Since the beginning of Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine, I have been out of step with my neighbours here in Toronto. I was aware of the American-led coup that ousted the democratically-elected president (Yanukovych) of Ukraine in 2014 and replaced him with a string of anti-Russian puppets. (For his part, the latest president, Zelensky, has betrayed the Ukrainians who elected him in 2019 on a platform of reconciliation with Russia and the Russian-speaking provinces of Donbass. Once in office, for whatever reason and under whatever pressure from whatever source, he has become irreconcilably aggressive towards everything Russian.) I remembered the horrors of the Maidan “revolution” and the subsequent massacres of Russian-speaking Ukrainians in Odessa and Mariupol by the Nazi thugs that guaranteed the new regime. I was relieved when Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to join Russia. I figured that they had escaped the fate of the Russian-speaking Ukrainians in Odessa, set on fire and battered to death by Nazi Ukrainians. And then I followed the fate of the poor people of Donbass, called “pro-Russian separatists” in the Western media. It was claimed by the propagandists that Russia was supplying arms to the “separatists.” However, NATO knew all along that the guns that the people of the Donbass were using in self-defence came from Ukrainian army deserters who had defected to Donbass and brought their arms with them. In fact, the people of Donbass wisely sought to control their lives through a designation as autonomous regions within Ukraine. The Minsk Accords of 2014 and 2015 were intended to establish this relationship. However, Kiev negotiated in bad faith. Ukraine’s new regime intended to keep the Donbass within Ukraine while killing or exiling the Russian-speaking majority. This carried on until Russia finally recognized the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic and intervened to protect them from a Ukrainian invasion that had already begun on 16 February 2022. The Republics had declared themselves to be independent states once they realized that Ukraine, backed by NATO, would never honour the Minsk Accords. They had established their own governing structures and their own militaries. They had the support of their populations, increasingly desperate to secede from Ukraine. The Kiev government’s eight-year-long assault on Donbass had been well documented by the OSCE, the UNHCHR, AI, and HRW. It was, however, never mentioned by Western governments and media. Russia officially recognized the Republics as independent states and, at their request and under the authority of Section 51 of the UN Charter, came to their aid against the assault by Ukraine. It was not Russia that invaded Ukraine, but Ukraine that had been invading the independent republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. The United States, Canada, and other NATO countries have been intervening in this “civil war” since before 2014.
The Western media and governments have created the narrative that Putin invaded Ukraine in an unprovoked attempt to conquer a sovereign country and that Ukrainians have been valiantly resisting the Russian aggressor. (In fact, the Russian intervention on behalf of the Republics is exactly what Washington and NATO had intended all along. The consequences of that intervention, however, are not going to plan.) Here in Canada, I have often heard this basic story recounted uncritically by my neighbours. When people hold opposing assumptions about any topic, meaningful conversation is almost impossible until they can agree on the basic facts or, at least, acknowledge that other facts and assumptions lead to different conclusions. Courts of law, scientific studies, and domestic quarrels are all subject to the rules of logic that begin with establishing facts.
The flags and lawn signs that began appearing everywhere here in Toronto over the winter urging Canadians to “Stand with Ukraine” make no sense to me. What does that even mean? Which Ukrainians? I keep asking. No one knows what I’m talking about. Why didn’t we care about the victims of Kiev’s aggression in Donbass since the coup that we supported? The Western media had been reporting on Ukraine’s Nazi problem since 2014. But, suddenly, the media was silent about that delicate issue. And, now, it’s forgotten. Now, there are only Ukrainians, all of them under attack by Putin, the dictator of Russia. Strangely, the NATO countries have also declared war on Russian citizens. (Daniil Medvedev was barred from playing at Wimbledon. Other Russians have fared much worse.) So, they have it both ways: the alleged victims of Putin’s tyrannical rule are as guilty as he is. Don’t try to make sense of this.
