing international isolation over the war in Ukraine, appears largely due to the Education Ministry’s decision to expand university quotas for foreigners and to introduce programmes to help overseas students finance their studies.

In 2021, Russia’s Education Ministry announced plans to raise the country’s foreign student quota from 17,000 to 30,000 by 2023, and Russia now has the sixth largest number of foreign students in the world studying in its universities, outranked only by the US (which has almost a million international students), the UK, Canada, France, and Australia.

The extra places have proved easy to fill, largely due to their price tag — the current exchange rate means that Russian tuition fees have become much more affordable. Moscow State University’s Faculty of Journalism currently charges around $5,000 per year, for example, while recent figures suggest that 15,000 foreign students receive scholarships or study grants of some kind.

For most foreign students, accommodation costs are negligible, with undergraduates at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics paying as little as 1,000 rubles (€10) per month for a bed in a student dormitory.

Foreigners enrolling at Russian universities tend to come primarily from former Soviet republics or countries in Asia, with students from Kazakhstan making up the largest number from any one country — some 62,500 in early 2023. China provides the second-highest number of foreign students, number just under 40,000, followed by Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, India, Egypt, and Belarus. Medicine and engineering, are the most popular fields of study among overseas students, according to the Education Ministry.

The quality of the education these students receive is not always consistent, however.

The QS World University Ranking, which assesses universities based on the quality of the research they produce and the graduate career prospects, included just one Russian university in its ranking list this year.

Moscow’s Higher School of Economics (HSE) came in at 399, having dropped 100 places since 2021. The HSE also made The Times Higher Education’s list of top 100 law universities in 2021 but slipped off it by the following year.

We asked three foreign students attending Russian universities to explain why they opted to study in Russia and how they would describe their experiences so far. All their names have been changed at their request.

Isidor, a third-year linguistics student at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics from Latvia:

“I study here free of charge thanks to the international student quota. And, of course, I found it really attractive that there was no language or cultural barrier here at the HSE. In general, everyone told me that HSE was a great option: the programme is good, there are many travel opportunities, and the people — I knew a couple of them already — are cool. All of that turned out to be true, so I don’t have any regrets.

I studied for a year at a Latvian university before I came here, but I didn’t enjoy studying in Latvian. Also, theoretical linguistics isn’t taught in Latvia, so Russia is on another level. Many Russian students ask me why I chose to come to Russia and why I’m still here. They are mostly respectful, though they sometimes they make inoffensive jokes about Latvians. I haven’t really had any negative experiences.

As for the war, I remember talking about it with my roommate on 21 February [2022], and we agreed that something was about to happen. The morning of the 24 February, we read the news, but we weren’t really scared — there was a feeling of apprehension, it felt like something of global importance was happening, and we were sort of a part of it. My mum texted me and asked me if I wanted to leave Russia. But I said I didn’t want to. I like it here.

I think the war hasn’t been as hard for me as it has been for a lot of Russians. I know many Russians became depressed when the whole thing started, but maybe it’s just that I don’t identify as a part of this country that much. And I also knew I had a place to go, if necessary.

I’m certain that we’ll have career prospects. I haven’t heard about anyone being rejected from a master’s programme for having a Russian bachelor’s diploma. Attending conferences is also not a problem. People in academia understand what’s going on, and everyone is welcome.

We have an objectively strong programme here, so people abroad are interested in us. My plan for the future is to be a researcher. Once I’m done with my bachelor’s degree, I think I’ll do my master’s in Europe, and then maybe a PhD in the US. I’m definitely going to leave Russia anyway. I want to gain some experience elsewhere, in a different country with a higher quality of life, I think.”

Susie, a fourth-year journalism student at Moscow State University from China:

“I think the education in Russia is good, but not as good as it should be. I’ve studied the theoretical basics in my field already, and I wanted a more practice-oriented approach to see things from various angles. In China, when someone hears you have a tech or science degree from a renowned Russian university, they generally think you have great career prospects. But once they hear you have a social studies degree, they’re a little more sceptical.

I think most of the Chinese students who come to Russia to study do so because it’s easy to enrol and because the cost of living is low here.

Another important reason is the friendly relationship between our governments. Most Chinese people don’t know much about studying in Europe outside the UK, so they tend to choose Russia.

I think [international students] are treated fairly here. We have the same syllabus and the same teachers as the Russian students. One of my teachers organises extracurricular activities for foreign students, and she is very warm and friendly.

There is some prejudice as well, though, especially when it comes to accommodation, and it’s not just at our university: students from China often get assigned worse dormitories.”

Anna, a second-year design student at Kosygin State University from Macedonia:

“I started a fashion design programme in 2022. I’ve always wanted to be a fashion designer, and my university has a good programme. I arrived in Russia after the war in Ukraine had already started. Of course, I can’t believe that civilised people still use war as a means of solving problems. I was always taught that negotiation is the best solution. Nonetheless, I’m a student in Russia.

It’s cold here, and I often cry when I’m on the metro, but otherwise it’s more or less okay. I’ve made friends with the cockroaches in my dormitory. Despite the cold temperatures, the people here are warm. I haven’t met any other Macedonians at my university, but I have some friends in Macedonia who are planning to study in Russia in the future. I think my education will give me good career prospects.”

Vedica Singh: ‘17,000 Troops Gone, 10,000 concedes’ Ukraine’s Surrender Stats Revealed

Photo by Nati on Pexels.com

By Vedica Singh, TFI Global, 9/28/23

TFI Global is an Indian media outlet.

Zelensky’s war narrative is at odds with stark data. Recent figures reveal Ukrainian troops surrendering in significant numbers, challenging his counteroffensive claims.

Ukrainian troops surrendering en masse

In recent weeks, a significant number of Ukrainian troops have surrendered to the Russian military, utilizing a dedicated radio frequency established by the Russian armed forces, known as “Volga” with a call sign of 149.200. This frequency was set up during the summer and has been actively used by over 10,000 Ukrainian servicemen who subsequently surrendered to Russian custody. The radio frequency is operational along the entire front line.

The surrender process has gained momentum, especially in the vicinity of Rabotino, a village in the Zaporozhye Region. Rabotino has witnessed intense fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces in recent weeks, remaining a major flashpoint in the conflict.

Despite Ukraine’s highly publicized counteroffensive launched in early June, Rabotino and its surroundings have not yielded significant gains for Ukrainian forces. Reports indicate that Ukrainian troops are suffering substantial casualties and equipment losses.

According to Moscow’s latest assessments, Kiev has incurred over 17,000 military casualties this month alone. Since the commencement of the counteroffensive, Ukraine has witnessed more than 83,000 military personnel fatalities, along with the destruction of over 10,000 pieces of heavy military equipment, as per the Russian military’s data.

The surrendering Ukrainian troops, utilizing the “Volga” frequency, are reportedly well-fed and receive necessary medical care. This significant surrendering of troops via radio communication underscores the complex dynamics and challenges faced by Ukrainian forces in the ongoing conflict with Russian military forces.

Silent Confirmations

During a pivotal moment in Ukraine’s history, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s optimistic statements clash with the grim reality on the ground. Retired Ukrainian Major General Sergey Krivonos also criticized Zelensky’s overly positive reports on the conflict, revealing a significant gap between rhetoric and the harsh conditions faced by Ukrainian forces.

Krivonos’ concerns highlight the disconnect between President Zelensky’s optimistic rhetoric and the harsh reality on the ground in Ukraine. He cautioned against underestimating the Russian Army’s experience and training, emphasizing that the conflict is not a one-sided victory. The revelation of Ukraine’s losses is grim, with approximately half a million troops lost since the start of the Russian military operation. This estimate is based on a combination of intelligence, open data, and various sources. Even a Ukrainian mobile operator, MTS-Ukraine, unintentionally confirmed the devastating death toll, revealing that around 400,000 individuals would never answer their phones again. This data is from just one operator, highlighting the scale of overall losses in the conflict.

Stoltenberg Unveils the toll of Zelensky’s counteroffensive

Even recently, during a European Parliament meeting, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg indirectly confirmed the high casualty count in Ukraine, contributing to the acknowledgment of the grim reality faced by Ukrainian forces. These numbers, which approach 500,000 deaths, don’t even include the numerous injured soldiers, some of whom may never return to active duty, further straining Ukraine’s military capabilities. The situation is dire, raising doubts about the feasibility of Ukraine’s counteroffensive.

Adding to the complexity, Stian Jenssen, Chief of Staff to Jens Stoltenberg, proposed an unconventional solution to the Ukraine conflict. He suggested Ukraine consider surrendering its eastern territories in exchange for NATO membership. 

Now as the staggering casualties in Ukraine continue to mount, with an unofficial estimate approaching hundreds of thousands of deaths, the grim reality of the conflict cannot be ignored.

Scott Ritter: “Ukraine, before and after.”

The Floutist, 9/17/23

Scott Ritter, a former Marine intelligence officer with a distinguished record as a weapons inspector, seems to us among the most interesting analysts now looking at the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine from the perpective of a man who once wore a uniform. We recently met Ritter at Mut zur Ethik, a twice-a-year forum in Zurich’s environs, and were much taken by his view of the war and its broader significance. We are pleased to welcome Ritter into our pages (and plan soon to publish a Q & A we conducted while in Switzerland). Here we reproduce one of the speeches Ritter delivered, of several, at the Mut zur Ethik gathering held 1–3 September.

1 SEPTEMBER—It’s an honor and a privilege to be here to have an opportunity to talk to you. I wish we could talk about better subjects. I wish we were in a time we could talk about moving forward with a confidence the world would move forward with us, but we live in difficult times. 

Today I’ve been asked to address “global geopolitics in the context of the Ukrainian conflict.” I think when historians look back on the events that are transpiring today you’re going to be speaking of “BU” and “AU” the same way we speak of “BC” and “AD.” “BU” is “before Ukraine,”  “AU” is “after Ukraine.” The Ukrainian war, ladies and gentlemen, has changed everything. 

The world that exists today is a fundamentally different world than existed before the conflict in Ukraine began. And when I say “the conflict in Ukraine” let’s just be clear: In reality, the conflict in Ukraine has been going on for decades. But the conflict I speak of is the conflict that has transpired since the decision by Vladimir Putin to send Russian troops into Ukraine on the 24th of February 2022. 

I have the honor and privilege twice a year to advise a board of some of the world’s most powerful and influential people, and those, of course, are people who operate in the oil and gas industry They make a lot of money and money equals power. 

I was brought in to talk geopolitics, and for several years now I’ve been hammering away at two things trying to convince these leaders of global industry that the world is evolving, that you need to evolve with it or you are going to be left behind. I spoke of the fact that the world is evolving away from an American singularity to a multipolarity, where America is no longer viewed by the world as the global hegemony—where, instead, America will have to learn to participate in a global community of equals. They have said, “No. Because that would require America to depart from the rules-based international order.” Which, of course, are rules that the United States wrote in the aftermath of the Second Word War to continue to empower ourselves. 

The rules-based international order is a sharp deviation from the principles, for instance, of the United Nation’s Charter, which speaks of multipolarity, global equality, and all that kind of nonsense. When I say “nonsense,” I mean from an American perspective because we don’t believe in any of that, we believe in the sole empowerment of the United States.

Many of these leaders of industry are American. They lead multinational corporations, but the multinational corporations don’t enrich multi-nations. They enrich the United States. Therefore, they need the rules-based international order to continue to exist, to maintain the system of enrichment that they have put in place over the course of the past 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 years. 

The other thing I brought up to them is that for those who believe that America can impose its will on the world no matter what. Even if we run into an economic hiccup, we will be able to resolve this hiccup in our favor by projecting military power, which is unmatched: There is nobody in the world that can match the Americans in terms of military power. I said, “Those days are over, too.” 

They did not want to hear this. But I brought up the reality that twenty years of endless war in the so-called global war on terror had fundamentally transformed the lethality of the American military. No longer were we trained, armed, equipped, or prepared to fight a land-based war in Europe or a large-scale conflict in the Pacific. We, instead, had broken our military in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Syria—we no longer had the skill set. They didn’t want to hear that, either. They said, “No. America has aircraft carriers, America has armored brigades, America is America and the world will never be able to defeat America.”