My narrative of the situation in Ukraine, outlined in skeletal form in the opening paragraph, is influenced by the ex-Swiss Army intelligence officer, Jacques Baud. His detailed, scholarly exposé of the roots of this war has been published in numerous issues of The Postil. Baud is writing from the inside, with a comprehensive knowledge of the history and current events. His narrative is well supported with facts. But since every fact contradicts the official narrative, it takes time to digest. You have to take apart what you think you know and then build a more comprehensible narrative. For example, we had been told for years that Russian military equipment had been pouring into the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk to support the pro-Russian separatists behind the violence. In fact, Baud tells us that NATO had known all along that the arms used by the defenders of Donbass had come from the Ukrainian army itself. After the Maidan coup, the Russian-speaking soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine defected to their homeland and carried their arms with them to defend against Ukrainian aggression. They had seen the anti-Russian Nazis up close and, not surprisingly, wanted out of the army and out of Ukraine. Consider the implications: people who trust the Western media and politicians are trapped in a web of lies from which they can only extricate themselves one thread at a time.
For disseminating this kind of intelligence, Jacques Baud has been added to a hit list promulgated by the secret services of Ukraine, the SBU. He is targeted for assassination as are other critics of the Ukrainian/NATO position. As we will see, this list is not an idle threat. People inside and outside of Ukraine are being killed for challenging the official narrative. Those whose evidence is most credible and who are influencing public opinion effectively are prioritized for assassination. There are 327 children on the hit list. The Shiller Institute claims that 200,000 names have been added since 2014. The list is called Myrotvorets and is available online. (However, while the site is available, you now need a password to see the identity of the targetted individuals.)
Before I became aware of Myrotvorets and their hit list, I benefited from the work of several journalists reporting in English and French from the Donbass. They consistently showed that the media narrative in the West was fictitious. The Russian army, we were told, was shelling and killing the poor people of Donbass. Instead, journalists like Graham Phillips and Patrick Lancaster have published a deep body of work from inside of Donbass telling an entirely different story. The people of Donbass have been under constant shelling from the Ukrainian Armed Forces since the Maidan coup of 2014. Anne-Laure Bonnel made a documentary film in 2016, showing the same story. She has continued to try to educate the French public ever since despite pressure from the media. The majority Russian-speaking people of Donbass had every reason to fear the anti-Russian coup regime, installed by Washington in 2014. Anne-Laure Bonnel, Graham Phillips, and Patrick Lancaster are all on the Myrotvorets hit list.
When Darya Dugina came to visit Mariupol after the defeat of the Ukrainian Army there, Phillips accompanied her through the Azovstal plant that had served as the last stand of the Azov Battalion. Dugina, a Moscow-based academic who had been outspoken in her support for the Russian-speakers in Donbass in the face of Ukrainian aggression, witnessed the Nazi artefacts left behind by the Azov (Nazi) Battalion. She denounced Kiev’s anti-Russian politics. She was on Myrotvorets hit list. On August 20, she was killed by a car bomb in Moscow. Her picture on Myrotvorets is overwritten with the word “liquidated.” The Russian authorities have strong evidence that she was assassinated by a woman associate with the Azov battalion (Myrotvorets partners) who entered Russia for that purpose.
The Moscow-based, American academic and political commentator Mark Sleboda discussed her assassination with journalists and analysts who are also targeted for assassination by Myrotvorets. Sleboda (who is also on the Myrotvorets hit list) regularly receives death threats for his anti-Nazi analysis that exposes the lies of NATO and the West. He claims that most of the death threats come from Toronto, Canada, where a sizeable contingent of Ukrainian immigrants are based. Canada became a destination for Ukrainian Nazi collaborators, such as the grandfather of the Canadian deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland.
Dugina’a father, Alexander Dugin, an otherwise little-known academic in Russia, is also on the list. He also publicly advocates for Russian support for Donbass. Why are these two marked by the SBU? Since they are so little known inside of Russia, Sleboda, who knows the family well, argues that it is Dugin’s profile outside of Russia that has earned him the fatwa. He says that Dugin has been promoted in the West as “Putin’s Brain.” Western “analysts” have created an entirely fictitious profile of Dugin as a dangerous ultranationalist, a sort of Rasputin-like éminence grise behind Putin. In fact, Sleboda says that Dugin has never met Putin. There is no evidence that he has had any influence at all on Putin. So, why is he marked? For his support for the military operation? Maybe. Or, perhaps it is because his assassination would be a strike at the image that has been crafted by the West. In other words, they can now assassinate you for what they say you are, what they say you believe, what they say you support.