That was “before Ukraine.” After Ukraine, a new reality has set in. Before Ukraine, the United States was able to convince Europe that Russia could be sanctioned into submission. I know we laugh about it today, when we reflect on the ludicrous nature of the overconfidence of those who thought so. But those who have memories that can go back simply two years remember, in the leadup to the conflict, how the United States said over and over and over again, “We will bring Russia to its knees.” That,  “Together with the West, we will sanction Russia, we will break the will of Russia. Russia will fold. Even if Russia were to go into Ukraine militarily they could not sustain this attack because their economy will fail.”

Ladies and gentlemen, the Russian economy today is stronger than it has ever been largely because of the economic sanctions: “before Ukraine,” “after Ukraine.” But it’s more than simply the empowerment of the Russian economy. It’s how the world thinks about America: The American singularity is over. 

Just the other week there was a meeting in South Africa of the BRICS organization—five “developing nations,” we call them. Is China a developing nation? Is India a developing nation? These are developed nations. Now, they haven’t been able to come together before Ukraine. There were internal squabbles: India and China didn’t get along, the Russian economy wasn’t so hot. Who knew about Brazil? Was the African continent ready for development? These are questions that were thrown out there. There is no longer talk about that. BRICS  prior to last week was a concept that had promise. BRICS today is a reality that has changed the world. Notice that I didn’t say “changing” the world. I said “changed the world.” 

Let me tell you what happened when BRICS came together and expanded. America went from being number one to being number two. The day of the American singularity is over. It’s past, it’s done, it’s finished, it’s gone. We haven’t, maybe, realized it yet. Americans might believe that we’re still number one, but we’re not. We’ve been bypassed by BRICS. Well, you’ll say, “Wait a minute Scott, that’s many nations.” What do you think multipolarity means, ladies and gentlemen? It means many nations working together. And multipolarity is no longer a theory: It’s a reality. 

The reality of BRICS is such that America is number two. It will forever be number two because it will not have the economic strength to surpass the multipolar organization known as BRICS, which is expanding as we speak. And an interesting thing about BRICS is that we tried to keep Russia off the agenda. We tried to keep Vladimir Putin away from that meeting. He attended by proxy with his foreign minister, [Sergei] Lavrov. He attended by video. He dominated the proceedings, ladies and gentlemen. Russia will be the chair of BRICS starting in January 2024. When BRICS expands from its current membership of five, adding six, Vladimir Putin will be the head of BRICS. And when BRICS meets again next summer and they talk about brining ten nations in, Vladimir Putin will be the head of BRICS. 

It’s backfired. Everything we do has backfired. And it’s not just economically. Militarily: Prior to Ukraine, before Ukraine, BU—I’m trying to inject this concept into people’s minds—before Ukraine, people did fear the American military. With good cause. We go to war a lot. There is lethality associated with what we do. In Europe, NATO believed that it was a powerful military alliance. NATO believed that when NATO flexed its muscle people listened—before Ukraine. After Ukraine, NATO has been exposed as a paper tiger. A paper tiger. 

There is no military strength in NATO. NATO has no capacity to project meaningful military power beyond the borders of Europe. NATO cannot fight a war along the lines of the war that’s being fought in Ukraine today. Don’t believe me, believe General Christopher Cavoli, four-star American general, commander of U.S. forces, supreme allied commander. He said in a Swedish defense forum last January (2022), that NATO could not imagine the scope and scale of the violence taking place in Ukraine today. Think about that. 

What do military people do? We prepare for the future. We prepare for the future based upon what we imagine. We imagine something, we create capabilities to meet that which we imagine. If we have not imagined the scope and scale of the violence taking place in Ukraine today, that means we’re not ready for it. We haven’t trained for it, we haven’t equipped for it, we haven’t organized for it. We can’t fight it. And this is a fact. 

Right now there’s a counteroffensive taking place in Ukraine. The Ukrainian army has three brigades trying to take the town, the village, of Robotyne. Three brigades. That’s 15,00 men. Imagine NATO putting three brigades on the line right now. They can’t. NATO cannot put three brigades on the line. But imagine if they did: They’ve assaulted the village, they’ve been repulsed by the Russians. So three brigades are now being pulled out, three more are being brought in, in a complex passage of lines. NATO has not done a six-brigade passage of lines ever. And Ukraine is doing it under fire. They’re failing, but they are doing it. [Editor’s note: As of 8 September, Moscow acknowledged withdrawing forces from Robotyne.] 

That war that’s taking place right now in Zaporizhzhia, in Kherson, in Luhansk, in Donetsk: It’s a war that NATO cannot fight. And now the world knows it. NATO is a paper tiger. The world knows it’s a paper tiger. They know the United States cannot meet its stated desire to reinforce Europe in a fashion. Ukraine has lost 400,000 men in battle, 40,000 to 50,000 in the last several weeks. It took America ten years to lose 58,000 in Vietnam and that broke our back. Can you imagine a situation where the United States military was asked to sacrifice 40,000 men in two weeks? Can you imagine a situation when any European army was asked to sacrifice 40,000 men in two weeks? The fact of the matter is: We can’t win a war today in Europe. We’re not number one anymore. We’re not number two anymore. We might be number three. 

But this is a reality. It’s not just in Europe that we can’t prevail. It’s in the Pacific. Don’t believe me, believe Lieutenant General Samuel Clinton Hinote. He was the deputy chief of staff of the United States Air Force. He just recently retired. But his job was strategy. And what he did for the last four years is war-game every potential scenario of conflict between the United Sates and China in the Pacific. And he recently, before his retirement, went to the Pentagon and went to the White House, and said the following: Cease and desist your policies that push us to a potential military confrontation with China. Because if it does become a kinetic fight between the United States and China, there is no scenario in which we win. We lose every single time. And there is nothing we can do in the immediate future to change that outcome. We have to change the way we interface with China. 

That’s why Tony Blinken went to China in July. You remember that trip? He went—he had to go through thirty Chinese officials before he got to Xi Jinping—for a thirty-minute lesson in humility. The reason why he had to go there is because the United States had to hit pause on its China policy: Stop the path towards confrontation. We had just had a situation in the Strait of Taiwan where an American ship was almost rammed by a Chinese ship. And the Pentagon said, “If they do hit us, what do we do? Sink them?” And now the scenarios begin: If we sink them they retaliate, we retaliate, how does it end? Well, General Samuel Clinton Hinote said that it ends only one way every time: America loses.  

This is the reality today. We lose because we don’t have the capacity. But before Ukraine nobody understood that. Nobody believed that. Everybody believed that America was the supreme military power in the world. Today, the blinders have come off. Economically, we’re number two. Maybe we can maintain that position, maybe not. Militarily, we’re number three. And who knows where we’ll go with that. Because our military is a broken system. We spent hundreds of billions of dollars on a system that produces nothing beneficial to the defense of the United State. Let alone the defense of its allies. How can you spend $900 billion a year and say we can’t fight and prevail in a land war in Europe against the Russian army that spends $68 billion a year? It’s because our system is broken. But that’s another question. 

Ukraine has changed everything. Before Ukraine, America was number one, at least perception-wise. After Ukraine, American is number two economically, number three militarily, and this is a reality that the world is accepting. It’s not Scott Ritter saying this in a closed community to oil and gas executives. It’s Scott Ritter saying this while the rest of the world acknowledges this. Russia knows this. Russia no longer fears the American military. It’s not that they want to go to war against the America military, but Russia knows its capabilities. It’s been tested. China knows this, as well. 

When will Europe know it? When will Europe realize that NATO is a false prophet? When will Europe realize that the money you put into NATO is wasted money? When will Europe realize that instead of pursuing war you should be pursuing peace? It’s time for Europe to wake up. Because if you don’t, if you continue to believe in the myth of American hegemony, the myth of American supremacy—because it is a myth, it isn’t real anymore, it exists in the minds of American politicians, but it doesn’t exist in the way the world operates today. Europe has to decide: Do you want to become a prisoner in a cage of your own construct? Because that’s what’s happening. The world is bypassing America. The world is moving on with their collective life. And the American singularity is in the rearview mirror going backwards. 

Thank you very much.

Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of  Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika: Arms Control and the End of the Soviet Union  (Clarity, 2023). He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, served on General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and, from 1991 to 1998, was a chief weapons inspector with the U.N. in Iraq. In addition to his writing arms control and nonproliferation, Ritter currently writes commentary and analysis on international security, military affairs, Russia, and the Middle East. His Substack newsletter can we read here. 

Russia Matters: The U.S. and its allies should avoid “optimism in regard to nuclear risk” emanating from “Russian nuclear coercive diplomacy”

Russia Analytical Report, Russia Matters, Week of 9/25/23 -10/2/23

The U.S. and its allies should avoid “optimism in regard to nuclear risk” emanating from “Russian nuclear coercive diplomacy,” according to Stephen Cimbala of Penn State University and Lawrence Korb of Georgetown, who have three concerns about such optimism. “First, the United States and NATO cannot and should not assume that Russian reasoning about nuclear deterrence and escalation will follow a logic similar to that of their Western counterparts,” they write in BAS, criticizing the Western scholars who “dismiss[s] too abruptly the possibility of Russian escalation to nuclear weapons use.” “Second, escalation need not be the outcome of deliberate forethought,” they write, “no one should underestimate what Ukraine and NATO have already accomplished in this war … without provoking nuclear escalation.” This commentary appeared after the publication of  multiple  reports in Western media warning that Russia has increased construction on the Arctic island of Novaya Zemlya, which was one of the USSR’s nuclear weapons testing locations. Last week, director of Russia’s Kurchatov Center Mikhail Kovalchuk  said Russia should consider resuming nuclear tests and called for revising Russia’s nuclear deterrence.*When assessing signaling from Moscow, one should avoid interpreting recent saber-rattling by figures such as the Kurchatov Center’s Kovalchuk and SVOP’s Sergei Karaganov as a “decisive shift within the [Russian] leadership” on the use of nuclear weapons, according to Tatiana Stanovaya of R.Politik. Putin values Kovalchuk’s input but may disagree with his views, she writes. As for Karaganov, “while his provocative suggestions are frequently used in certain quarters to push an agenda (such as the Security Council), his interventions cause irritation among others (such as the Ministry for Foreign Affairs),” according to the founder and head of R.Politik.“Never before has [the U.S.] faced four allied antagonists at the same time—Russia, China, North Korea and Iran—whose collective nuclear arsenal could within a few years be nearly double the size of its own,” Robert Gates warns in his article for FA. The former U.S. secretary of defense warns that “dysfunction has made American power … unreliable,” hindering Washington’s efforts to deter Beijing and Moscow. “To ensure that Washington is in the strongest possible position to deter its adversaries from making  … strategic miscalculations, U.S. leaders must first address the breakdown in the decades-long bipartisan agreement with respect to the United States’ role in the world,” according to the ex-CIA director.Ukraine will not be able to win the war and regain all its territory “in the absence of a collapse of either the Russian government or the Russian army’s morale, neither of which seems imminent,” according to Niall Ferguson of Stanford University. Thus, “[r]ather than risk a protracted war with the added danger of waning Western support, Ukraine needs to lock in what it has already achieved,” taking a cue from South Korea, according to this senior Belfer Center fellow’s column in Bloomberg. According to the  Sept. 26 issue  of the Russia-Ukraine War Report Card published by the Belfer Russia-Ukraine War Task Force, Ukraine endured a net loss of 15 square miles of its territory in the preceding month.In an effort to clarify his recent on Russia’s conditions for peace with Ukraine, which some interpreted as a shift toward recognition of Ukraine’s territorial integrity,  Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov granted an interview on Sept. 28 to signal that Moscow has not abandoned its demands for recognition of its land grabs in Ukraine.  Speaking at the U.N., Lavrov said on Sept. 23: “Of course, we recognized the sovereignty of Ukraine back in 1991, on the basis of the Declaration of Independence. One of the main points for us in the declaration was that Ukraine would be a non-bloc, non-alliance country; it would not join any military alliances. In that version, on those conditions, we support Ukraine’s territorial integrity.” Five days later, however, Lavrov told TASS that “our position remains the same: we are ready to come to terms, taking into account the realities on the ground.” “It is also imperative to take into account our security interests and prevent the creation of a hostile … regime on our borders,” he added.