***
Let’s take a look at how Canada’s state broadcaster responds to the inclusion of one of the country’s top journalists, Eva K Bartlett, on the Myrotvorets hit list. Well, we can’t actually do that, because no public broadcaster in Canada has acknowledged, let alone discussed, the hit list. However, the CBC did make Bartlett the subject of a report on Ukraine. The segment, which aired 5 July 2022, is called “The Westerners Helping Putin’s Propaganda War on Ukraine.” Watch the segment, please. Then we’ll discuss the questions it raises in regards to Bartlett’s actual reportage.
In this section, I intend to offer a methodology for watching mainstream news. We should all watch “the news” from time to time. However, I suggest that you approach “the news” with caution and patience. Record a segment or a report and then research it, analyze it, and judge the validity of the facts and the cogency of the argument. What assumptions underlie the argument? Do you accept them? What facts are missing? You can’t know that without research. “Watching the news” must not be a passive experience. You must make it active.
The CBC report is the work of independent journalist Justin Ling. In journalistic circles, it would be called a “hit piece.” What is this report about? Why is it on the CBC? A shorthand approach to watching the news is to always ask yourself, ‘Who is saying what to whom, and why?’ The CBC has hired Ling to convince their audience that Russia is committing war crimes in Ukraine. So, the goal is definitely not to educate or inform their audience, but to arouse indignation and, even, anger. It had the opposite effect on me. After I researched and analyzed the issue critically, I found myself contemptuous of Justin Ling and the CBC. Here’s why.
Ling wants to convince me that Russia is committing war crimes in Ukraine. Instead of providing evidence, he implies that the august International Criminal Court (ICC) is compiling evidence of these alleged crimes while some halfwit in Moscow is using dishonest foreign journalists to build a farcical case against Ukraine. The Russian is seen in front of bombed-out buildings in Donbass. Ling claims that the Russian is trying to sell the absurd story that Nazi Ukrainians are bombing their own people, and not the Russian Army in its bid to conquer Ukraine. After introductory remarks about the two opposing tribunals, he introduces us to the two journalists who have sold out to the Russians. One of them is Canadian Eva Bartlett. He wants me to be ashamed of her. He then has to address her motivation. There doesn’t seem to be any. Never mind, she’s probably getting something from Russia. (No, really – that’s his argument. Do you think CBC paid Ling for this report?) Ling plays short clips of both the journalists claiming that Western media is fake news. (Ironically, Ling’s report is proof.) Bartlett says that she didn’t accept Ling’s request for an interview because she knows that CBC would never give her a fair hearing. Since I’m watching CBC, my friend and trusted news source, she is effectively insulting me. I identify with CBC. Ian Hanomansing ties a bow on the report by asking Ling a few irrelevant questions.
You will have seen the graphics that accompany Justin Ling’s voice-over during the introduction to the piece. But here is what he says:
Right now, investigators at the International Criminal Court in the Hague are building the case that Russian soldiers have committed war crimes in their invasion of Ukraine. In all likelihood, this will be one of the most important war crimes prosecutions since the end of World War Two. There is even a possibility that the Russian government or Russian military officials could be charged with committing acts of genocide. But in a drab yellow conference room in Moscow, one man is building the case that it’s Ukraine that’s responsible for atrocities in this war. He’s selling the narrative that Ukraine is run by neo-Nazis who want to ethnically cleanse Russians from their territory. And he has a secret weapon – a team of Westerners from Canada, the United States, and Europe – all of whom have a history of peddling pro-Russian disinformation. They are core parts of what he calls the International Public Tribunal on Ukraine. This Tribunal can tell us a lot about how Moscow intends on responding to this real war-crimes prosecution.
Since the beginning of this invasion, there has been overwhelming evidence that Russian forces have bombed civilian buildings, used rape as a weapon of war, executed civilians in the streets, and even attacked chemical and nuclear facilities. But, this tribunal is an attempt to flip that narrative. … Key to Grigoryev’s plan was to bring in Westerners like Dougan who showed up to parrot the Russian talking point that Ukraine was using their own citizens as human shields. This claim is a clear tactic to distract from Russia’s very real targetting of civilian infrastructure.