Lee Fang: Spinning the Press on Hunter Biden

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

By Lee Fang, Real Clear Investigations, 9/19/23

Speaker Kevin McCarthy, announcing that the House of Representatives will pursue an impeachment inquiry, suggested that the probe will hinge in part on deceiving the American public about Hunter Biden’s foreign business ventures.   

“President Biden did lie to the American people about his own knowledge of his family’s foreign business deals,” McCarthy said at a press conference. GOP lawmakers, he added, have “uncovered credible allegations into President Biden’s conduct.” 
 
Such an investigation will likely force an examination of the public narrative regarding Hunter Biden’s consulting deals that go back at least a decade. During President Obama’s second term, then-Vice President Joe Biden was the administration’s point man on the nation’s policy toward Ukraine, a perch he used to urge the country to resist “the cancer of corruption” and enact sweeping ethics reforms.   
 
At the time, some American journalists began to question whether the vice president’s stern message was undermined by his son Hunter Biden’s employment at the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, which was owned by a notorious local oligarch.    

Emails on Hunter’s laptop reveal that the inquiries sparked an internal debate within his team of consultants and public relations agents. Ultimately, they devised a series of responses about Hunter’s work with Burisma that were, at best, misleading and, at worst, outright falsehoods.  

The Biden team has constructed a careful image of Hunter Biden’s business ventures, sometimes employing a sophisticated myth-making operation aided by allies in the media who rarely challenged or investigated their false claims. The laptop emails show that the team closely monitored critical reporting and pushed to shape coverage with reporters from the New York Times, Time magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and the Associated Press.  

Their spin informed much of the ensuing coverage in the mainstream press, defusing the issue, even as President Trump and other Republicans insisted that Ukraine was a hotbed of Biden family corruption. Although he had no background in the energy field and little experience in corporate governance, Hunter Biden, who had a law degree, was appointed to the board of Burisma in May 2014.   

Washington Post

It was revealed later that he was paid about $1 million per year – as was his business partner Devon Archer. In a press release announcing his appointment, Hunter Biden is quoted as saying, “I believe that my assistance in consulting the Company on matters of transparency, corporate governance and responsibility, international expansion and other priorities will contribute to the economy and benefit the people of Ukraine.”  

That same month, journalist Michael Scherer reached out with questions about the arrangement.   
 
Several consultants employed by Burisma, including Ryan Toohey of FTI Consulting and Heather King, a partner at the law firm Boies, Schiller, & Flexner, where Hunter worked as counsel, strategized over how to respond to Scherer, a reporter then with Time magazine who has since joined the Washington Post.  
 
For the Scherer inquiry, laptop emails show, Hunter’s business associates settled on a strategy to deflect the most direct questions and obfuscate the true intent of Burisma’s attempts to sway U.S. government officials.  
 
One of Hunter’s associates noted that they planned to respond to Scherer’s attempts to reach David Leiter, a former aide to then-Secretary of State John Kerry, hired to work for Burisma. The plan was to use an assistant to make Leiter “unavailable to comment, as opposed to some sort of statement that made it seem like we were unwilling or refusing to engage with the reporter.” Leiter, the emails show, was in fact available, but the public relations team wanted to keep him out of reach.  

FTI Consulting

Scherer wanted to know why Burisma was on a hiring spree of well-connected American lobbyists, including Leiter and others. In response, Toohey planned to tell Scherer that the hired guns were simply working on issues related to energy independence, economic growth, as well as “transparency and good governance.”  
 
In response to other questions posed by Scherer, Toohey prepared a statement claiming that Hunter Biden will “not be engaged with the U.S. government” on anything related to Burisma.   

The response belied a detailed lobbying agenda spelled out in other emails.  

Burisma had made clear that the company had hired Leiter, Hunter Biden, and other political operatives as part of a focused plan to obtain Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky a U.S. visa as well as to persuade American officials to intervene with Ukrainian government officials to drop an investigation of his business interests.   
 
In a May 2014 email, Vadym Pozharskyi, a close adviser to Zlochevsky, explained to Hunter that he needed his “advice on how you could use your influence to convey a message/signal, etc. to stop what we consider to be politically motivated actions,” a reference to an ongoing investigation of Zlochevsky by Ukrainian prosecutors.   
 
That month, Pozharskyi again wrote to Hunter, spelling out the “working plan for both FTI and David,” reiterating that he wanted the lobbyists to intervene against the “politically motivated proceedings initiated against us in Ukraine” and to overcome the “US entry ban” for the Burisma owner.

“The immediate plan is to reach out to the Energy and Ukraine desks, respectively, at State Dept,” wrote Heather King, the attorney working closely with Hunter Biden at the time. “That will include outreach to Carlos Pascual, he is the top US energy diplomat,” she added.  
 
Scherer printed the denials, but to his credit, reported on the odd circumstances surrounding Biden’s hiring, at a time when Joe Biden was the Obama administration’s point person for Ukraine, with a special focus on energy policy in the region.  
 
In many cases, Hunter Biden’s associates cast him as simply an auditor with a special focus on renewable energy sourced from geothermal vents. That was the strategy in response to an inquiry from Stephen Braun, a reporter for the Associated Press. “Mr. Biden will not lobby on behalf of Burisma. His role is to advise the company’s legal and compliance unit, including guidance on corporate governance standards.”   
 
Behind the scenes, Hunter Biden’s team knew otherwise. In emails conferring over how to deal with Braun’s questions, one lobbyist reiterated the plan to provide Braun with “minimum information.”  
 
Like many other articles from this time, the AP story focused on the conflict of interest issues, noting the denials around any lobbying with a degree of skepticism:   

Stephen Braun, AP: The plan was to provide him with “minimum information.”

AP/YouTube

A former Washington lobbyist, the vice president’s son is effectively exempt from most rules that would require him to describe publicly the legal work he does on behalf of Burisma.   
 
Hunter Biden will not lobby for the company, said Lawrence Pacheco, an official with FTI Consulting, a Washington government affairs company recently hired by Burisma.   
 
Pacheco did not say whether Biden might oversee or advise on any future Burisma lobbying strategy in the U.S. Pacheco said the company “does not take positions on political matters.”  

Braun could not be reached for comment. Scherer declined an opportunity to comment on the Hunter Biden emails. Biden, Toohey, and King did not respond to a request for comment.  

However, the emails clearly indicate that substantial resources were allocated to managing both Burisma and Hunter’s personal image. Pozharskyi pointed out that Burisma had retained American consultants to reach out to “the most reputable European and American journalists/newspapers, magazines, websites, blogs,” while assistance was required to handle Wikipedia, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other online platforms. Burisma, wrote Pozharskyi, sought a “detailed algorithm on how the Company should act in case of bad publicity.” The effort included scrubbing negative details from Hunter Biden’s Wikipedia, while bolstering the online credentials of Burisma, emails show.    

A highly focused effort to monitor and shape news media coverage helped maintain the public profile. Even with relatively low visibility, independent media were closely watched. Hunter and his team monitored Vice News as well as the gadfly website ZeroHedge. In response to critical reporting from Vice, one colleague noted approvingly that the article was not being “reposted or republished” in Ukrainian media.

In July 2014, Toohey circulated an investigative piece I wrote for Salon about Hunter Biden’s hiring at Burisma, which noted that the vice president’s son had been retained amid a string of nepotistic hires likely aimed at influencing natural gas and energy policy.   
 
In the article, I noted that Joe Biden had traveled to Ukraine to “announce a $50 million aid package that included technical support for increasing the country’s natural gas production – an investment that could bolster profits at Burisma Holdings, where his son is a director.” What was not known at the time, however, was that Hunter Biden was already working with a team of public affairs consultants to channel U.S. government technical assistance to his client.  

The laptop emails show that even this relatively brief mention of Hunter Biden and a potential conflict of interest with his father raised concerns.  
 
“All, please see below a piece that mentions Hunter’s appointment as part of a broader trend, mostly within the context of relatives of eleceds [sic] engaged to lobby for the energy industry,” wrote Toohey, attaching a copy of the text of my piece. But, he added, “This was a freelanced piece picked up in a number of web-based outlets including Salon, but nothing with significant reach.”   
 
Pozharskyi replied that he had seen the piece earlier and “wanted to have a discussion in this regard.”  

In some cases, the team celebrated media coverage that elevated its desired narrative. Politico reported Hunter’s hiring at Burisma and simply printed quotes from the company’s official statements: 

“The company’s strategy is aimed at the strongest concentration of professional staff and the introduction of best corporate practices, and we’re delighted that Mr. Biden is joining us to help us achieve these goals,” Alan Apter, Burisma Holdings’ chairman of the board of directors, said in a statement, which was reported by The Moscow Times on Tuesday.  

Biden, joining the board, will be in charge of the legal unit, the company said. He will also provide support for Burisma Holdings “among international organizations.”  

Biden said the company will help strengthen Ukraine’s economy.  

Pozharskyi circulated a link to the Politico article to Hunter and his associates, noting the “positive coverage.”  

Slowking4/Wikimedia

Hunter’s membership on the Burisma board received renewed attention in late 2015, as then-Vice President Biden was set to visit Ukraine where he planned to address the parliament on the need to adopt new reforms against a culture of corruption in the country. James Risen of the Times, among others, renewed inquiries directed toward Hunter and his associates about the rationale behind his appointment to the company, Burisma, and why the company appeared to be buying access to high levels of government.   

In one email found on Hunter’s laptop, Risen asked, “What lobbying activities is the company engaged in the US?” among other questions to Hunter Biden. In response, a Burisma spokesperson straightforwardly claimed that “no one is lobbying on their behalf.”  
 
The company’s lobbying efforts were not covered in the story ultimately published by the New York Times, which featured Risen’s piece on Dec. 8, 2015. The article included a statement from the Hunter Biden team, crafted by the strategy firm FTI Consulting, asserting that the company’s focus was on “corporate governance and transparency.” 

Risen’s article did not address whether Hunter’s business career demonstrated such expertise or his lack of experience in the energy field. Although Risen identified Hunter as “a former Washington lobbyist,” he accepted the denial that no lobbying was involved.  

In reality, just a month prior to the email exchange with the Times, Burisma, following Hunter Biden’s advice, had hired Blue Star Strategies, a Democratic lobbying firm, to influence the Obama administration. A copy of the agreement, belatedly filed with the Justice Department, reveals that the firm, which aided in lobbying State Department officials on Ukrainian energy policy, received a monthly retainer of $30,000.  
 
Blue Star Strategies was even copied on the emails with the Hunter Biden team on its response plan to Risen.   

Risen also allowed a Burisma spokesman to decline to state Hunter’s compensation while claiming it was “not out of the ordinary” for such board positions. It was later disclosed that he was paid about $1 million per year, which is far higher than the typical compensation. As a point of comparison, median annual compensation of board members at Fortune 500 companies is around $110,000. 

Risen, now with The Intercept, did not respond to a request for comment.  

Blue Star Strategies

Political operatives of all ideological backgrounds frequently manipulate public perception – often employing specialized “crisis communication” firms to suppress negative coverage and shape desired narratives. What is remarkable about the Hunter Biden episode is how successful it was, and how uncritically most media organizations treated this unorthodox relationship between a president’s son and a controversial foreign corporation.  
 
In response to the Wall Street Journal, Toohey worked closely with Blue Star Strategies’ Sally Painter and Karen Tramontano to craft a message defusing questions around a conflicting message between Hunter and his father. They settled on a strategy of presenting the Ukrainian gig as perfectly “aligned” with an anti-corruption agenda, laptop emails show. The lobbyists suggested that they release a statement to the Journal claiming that Hunter’s work for the Ukrainian energy giant, to supposedly strengthen corporate governance, are “also goals the United States.”  
 
The Journal printed the statement, attributing it to a spokesperson.   

LinkedIn

Such coverage – which suggested Hunter Biden had engaged in questionable but ultimately harmless behavior that did not involve, much less implicate, his father – set the narrative for most coverage in mainstream outlets. When President Trump told Ukraine’s president in 2018 that “there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son” and asked him to look into Joe Biden’s demand that the prosecutor looking into Burisma be fired, Democrats moved to impeach him.   
 