This news segment targets a passive audience. CBC is not intending to present facts and arguments, but rather to rally an audience, over which it has already established control, against traitors from within. CBC assumes I am a child without the capacity for critical thought. The images and scenes are all chosen and edited to accomplish that goal. Editing is a key tool in this exercise. We’ll see that as we analyze it in detail. But first, we have to always keep in mind that never, throughout the course of this report, will CBC address the reportage produced by either the American John Mark Dougan, the Canadian Eva K Bartlett, or “the secret army of journalists,” all of whom are on the Myrotvorets hit list. Whatever CBC’s goal, it is definitely not to establish the facts of the situation in Donbass. To accomplish that, CBC knows that its target audience is mostly ignorant about the conflict. So, before we go through the CBC report in more detail, let’s imagine what a serious news agency would have done. We’ll take Eva Bartlett as an example since she’s the Canadian. However, this applies to all of “Putin’s secret army of Western journalists.”
***
On 23 April 2022, CBC published an Associated Press article, “Ukraine’s Zelensky accuses Russian troops of mass civilian killings, coverup in Mariupol.” The article quotes Zelensky as claiming that Russian forces buried tens of thousands of civilians in mass graves near a town called Vynohradne, approximately twelve kilometers outside of Mariupol. The Russians were trying to cover up their crimes, but the Ukrainians have satellite images as evidence. A day later, 24 April 2022, Bartlett published “Western Claims of Russian Mass Graves Near Mariupol More Fake News, I Know, I Went To See.” Bartlett travelled to the location of the alleged mass grave and filmed the cemetery. All graves were marked with the identity of the deceased. She speaks with the gravediggers who are visibly indignant at the suggestion that they would participate in such an atrocity. They seem like decent guys. They say that they treat every deceased body with respect, even Ukrainian soldiers. And the evidence surrounding them corroborates that claim. The gravediggers have been busy and I don’t question their dedication. We see the graves prepared for burial and the markings on those that have recently been occupied.
If CBC wanted to fact-check its reportage of the alleged mass graves, it could have sent its staff to Vynohradne. Alternatively, it could have invited Bartlett to discuss her coverage of the issue. But it did neither. In fact, Bartlett’s work is full of such investigations into the lies of Western media, including the CBC. No wonder CBC can’t engage with her honestly. People who lie don’t discuss their dishonesty honestly.
***
Let’s go back to the introduction. Ling says, “Right now, investigators at the International Criminal Court in the Hague are building the case that Russian soldiers have committed war crimes in their invasion of Ukraine. In all likelihood, this will be one of the most important war crimes prosecutions since the end of World War Two. There is even a possibility that the Russian government or Russian military officials could be charged with committing acts of genocide.” Full of hypotheticals and unfounded assertions: “are building … will be … a possibility that … could be charged.” How should we interpret that?
Ukraine made the first request to the ICC in April 2014. Since Ukraine is not a State Party to the ICC, it had to officially recognize “the jurisdiction of the ICC for the purpose of identifying, prosecuting and judging the authors and accomplices of acts committed on the territory of Ukraine within the period 21 November 2013 – 22 February 2014.” The request was repeated by Pavlo Klimkin, Ukraine’s foreign minister, on 8 September 2015, asking the ICC to investigate “crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by senior officials of the Russian Federation and leaders of terrorist organizations “DNR” and “LNR”, which led to extremely grave circumstances and mass murder of Ukrainian nationals.” However, in the same letter, Klimkin accepts the jurisdiction of the ICC for the purpose of “identifying, prosecuting and judging the perpetrators and accomplices of acts committed in the territory of Ukraine since 20 February 2014.” So, first, Klimkin tells the ICC who the guilty parties are and, then, by the next stroke of the pen, defers to the investigative authority of the ICC to determine who the guilty parties are. On 2 March 2022, Karim Khan, ICC prosecutor, announced that he had opened an investigation into the situation in Ukraine. He is not (at least, in principle and contrary to Ling) investigating Russian crimes, but all crimes that fall within the jurisdiction of the ICC. Khan says that the investigation will build upon the research compiled since 2014 and tabled in 2020. The summary of the findings of those six years of investigation claims that crimes were indeed committed in Ukraine. Who committed those crimes is not discussed. Neither does the ICC address the issue of the justification for going to war in the first place.
In 2020, the ICC claimed that it had amassed evidence to proceed to trial. (It never did.) But who was to be prosecuted? The Russian-speaking population of Donbass, who had been under attack for six years by that point? Or the Ukrainian government that called the leaders of those provinces, now Republics, “terrorists” for defending themselves? We know that other investigative bodies had researched the conflict during those years of Ukrainian aggression on the Russian-speaking people of Donbass. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the European Union, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. Annual reports from those bodies confirm what Ling is ridiculing: Kiev was targetting Russian-speakers of Donbass. That’s why the Minsk Accords exist: to negotiate a settlement between Kiev and the people of Donbass. However, the Nazi groups that control Kiev, with the support of NATO, threaten anybody who tries to negotiate with Russia in good faith. On 5 March 2022, one of Ukraine’s key negotiators, Denis Kireyev, was shot in the head and left on a street in Kiev. The SBU (Ukraine’s secret service agency) admits having killed him. This sent a message to all authorities considering negotiating with Russia in good faith.
Ling, however, says that the ICC is investigating Russian crimes in Ukraine. End of story. (If he is correct, then it is another instance of the ICC demonstrating that it is a political body, incapable of adjudicating war crimes and crimes against humanity.) Ling has mocked the very idea of a Ukrainian government controlled by Nazis. However, the CBC and other Western media and governments have been aware of the problem since 2014. Ling’s goal here is to make it sound ridiculous. You the viewer should never consider the issue of ethnic/linguistic tensions in Ukraine. It’s a simple story that Ling is peddling, easy to grasp for those easily led: Russians have invaded Ukraine and are killing and raping Ukrainians. Someone is bombing Donbass; it must be Russia. However, you the viewer aren’t to know that Kiev has been shelling Donbass for eight years. Things have only heated up since Russia finally accepted the request of the Republics to help in their defence. In fact, the journalists that Ling mocks in this report have shown that the Armed Forces of Ukraine consistently use the people of Donbass as human shields against the Allied Forces. (The Allied Forces is what I am calling the militias of the DPR, LPR, and the Russian Armed Forces.)
There is a well-established distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello. The first describes the conditions under which states are justified in going to war. Self-defence, for instance, is a universally-accepted justification for military action. Jus in bello, on the other hand, regulates the behaviour of parties once they are engaged in conflict. In the referrals we have cited above, the ICC is investigating the latter. However, it is the justification for resorting to armed conflict that needs to be prioritized. It is my judgement that the Republics have been engaged in clear acts of self-defence for eight years. It is my judgement that Russia was justified in accepting their request for help. The UN Charter (Section 51) recognizes that intervention as justified in the context of self-defence.
The ICC has a highly unfavourable record of prosecution. Established in 2002, it did not prosecute the United States or any American citizen for well-documented crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and so on. The ICC is charged, among other crimes, with prosecuting the crime of aggression, in other words, jus ad bellum. But Washington has been getting away with murder. Over the last few years, American authorities (Bolton, Pompeo, Trump) have repeatedly threatened that ICC staff who try to prosecute American nationals or the nationals of its allies (notably Israel) would be subject to financial sanctions, visa bans, and prosecutions in American courts. So, Ling might have asked whether the ICC was really free to prosecute Ukrainians who commit crimes against Russia and Russian-speakers – that America has proclaimed its arch-enemies. The ICC is under enormous pressure to do the bidding of Western, NATO countries.
Just to stay on topic: Why, Justin Ling, is the ICC not investigating the assassinations by the Ukrainian SBU (or those under its influence) of people on the Myrotvorets hit list?
Remember how Ling introduced the International Public Tribunal on Ukraine: “But in a drab yellow conference room in Moscow, one man is building the case that it’s Ukraine that’s responsible for atrocities in this war. He’s selling the narrative that Ukraine is run by neo-Nazis who want to ethnically cleanse Russians from their territory. … This tribunal can tell us a lot about how Moscow intends on responding to this real war-crimes prosecution.” Ling is referring to Maxim Grigoryev, a member of the Russian Public Chamber. Human-rights activists and journalists from twenty countries are taking part in this Tribunal. They are all gathering evidence and will present it publicly as well as handing it over to their national judicial systems. So, Bartlett, in principle, will hand the information she collects to Canada’s Ministry of Justice. It will be interesting to see how the different countries deal with the material they receive. For his part, Grigoryev will pass his information along to the Russian Investigative Committee.
Grigoryev has been collecting testimonies from citizens in Donbass. As with the other journalists participating in the Tribunal, he is making at least some of the interviews available online. One woman was evacuated from Mariupol by Chechen and DPR soldiers, whom she calls “our boys”. She says that she witnessed Azov snipers killing civilians from the attics of residential buildings. Another woman tells of Azov soldiers shooting at civilians who try to escape from them as they commandeer upper-level apartments and install grenade launchers. A ninety-two-year-old woman tells Maxim how the DPR soldiers saved her from the “inhuman” Ukrainian Azovites. A common theme repeated by the witnesses is that the Ukrainians were setting up their military positions in residential areas, using citizens as human shields. The work of Patrick Lancaster (also on the Myrotvorets hit list) is full of evidence that the Ukrainians have been both firing on civilian targets and using them as human shields throughout the conflict.
Ling says that the “Key to Grigoryev’s plan was to bring in Westerners like Dougan who showed up to parrot the Russian talking point that Ukraine was using their own citizens as human shields.” He didn’t mention that Amnesty International came to the same conclusion in its report of 4 August 2022, “Ukraine fighting tactics endanger civilians” The report claimed that the Ukrainian Armed Forces “put civilians in harm’s way by establishing bases and operating weapons systems in populated residential areas, including schools and hospitals.” The report caused an uproar in Kiev and among NATO countries. While Amnesty International stood by the report, it apologized to Kiev for the “distress and anger” that it caused. Amnesty International’s Ukraine head resigned from the organization as a result of the furor.
***
People who record the crimes of the AFU and the Ukrainian government are targetted in other ways. So, it’s time to look at the reach of the propaganda machine and the role the Western governments are playing in the information/disinformation space.
The Ukrainian military has put a 10,000 dollar bounty on the head of military correspondent Georgy Medvedev. He grew up in the Donetsk region and is with the People’s Militia. He is the first soldier on the scene of Ukrainian shelling of residential areas. He films the results of the shelling and talks with residents. He claims that the state of Ukraine doesn’t exist, but that Western money is funding all of the destruction in Donbass. He wears no press insignia, because he says that the AFU deliberately targets correspondents. “There are millions of people here [in Donbass], the same women, old people, children. Every day, they died under the fire of crazy neo-Nazis. And today, and for eight years, they have been waiting for the Russian army to arrive, for the tricolour to be raised here in defence.”
Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone is not aware that he’s on the Myrotvorets hit list. However, his coverage of Ukraine has had repercussions. Over the summer of 2022, hundreds of journalists were sent emails from a former advisor to the Ukrainian foreign ministry working with Molfar, a military intelligence organization based in London, England with funding from USAID and the British foreign office. (Molfar is also funded by CRDF Global, which lists the Canadian government as a partner as well as the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine and the State Special Communications Service of Ukraine.) The journalists were offered a dossier purportedly containing proof that Blumenthal was a Russian asset and well paid by the Kremlin for spreading disinformation about Ukraine. In fact, the dossier provided no evidence that Blumenthal was connected with Russia. However, it offered to provide journalists who were willing to cooperate with Molfar private information about Blumenthal and his family. In other words, they would be able to dox him for having got on the bad side of British-American intelligence. (Western intelligence is looking to co-opt Western journalists into spreading disinformation claiming that Moscow is co-opting Western journalists to spread disinformation.) The dossier even doxed the employer of Blumenthal’s younger brother. In other words, this was an attempt to discredit and intimidate Blumenthal by putting him and his family at risk. Consider their tactic: Molfar sends out a trial email far and wide, looking to identify journalists willing to cooperate with them. Then, they send the actual, clearly fraudulent dossier to those journalists whom they have vetted as reliable to spread disinformation. This issue reveals the connection between the Ukrainian government and British and American state and intelligence agencies. These states are working together in support of the propaganda war. That means that Westerners who ask unwelcome questions are likely to be targetted in the information war.
Blumenthal’s story begs the question of how involved Western governments are in Ukraine’s targetting of those who reject the CBC narrative as promoted by Ling. I have shown that there are suspicious partnerships among Western government secret services and Ukraine in regards to the dissemination of propaganda. But the Shiller Institute and Scott Ritter have more to say about these connections.
Scott Ritter is on the Myrotvorets hit list. Ritter came to prominence when, as a UN weapons inspector in 2003, he publicly contradicted President George Bush’s claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The WMD story was invented to justify the unlawful invasion of Iraq. Now, Ritter lives in Albany, New York. He has been analyzing and commenting on the conflict in Ukraine. His commentary highlights how Washington has been using Ukraine and Ukrainians in its geostrategic goal of remaining the global hegemon and containing – if not destroying – Russia. He’s not alone in that analysis. RAND, an arm of the American foreign policy establishment, commissioned and published a major study in 2019 describing all the ways that the USA could weaken Russia. One of its main suggestions was using Ukraine to bleed the Russian military. Also, the study devotes much attention to the strategic value of sanctions to weaken Russia economically. The problem for the deep state is that these tactics were never intended to be discussed and debated publicly. In any case, like the others on the Myrotvorets hit list, Ritter is targeted for speaking the truth clearly. Here is his own account of why he is disturbed, as an American citizen, to be targeted by a Ukrainian security organization:
I took umbrage over this list for several reasons, first and foremost that the salaries of the Ukrainians who compiled this list appeared to be paid by the U.S. taxpayer using funds appropriated by Congress for that very purpose. The idea of Congress passing a law which empowered the Ukrainian government to do something — suppress the First Amendment guarantees of free speech and a free press — that Congress was Constitutionally prohibited from doing angered me.
So, too, did the fact that the Center for Countering Disinformation [which operates under Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council] announced the existence of this “blacklist” at a function organized by a U.S.-funded NGO and attended by State Department officials who sat mute while their Ukrainian colleagues labeled the persons on this list “information terrorists” who deserved to be arrested and prosecuted as “war criminals.”
At the time, I cautioned that the use of such inflammatory language meant that the “blacklist” could be turned into a “kill list” simply by having a fanatic decide to take justice into his or her own hands. Given that the U.S. government funded the creation of this list, organized the meeting where it was presented to the world and gave an implicit stamp of approval to the list and its accompanying labeling through the attendance of U.S. government officials, these fanatics don’t have to be foreign sourced. Plenty of people in the U.S. adhere to the same hate-filled ideology that exists in Ukraine today and which gave birth to the “blacklist.”
Knowing that he was on a list of enemies of Ukraine targeted for liquidation, Ritter says that he has once again called upon the skills he learned as a Marine Corps intelligence officer to evade assassination. Why should a writer living in Albany New York worry about his inclusion on a Ukrainian hit list? Near him in upstate New York is a youth camp for Ukrainian-American children that boasts a forty-two-foot-tall “Heroes Monument” that glorifies four figures, including Stepan Bandera, involved in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Russians, Poles, and Jews during World War Two.
Bandera has been elevated to the status of a national hero in Ukraine, and his birthday is considered a national holiday.
That a monument to men responsible for genocidal mass murder and who, in the case of two of them (Shukhevych and Bandera) openly collaborated with Nazi Germany, could be erected in the United States is disturbing.
That every year Ukrainian-American adherents of the odious ideology of Stepan Bandera gather to celebrate his legacy at a “children’s camp” where the youth are arrayed in brown uniforms that make them look like what they, in fact, are — ideological storm troopers for a hateful neo-Nazi ideology that promotes the racial superiority of the Ukrainian people, is an national abomination.
From Ellenville to Bethel, I saw evidence of this hateful reality in every blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag fluttering in the wind — and every red-and-black banner of the Bandera-worshipping Ukrainian neo-Nazi fanatics that fluttered next to them.
Like many analysts, I see what is happening in Ukraine as a proxy war between Russia and the USA/NATO. It is being fought in Ukraine, but that was the plan according to the RAND report: using Ukraine to weaken Russia. (That is only one element of RAND’s detailed agenda to extend Russia and assure Washington’s continued hegemony.) If my analysis is correct, it explains why people like Ritter and Bartlett are targetted for assassination. We are all at war, even though our governments haven’t declared it.
We’ll find out we’re at war when we’re targetted for assassination by our government’s ally, Ukraine, and our country does nothing in response.
***
At the beginning of the CBC report, “The Westerners Helping Putin’s War on Ukraine,” Ling includes a clip of President Biden saying “This man [Putin] cannot remain in power.” So, he is inciting, at least, regime change in Russia. However, other Western politicians, such as Lindsey Graham, have actually called for his assassination. Facebook changed its hate-speech policy after the start of the Special Military Operation to allow calls for the killing of Russian soldiers and other Russians. Facebook is a child of the Pentagon and it exists as an adjunct of the deep state. So, we are looking at unacknowledged official policy.