The Biden spin continued even after the New York Post published the first articles based on material from Hunter’s laptop in October 2020. The Washington Post’s fact checker, Glenn Kessler, sought to discredit the New York Post’s reporting that Hunter Biden had arranged a dinner meeting between his Ukrainian associates at Burisma and his father when he served as vice president. At the time, the Biden presidential campaign claimed that it “reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time, and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.” Kessler reiterated this denial as though it were an established fact. 

It turned out to be false. The July testimony by former Hunter Biden associate Devon Archer confirmed that Hunter Biden had arranged a secret dinner with his Ukrainian business partner and his father, as the New York Post had originally reported. The ongoing saga over the Washington Post’s role in discrediting the Biden revelations was detailed last month by RealClearInvestigation’s Paul Sperry.  

Last month, Kessler “updated” his article to acknowledge this.  

LinkedIn

Also last month, Washington Post columnist Philip Bump, who has dismissed any hint of scandal regarding Biden business dealings, appeared on Live at the Table, a podcast hosted by Noam Dworman, the owner of New York City’s Comedy Cellar. The show went viral as Dworman challenged Bump’s claims that there was “no evidence” of wrongdoing by Joe Biden.   

In a heated exchange, Bump conceded that Hunter Biden’s text messages that claim, “unlike pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary,” was one form of “evidence.” Moments later, Bump ended the interview and walked off the set.  
 
The interaction provided a rare moment of visible accountability for the establishment press, which has largely followed the Biden spin for an entire decade on this issue.    

Yet the White House is still hoping it can still instruct journalists on how to cover the story. Shortly after McCarthy’s impeachment inquiry announcement, President Biden’s White House staff circulated a memo, instructing media outlets on how to cover the news. In bold type, the memo claimed that the entire Hunter Biden conflict of interest scandal had been “refuted” and “debunked” – language that was adopted in media reports about the inquiry in Vox, NBC News and CNN.   

Lee Fang is an independent journalist based in San Francisco. He writes an investigative newsletter on Substack via www.leefang.com.

James Tweedie: UK Journo Arrested for ‘Malinformation’ After Exposing Trudeau Applauding Nazi

Photo by Markus Winkler on Pexels.com

By James Tweedie, Sputnik, 9/26/23

Free speech advocates have warned that the British government’s Online Safety Bill could be used to crack down on anyone questioning the official narrative on issues from the COVID-19 pandemic to the conflict in Ukraine.

A British independent journalist has been arrested after he condemned the Canadian parliament’s lauding of a Ukrainian Nazi Waffen-SS member.

Warren Thornton was hosting an edition of his webcast The Real Truth on the evening of Sunday September 24 when police officers knocked at his door.

The video blogger has been critical on social media of NATO’s support to Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. He had also helped expose the dark past of 98-year-old Ontario resident Yaroslav Hunka, who was given a standing ovation in the Canadian House of Commons last week during a speech by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky at the invitation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Guest Fiona Ryan recounted how Thornton “vanished” 20 minutes before the show ended, as she was talking with fellow guest Johnee, host of the Café Revolution YouTube channel based in Donetsk on the front line of the conflict with Ukraine.

When she sent a WhatsApp message to Thornton after the webcast ended to ask what happened, he texted back the single word “police”.

Thornton confirmed to Sputnik that officers from the regional Cyber Crime Unit “invited” him to be “interviewed”. When he declined, they put him under arrest and drove him to a police station in Bristol, many miles from his home.

There they attempted to serve him with a formal caution for ‘malinformation’ in relation to 16 videos he had posted on social media.

Thornton said the officers interrogated him became “flustered” when he asked which videos in particular they objected to. He added that his lawyer “ripped them to bits” and demanded the police “charge him or release him.”

He was finally released without charge or caution on Monday, left with a lengthy train journey home.

Several of the videos presented by Thornton discussed the conflict in Ukraine, focussing on the failure of Kiev’s counter-offensive and its indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas. Another discussed the evidence presented by the Russian Ministry of Defence of the US biolab program in Ukraine, linking it to the COVID-19 pandemic.

One in particular, entitled ‘Spies, Lies and Mercenaries’, exposed how French intelligence agents were working with foreign militants in Kiev as early as 2020, two years before the conflict with Russia. Another delved into last week’s invitation of Ukrainian Nazi Yaroslav Hunka to the Canadian parliament.

During the Second World War, Hunka was a member of the notorious 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division Galicia, a unit of Ukrainian collaborators recruited by the Nazi occupiers which took part in massacres of the civilian population. After the Axis defeat in 1945, Hunka was among thousands of Ukrainian Nazis who emigrated to the Soviet Union’s erstwhile ally Canada — including the grandfather of Foreign Minister and Deputy PM Christia Freeland.

Trudeau apologised for the outrage on Monday — before attempting to shift the focus to alleged “Russian disinformation.”

The incident highlights the concerns of free speech advocates that the Online Safety Bill, currently being debated in Parliament, which could be used to crack down on commentators who criticise the official government line.

In a video on social network site X (formerly Twitter) — since taken down — Thornton said that “being taken away and questioned for ‘malinformation’ is quite an honour.”

He noted that “disinformation is when you knowingly know something is a lie, and you publish it. Misinformation is when you don’t know something is a lie, and you go ahead and publish it.”

“’Malinformation’ is when you know something is completely true, and you publish it, and they consider it harm to take it from the private sphere and put it into the public sphere,” Thornton argued.

He pointed out that journalists have a “duty” to expose crimes, impropriety, risks to public health and safety and to prevent the people from being misled by public figures.

“So thank you very much for showing that all 16 of the videos you were investigating are completely and utterly true,” Thornton told the police, pointing out that “no further action” was being taken against him.

“There is no way that we are going to keep silent, and we are going to keep telling people the truth,” Thornton vowed. “It is incumbent upon them to prove that what we are doing doesn’t benefit the public.”

He stressed that his and others’ critical coverage of the West’s proxy conflict with Russia in Ukraine was vital in the interests of humanity, and that he was entitled to point out breaches of Article 39 of the UN Charter — which mandates a response to ‘any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression’ — which he believed “all NATO members have been guilty of.”

“We need to stop the killing and all the money that is flowing to these lunatic people and this lunatic war that is being fought on behalf of these lunatics in power,” Thornton said.

MK Bhadrakumar: The ‘Biden Phase’ of the Ukraine War

By MK Bhadrakumar, Indian Punchline, 9/17/23

The ground war in Ukraine has run its course, a new phase is beginning. Even diehard supporters of Ukraine in the western media and think tanks are admitting that a military victory over Russia is impossible and a vacation of the territory under Russian control is way beyond Kiev’s capability.

Hence the ingenuity of the Biden Administration to explore Plan B counselling Kiev to be realistic about loss of territory and pragmatically seek dialogue with Moscow. This was the bitter message that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken transmitted to Kiev recently in person. 

But President Zelensky’s caustic reaction in a subsequent interview with the Economist magazine is revealing. He hit back that the western leaders still talk the good talk, pledging they will stand with Ukraine “as long as it takes” (Biden mantra), but he, Zelensky, has detected a change of mood among some of his partners: “I have this intuition, reading, hearing and seeing their eyes [when they say] ‘we’ll be always with you.’ But I see that he or she is not here, not with us.” Certainly, Zelensky is reading the body language right, as in the absence of an overwhelming military success shortly, western support for Ukraine is time-limited.

Zelensky knows that sustaining the western support will be difficult. Yet he hopes that if not Americans, European Union will at least keep supplying aid, and but may open negotiations over the accession process for Ukraine possibly even at its summit in December. But he also held out a veiled threat of terrorist threat to Europe — warning that it would not be a “good story” for Europe if it were to “drive these people [of Ukraine] into a corner”. So far such ominous threats were muted, originating from low ranking activists of the fascist Bandera fringe.

But Europe has its limits, too. The western stockpiles of weapons are exhausted and Ukraine is a bottomless pit. Importantly, conviction is lacking whether continued supplies would make any difference to the proxy war that is unwinnable. Besides, European economies are in doldrum,’ the recession in Germany may slide into depression, with profound consequences of “deindustrialisation.” 

Suffice to say, Zelensky’s visit to the White House in the coming days becomes a defining moment. The Biden Administration is in a sombre mood that the proxy war is hindering a full-throttle Indo-Pacific strategy against China. Yet, during an appearance on ABC’s This Week, Blinken explicitly stated for the first time that the US would not oppose Ukraine using US-supplied longer-range missiles to attack deep inside Russian territory, a move that Moscow has previously called a “red line,” which would make Washington a direct party to the conflict. 

The well-known American military historian, strategic thinker and combat veteran Colonel (Retd.) Douglas MacGregor (who served as advisor to the Pentagon during the Trump administration), is prescient when he says that a new “Biden’s phase of the war” is about to begin. That is to say, having run out of ground forces, the locus will now shift to long-range strike weapons like the Storm Shadow, Taurus,  ATACMS long-range missiles, etc. 

The US is considering sending ATACMS long-range missiles that Ukraine has been asking for a long time with the capability to strike deep inside Russian territory. The most provocative part is that NATO reconnaissance platforms, both manned and unmanned, will be used in such operations, making the US a virtual co-belligerent. 

Russia has been exercising restraint in attacking the source of such enemy capabilities but how long such restraint will continue is anybody’s guess. In response to a pointed query about how Washington would see the attacks on Russian territory with American weaponry and technology, Blinken argued that the increasing number of attacks on Russian territory by Ukrainian drones are “about how they’re [Ukrainians] going to defend their territory and how they’re working to take back what’s been seized from them. Our [US] role, the role of dozens of other countries around the world that are supporting them, is to help them do that.” 

Russia is not going to accept such a brazen escalation, especially as these advanced weapon systems used to attack Russia are actually manned by NATO personnel — contractors, trained ex-military hands or even serving officers. President Putin told the media on Friday that “we have detected foreign mercenaries and instructors both on the battlefield and in the units where training is carried out. I think yesterday or the day before yesterday someone was captured again.” 

The US calculus is that at some point, Russia will be compelled to negotiate and a frozen conflict will ensue where the NATO allies would retain the option to continue with Ukraine’s military build-up and the process leading to its membership of the Atlantic alliance, and allow the Biden Administration to focus on the Indo-Pacific. 

However, Russia will not settle for a “frozen conflict” that falls far short of the objectives of demilitarisation and denazification of Ukraine that are the key objectives of its special military operation. 

Faced with this new phase of the proxy war, what form the Russian retaliation will take remains to be seen. There could be multiple ways without Russia directly attacking NATO territories or using nuclear weapons (unless the US stages a nuclear attack — of which the chances are zero as of now.)

Already, it is possible to see the potential resumption of military-technical  cooperation between Russia and the DPRK (potentially including ICBM technology) as a natural consequence of the aggressive US policy towards Russia and its support for Ukraine — as much as of the current international situation. The point is, today it is with DPRK; tomorrow it could be with Iran, Cuba or Venezuela — what Col. MacGregor calls “horizontal escalation” by Moscow.  The situation in Ukraine has become interconnected with the problems of the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan. 

Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu said on state television on Wednesday that Russia has “no other options” but to achieve a victory in its special military operation and will continue to make progress with their key mission of mowing down the enemy’s equipment and personnel. This suggests that the attritional war will be further intensified while the overall strategy may shift to achieving total military victory. 

The Ukrainian military is desperate for manpower. In the 15-week “counteroffensive” alone, over 71,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed. There is talk of Kiev seeking repatriation of its nationals in military age from among the refugees in Europe. On the other hand, in expectation of a prolonged conflict, the mobilisation in Russia is continuing. 

Putin disclosed on Friday that 300,000 people have volunteered and signed contracts to join the armed forces and new units are being formed, equipped with advanced types of weapons and equipment, “and some of them are already 85–90 percent equipped.” 

The high likelihood is that once the Ukrainian “counteroffensive” peters out in another few weeks as a massive failure, Russian forces may launch a large-scale offensive. Conceivably, Russian forces may even cross Dnieper river and take control of Odessa and the coastline leading to the Romanian border, from where NATO has been mounting attacks on Crimea. Make no mistake, for the Anglo-American axis, encircling Russia in the Black Sea has always remained a top priority.

Watch the excellent interview (below) of Col. Douglas MacGregor by Professor Glenn Diesen at the University of North-Eastern in Norway: