Ukraine’s Air Force says Russia launched its largest aerial attack overnight since its 2022 full-scale invasion, firing a record 741 drones and missiles, most of them targeting the city of Lutsk in western Ukraine. The barrage prompted Poland to activate its air defenses and scramble fighter jets. Russia’s attack came after President Trump on Tuesday sharply criticized Vladimir Putin in his latest in a series of U-turns on Ukraine policy. We speak with Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and former foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, on the latest developments. Trump is “learning that it’s actually not that easy,” he says. “And it’s not that easy because Vladimir Putin is not interested in a peace deal.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

On Monday President Donald Trump telephoned President Vladimir Putin and they talked for two hours before Trump put lunch in his mouth and Putin his dinner.

On the White House schedule, there was no advance notice of the call and no record afterwards. The White House log is blank for Trump’s entire morning while the press were told he was at lunch between 11:30 and 12:30.

Putin went public first, making a statement to the press which the Kremlin posted at 19:55 Moscow time; it was then 12:55 in Washington. Click to read.

Trump and his staff read the transcript and then composed Trump’s statement in a tweet posted at 13:33 Washington time, 20:33 Moscow time. Click to read.

If Secretary of State Marco Rubio and General Keith Kellogg, the president’s negotiator with the Ukraine and FUGUP (France, United Kingdom, Germany, Ukraine, Poland), were consulted during Trump’s prepping, sat in on the call with the President,  or were informed immediately after the call, they have remained silent.

The day before, May 18, Rubio announced that the Istanbul-II meeting had produced agreement “to exchange paper on ideas to get to a ceasefire. If those papers have ideas on them that are realistic and rational, then I think we know we’ve made progress. If those papers, on the other hand, have requirements in them that we know are unrealistic, then we’ll have a different assessment.” Rubio was hinting that the Russian formula in Istanbul, negotiations-then-ceasefire, has been accepted by the US. What the US would do after its “assessment”, Rubio didn’t say – neither walk-away nor threat of new sanctions.

Vice President JD Vance wasn’t present at the call because he was flying home from Rome where he attended Pope Leo XIV’s inaugural mass. “We’re more than open to walking away,” Vance told reporters in his aeroplane. “The United States is not going to spin its wheels here. We want to see outcomes.” Vance prompted Trump to mention the Pope as a mediator for a new round of Russian-Ukrainian negotiations, first to Putin and then in public.

Kellogg is refusing to go along. He tweeted on Sunday: “In Istanbul @SecRubio  made it clear that we have presented ‘a strong peace plan’. Coming out of the London meetings we (US) came up with a comprehensive 22 point plan that is a framework for peace. The first point is a comprehensive cease fire that stops the killing now.”

FUGUP issued their own statement after Trump’s call. “The US President and the European partners have agreed on the next steps. They agreed to closely coordinate the negotiation process and to seek another technical meeting. All sides reaffirmed their willingness to closely accompany Ukraine on the path to a ceasefire. The European participants announced that they would increase pressure on the Russian side through sanctions.”

This signalled acceptance with Trump of the Russian formula, negotiations-then-ceasefire, and time to continue negotiating at the “technical” level. The sanction threat was added. But this statement was no longer FUGUP. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was omitted; so too Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. The Italian, the Finn and the European Commission President were substituted. They make FUGIFEC.

Late in the Paris evening of Sunday French President Emmanuel Macron attempted to keep Starmer in Trump’s good books and preserve the ceasefire-first formula. “I spoke tonight,” Macron tweeted, “with @POTUS @Keir_Starmer @Bundeskanzler  and @GiorgiaMeloni  after our talks in Kyiv and Tirana. Tomorrow, President Putin must show he wants peace by accepting the 30-day unconditional ceasefire proposed by President Trump and backed by Ukraine and Europe.” By the time on Monday that Macron realized he had been trumped, the Elysée had nothing to say.

By contrast, Italian Prime Minister Meloni signalled she was happy to line up with Trump and accept Putin’s negotiations-then-ceasefire. “Efforts are being made,” Meloni’s office announced, “for an immediate start to negotiations between the parties that can lead as soon as possible to a ceasefire and create the conditions for a just and lasting peace in Ukraine.”  Meloni claimed she would assure that Pope Leo XIV would fall into line. “In this regard, the willingness of the Holy Father to host the talks in the Vatican was welcomed. Italy is ready to do its part to facilitate contacts and work for peace.”

For the time being, Putin’s and Trump’s statements have put Rubio, Kellogg and the Europeans offside. Decoding the two president’s statements shows how and why.

President Putin’s Statement

Source: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/76953 

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good evening.

Our colleagues asked me to briefly comment on the outcome of my telephone conversation with the President of the United States.This conversation has effectively taken place and lasted more than two hours. I would like to emphasise that it was both substantive and quite candid. Overall, [1] I believe it was a very productive exchange.

First and foremost [2], I expressed my gratitude to the President of the United States for the support provided by the United States in facilitating the resumption of direct talks between Russia and Ukraine aimed at potentially reaching a peace agreement and resuming the talks which, as we know, were thwarted by the Ukrainian side in 2022 [3].

The President of the United States shared his position [4] on the cessation of hostilities and the prospects for a ceasefire. For my part, I noted that Russia also supports a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine crisis as well. What we need now is to identify the most effective [5] ways towards achieving peace.

We agreed with the President of the United States that Russia would propose and is ready to engage with the Ukrainian side on drafting a memorandum [6] regarding a potential future peace agreement. This would include outlining a range of provisions, such as the principles for settlement, the timeframe for a possible peace deal, and other matters, including a potential temporary ceasefire, should the necessary agreements [7] be reached.

Contacts among participants of the Istanbul meeting and talks have resumed, which gives reason to believe that we are on the right track overall [8].

I would like to reiterate that the conversation was highly constructive, and I assess it positively. The key issue, of course, is now for the Russian side and the Ukrainian side to show their firm commitment to peace and to forge a compromise that would be acceptable to all parties.

Notably, Russia’s position is clear. Eliminating the root causes [9] of this crisis is what matters most to us.

Should any clarifications be necessary, Press Secretary [Dmitry] Peskov and my aide, Mr Ushakov [10], will provide further details on today’s telephone talks with President Trump.

Keys to Decode

1. This is a qualifier, meaning there are serious differences on the details — Putin asked Trump to pause, halt or cease all arms deliveries to the Ukraine, including US arms shipped through Israel, Germany, and Poland. This is a bullet Trump hasn’t bitten, yet.

2. Putin has made a firm decision to give Trump the “peace deal” he has asked for and wishes to announce at a summit meeting. In their call Putin was mollifying Trump’s disappointment at the failure of their plan to meet when Trump was in the Middle East. A Russian source comments: “Whatever concessions have to be made will be made only by Putin and only to Trump. The Europeans are trying to hog the headlines and turn their defeat into some sort of victory – Trump won’t let them have it and Putin won’t either.”

3. Putin does not publicly admit the mistakes he made with Roman Abramovich and Vladimir Medinsky in March 2022 at Istanbul-I. They have now been corrected at the  consensus decision-making session with the military and intelligence chiefs (May 14 Kremlin session) and then on May 16 in Istanbul with Admiral Igor Kostyukov of the GRU seated on Medinsky’s right with General Alexander Fomin, Deputy Minister of Defence. For more details, click to listen.

Source: https://ria.ru/20250516/peregovory-2017151081.html
At top left, 2nd from left, Fomin, then Kostyukov (obscured) and then Medinsky.

4. Soft qualifier. This means Putin did not agree with several of Trump’s points relating to intelligence sharing, arms deliveries, Ukrainian elections.

5. Future tense. Putin suggested to  Trump that he stop Kellogg and FUGUP encouraging Zelensky. Putin made an especially negative remark about the role played by Prime Minister Starmer.

6. This is a Russian lesson in escalation control. By putting the memorandum of understanding in Russian hands to initiate, Putin returns to the key parts of the December 17, 2021, draft treaty which President Joseph Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken summarily dismissed. Placing agreement on these terms first, before a temporary ceasefire, and making that ceasefire conditional on ceaseforce (halt to battlefield intelligence sharing and arms re-supply), Putin has invited Trump to choose between the US and FUGUP; between Zelensky and an elected successor;  and between his personal negotiator advisors, Steven Witkoff and General Kellogg.

7. Reiteration of the formula, negotiations first, then ceasefire.

8. Qualifier repeated – see Key 1.

9. This phrase refers to the European security architecture and mutual security pact of December 2021, as well as to the two declared objectives of the Special Military Operation — demilitarization and denazification.

10. Following Putin’s statement, Ushakov added: “other details of the telephone conversation. Among other things, Putin and Trump touched upon the exchange of prisoners of citizens of the two countries: the format of ‘nine nine’ is being worked out. The leaders also discussed their possible meeting and agreed that it should be productive, so the teams of the presidents will work out the content of the summit between Russia and the United States.”

President Trump’s Statement

Tweet source: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114535693441367601

Trump followed in a stumbling speech in the Rose Garden in which, referring to the morning telephone call, he said “they [Putin] like Melania better.”

Just completed my two hour call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. I believe it went very well. Russia and Ukraine will immediately start negotiations toward a Ceasefire [1] and, more importantly, an END to the War. The conditions for that will be negotiated between the two parties, as it can only be, because they know details of a negotiation that nobody else would be aware of. [2] The tone and spirit of the conversation were excellent. If it wasn’t, I would say so now, rather than later. Russia wants to do largescale TRADE with the United States when this catastrophic “bloodbath” is over, and I agree [3]. There is a tremendous opportunity for Russia to create massive amounts of jobs and wealth. Its potential is UNLIMITED. Likewise, Ukraine can be a great beneficiary on Trade, in the process of rebuilding its Country.

Negotiations between Russia and Ukraine will begin immediately. I have so informed President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, of Ukraine, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, President Emmanuel Macron, of France, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, of Italy, Chancellor Friedrich Merz, of Germany, and President Alexander Stubb, of Finland, during a call with me,[4]  immediately after the call with President Putin. The Vatican, as represented by the Pope [5] has stated that it would be very interested in hosting the negotiations. Let the process begin! [6]

Keys to Decode

1. Trump accepts that negotiations should come before ceasefire.

2. This amounts to rejection of Kellogg’s 22-point term paper first decided with Zelensky and FUGUP in London on April 23 and repeated by Macron the night before Trump’s telephone call; as well as rejection of Witkoff’s term paper discussed at the Kremlin on April 25.

Source: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/76797
From left to right: Witkoff’s interpreter, Witkoff, Putin, Ushakov, Russian interpreter, Kirill Dmitriev. For analysis of the term sheets, read this.

3. Agreement with the business deal-making which Witkoff has been discussing with Kirill Dmitriev. For the deal beneficiaries on both sides, read this.

4. This list includes two Germans, both Russia haters — Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Ursula von der Leyen, former German defense minister and supporter of the German rearmament plan to continue the war with Russia into the future. The British Prime Minister has been dropped by Trump, and also Polish Prime Minister Tusk. Included for the first time in this context are the Italian and Finnish representatives with whom Trump has demonstrated personal rapport. Research by Manos Tzafalias indicates that there is a substantial money interest in Finland for Trump’s associate, Elon Musk.

5. Prompt from the Catholic convert, Vice President Vance.

Vance and Rubio meeting with Pope Leo XIV on May 18. They invited the Pope to make an official visit to Washington. The last papal visit to the White House was in September 2015 on the invitation of President Obama and Vice President Biden.

6. Trump has covered his disappointment at failing to hold a summit meeting with Putin in Istanbul on the afternoon of May 16 by dismissing the negotiations which occurred without him. For details of Trump’s abortive summit plan, read this.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John Helmer.

Aramyan, the co-founder of the student publication DOXA, is currently in exile alongside three DOXA editors — Alla Gutnikova, Natalia Tyshkevich, and Vladimir Metelkin — after authorities convicted them in April 2022 on charges of involving minors in illegal protests that same year. The court also banned them from administering websites for three years. 

“Russian authorities’ persecution of journalists in exile through arrest warrants in absentia highlights their escalating repression of those who have had to flee the country following a crackdown on their reporting and journalism,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “The authorities must immediately stop the prosecution of DOXA co-founder Armen Aramyan, and the transnational repressions aimed at silencing exiled Russian journalists.”  

Russian authorities placed Aramyan on the federal wanted list in August 2023 after he left the country in April 2022.

The Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation declared DOXA an “undesirable” organization in January 2024. 

Organizations that receive the “undesirable” classification are banned from operating in Russia or distributing their content, and anyone who participates in them faces up to six years in prison and administrative fines.

CPJ emailed the Moscow branch of the Russian Investigative Committee for comment on Aramyan’s arrest in absentia but did not immediately receive a reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Authorities sought the arrest one exiled journalist and added two to their wanted list of suspects sought on criminal charges. More than 95,000 people are named on the the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ online database and risk arrest if they enter Russia.

In addition, five were prosecuted for working with “undesirable organizations,” which are banned from operating in Russia. Anyone who participates in or works to organize the activities of such outlets faces up to six years in prison. It is also a crime to distribute the organizations’ content or donate to them.

Another three journalists were added to the “foreign agents” register, which legally requires them to regularly submit detailed reports of their activities and expenses to authorities and to list their status as “foreign agents” on any published content. Two journalists were fined for failing to comply with this law.

Arrested in absentia

• On June 26, a Moscow court ordered ex-state TV host Farida Kurbangaleeva’s arrest in absentia on charges of justifying terrorism and spreading “fake” information about the Russian army after she interviewed a soldier of a pro-Ukrainian Russian paramilitary group on her YouTube channel. A person arrested in absentia would be immediately held in pre-trial detention if they traveled to Russia or if they traveled to a country that could extradite them to Russia.

On June 20, the Prague-based journalist was also added to the government’s wanted list and on June 28, she was designated a foreign agent.

Wanted list

• On July 17, the Ministry of Internal Affairs added Andrei Zakharov, an investigative journalist and host of The Insider Live YouTube channel, to its wanted list on unspecified charges. Zakharov is facing criminal charges for failing to list his status as a foreign agent in two Telegram posts in March. Zakharov was labeled a foreign agent in 2021, after which he fled Russia.

• On July 18, the Ministry of Internal Affairs added Svetlana Prokopyeva, a journalist with the U.S. Congress-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Sever.Realii website, to its wanted list on unspecified charges under the Criminal Code. In 2023, Prokopyeva was fined for “discrediting” the army for an interview with a historian about the war in Ukraine. Prokopyeva, a CPJ 2020 International Press Freedom Awardee, left Russia in 2022.

Prosecuted for ‘undesirable’ activities

• On June 27, a Moscow court fined Asya Zolnikova, a journalist with the Latvia-based independent news site Meduza, 12,000 rubles (US$136) for “participating in an undesirable organization.” At least four other journalists with Meduza, which was labeled as undesirable in 2023, have faced similar charges this year.

Four exiled journalists were prosecuted for “participating in an undesirable organization” for working with Latvia-based investigative outlet The Insider, which was banned in 2022:

• On June 27, journalist Vladimir Romensky was fined 7,500 rubles (US$85) by a Moscow court.

• On July 2, a Moscow court registered a case against The Insider’s founder and editor-in-chief Roman Dobrokhotov.

• On July 15, journalist and editor Timur Olevskiy was fined 10,000 rubles (US$114) by a Moscow court.

• On July 18, a case was registered against journalist Marfa Smirnova.

Designated foreign agents

Between June 28 and July 5, the Ministry of Justice added at least three more exiled journalists to its foreign agents register:

• Aleksandr Shurshev, editor-in-chief of the investigative outlet Khroniki (Chronicles Media).

• Olesya Gerasimenko, who told CPJ that she worked with the BBC until January when she became a freelance journalist.

• The Insider’s investigative reporter Sergey Yezhov.

Fined under foreign agent legislation

Two journalists were fined by a court in the western region of Pskov for failing to comply with the foreign agent legislation:

• On July 1, Denis Kamalyagin, the exiled editor-in-chief of independent newspaper Pskovskaya Guberniya, and the legal entity the journalist created to comply with the law, were fined 330,000 rubles (US$3,785).

• On July 19, the legal entity created by journalist Lyudmila Savitskaya was fined 300,000 rubles (US$3,441). Savitskaya was labeled a foreign agent in 2020 and left Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Russian authorities have effectively clamped down on independent reporting in the country since their full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Hundreds of Russian journalists have fled into exile, where they are now increasingly harassed by the authorities with fines, arrest warrants and jail terms in absentia.

CPJ emailed the Ministry of Internal Affairs requesting comment but received no immediate response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

In this chilling episode of Gaslit Nation, Russian mafia expert Olga Lautman and European analyst Monique Camarra of the Kremlin File podcast join Andrea to discuss the latest leadership shake-up in Russia’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine, the forces behind Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, and the latest threats from Russia’s mafia state, including against Olga and her fearless human rights work. Western leaders must wake-up and do more to protect those on the frontlines, fighting for our democracy, more than the institutions failing us. 

The discussion with Kremlin File begins around the 18-minute mark and is exclusive to our subscribers at the Truth-teller tier and higher. In the opening segment, Andrea reads comments from Gaslit Nation subscribers at the Democracy Defender tier and higher on our recent coverage of Israel and Palestine. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!

Thank you to everyone who supports the show – we could not make Gaslit Nation without you! To join the conversation, submit questions to our regular Q&As, bonus shows, get all shows ad-free and invites to virtual events, and more, subscribe to Gaslit Nation at the Truth-teller level or higher on Patreon.com/Gaslit!

Here are some of the exciting events we have coming up for our Patreon community: 

Investigative Journalist Craig Unger Live-Taping - June 25th 12pm ET: 

• June 25th is George Orwell’s birthday! Come celebrate with us at a live taping of Gaslit Nation, featuring another fearless journalist, Craig Unger, the author of several bestselling books: House of Trump, House of Putin; House of Bush, House of Saud; and American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery (which features his reporting on Jeffrey Epstein's pedophile global crime syndicate). Joining the live-taping will be Russian mafia expert Olga Lautman and European analyst Monique Camarra of Kremlin File. Drop your questions in the chat! Be sure to subscribe at Patreon.com/Gaslit at the Truth-teller tier ($5/month) or higher to get your ticket. A zoom link will be sent out the morning of the event. Thank you to everyone who supports the show! 

Cult Expert Dr. Janja Lalich Live-Taping - July 15 8pm ET

• July 15th kicks off the Republican National Convention/Hitler rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. To help us cope with the mainstream media, especially the New York Times, continuing to normalize Trump and his MAGA cult, we’re producing a live taping with cult expert Dr. Janja Lalich. Bring your questions about how to navitage this perilous time of rampant disinformation and manipulation, learn the signs of cult grooming, and how to help loved ones who have fallen victim. This will be Dr. Lalich’s second time on the show. You can listen to the interview with her from April 2022 here. 

In the Shadow of Stalin Book Launch - September 

• Gaslit Nation will host a live taping at a book launch in New York City for In the Shadow of Stalin, the graphic novel adaptation of Mr. Jones. It includes scenes that didn’t make it into the final cut of the film, or it would have been three hours long! The evening will include a special meet-up just for Patreon supporters. We look forward to sharing more details as we get closer. If you want a book event/live taping of Gaslit Nation in your town or city, let us know! 

Indivisible x Gaslit Nation Phonebank Party! - June 20th 8pm ET

• Open to all, Gaslit Nation and Indivisible are kicking things off early this year, really early! When there’s such a thing as Project 2025, there’s no time to waste. Come join us for our first phone bank party of the season, as we make calls to our fellow citizens in Republican hostage states, to refuse to abandon those on the frontlines of American authoritarianism, and to plant seeds of change. We’re going in! 

RSVP here to join us! https://www.mobilize.us/indivisible/event/628701/

Show Notes:

Pre-Order In the Shadow of Stalin: The Story of Mr. Jones, out this September!

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/In-the-Shadow-of-Stalin-The-Story-of-Mr-Jones/Andrea-Chalupa/9781637152775

Paul Klebnikov: The Man Who Knew Too Much

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-man-who-knew-too-much/

Godfather of the Kremlin: The Decline of Russia in the Age of Gangster Capitalism

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/godfather-of-the-kremlin-the-decline-of-russia-in-the-age-of-gangster-capitalism_paul-klebnikov/297758/#edition=4484892&idiq=3909390

This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.

• Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny dies in prison, world leaders condemn Vladimir Putin.
• New York judge order Trump organization to pay $355 million in civil fraud trial verdict.
• Madera city council approves Gaza ceasefire resolution.
• San Francisco General Hospital workers demand higher staffing levels.

The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – February 16, 2024 Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny dies in prison, world leaders condemn Vladimir Putin. appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

On October 26, 2023, the Telegram channel “General SVR” announced the death of Vladimir Putin. According to the channel, the late president had been hastily replaced with a double, as the authorities had not yet decided what to do after his inconvenient death. This same information was announced by Professor Valery Solovey, who had repeatedly insisted for some time that the president was seriously ill. Such stories, of course, smack of “conspiracy theory” and were thus not widely believed, especially since the “General SVR” channel has an mixed reputation. On the one hand, it had reported several times about events being prepared behind the scenes by the government, which were later confirmed. On the other hand, a number of messages from the same channel turned out to be completely unreliable. In fact, “General SVR” is a kind of aggregator of Kremlin rumors, bringing to its readers information, both true and false, that circulates in the highest echelons of the bureaucracy and intelligence services.

Western politicians and journalists, as well as Russian emigrants (with the exception of sociologist Ekaterina Shulman), ignored the messages of “General SVR,” but throughout Russia rumors continued to spread, and sharply intensified after January 1 when, during his New Year’s televised address, President Putin seemed not quite himself, and there was an unpleasant sense that the head on the screen was somehow not quite firmly attached to the body.

To make matters worse, for some time now, during his public appearances, Putin began to reveal alleged details of his biography that blatantly contradicted what had been previously officially reported. If the former Putin had been a state security officer who worked in East Germany, a judoka, and a Leningrader, then the current Putin, in his own words, had instead been a marine, a carpenter, a taxi driver, and also an obvious provincial. His demeanor and vocabulary changed dramatically. In general, something strange had clearly happened to the president.

Of course, it is completely impossible to definitively confirm or refute rumors about the death of the president at the moment, but the very fact of their appearance speaks of a growing sense of uncertainty in both Russian bureaucracy and in society. Of course, the question of whether the person who performed on New Year’s Eve under the name of Putin was real or fake is not particularly important in a political sense. For the Russian state today, Putin has long since ceased to be a mere person, and has become a symbol; the ideologists of the regime now speak directly about his political immortality. Recall the article by the famous Kremlin publicist Vladislav Surkov, who proclaimed that no one except Putin will lead Russia as long as the current state exists, or the famous 2014 statement by State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin: “If there is Putin, there is Russia; no Putin, no Russia.”Within the framework of such an ideology, the death of a ruler is impossible in principle; such a thing merits not even the slightest consideration. Even if the information released by “General SVR” is correct, then, at a minimum, it is not clear how it could even be reported to the outside world – let alone the Russian people – without provoking the collapse of the regime’s ideological supports. Therefore, the man presented as Putin last week is undoubtedly the real Putin, whether or not he is biologically identical to the person elected to office of the presidency in 2018.

Curiously, there is precedent in Russian history for a ruler to die and and be resurrected – it happened more than once in the 17th century alone. After Tsarevich Dmitry, son of Ivan the Terrible, died under strange circumstances, an impostor appeared some time later in Krakow declaring himself heir to the throne. Historians believe that it was not, in fact, the risen Dmitry, but a fugitive monk named Grishka Otrepiev. After he marched on Moscow, with the support of both Polish troops and Russian troops who had come over to his side, the prince was unanimously recognized by all the boyars and even the mother of the real Dmitry. The new tsar settled in the Kremlin, but very soon the boyars, who hoped to control him as their puppet, discovered that he was trying to pursue an independent policy. The impostor was immediately exposed, cast from the throne, and killed. Soon after this, however, yet another Dmitry appeared near Moscow, founded his own court in Tushino, and was again officially recognized by a fair portion of the boyars, as well as his own wife Marina Mniszrech. Many territories of the state swore allegiance to him, although, unlike his predecessor, he ultimately failed to take possession of the Kremlin and the crown. After having begun a war simultaneously with the Moscow government and the Poles, False Dmitry II was killed by his own people in Kaluga. But a short time later False Dmitry III appeared, claiming the right to rule Russia from Pskov. This latest impostor was soon on the verge of riding into Moscow in triumph, but, like his two predecessors, he fell victim to a conspiracy drawn up by his own entourage in 1612.

All three stories reproduced the same pattern: a false ruler comes to power with the support of a significant part of the elite who try to legitimize their hegemony with his help, but very soon the puppet attempts to seize the levers of real control and act independently, after which he must be eliminated by violent means.

To what extent this story can repeat itself in modern Russia we can only guess. But in any case, it is highly instructive.

Translated by Dan Erdman.

This first appeared on Russian Dissent.

The post Is This a False Vladimir? Does It Matter? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Boris Kagarlitsky.

Furthermore: the U.S. Government began in 1948 its many dozens of coups (starting with Thailand in that year) to overthrow the leaders of its targeted-for-takeover countries, and its replacement of those by U.S.-chosen dictators. Ever since 25 July 1945, the U.S. Government has been aiming to take control over the entire world — to create the world’s first-ever all-encompassing global empire.

Cold War Two is the years when Russia had ended its side of the Cold War in 1991 while the U.S. secretly has continued its side of the Cold War. This deceit by America was done during the start of Russia’s Yeltsin years, when the G.H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton Administrations sent the Harvard economics department into Russia to teach Yeltsin’s people how to become capitalists by partnering U.S. billionaires with whomever Russia would privatize its assets to, and so created an incredibly corrupt economy there, which would be dependent upon decisions by America’s billionaires — Russia was then in the process of becoming the U.S. Government’s biggest colony or ‘ally’ after it would be trapped fully in the thrall of America’s billionaires, which was the U.S. regime’s objective. Then, while getting its claws into Russia’s Government that way, Clinton lowered the boom against Russia, by blatantly violating the promises that Bush’s team had made (but which violation by Bush’s successors had been planned by Bush — Bush secretly told his stooges (Kohl, Mitterand, etc.) that the promises he had told them to make to Gorbachev, that NATO wouldn’t expand toward Russia, were to be lies) to Gorbachev, and that NATO actually would expand toward Russia and would exclude Russia from ever being considered as a possible NATO member-nation (i.e., Russia wasn’t to be another vassal nation, but instead a conquered nation, to be exploited by the entire U.S. empire). The expansion of America’s NATO toward Russia was begun by Clinton — on 12 March 1999 near the end of his Presidency — bringing Czechia, Hungary, and Poland, into NATO, blatantly in violation of what Bush’s team had promised to Gorbachev’s team.

Russia’s top leadership now knew that America’s top leadership intended to conquer Russia, not merely for Russia to become yet another vassal-nation in the U.S. empire; and, so, Yeltsin resigned as President on 31 December 1999, and passed the nation’s leadership (and Russia’s then seemingly insuperable problems from it) to Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who promptly began to clean house and to inform Russia’s billionaires that either they would do what he asks them to do, or else he would make sure that Russia would pursue whatever legal means were then available in order to get them into compliance with Russia’s tax-laws and other laws, so as for them not to continue to rip-off the Russian nation (as they had been doing). Even the post-2012 solidly neoconservative British newspaper Guardian headlined on 6 March 2022 “How London became the place to be for Putin’s oligarchs” and touched upon the surface of the escape of “Russian oligarchs” to London (and elsewhere in America’s EU-NATO portion of the U.S. empire), but their article didn’t mention the worst cases, such as Mikhail Khordorkovsky, Boris Berezovsky, and Vladimir Gusinsky. Each of these were individuals who had absconded with billions in Russia’s wealth. (I previously posted to the Web my “Private Investigations Find America’s Magnitsky Act to Be Based on Frauds”, presenting in-depth the case of the American-in-Russia financial operator Bill Browder’s theft of $232 million from Russia, and documenting Browder’s lies on the basis of which President Obama got passed in the U.S. Congress the Magnitsky Act protecting Browder and sanctioning Russia on fake charges that were cooked up by Browder and by the billionaire George Soros’s ’non-profits’. Not all of the American skimmers from Russia were billionaires; some, such as Browder, weren’t that big. But their shared target was to win control over Russia; and this was the U.S. Government’s objective, too.)

The U.S. regime also changed its entire strategy for expanding its empire (its list of colonies or ‘allies’ — vassal-nations) after 1991, in a number of significant ways, such as by creating front-organizations, an example being Transparency International, to downgrade creditworthiness of the U.S. regime’s targeted countries (so as to force up their borrowing-costs, and thus weaken the targeted nation’s Government), and there were also a wide range of other ‘non-profits’, some of which took over (privatized) much of the preparatory work for the U.S. regime’s “regime-change” operations (coups) that formerly had been done by the by-now-infamous CIA.

One of these ‘non-profits’, for example, is CANVAS, Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, which “was founded in 2004 by Srđa Popović, and the CEO of Orion Telecom, Slobodan Đinović.” Just about all that is online about Đinović is this, this, this, this and this. It’s not much, for allegedly the 50% donor to CANVAS. Actually, that organization’s major funding is entirely secret, and is almost certainly from the U.S. Government or conduits therefrom (including U.S. billionaires such as Soros), since CANVAS is always aiding the overthrow of Governments that the U.S. regime aims to overthrow.

Both Popović and Đinović had earlier, since 1998, been among the leading members of another U.S. astroturf ‘revolution for democracy’ organization, Otpor! (“Resistance!”), which had helped to overthrow Milosevic and break up Yugoslavia. Otpor! ended successfully in 2004, at which time Popović and Đinović founded their own CANVAS, which they designed to institutionalize and spread to Ukraine and other countries the techniques that Otpor! had used and which had been taught to Otpor! by the U.S. regime under Bill Clinton. These were techniques which had been formalized by the American political scientist Gene Sharp.

Even well before Popovic and Dinovic had joined in 1998 (during the U.S-NATO’s prior overthrow-Milosevic campaign to break up the former Yugoslavia) the Otpor student movement to overthrow Yugoslavia’s President Slobodan Milošević, the American Gene Sharp had created the detailed program to do this. Sharp’s Albert Einstein Institute published and promoted Sharp’s books advocating pacifism as the best way to force a ‘dictatorship’ (i.e., any Government that the U.S. regime wants to overthrow) to be overthrown. Sharp presented himself as being an advocate of ’non-violent resistance’ as practiced by Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other actual anti-imperialists, but Sharp himself was no anti-imperialist (quite the contrary!); he was instead purely a pacifist, and not at all anti-imperialist. Einstein, like Gandhi, had been no pacifist, but didn’t know that Sharp, whom Einstein never met, accepted imperialism, which Sharp’s claimed hero, Gandhi, detested. So, Einstein unfortunately accepted the cunning Sharp’s request to write a Foreword for Sharp’s first book praising Gandhi, Gandhi Wields the Weapon of Moral Power, and Sharp then used that Foreword as ‘proof’ that Sharp was a follower of Einstein (even naming his Institute after the by-then deceased physicist) — which was as false as Sharp’s claimed advocacy of Gandhi’s philosophy was. Sharp was a master self-publicist and deceiver. Einstein’s 321-word, 1.3-page-long, Foreword praised the work and its young author, but he might just have cursorily skimmed the manuscript. He probably would have have been appalled at what followed from Sharp.

Sharp, thus, carefully avoided clarifying that, for example, he would have been a pacifist if he had been in America during the U.S. Revolutionary War, or even perhaps if he had been a northerner during the Civil War, or else been an anti-Nazi partisan during WW II (a pacifist ‘anti-Nazi’). Sharp’s recommendations are useful for the U.S. regime’s coups, because Sharp’s recommendations provide a way to make as difficult as possible for a head-of-state that the U.S. regime has targeted for removal, to remain in office. Sharp’s recommendations are for such a head-of-state to need to employ so much — and ever-increasing — violence against so many of his domestic opponents (fooled non-violent resistors — ‘martyrs’), as to become forced to resign, simply in order not to become himself a casualty of the resultant soaring backlash against himself as being viewed by his own public as simply a ruthless tyrannical dictator, for imprisoning or even killing those ‘democracy protesters’ who had been fooled by agents of the U.S. empire. So: Sharp’s methods are ideal to use so as to increase the public’s support for what is actually a U.S. coup. And that’s their real purpose: to facilitate coups, instead of to create any actual revolution. (As the commentator at the opening there noted, “Missing from Gene Sharp’s list are ‘Constructive actions’ – actions you take to build the alternative society you hope to create.” Sharp’s entire system is for destroying a Government — nothing to create a new one except that it should be ‘democratic’ — whatever that supposedly meant to his fools.) And, then, the coup itself is carried out, by the U.S. professionals at that, once the targeted head-of-state has become hated by a majority of his population. That’s the Sharp method, for coups.

This is an alternative to what had been the U.S. regime’s method during 1945-1991, which was simply CIA-run coups, which relied mainly upon bribing local officials and oligarchs, and hiring rent-a-mobs so as to show photographic ‘mass-support’ for overthrowing a ruler, in order to replace the local ruler with one that the U.S. regime has selected (like this).

On 12 November 2012, the pacifist John Horgan headlined at Scientific American, “Should Scientists and Engineers Resist Taking Military Money?,” and he wrote:

Defense-funded research has led to advances in civilian health care, transportation, communication and other industries that have improved our lives. My favorite example of well-spent Pentagon money was a 1968 Darpa grant to the political scientist Gene Sharp. That money helped Sharp research and write the first of a series of books on how nonviolent activism can bring about political change.

Sharp’s writings have reportedly inspired nonviolent opposition movements around the world, including ones that toppled corrupt regimes in Serbia, Ukraine [he was referring here to the 2004 ‘Orange Revolution’, but Sharp’s methods were also used in the 2014 ‘Maidan Revolution’], Georgia–and, more recently, Tunisia and Egypt [the ‘Arab Spring’]. Sharp, who has not received any federal support since 1968, has defended his acceptance of Darpa funds. In the preface of his classic 1972 work The Politics of Nonviolent Action, he argued that “governments and defense departments — as well as other groups — should finance and conduct research into alternatives to violence in politics.” I couldn’t agree more.

So: Sharp’s pacifists are the opposite of anti-imperialists; they are neocons: agents to expand the U.S. empire, by means of (i.e., now preferring) coups instead of military invasions.

On 11 December 2000, the Washington Post headlined “U.S. Advice Guided Milosevic Opposition,” and reported:

The lead role was taken by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government’s foreign assistance agency, which channeled the funds through commercial contractors and nonprofit groups such as NDI and its Republican counterpart, the International Republican Institute (IRI).

While NDI worked closely with Serbian opposition parties, IRI focused its attention on Otpor, which served as the revolution’s ideological and organizational backbone. In March, IRI paid for two dozen Otpor leaders to attend a seminar on nonviolent resistance at the Hilton Hotel in Budapest, a few hundreds yards along the Danube from the NDI-favored Marriott.

During the seminar, the Serbian students received training in such matters as how to organize a strike, how to communicate with symbols, how to overcome fear and how to undermine the authority of a dictatorial regime. The principal lecturer was retired U.S. Army Col. Robert Helvey, who has made a study of nonviolent resistance methods around the world, including those used in modern-day Burma and the civil rights struggle in the American South.

“What was most amazing to us was to discover that what we were trying to do spontaneously in Serbia was supported by a whole nonviolent system that we knew nothing about,” said Srdja Popovic, a former biology student. “This was the first time we thought about this in a systematic, scientific way. We said to ourselves, ‘We will go back and apply this.’ ”

Helvey, who served two tours in Vietnam, introduced the Otpor activists to the ideas of American theoretician Gene Sharpe, whom he describes as “the Clausewitz of the nonviolence movement,” referring to the renowned Prussian military strategist. Six months later, Popovic can recite Helvey’s lectures almost word for word, beginning with the dictum, “Removing the authority of the ruler is the most important element in nonviolent struggle.”

“Those Serbs really impressed me,” Helvey said in an interview from his West Virginia home. “They were very bright, very committed.”

Back in Serbia, Otpor activists set about undermining Milosevic’s authority by all means available. Rather than simply daubing slogans on walls, they used a wide range of sophisticated public relations techniques, including polling, leafleting and paid advertising. “The poll results were very important,” recalled Ivo Andric, a marketing student at Belgrade University. “At every moment, we knew what to say to the people.”

The poll results pointed to a paradox that went to the heart of Milosevic’s grip on power. On one hand, the Yugoslav president was detested by 70 percent of the electorate. On the other, a majority of Serbs believed he would continue to remain in power, even after an election. To topple Milosevic, opposition leaders first had to convince their fellow Serbs that he could be overthrown.

At a brainstorming session last July, Otpor activist Srdjan Milivojevic murmured the words “Gotov je,” or “He’s finished.”

“We realized immediately that it summed up our entire campaign,” said Dejan Randjic, who ran the Otpor marketing operation. “It was very simple, very powerful. It focused on Milosevic, but did not even mention him by name.”

Over the next three months, millions of “Gotov je” stickers were printed on 80 tons of imported adhesive paper–paid for by USAID and delivered by the Washington-based Ronco Consulting Corp.–and plastered all over Serbia on walls, inside elevators and across Milosevic’s campaign posters. Printed in black and white and accompanied by Otpor’s clenched-fist emblem, they became the symbol of the revolution.

However, a WikiLeaked email from Jake Sullivan to Hillary Clinton on 26 July 2011, about the Subject “Gene Sharp,” discussed Egypt’s “April 6 movement,” which had overthrown Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak. Sullivan told her that “In order to assess … the role of Gene Sharp’s ideas in the January 25 revolution, several members of the Policy Planning Staff (S/P) looked into the issue during a recent fact-finding trip to Egypt. They met with representatives of a wide range of protest groups — including the April 6 movement — major civil society organizations, and political parties.” And Sullivan concluded that “ the earlier reporting on these purported ties to Gene Sharp now seems somewhat overblown. …  Most other analysts … credit this to the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood.” Sullivan wrote from ignorance. On 3 March 2018, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper headlined “The Resistance Guide That Inspired Jewish Settlers and Muslim Brothers Alike: Opponents of Israel’s 2005 Gaza withdrawal, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and anti-government protesters in Iran have adopted the civil disobedience principles of the late Prof. Gene Sharp,” and recounted that, “Participants in the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 also owe many of their achievements to Sharp’s ideas. In Egypt it’s known that at least four groups of activists were influenced by them. Even the Muslim Brotherhood [the group that Sullivan said was NOT influenced by Sharp’s ideas], whose tradition of violence struck fear into the hearts of many, viewed Sharp’s book as a manual and posted it in Arabic translation on its website.” And, for example, even Wikipedia, in its article on the “April 6 Youth Movement,” says: “The April 6 movement is using the same raised fist symbol as the Otpor! movement from Serbia, that helped bring down the regime of Slobodan Milošević and whose nonviolent tactics were later used in Ukraine and Georgia. Mohammed Adel, a leader in the April 6 movement, studied at the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, an organization founded by former Otpor! members.”

Jake Sullivan was stunningly ignorant — not merely arrogant. The U.S. intelligence community has intimately cooperated with Otpor, CANVAS, and other such astroturf ‘revolution’-generators for American billionaires. For example, Ruaridh Arrow, the writer and director of a eulogistic biopic on Gene Sharp, “How to Start a Revolution,” headlined “Did Gene Sharp work for the CIA? Correcting the Conspiracies.” He wrote: “Funds were provided by the NED and IRI to activists for Albert Einstein Institution projects, for example in Burma, but the Institution was never able to fund groups in its own right.” (And what is that “but”-clause supposed to mean?) However, Arrow also wrote there: “Gene Sharp never worked for the CIA, in fact he was highly critical of them and advised activists not to take money from intelligence services. He argued that reliance on outsiders could weaken their movement and make them reliant on a foreign state which could suddenly cut off money and support, causing serious damage to their cause. It’s one thing to deny involvement with the CIA, it’s quite another to go around the world giving convincing arguments NOT to take money from them. … See below for a video of Gene Sharp telling people NOT to take money from the CIA.”

Sharp’s operation, and that of the other ’non-profits’ such as CANVAS that adhere to it, don’t need money from the CIA, because they can get plenty of money from the billionaires who benefit from America’s coups. On 26 January 2001, David Holley in the Los Angeles Times headlined “The Seed Money for Democracy: Financier George Soros has put out $2.8 billion since 1990 to promote a global open society. His efforts include funding the student movement that helped oust Milosevic in Yugoslavia.” He wrote:

Yugoslavia was a case where everything democrats had worried about–extreme nationalism, ethnic conflict, corruption, media controls and bickering among opposition political parties–were at their worst. Yet, just as Soros had calculated, it was a grass-roots surge by strong citizen organizations that won the battle for democracy.

Soros’ branch in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, was among the earliest backers of Otpor, which grew under young and decentralized leadership to strengthen the fractured opposition to Milosevic. “We gave them their first grant back in 1998, when they appeared as a student organization,” said Ivan Vejvoda, executive director of the Fund for an Open Society-Yugoslavia, the network’s branch here.

Foreign financial support helped Otpor surreptitiously print about 60 tons of posters and leaflets in the months before the Sept. 24 election that led to Milosevic’s ouster, said Miljana Jovanovic, a student who is one of the movement’s leaders. …

The vast majority of groups funded by Soros are not nearly as powerful as Otpor, nor do they play for such huge stakes.

More typical are efforts such as “horse-riding therapy” for disabled children, funded by the network’s Polish branch, the Stefan Batory Foundation.

I found that article only recently. On 18 April 2022, I had headlined “History of the Ukrainian War” and here was a passage in it that included the Stafan Battory Foundation, but I didn’t know, at the time, that this organization was actually Soros’s Open Society Foundation in Poland. Here is the relevant portion from that history of the Ukrainian war:

*****

On 1 March 2013 inside America’s Embassy to Ukraine in Kiev, a series of “Tech Camps” started to be held, in order to train those Ukrainian nazis for their leadership of Ukraine’s ‘anti-corruption’ organizing. Simultaneously, under Polish Government authorization, the CIA was training in Poland the military Right Sector leaders how to lead the coming U.S. coup in neighboring Ukraine. As the independent Polish investigative journalist Marek Miszczuk headlined for the Polish magazine NIE (“meaning “NO”) (the original article being in Polish): “Maidan secret state secret: Polish training camp for Ukrainians.” The article was published 14 April 2014. Excerpts:

An informant who introduced himself as Wowa called the “NIE” editorial office with the information that the Maidan rebels in Wrocław are neo-fascists … [with] tattooed swastikas, swords, eagles and crosses with unambiguous meaning. … Wowa pleadingly announced that photos of members of the Right Sector must not appear in the press. … 86 fighters from the then prepared Euromaidan flew over the Vistula River in September 2013 at the invitation of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The pretext was to start cooperation between the Warsaw University of Technology and the National University of Technology in Kiev. But they were in Poland to receive special training to overthrow Ukraine’s government. … Day 3 and 4 – theoretical classes: crowd management, target selection, tactics and leadership. Day 5 – training in behavior in stressful situations. Day 6 – free without leaving the center. Day 7 – pre-medical help. Day 8 – protection against irritating gases. Day 9 – building barricades. And so on and on for almost 25 days. The program includes … classes at the shooting range (including three times with sniper rifles!), tactical and practical training in the assault on buildings. …

Excited by the importance of the information that was presented to me, I started to verify it.

The Office of the Press Spokesman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs refused to answer the questions about the student exchange without giving any reason. It did not want to disclose whether it had actually invited dozens of neo-fascists to Poland to teach them how to overthrow the legal Ukrainian authorities. …

Let us summarize: in September 2013, according to the information presented to me, several dozen Ukrainian students of the Polytechnic University will come to Poland, at the invitation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In fact, they are members of the Right Sector, an extreme right-wing and nationalist Ukrainian group led by Dmytro Jarosz – he declined to comment on his visit to Legionowo.

Poland’s ‘fact-checking’ organization is (appropriately) titled demagog dot org (Demagog Association), and it is funded by the Stefan Batory Foundation. Demagog’s article about that NIE news-report rated it “NIEWERYFIKOWALNE” or “ NOT VERIFIABLE”. The sole reason given was: “The Ministry [of Foreign Affairs] strongly opposes such news, emphasizing that the weekly (magazine) has violated not only the principles of good taste, but also raison d’etat (reasons of state).” No facts that were alleged in Miszczuk’s article were even mentioned, much less disproven. How can his article be “unverifiable” if the evidence that it refers to isn’t so much as even being checked?

Miszczuk’s article’s mention of “the Right Sector, an extreme right-wing and nationalist Ukrainian group led by Dmytro Jarosz” referred to the key person (Dmitriy Yarosh) and the key group (his Right Sector paramilitary organization and political party) that has actually been running Ukraine behind the scenes ever since the coup, and they also were the key people who had led the snipers who were firing down from tall buildings upon the Ukrainian Government’s police and upon the anti-Government demonstrators at Kiev’s Maidan Square — the violence simultaneously against both sides — that the newly installed post-coup government immediately blamed against the just-ousted democratically elected President, so that the new top officials were all blaming the ones that they had replaced.

*****

On 4 October 2017, the historian F. William Engdahl, who unfortunately leaves many of his allegations not linked to his alleged sources, wrote:

Goldman Sachs and Stratfor

Even more interesting details recently came to light on the intimate links between the US “intelligence consultancy”, Stratfor — known as the ”Shadow CIA” for its corporate clients which include Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and U.S. government agencies including the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

It was revealed in a huge release of internal memos from Stratfor in 2012, some five million emails provided them by the hacker community Anonymous, that Popović, after creating CANVAS also cultivated very close relations with Stratfor. According to the Stratfor internal emails, Popović worked for Stratfor to spy on opposition groups. So intimate was the relationship between Popović and Stratfor that he got his wife a job with the company and invited several Stratfor people to his Belgrade wedding.

Revealed in the same Stratfor emails by Wikileaks was the intriguing information that one of the “golden geese” funders of the mysterious CANVAS was a Wall Street bank named Goldman Sachs. Satter Muneer, a Goldman Sachs partner, is cited by Stratfor’s then-Eurasia Analyst Marko Papic. Papic, asked by a Stratfor colleague whether Muneer was the “golden goose” money behind CANVAS, writes back, “They have several golden gooses I believe. He is for sure one of them.”

Now the very remarkable Mr Popović brings his dishonest career to Hungary where, not a dictator, but a very popular true democrat who offers his voters choices, is the target for Popović’ peculiar brand of US State Department fake democracy. This will not at all be as easy as toppling Milošević, even if he has the help of student activists being trained at Soros’ Central European University in Budapest.

If he had linked to those WikiLeaks documents, then copies of his article that were made before the U.S. regime removed some WikiLeaks files from the Web would have archived those files, but that didn’t happen; and, so, today, a Web-search for the 3-word string

Stratfor Popović wikileaks

produces finds such as

https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/17/1773778_meeting-canvas-stratfor-.html

https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/17/1792423_information-on-canvas-.html

of which no copies were saved at any of the Web archives.

However, a prior article, by Carl Gibson and Steve Horn of Occuy.com, on 2 December 2013, was headlined “Exposed: Globally Renowned Activist Collaborated with Intelligence Firm Stratfor,” and it has links to the WikiLeaks documents. From all of this, it’s clear that the obscure Srđa Popović and Slobodan Đinović, are each well-connected to wealth, if not themselves quite wealthy, from their business, of fomenting coups for the U.S. regime, in the names of ‘peace’ and of ‘democracy’.

Apparently, CANVAS remains quite active today:

On 6 October 2023, Kit Klarenberg, at The Grayzone, headlined “A Maidan 2.0 color revolution looms in Georgia,” and reported that:

The arrest of US regime change operatives in Tbilisi suggests a coup against Georgia’s government could be in the works. As Ukraine’s counteroffensive fails, the West appears eager to open a new front in its proxy war.

On September 29, in a disclosure ignored by the entire Western media, the US government-run Radio Free Europe’s Russian-language portal Slobodna Evropa revealed that three foreign operatives had been summoned for questioning by the Georgian Security Service, for allegedly assisting opposition elements prepare a Maidan-style regime change scenario in Tbilisi.

The operatives were staffers of the Center for Applied Nonviolent Actions and Strategies. …

The ruling Georgian dream [NO — it’s the Georgian Dream Party] has been portrayed in the west as a pro-Kremlin government. In reality, it’s simply reverted to a longstanding policy of balancing between East and West. For the neoconservative establishment, its true sin is being insufficiently supportive of the Ukraine proxy war. Thus Ukrainian elements are set to be involved in a possible color revolution. If such an operation succeeds, it would open a second front in that war on Russia’s Western flank.

The development seemingly confirms warnings from local security officials earlier this September. They cautioned “a coup a la Euromaidan is being prepared in Georgia,” referring to the 2014 US-backed color revolution which toppled Ukraine’s elected president and ushered in a pro-NATO government. The purported lead plotters are ethnic Georgians working for the Ukrainian government: Giorgi Lortkipanidze, Kiev’s deputy military intelligence chief; Mikhail Baturin, the bodyguard of former President Mikheil Saakashvili; and Mamuka Mamulashvili, commander of the notorious Georgian Legion.

A September 6 investigation by The Grayzone revealed that Georgian Legion chief Mamulashvili is centrally implicated in a false flag massacre of Maidan protesters, which was pivotal in unseating elected President Viktor Yanukovych. He apparently brought the shooters to Maidan Square to “sow some chaos” by opening fire on crowds, and provided sniper rifles for the purpose.

Georgian officials say that now they’ve uncovered evidence that young anti-government activists are undergoing training near Ukraine’s border with Poland to enact a similar scheme, which would feature a deadly bombing during planned riots meant to take place in Tbilisi between October and December, when the European Commission is expected to rule on whether Georgia can formally become an EU candidate country.

The Wikipedia article “Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies” says:

CANVAS’ training and methodology has been successfully applied by groups in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), Lebanon (2005), The Maldives (2008)?, Egypt (2011)?, Syria (2011)? and Ukraine (2014). It works only in response to requests for assistance.

However: anyone who participates in such ‘Revolutions’ is placing oneself at severe personal risk, in order to facilitate a coup by the U.S. Government and its controlling owners, who are billionaires. People such as Sharp, Popović, and Đinović, are merely well-paid and maintained servants to America’s billionaires.

Here’s how they market their operation, to peaceniks:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230521063855/https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/CANVAS-Core-Curriculum_EN4.pdf

https://canvasopedia.org/2023/01/05/examining-non-state-stakeholders-role-in-modern-nonviolent-conflict-2/

https://web.archive.org/web/20231025015004/https://fsi-live.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/canvas_presentation.pdf

They open by paying homage to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. This is mocking them — aping their influence, not spreading it.

And here is how the neoconservative Tina Rosenberg, in the neoconservative Donald Graham’s Foreign Policy magazine, promotes CANVAS, as being “Revolution U“:

As nonviolent revolutions have swept long-ruling regimes from power in Tunisia and Egypt and threaten the rulers of nearby Algeria, Bahrain, and Yemen, the world’s attention has been drawn to the causes — generations of repressive rule — and tools — social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter — animating the wave of revolt. But as the members of the April 6 movement learned, these elements alone do not a revolution make. What does? In the past, the discontented availed themselves of the sweeping forces of geopolitics: the fall of regimes in Latin America and the former Soviet bloc was largely a product of the withdrawal of superpower support for dictatorships and the consolidation of liberal democracy as a global ideal. But the global clash of ideologies is over, and plenty of dictators remain — so what do we do?

The answer, for democratic activists in an ever-growing list of countries, is to turn to CANVAS. Better than other democracy groups, CANVAS has built a durable blueprint for  nonviolent revolution: what to do to grow from a vanload of people into a mass movement and then use those masses to topple a dictator. CANVAS has figured out how to turn a cynical, passive, and fearful public into activists. It stresses unity, discipline, and planning — tactics that are basic to any military campaign, but are usually ignored by nonviolent revolutionaries. There will be many moments during a dictatorship that galvanize public anger: a hike in the price of oil, the assassination of an opposition leader, corrupt indifference to a natural disaster, or simply the confiscation by the police of a produce cart. In most cases, anger is not enough — it simply flares out. Only a prepared opponent will be able to use such moments to bring down a government.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

The hound flipped through the channels with the remote but could only find two mollusks debating how stupid Joe Biden is and the National Weather Service talking about a terrible pestilence sweeping the land.

“Wait!” said the cat. “Let’s see what they named the terrible pestilence.”

“The crawl says they’re calling it the… Victoria Nuland!” said the hound. “Hey, it’s time already for the CIA mockingbird news.”

At this the cat sprang off the couch and got nose to nose with the screen, switching his tail from side to side, as the mockingbird fluttered and chirped away:

“In our continuing exhausting award-winning coverage of Russia’s Hitler-like attack on Ukraine, we sum up the irrefutable truths so far: Russia bombed its own Nord Stream gas pipeline, bombed its own ammonia pipeline, bombed its own journalists in its own cafe, bombed its own Kerch bridge, tortured and killed its own allies and sympathizers in Bucha, attacked the Kremlin with drones, bombed its own troops holding the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and destroyed the Nova Kakhovka dam so Russian defenses and minefields would be washed away and water would be cut off to its soldiers and allies in Crimea.”

The cat turned his head to the hound and said, “Can you believe this shit?”

And the hound answered: “I know! I never saw a country attack itself so much. It’s like it has an auto-immune disorder – like a really bad gluten allergy.”

And that, children, is how Vladimir Gluten got his name.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Randy Shields.

"Every new investment in planet-heating fossil fuels is a death sentence for the vulnerable communities who are already facing devastating storms, floods, and rising seas," Singh said. "The rich, industrialized countries are also shirking their responsibilities to provide adequate finance to help poorer nations adapt to and recover from the losses and damages caused by climate disasters."

"Every new investment in planet-heating fossil fuels is a death sentence for the vulnerable communities who are already facing devastating storms, floods, and rising seas."

Lidy Nacpil, coordinator of the Asian Peoples' Movement on Debt and Development, declared that "instead of delivering on climate finance obligations and fulfilling last year's commitment to end public finance for fossil fuels by the end of 2022, this year's Japan-led G7 continues its shameful disregard for what people and planet urgently need—a rapid, equitable, and just transition directly to renewable energy systems."

Referencing the bolder goal of the 2015 Paris agreement, the communiqué states that "we underline our commitment, in the context of a global effort, to accelerate the phase-out of unabated fossil fuels so as to achieve net-zero in energy systems by 2050 at the latest in line with the trajectories required to limit global average temperatures to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, and call on others to join us in taking the same action."

However, noting the energy impacts of Russia's war on Ukraine, the statement adds that "investment in the gas sector can be appropriate to help address potential market shortfalls provoked by the crisis, subject to clearly defined national circumstances, and if implemented in a manner consistent with our climate objectives and without creating lock-in effects, for example by ensuring that projects are integrated into national strategies for the development of low-carbon and renewable hydrogen."

Oil Change International (OCI) earlier this month published a briefing about how major economies—particularly the G7 countries Japan, the United States, Italy, and Germany—have poured billions of dollars of public financing into new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal capacity over the past decade. That document followed the group's March report calling out multiple countries for breaking their promise to swiftly cut off public finance for international fossil fuel projects.

Pointing to the Group of Seven's related pledge from last year, OCI public finance campaign co-manager Laurie van der Burg said Thursday that a new International Energy Agency analysis "reinforces that for the G7 not to jeopardize the 1.5°C global warming limit, they must not backslide on this commitment by endorsing new gas investments."

"The science is crystal clear that leaving the door open to investments in new gas or LNG leaves the G7 off track for 1.5°C," van der Burg stressed Sunday. "In addition, the claim that last year's G7 commitment to end international fossil fuel finance has been met is an outright lie as evidenced by new investments in fossil fuel projects."

"G7 leaders must next month fully close the door to investments in new gas and LNG and instead maximize on their opportunity to shift billions in public money out of fossil fuels and into the clean energy solutions that can build a more energy secure, sustainable, and affordable future," she said. "The U.K., Canada, and France have shown this can be done, Japan, Germany, Italy, and the United States must urgently catch up."

Along with the gas language in the communiqué, "Japan won endorsements from fellow G7 countries for its own national strategy emphasizing so-called clean coal, hydrogen, and nuclear energy to help ensure its energy security," The Associated Pressreported, explaining that a timeline to phase out coal "is a long-standing sticking point" because the nation relies on it for nearly a third of its power generation.

"This G7 ministerial revealed Japan's failure of climate leadership at a global level," charged OCI Asia program manager Susanne Wong. "At a time when we rapidly need to phase out fossil fuels, this year's G7 host pushed for the expansion of gas and LNG and technologies that would prolong the use of coal. We need Japan to stop prioritizing corporate interests and derailing the transition to clean energy with its dirty energy strategy."

Friends of the Earth Japan campaigner Hiroki Osada similarly argued that the country "has become both a promise-breaker and Earth-destroyer at the same time by continuing to finance fossil fuel projects overseas."

"With no time to waste to address climate change, nothing can justify new investment in fossil fuels, and no exceptions can be allowed," Osada added. "Japan should immediately end international financial support to fossil fuels in line with its G7 commitment, and should also commit to a complete phase-out from coal by 2030."

"LNG is... a bridge that ends in a hotter, more dangerous world for all of us, especially the world's most vulnerable people and ecosystems."

While campaigners certainly took aim at Japan, they also criticized other nations represented at the meeting.

"The effects of Italy's nonexistent implementation of its stop funding fossils pledge are beginning to reverberate on the international scene, now also with the Japan-led G7 ministerial," said Simone Ogno of ReCommon Italy. "We urge that the other G7 members like France and the U.K. work to bring both governments back on track. This is especially important as Italy is scheduled to host the G7 next year."

Leading up to the meeting this weekend, climate campaigners told U.S. President Joe Biden that "the global LNG boom must be stopped in its tracks," warning of the impacts on frontline communities, and were outraged when his administration approved a liquefied natural gas project in Alaska, on the heels of greenlighting ConocoPhillips' Willow oil development in the state.

"LNG is not a bridge fuel to a clean energy future," Leah Qusba, executive director of Action for the Climate Emergency, wrote Friday for The Hill, highlighting the resulting methane emissions. "It's a bridge that ends in a hotter, more dangerous world for all of us, especially the world's most vulnerable people and ecosystems."

After the meeting, OCI United States program manager Collin Rees said that "despite G7 ministers' rhetorical games, new investments in gas and LNG cannot be 'consistent with our climate objectives.' This is a deadly lie inconsistent with science and justice."

"Joe Biden's team signing off on this language rings dangerously hollow just days after he approved a massive LNG project in Alaska that, if built, will devastate communities and the climate for decades," Rees continued. "Biden must stand up to Japan's dirty energy lobby at the G7 and stop doing the gas industry's bidding at home."

Biden's climate envoy, John Kerry, even acknowledged during a Sunday interview with the AP that the international community has made progress over the past few years, "but we're not doing everything we said we'd do."

"A lot of countries need to step up, including ours, to reduce emissions faster, deploy renewables faster, bring new technologies online faster, all of that has to happen," said Kerry, who attended the meeting in Japan.

"If we're going to be responsible, we have to turn around and figure out how we are going to more rapidly terminate the emissions," he added. "We have to cut the emissions that are warming the planet and heading us inexorably toward several tipping points beyond which there is no reverse."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

The United Nations human rights chief on Monday condemned a Russian court's decision to sentence Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian-British dissident who has publicly criticized the invasion of Ukraine, to 25 years in prison after a closed-door trial.

The charges against Kara-Murza, a journalist and longtime Putin critic, include treason and perpetuating false information about the Russian army. The latter charge was brought under a law passed in the wake of Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Volker Türk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, called the sentence "another blow to the rule of law and civic space in the Russian Federation."

"Kara-Murza was tried on charges that appear related to the legitimate exercise of his right to freedom of opinion, expression, and association, including his public criticism of the Russian Federation's armed attack against Ukraine," said Türk. "No one should be deprived of their liberty for exercising their human rights, and I call on the Russian authorities to release him without delay. As long as he continues to be detained, he must be treated with humanity and respect for his dignity."

Prominent human rights organizations also denounced the Moscow court's decision, with Amnesty International's Russia director Natalia Zviagina calling it "reminiscent of Stalin-era repression."

Amnesty has deemed Kara-Murza a prisoner of conscience and demanded his immediate, unconditional release.

"Vladimir Kara-Murza's 25-year prison sentence is yet another chilling example of the systematic repression of civil society, which has broadened and accelerated under the Kremlin since Russia's invasion of Ukraine last year," said Zviagina. "The so-called 'crimes' Vladimir Kara-Murza was tried for—speaking out against the invasion and advocacy on behalf of victims of human rights violations—are in fact acts of outstanding bravery."

Kara-Murza, who was first arrested just weeks after Russia's launched its full-scale attack on Ukraine, has denied the charges against him while refusing to drop his criticism of the invasion, which has devolved into a catastrophic war with no end in sight.

Kara-Murza is one of thousands of Russians who have been arrested for protesting the war in Ukraine.

"I subscribe to every word that I have said," Kara-Murza declared in a statement last week. "Not only do I not repent any of this, I am proud of it."

Prior to his arrest, Kara-Murza delivered a speech in the U.S. in which he called Russia's airstrikes on hospitals and other civilian infrastructure "war crimes that are being committed by the dictatorial regime in the Kremlin against a nation in the middle of Europe.

The charging document against Kara-Murza cites the speech as evidence of his guilt.

"The verdict against Vladimir Kara-Murza is a travesty of justice," Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement Monday. "Russian authorities should immediately vacate the verdict and unconditionally free him."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

• International Criminal Court files war crimes charges against Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and another high ranking official for child abductions from Ukraine
• Slovakia says it will join Poland in sending fighter jets to Ukraine.
• President Joe Biden calls for tougher penalties on executives of failed banks.
• California Governor Gavin Newsom pledges to transform San Quentin’s Death Row to rehabilitation and education facility.
• Detained immigrants in two California facilities mark one month of hunger strike, demanding their release, and better working and living conditions.
• Family of man killed by Antioch police, Angelo Quinto, demand his cause of death be ruled homicide, after new evidence.

Photo by Ahmed Zalabany on Unsplash.

The post ICC files war crimes charges against Russia’s President Vladimir Putin; California Governor Gavin Newsom transforms San Quentin’s Death Row; Family of Angelo Quinto, killed by Antioch police, seeks homicide as cause of death in new litigation — Pacifica Evening News March 17 2023 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

Who remembers anymore that, in 2003, we were Vladimir Putin? Today, our cable and social-media news feeds are blanketed with denunciations of the president of the Russian Federation for his lawless and brutal invasion of Ukraine. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken met briefly with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in New Delhi on March 2nd, he told him in no uncertain terms, “End this war of aggression.”

Putin himself, however, has a longer memory. In the speech that launched his “special operation,” he pointedly denounced the U.S. for “the invasion of Iraq without any legal grounds.” Then he added, “We witnessed lies made at the highest state level and voiced from the high U.N. rostrum. As a result, we see a tremendous loss in human life, damage, destruction, and a colossal upsurge of terrorism.”

Yes, it’s true, on the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, that war is long forgotten here. No one in the Biden administration today cares that it ruined what credibility America had as a pillar of international order in the global south and gave Putin cover for his own atrocity. So, sit back for a moment and let me take you on a little trip into a long-lost all-American world.

Mission (Un)Accomplished

On May 1, 2003, arrayed in Top Gun gear, President George W. Bush sat in the co-pilot’s seat of a fighter jet and was flown to the USS Abraham Lincoln, the aircraft carrier then stationed just off the coast of San Diego. No rationale drove this high-priced jaunt save the visuals his propaganda team hoped to generate.

Then, from that ship’s deck beneath a banner that proclaimed, “Mission Accomplished,” he made a televised speech about the invasion of Iraq he had ordered less than two months earlier. Bush proudly announced that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” Of course, neither assertion would prove faintly true. In fact, some 2,500 U.S. troops are still stationed in Iraq to this day, aiding in the fight against leaders of that country’s former Baath Party government who have now become fundamentalist guerrillas. And keep in mind that those troops remain there even though the Iraqi parliament has asked them to leave.

The rest of Bush’s speech deserves more infamy than it’s attained. The president declared, “Today, we have the greater power to free a nation by breaking a dangerous and aggressive regime. With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians.” Dream on, but of course Bush gave that “Mission Accomplished” speech to whitewash a war of aggression as a routine instrument of presidential policy. Describing the ramshackle, fourth-world country of Iraq then as “dangerous” and “aggressive” was as hyperbolic as Putin’s categorization of Volodomyr Zelenksy’s Ukraine as a “Nazi” state.

Note, however, that one phrase was missing from Bush’s Napoleonic screed about forcibly spreading “democracy” and “freedom” with that new tool, “precision warfare,” and that was, of course, “international law.” At the Nuremberg trials after World War II, the International Military Tribunal had observed,

“War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

And, of course, the United Nations charter forbids military aggression. It allows war only in self-defense or if the Security Council authorizes it.

On the deck of that aircraft carrier, however, Bush had the nerve to say: “When Iraqi civilians looked into the faces of our servicemen and women, they saw strength and kindness and goodwill.”

In fact, Iraqis had spent a significant part of the twentieth century trying to get British colonialists out of their country and it was hardly surprising that, in 2003, so many of them didn’t see such virtues in the forces that had invaded their land. The U.S. military personnel on the ground I talked to, then or later, often spoke of the sullen, angry gazes of the Iraqis they encountered. One acquaintance of mine, Lieutenant Kylan Jones-Huffman, sent me a message that very summer in which he described sitting in the back of a troop transport with other American forces on a road in southern Iraq and being passed by a truckload of armed Iraqis. One of them squinted sourly at them and lifted his rifle menacingly. Kylan said he just patted his M1 rifle, returning the threat.

A Navy reservist and Middle East specialist, he planned on a post-military academic career, having completed a Ph.D. in history. Insightful and easy-going, a crafter of exquisite haiku poetry, Kylan promised to be an exciting colleague for me. He told me he was being sent from Bahrain to brief the military brass in the city of Hillah in southern Iraq. On the evening of August 21, 2003, as I was watching CNN, on the scroll at the bottom of the screen I noticed an American had been shot dead in Hillah and that left me uneasy. The next day I learned that Kylan had indeed been the victim, killed by a young Iraqi as he waited in a jeep at an intersection. It was an elbow to the gut that left me in tears — and it still hurts to tell the story.

He was, in fact, one of more than 7,000 U.S. military personnel to die in Iraq, Afghanistan, or other “War on Terror” locales, along with 8,000 Pentagon contractors. And that’s not even to mention the more than 30,000 veterans of those conflicts who later committed suicide. One of them took my class on the modern Middle East at the University of Michigan. Well-informed and good-natured, he nevertheless couldn’t survive to the end of the semester, given whatever demons his experiences over there had burdened him with. In fact, for those still thinking about Iraq, the gut-punches of that war never stop.

And don’t forget the more than 53,000 American military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan who were injured badly enough in battle to end up in a hospital. About 10% of them had wounds on an injury severity scale of nine or greater, suffering, according to one National Institutes of Health study, from horrors that included traumatic brain damage, open wounds, chronic blood-clotting, and burns.

Corpse Patrols

And all of that was nothing compared to what the U.S. military did to Iraqis.

It should come as no surprise that President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and the other architects of one of America’s biggest foreign-policy fiascos in its 246 years of existence could support the bald-faced lie that they had invented a new kind of warfare that didn’t produce significant civilian deaths or casualties. Mind you, they also told serial whoppers about Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent ties to the al-Qaeda terror group and his supposedly active biological and nuclear weapons programs.

Contrary to President Bush’s glib assertions, the death toll in Iraq only burgeoned as the fighting went on. American planes routinely struck targets in densely populated Iraqi cities. Some American troops committed massacres, as did Blackwater mercenaries working for the U.S. military. During the civil war of 2006-2007 that emerged from the American occupation of the country, the Baghdad police had to establish a regular corpse patrol dispatched at the beginning of each workday to load up carts with human remains tossed in the streets overnight by rival sectarian militias.

In the years just after the Bush invasion, one Iraqi widow from the southern port city of Basra told me that her family barely avoided being attacked by members of a destitute, displaced Marsh Arab tribe then running a protection racket in the city. The family’s escape cost them all the cash they had on hand and required them to provide a feast for the tribesmen. Determined to try to improve the situation, the man of the household ran for public office. One day, he had just gotten into his car to go campaigning when a masked assailant suddenly appeared and shot him point blank in the head. His tearful widow told me that she could never get over the sight. And such events were hardly uncommon then.

By the time the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the terrorist cult that emerged from the U.S. occupation of the country, finally went down to defeat in 2019, Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates that some 300,000 Iraqis had died “from direct war-related violence caused by the U.S., its allies, the Iraqi military and police, and opposition forces.” Several times that number were wounded or crippled. Hundreds of thousands of widows lost their family breadwinners and some of them were reduced to a lifetime as beggars. Even larger numbers of children lost one or both parents. And keep in mind that such figures don’t include Iraqis who died from indirect but war-related causes like the breakdown of the provision of potable water and electricity thanks to U.S. bombing raids and damage to the country’s infrastructure.

The American Example in Iraq

In the first phase of the war, during the Bush years, four million Iraqis were displaced, some 1.5 million leaving the country and the rest internally. Many could never return home. One evening in the summer of 2008, while interviewing Iraqi refugees in Amman, Jordan, I had dinner with a professional couple, an architect and a physician. I mentioned that the worst of the civil war seemed to be over and asked if they planned to return to Baghdad. The man was a Sunni, his wife a Shiite. She explained that their home had been in an upscale Shiite district and they feared returning since so many neighborhoods had been ethnically cleansed of the rival sect.

Another man — call him “Mustafa” — was then in exile in the slums of East Amman. The members of his Sunni Iraqi family, denied work permits, were living off their dwindling savings. His wife was thinking of taking in sewing to make ends meet. Mustafa explained that he had gotten an envelope in the mailbox of his old Baghdad apartment from a militant Shiite militia, saying that if he and his family were still there in 24 hours, they would be dead. So, he and his wife had immediately packed everything they could fit into their car, awakened the children, and driven the nine hours to Amman. Mustafa hesitated. He looked around and lowered his voice. He had, he said, gotten threatening mail even in Jordan and moved to another apartment. The militia still had its eyes on him and had likely penetrated the expatriate Iraqi community. So, no, he and his wife couldn’t, he assured me, go home to Baghdad.

Under the Americans, there was no security for anyone. Two decades ago, Bush appointees dissolved the old Iraqi army and failed to train an effective new one or institute professional policing. I visited Baghdad in May 2013 during the interregnum between the two American campaigns in Iraq, to attend an international conference. We were taken by our kind Iraqi hosts to the National Museum and out to nice restaurants. To do so, however, we had to pile into white vans surrounded by Iraqi army vehicles, which strong-armed all the other traffic out of the way and ensured that our convoy never came to a standstill and so wouldn’t be the target of an ambush.

Bush’s disastrous war of aggression was a gift that just keeps giving. The disruption of Iraqi society and its government by that invasion ultimately paved the way for ISIL to take over 40% of that country’s territory in 2014. Six million Iraqis fled the brutal cultists and a million and a half of them are still displaced. Some fled to Turkey, where their lives were only recently devastated by the February 2023 earthquakes.

Today, the coffers of the Iraqi state treasury are empty, even though the country should have earned $500 billion in oil revenues since 2003. Corruption and inefficiency have become a hallmark of the new order. The unstable government installed by the U.S., dominated by Shiite religious parties, has gone through three prime ministers since 2018. Journalist Jonah Goldberg’s confidence that Iraqis would come to love the new constitution crafted under American rule in 2005 was woefully misplaced. He exemplified the pro-war intellectuals who insisted that their right-wing politics endowed them with superior judgment when it came to a country about which they, in fact, knew next to nothing.

In Iraq itself in recent years, young crowds have repeatedly gone into the streets to demand that the government once again provide basic services. The current prime minister, Mohammad Shia al-Sudani, is close to the Iran-backed militias that now play an outsized role in Iraqi politics. If anyone won the Iraq War, in fact, it was Iran.

Economists had estimated that the cost of the Iraq War to the United States, once you added in care for wounded veterans for the rest of their lives, had already reached $6 trillion even before the ISIL campaign of 2014-2019. Without the sums squandered in Iraq, our national debt would still be below our annual gross national product, putting us in a much more favorable economic position in 2023. As in today’s Russia, in the zeros of this century a war mentality fostered a fierce intolerance of dissent and of difference on the right, which is still unfolding.

One of the mantras of the U.S. government today, facing Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, is the championing of “the United Nations Charter” and a “rules-based international order.” That stands in contrast, of course, to what Washington now sees as the true international outlaw on Planet Earth, Putin’s Russian Federation. The Russian economy has been treated as the Iranian one was, subjected to relentless sanctions and boycotts. A Senate resolution sponsored by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called on the International Criminal Court, the authority of which the U.S. doesn’t even recognize, to put Russian officials on trial for war crimes.

Graham was one of the chief cheerleaders of the equally illegal Iraq War. Hypocrisy on such a scale is hardly impressive for a country still seeking to be the global power on this planet. In retrospect, on the 20th anniversary of the nightmarish decision to invade Iraq, we’ve lost more than our credibility in the Global South or a true commitment to international law. As a country, we lost our moral compass and now, amid Russian crimes in Ukraine, it seems that we have also lost all memory of the path we paved and the example we set in Iraq, as well as the crimes that went with it.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Juan Cole.

Who remembers anymore that, in 2003, we were Vladimir Putin? Today, our cable and social-media news feeds are blanketed with denunciations of the president of the Russian Federation for his lawless and brutal invasion of Ukraine. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken met briefly with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in New Delhi on March 2nd, he told him in no uncertain terms, “End this war of aggression.”

Putin himself, however, has a longer memory. In the speech that launched his “special operation,” he pointedly denounced the U.S. for “the invasion of Iraq without any legal grounds.” Then he added, “We witnessed lies made at the highest state level and voiced from the high U.N. rostrum. As a result, we see a tremendous loss in human life, damage, destruction, and a colossal upsurge of terrorism.”

Yes, it’s true, on the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, that war is long forgotten here. No one in the Biden administration today cares that it ruined what credibility America had as a pillar of international order in the global south and gave Putin cover for his own atrocity. So, sit back for a moment and let me take you on a little trip into a long-lost all-American world.

Mission (Un)Accomplished

On May 1, 2003, arrayed in Top Gun gear, President George W. Bush sat in the co-pilot’s seat of a fighter jet and was flown to the USS Abraham Lincoln, the aircraft carrier then stationed just off the coast of San Diego. No rationale drove this high-priced jaunt save the visuals his propaganda team hoped to generate.

Then, from that ship’s deck beneath a banner that proclaimed, “Mission Accomplished,” he made a televised speech about the invasion of Iraq he had ordered less than two months earlier. Bush proudly announced that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” Of course, neither assertion would prove faintly true. In fact, some 2,500 U.S. troops are still stationed in Iraq to this day, aiding in the fight against leaders of that country’s former Baath Party government who have now become fundamentalist guerrillas. And keep in mind that those troops remain there even though the Iraqi parliament has asked them to leave.

The rest of Bush’s speech deserves more infamy than it’s attained. The president declared, “Today, we have the greater power to free a nation by breaking a dangerous and aggressive regime. With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians.” Dream on, but of course Bush gave that “Mission Accomplished” speech to whitewash a war of aggression as a routine instrument of presidential policy. Describing the ramshackle, fourth-world country of Iraq then as “dangerous” and “aggressive” was as hyperbolic as Putin’s categorization of Volodomyr Zelenksy’s Ukraine as a “Nazi” state.

Note, however, that one phrase was missing from Bush’s Napoleonic screed about forcibly spreading “democracy” and “freedom” with that new tool, “precision warfare,” and that was, of course, “international law.” At the Nuremberg trials after World War II, the International Military Tribunal had observed,

“War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

And, of course, the United Nations charter forbids military aggression. It allows war only in self-defense or if the Security Council authorizes it.

On the deck of that aircraft carrier, however, Bush had the nerve to say: “When Iraqi civilians looked into the faces of our servicemen and women, they saw strength and kindness and goodwill.”

In fact, Iraqis had spent a significant part of the twentieth century trying to get British colonialists out of their country and it was hardly surprising that, in 2003, so many of them didn’t see such virtues in the forces that had invaded their land. The U.S. military personnel on the ground I talked to, then or later, often spoke of the sullen, angry gazes of the Iraqis they encountered. One acquaintance of mine, Lieutenant Kylan Jones-Huffman, sent me a message that very summer in which he described sitting in the back of a troop transport with other American forces on a road in southern Iraq and being passed by a truckload of armed Iraqis. One of them squinted sourly at them and lifted his rifle menacingly. Kylan said he just patted his M1 rifle, returning the threat.

A Navy reservist and Middle East specialist, he planned on a post-military academic career, having completed a Ph.D. in history. Insightful and easy-going, a crafter of exquisite haiku poetry, Kylan promised to be an exciting colleague for me. He told me he was being sent from Bahrain to brief the military brass in the city of Hillah in southern Iraq. On the evening of August 21, 2003, as I was watching CNN, on the scroll at the bottom of the screen I noticed an American had been shot dead in Hillah and that left me uneasy. The next day I learned that Kylan had indeed been the victim, killed by a young Iraqi as he waited in a jeep at an intersection. It was an elbow to the gut that left me in tears — and it still hurts to tell the story.

He was, in fact, one of more than 7,000 U.S. military personnel to die in Iraq, Afghanistan, or other “War on Terror” locales, along with 8,000 Pentagon contractors. And that’s not even to mention the more than 30,000 veterans of those conflicts who later committed suicide. One of them took my class on the modern Middle East at the University of Michigan. Well-informed and good-natured, he nevertheless couldn’t survive to the end of the semester, given whatever demons his experiences over there had burdened him with. In fact, for those still thinking about Iraq, the gut-punches of that war never stop.

And don’t forget the more than 53,000 American military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan who were injured badly enough in battle to end up in a hospital. About 10% of them had wounds on an injury severity scale of nine or greater, suffering, according to one National Institutes of Health study, from horrors that included traumatic brain damage, open wounds, chronic blood-clotting, and burns.

Corpse Patrols

And all of that was nothing compared to what the U.S. military did to Iraqis.

It should come as no surprise that President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and the other architects of one of America’s biggest foreign-policy fiascos in its 246 years of existence could support the bald-faced lie that they had invented a new kind of warfare that didn’t produce significant civilian deaths or casualties. Mind you, they also told serial whoppers about Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent ties to the al-Qaeda terror group and his supposedly active biological and nuclear weapons programs.

Contrary to President Bush’s glib assertions, the death toll in Iraq only burgeoned as the fighting went on. American planes routinely struck targets in densely populated Iraqi cities. Some American troops committed massacres, as did Blackwater mercenaries working for the U.S. military. During the civil war of 2006-2007 that emerged from the American occupation of the country, the Baghdad police had to establish a regular corpse patrol dispatched at the beginning of each workday to load up carts with human remains tossed in the streets overnight by rival sectarian militias.

In the years just after the Bush invasion, one Iraqi widow from the southern port city of Basra told me that her family barely avoided being attacked by members of a destitute, displaced Marsh Arab tribe then running a protection racket in the city. The family’s escape cost them all the cash they had on hand and required them to provide a feast for the tribesmen. Determined to try to improve the situation, the man of the household ran for public office. One day, he had just gotten into his car to go campaigning when a masked assailant suddenly appeared and shot him point blank in the head. His tearful widow told me that she could never get over the sight. And such events were hardly uncommon then.

By the time the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the terrorist cult that emerged from the U.S. occupation of the country, finally went down to defeat in 2019, Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates that some 300,000 Iraqis had died “from direct war-related violence caused by the U.S., its allies, the Iraqi military and police, and opposition forces.” Several times that number were wounded or crippled. Hundreds of thousands of widows lost their family breadwinners and some of them were reduced to a lifetime as beggars. Even larger numbers of children lost one or both parents. And keep in mind that such figures don’t include Iraqis who died from indirect but war-related causes like the breakdown of the provision of potable water and electricity thanks to U.S. bombing raids and damage to the country’s infrastructure.

The American Example in Iraq

In the first phase of the war, during the Bush years, four million Iraqis were displaced, some 1.5 million leaving the country and the rest internally. Many could never return home. One evening in the summer of 2008, while interviewing Iraqi refugees in Amman, Jordan, I had dinner with a professional couple, an architect and a physician. I mentioned that the worst of the civil war seemed to be over and asked if they planned to return to Baghdad. The man was a Sunni, his wife a Shiite. She explained that their home had been in an upscale Shiite district and they feared returning since so many neighborhoods had been ethnically cleansed of the rival sect.

Another man — call him “Mustafa” — was then in exile in the slums of East Amman. The members of his Sunni Iraqi family, denied work permits, were living off their dwindling savings. His wife was thinking of taking in sewing to make ends meet. Mustafa explained that he had gotten an envelope in the mailbox of his old Baghdad apartment from a militant Shiite militia, saying that if he and his family were still there in 24 hours, they would be dead. So, he and his wife had immediately packed everything they could fit into their car, awakened the children, and driven the nine hours to Amman. Mustafa hesitated. He looked around and lowered his voice. He had, he said, gotten threatening mail even in Jordan and moved to another apartment. The militia still had its eyes on him and had likely penetrated the expatriate Iraqi community. So, no, he and his wife couldn’t, he assured me, go home to Baghdad.

Under the Americans, there was no security for anyone. Two decades ago, Bush appointees dissolved the old Iraqi army and failed to train an effective new one or institute professional policing. I visited Baghdad in May 2013 during the interregnum between the two American campaigns in Iraq, to attend an international conference. We were taken by our kind Iraqi hosts to the National Museum and out to nice restaurants. To do so, however, we had to pile into white vans surrounded by Iraqi army vehicles, which strong-armed all the other traffic out of the way and ensured that our convoy never came to a standstill and so wouldn’t be the target of an ambush.

Bush’s disastrous war of aggression was a gift that just keeps giving. The disruption of Iraqi society and its government by that invasion ultimately paved the way for ISIL to take over 40% of that country’s territory in 2014. Six million Iraqis fled the brutal cultists and a million and a half of them are still displaced. Some fled to Turkey, where their lives were only recently devastated by the February 2023 earthquakes.

Today, the coffers of the Iraqi state treasury are empty, even though the country should have earned $500 billion in oil revenues since 2003. Corruption and inefficiency have become a hallmark of the new order. The unstable government installed by the U.S., dominated by Shiite religious parties, has gone through three prime ministers since 2018. Journalist Jonah Goldberg’s confidence that Iraqis would come to love the new constitution crafted under American rule in 2005 was woefully misplaced. He exemplified the pro-war intellectuals who insisted that their right-wing politics endowed them with superior judgment when it came to a country about which they, in fact, knew next to nothing.

In Iraq itself in recent years, young crowds have repeatedly gone into the streets to demand that the government once again provide basic services. The current prime minister, Mohammad Shia al-Sudani, is close to the Iran-backed militias that now play an outsized role in Iraqi politics. If anyone won the Iraq War, in fact, it was Iran.

Economists had estimated that the cost of the Iraq War to the United States, once you added in care for wounded veterans for the rest of their lives, had already reached $6 trillion even before the ISIL campaign of 2014-2019. Without the sums squandered in Iraq, our national debt would still be below our annual gross national product, putting us in a much more favorable economic position in 2023. As in today’s Russia, in the zeros of this century a war mentality fostered a fierce intolerance of dissent and of difference on the right, which is still unfolding.

One of the mantras of the U.S. government today, facing Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, is the championing of “the United Nations Charter” and a “rules-based international order.” That stands in contrast, of course, to what Washington now sees as the true international outlaw on Planet Earth, Putin’s Russian Federation. The Russian economy has been treated as the Iranian one was, subjected to relentless sanctions and boycotts. A Senate resolution sponsored by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called on the International Criminal Court, the authority of which the U.S. doesn’t even recognize, to put Russian officials on trial for war crimes.

Graham was one of the chief cheerleaders of the equally illegal Iraq War. Hypocrisy on such a scale is hardly impressive for a country still seeking to be the global power on this planet. In retrospect, on the 20th anniversary of the nightmarish decision to invade Iraq, we’ve lost more than our credibility in the Global South or a true commitment to international law. As a country, we lost our moral compass and now, amid Russian crimes in Ukraine, it seems that we have also lost all memory of the path we paved and the example we set in Iraq, as well as the crimes that went with it.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Juan Cole.

Who remembers anymore that, in 2003, we were Vladimir Putin? Today, our cable and social-media news feeds are blanketed with denunciations of the president of the Russian Federation for his lawless and brutal invasion of Ukraine. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken met briefly with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in New Delhi on March 2nd, he told him in no uncertain terms, “End this war of aggression.”

Putin himself, however, has a longer memory. In the speech that launched his “special operation,” he pointedly denounced the U.S. for “the invasion of Iraq without any legal grounds.” Then he added, “We witnessed lies made at the highest state level and voiced from the high U.N. rostrum. As a result, we see a tremendous loss in human life, damage, destruction, and a colossal upsurge of terrorism.”

Yes, it’s true, on the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, that war is long forgotten here. No one in the Biden administration today cares that it ruined what credibility America had as a pillar of international order in the global south and gave Putin cover for his own atrocity. So, sit back for a moment and let me take you on a little trip into a long-lost all-American world.

Mission (Un)Accomplished

On May 1, 2003, arrayed in Top Gun gear, President George W. Bush sat in the co-pilot’s seat of a fighter jet and was flown to the USS Abraham Lincoln, the aircraft carrier then stationed just off the coast of San Diego. No rationale drove this high-priced jaunt save the visuals his propaganda team hoped to generate.

Then, from that ship’s deck beneath a banner that proclaimed, “Mission Accomplished,” he made a televised speech about the invasion of Iraq he had ordered less than two months earlier. Bush proudly announced that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” Of course, neither assertion would prove faintly true. In fact, some 2,500 U.S. troops are still stationed in Iraq to this day, aiding in the fight against leaders of that country’s former Baath Party government who have now become fundamentalist guerrillas. And keep in mind that those troops remain there even though the Iraqi parliament has asked them to leave.

The rest of Bush’s speech deserves more infamy than it’s attained. The president declared, “Today, we have the greater power to free a nation by breaking a dangerous and aggressive regime. With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians.” Dream on, but of course Bush gave that “Mission Accomplished” speech to whitewash a war of aggression as a routine instrument of presidential policy. Describing the ramshackle, fourth-world country of Iraq then as “dangerous” and “aggressive” was as hyperbolic as Putin’s categorization of Volodomyr Zelenksy’s Ukraine as a “Nazi” state.

Note, however, that one phrase was missing from Bush’s Napoleonic screed about forcibly spreading “democracy” and “freedom” with that new tool, “precision warfare,” and that was, of course, “international law.” At the Nuremberg trials after World War II, the International Military Tribunal had observed,

“War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

And, of course, the United Nations charter forbids military aggression. It allows war only in self-defense or if the Security Council authorizes it.

On the deck of that aircraft carrier, however, Bush had the nerve to say: “When Iraqi civilians looked into the faces of our servicemen and women, they saw strength and kindness and goodwill.”

In fact, Iraqis had spent a significant part of the twentieth century trying to get British colonialists out of their country and it was hardly surprising that, in 2003, so many of them didn’t see such virtues in the forces that had invaded their land. The U.S. military personnel on the ground I talked to, then or later, often spoke of the sullen, angry gazes of the Iraqis they encountered. One acquaintance of mine, Lieutenant Kylan Jones-Huffman, sent me a message that very summer in which he described sitting in the back of a troop transport with other American forces on a road in southern Iraq and being passed by a truckload of armed Iraqis. One of them squinted sourly at them and lifted his rifle menacingly. Kylan said he just patted his M1 rifle, returning the threat.

A Navy reservist and Middle East specialist, he planned on a post-military academic career, having completed a Ph.D. in history. Insightful and easy-going, a crafter of exquisite haiku poetry, Kylan promised to be an exciting colleague for me. He told me he was being sent from Bahrain to brief the military brass in the city of Hillah in southern Iraq. On the evening of August 21, 2003, as I was watching CNN, on the scroll at the bottom of the screen I noticed an American had been shot dead in Hillah and that left me uneasy. The next day I learned that Kylan had indeed been the victim, killed by a young Iraqi as he waited in a jeep at an intersection. It was an elbow to the gut that left me in tears — and it still hurts to tell the story.

He was, in fact, one of more than 7,000 U.S. military personnel to die in Iraq, Afghanistan, or other “War on Terror” locales, along with 8,000 Pentagon contractors. And that’s not even to mention the more than 30,000 veterans of those conflicts who later committed suicide. One of them took my class on the modern Middle East at the University of Michigan. Well-informed and good-natured, he nevertheless couldn’t survive to the end of the semester, given whatever demons his experiences over there had burdened him with. In fact, for those still thinking about Iraq, the gut-punches of that war never stop.

And don’t forget the more than 53,000 American military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan who were injured badly enough in battle to end up in a hospital. About 10% of them had wounds on an injury severity scale of nine or greater, suffering, according to one National Institutes of Health study, from horrors that included traumatic brain damage, open wounds, chronic blood-clotting, and burns.

Corpse Patrols

And all of that was nothing compared to what the U.S. military did to Iraqis.

It should come as no surprise that President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and the other architects of one of America’s biggest foreign-policy fiascos in its 246 years of existence could support the bald-faced lie that they had invented a new kind of warfare that didn’t produce significant civilian deaths or casualties. Mind you, they also told serial whoppers about Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent ties to the al-Qaeda terror group and his supposedly active biological and nuclear weapons programs.

Contrary to President Bush’s glib assertions, the death toll in Iraq only burgeoned as the fighting went on. American planes routinely struck targets in densely populated Iraqi cities. Some American troops committed massacres, as did Blackwater mercenaries working for the U.S. military. During the civil war of 2006-2007 that emerged from the American occupation of the country, the Baghdad police had to establish a regular corpse patrol dispatched at the beginning of each workday to load up carts with human remains tossed in the streets overnight by rival sectarian militias.

In the years just after the Bush invasion, one Iraqi widow from the southern port city of Basra told me that her family barely avoided being attacked by members of a destitute, displaced Marsh Arab tribe then running a protection racket in the city. The family’s escape cost them all the cash they had on hand and required them to provide a feast for the tribesmen. Determined to try to improve the situation, the man of the household ran for public office. One day, he had just gotten into his car to go campaigning when a masked assailant suddenly appeared and shot him point blank in the head. His tearful widow told me that she could never get over the sight. And such events were hardly uncommon then.

By the time the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the terrorist cult that emerged from the U.S. occupation of the country, finally went down to defeat in 2019, Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates that some 300,000 Iraqis had died “from direct war-related violence caused by the U.S., its allies, the Iraqi military and police, and opposition forces.” Several times that number were wounded or crippled. Hundreds of thousands of widows lost their family breadwinners and some of them were reduced to a lifetime as beggars. Even larger numbers of children lost one or both parents. And keep in mind that such figures don’t include Iraqis who died from indirect but war-related causes like the breakdown of the provision of potable water and electricity thanks to U.S. bombing raids and damage to the country’s infrastructure.

The American Example in Iraq

In the first phase of the war, during the Bush years, four million Iraqis were displaced, some 1.5 million leaving the country and the rest internally. Many could never return home. One evening in the summer of 2008, while interviewing Iraqi refugees in Amman, Jordan, I had dinner with a professional couple, an architect and a physician. I mentioned that the worst of the civil war seemed to be over and asked if they planned to return to Baghdad. The man was a Sunni, his wife a Shiite. She explained that their home had been in an upscale Shiite district and they feared returning since so many neighborhoods had been ethnically cleansed of the rival sect.

Another man — call him “Mustafa” — was then in exile in the slums of East Amman. The members of his Sunni Iraqi family, denied work permits, were living off their dwindling savings. His wife was thinking of taking in sewing to make ends meet. Mustafa explained that he had gotten an envelope in the mailbox of his old Baghdad apartment from a militant Shiite militia, saying that if he and his family were still there in 24 hours, they would be dead. So, he and his wife had immediately packed everything they could fit into their car, awakened the children, and driven the nine hours to Amman. Mustafa hesitated. He looked around and lowered his voice. He had, he said, gotten threatening mail even in Jordan and moved to another apartment. The militia still had its eyes on him and had likely penetrated the expatriate Iraqi community. So, no, he and his wife couldn’t, he assured me, go home to Baghdad.

Under the Americans, there was no security for anyone. Two decades ago, Bush appointees dissolved the old Iraqi army and failed to train an effective new one or institute professional policing. I visited Baghdad in May 2013 during the interregnum between the two American campaigns in Iraq, to attend an international conference. We were taken by our kind Iraqi hosts to the National Museum and out to nice restaurants. To do so, however, we had to pile into white vans surrounded by Iraqi army vehicles, which strong-armed all the other traffic out of the way and ensured that our convoy never came to a standstill and so wouldn’t be the target of an ambush.

Bush’s disastrous war of aggression was a gift that just keeps giving. The disruption of Iraqi society and its government by that invasion ultimately paved the way for ISIL to take over 40% of that country’s territory in 2014. Six million Iraqis fled the brutal cultists and a million and a half of them are still displaced. Some fled to Turkey, where their lives were only recently devastated by the February 2023 earthquakes.

Today, the coffers of the Iraqi state treasury are empty, even though the country should have earned $500 billion in oil revenues since 2003. Corruption and inefficiency have become a hallmark of the new order. The unstable government installed by the U.S., dominated by Shiite religious parties, has gone through three prime ministers since 2018. Journalist Jonah Goldberg’s confidence that Iraqis would come to love the new constitution crafted under American rule in 2005 was woefully misplaced. He exemplified the pro-war intellectuals who insisted that their right-wing politics endowed them with superior judgment when it came to a country about which they, in fact, knew next to nothing.

In Iraq itself in recent years, young crowds have repeatedly gone into the streets to demand that the government once again provide basic services. The current prime minister, Mohammad Shia al-Sudani, is close to the Iran-backed militias that now play an outsized role in Iraqi politics. If anyone won the Iraq War, in fact, it was Iran.

Economists had estimated that the cost of the Iraq War to the United States, once you added in care for wounded veterans for the rest of their lives, had already reached $6 trillion even before the ISIL campaign of 2014-2019. Without the sums squandered in Iraq, our national debt would still be below our annual gross national product, putting us in a much more favorable economic position in 2023. As in today’s Russia, in the zeros of this century a war mentality fostered a fierce intolerance of dissent and of difference on the right, which is still unfolding.

One of the mantras of the U.S. government today, facing Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, is the championing of “the United Nations Charter” and a “rules-based international order.” That stands in contrast, of course, to what Washington now sees as the true international outlaw on Planet Earth, Putin’s Russian Federation. The Russian economy has been treated as the Iranian one was, subjected to relentless sanctions and boycotts. A Senate resolution sponsored by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called on the International Criminal Court, the authority of which the U.S. doesn’t even recognize, to put Russian officials on trial for war crimes.

Graham was one of the chief cheerleaders of the equally illegal Iraq War. Hypocrisy on such a scale is hardly impressive for a country still seeking to be the global power on this planet. In retrospect, on the 20th anniversary of the nightmarish decision to invade Iraq, we’ve lost more than our credibility in the Global South or a true commitment to international law. As a country, we lost our moral compass and now, amid Russian crimes in Ukraine, it seems that we have also lost all memory of the path we paved and the example we set in Iraq, as well as the crimes that went with it.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Juan Cole.

Sixteen years ago, on 10 February 2007, Russian President Putin delivered a landmark speech at the Munich Security Conference, a clear statement of post- Cold War Russian foreign policy, focusing on the need for multilateralism and international solidarity.  The mainstream media did not give much visibility to Putin’s security analysis in 2007, and still fails to do so.  Yet, it is worth our while to revisit that speech.

In 2007 I did recognize the implications of Putin’s speech and even distributed the text to my students at the  Geneva School of Diplomacy.  Sometimes I distribute the Putin speech together with President John F. Kennedy’s brilliant commencement address at American University[1] on 10 June 1963, an appeal to rationality that is as relevant today as it was then.  If everyone would read it and implement what is in there, we would not be in the dangerous and tragic situation we are in today.

Allow me to quote Kennedy: “while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy—or of a collective death-wish for the world.”[2]

Sometimes I share with my students the article published in the New York Times by our diplomat par excellence George F. Kennan, in which he warned about breaking our word to Russia by expanding NATO eastwards, contrary to assurances given by our Secretary of State James Baker to Mikhail Gorbachev: “Why, with all the hopeful possibilities engendered by the end of the Cold War, should East-West relations become centered on the question of who would be allied with whom and, by implication, against whom in some fanciful, totally unforeseeable and most improbable future military conflict?…[B]luntly stated…expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking … ”[3]

Bells should have rung when Putin gave his Munich speech in 2007, ten years after Kennan’s warning, in which Putin calmly expressed concern about: “the so-called flexible frontline American bases with up to five thousand men in each. It turns out that NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders, and we continue to strictly fulfil the treaty obligations and do not react to these actions at all. I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? No one even remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr, Manfred Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: “the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee”.

Unfortunately, the reception to Putin’s speech in the West was minimal. His warnings and predictions were not taken seriously. This is perhaps because we have a distorted perception of reality, a kind of solipsism, embedded in our self-centered world view. Most people in the West were and remain unaware of Putin’s speech or for that matter of the texts of the two proposals that he put on the table in December 2021, two draft treaties solidly anchored in the UN Charter concretising the necessity of agreeing on a modus vivendi and building a security architecture for Europe and the world.

The mainstream media bears considerable responsibility for failing to inform the public about Putin’s speech and about his repeated offers to negotiate in good faith as required by article 2(3) of the UN Charter. It is clear that NATO expansion and the weaponization of Ukraine constituted an existential threat to Russia, and that the malevolent demonization of Russia and Putin since the early 2000s entailed a menace, a “threat” of the use of force, which is prohibited in article 2(4) of the UN Charter.

As I understood it then and now — Putin’s speech was an outstretched hand to the West and proof of his readiness to sit down and talk about the new world order after the Cold War.

Michail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltzin and Putin again and again expressed their wish to turn the page on the US/Soviet Union confrontation and start a new page of cooperation for the benefit of all humankind.

There were some politicians and academics in the West who also shared the hope that finally the world could implement disarmament for development and that both major nuclear powers would reduce stockpiles and eventually ban nuclear weapons. Imagine if all the financing that went and still goes into the military, military bases, procurement of tanks, missiles and nuclear weapons became available for financing education, health, housing, infrastructure, research and development!

Humanity had a brief moment of transcendental hope. President Bill Clinton smashed that hope when he consciously broke the promises given by James Baker to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastward. This was short-sighted hubris, an expression of the conviction that we were the only super-power, could dictate to others what to do or not do. Western politicians gloated over the fact that Russia would not be able to do anything about our breach of trust. We cheated, as we so often cheat in international relations. I would even say that we have developed a “culture of cheating”[4], of taking advantage of the other guy whenever possible. It is perceived almost as cleverness, a secular virtue.

And yet, Russia was not threatening anyone in 1997 – Russia wanted to join the West under the banner of the United Nations and the UN Charter, which is akin to a world constitution, the only existing “rules-based international order” the world has. But the US did not share the worldview of multipolarity and multilateralism. And to this day the US still believes in its own “exceptionalism” and in the imperialist fantasies of Zbigniew Brzezinski[5] and Paul Wolfowitz.

Wise academics like Professors Richad Falk, Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer and Noam Chomsky have long recognized the colossal errors committed by American politicians from Clinton to George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Alas, these professors do not sing the song that the military-industrial-financial complex want them to sing, and for this reason the corporate media do not give them visibility.

In a democratic society the public has a right to know and must have access to all sources of information and analysis. Alas, the mainstream media in the US has engaged in Russia-bashing for decades, and has gone out of its way to denigrate Russian politicians, Russian culture, even Russian athletes. I still remember the ridiculous things that were written about Russian athletes during the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014. I remember the negative caricatures in the press and the incessant defamation of the Russians as totalitarians.  It is the artificial creation of such negative feelings toward other peoples and cultures that facilitates war propaganda and serves to justify sanctions and war crimes, all of this in violation of article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and in violation of the UNESCO Constitution.

The problem is not limited to the United States – it is emblematic for the entire West. Those professors or journalists who tried to remain objective and report in a balanced way were (and are) denounced as Putin puppets, useful idiots or (in Germany) “Putin Versteher” – as if it were somehow inappropriate to make an effort to understand Putin’s point of view, and not just swallow the skewed narrative that the corporate media sells. One would think that every intelligent person would want to understand the way Putin, Zelinski, Biden, Scholz, Macron, etc. actually see things.

True enough, many of our best minds did realize the danger posed by NATO expansion.  Many understood that if we continued provoking the Russian Bear, sooner or later the Bear would respond. Back in August of 2008 when the Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, goaded by the US, decided to attack Southern Ossetia, after the decisive and proportionate response by Russia in that short war, I thought that we could have learned something. Alas, we learned nothing and continued the provocations and war-propaganda.

It seems that we in the West live in our own bubbles. First, we are convinced that we are “the good guys” by definition. This is an item of faith. This was drummed into my head in high school in Chicago, in college and law school in Boston. This I absorbed from the press, from Hollywood movies, from literature. The soft and hard indoctrination has been thorough, and our faculty of self-criticism remains woefully underdeveloped. Second, we in the United States are a continent separated by two oceans from Europe, Africa and Asia. We have the illusion that we are invincible. Alas, in the nuclear age there is no place on the planet that is safe.

Allow me to return to the information war and the media. Surely the propaganda that Washington and Brussels produce and disseminate by far outdoes anything that Goebbels ever did with his Nazi propaganda. And it is not just the dis-information and the skewed narratives in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Times, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, El Pais, even the Neue Zürcher Zeitung – it is the suppression of dissent, the suppression of other views and perspectives. That is precisely the reason why millions of people in the West remain so ignorant, and that is why RT and Sputnik are maligned and censored, because “Big Brother” will not allow that the public get the idea that the Ukraine conflict has a long history, that NATO is not the “good guy”.  Maybe someday, when we grasp the magnitude of the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by NATO member states in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria – maybe we will understand that NATO — originally a legitimate defensive alliance — gradually morphed into a criminal organization within the meaning of articles 9 and 10 of the Nuremberg Statute.

Notes.

[1] https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/historic-speeches/american-university-commencement-address

[2] See also my essay https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/09/14/natos-death-wish-will-destroy-not-only-europe-but-the-rest-of-the-world-as-well/

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/05/opinion/a-fateful-error.html

[4] https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/01/28/a-culture-of-cheating-on-the-origins-of-the-crisis-in-ukraine/

[5] The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. New York: Basic Books, 1997

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Alfred de Zayas.

The post Amtraks Across America: All Aboard With Vladimir Putin appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Matthew Stevenson.

Russia wants a peaceful Ukraine, Americans prefer one at war.

— Israel Shamir, “Putin Prefers a Bad Peace”

Even before the current round of nuclear brinksmanship in Ukraine, U.S.-Russian relations had descended to a lower point than U.S.-Soviet relations reached during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We’ve been courting nuclear annihilation for some time.

Those who would like to exempt Washington from blame now will have to account for U.S. hostility towards Russia and the USSR, both of which long pre-date anything that could remotely be construed as provocation by Putin. After all, the United States invaded and occupied parts of the former USSR from 1918-1920, maintained a harshly belligerent stance all during the Cold War, and unleashed a plague of financial locusts to loot state enterprises throughout the former USSR as soon as the Berlin Wall came down, while enrolling the newly “independent” states into an anti-Moscow military alliance that extended to the very borders of Russia. Standards of living plunged, death rates soared, diplomacy suffocated, and Boris Yeltsin’s proposed U.S.-Russian partnership was immediately forgotten.

If a China-Russia alliance had installed hostile governments in Canada and Mexico at the end of WWII, after which all of Latin America went full Communist while narco-terrorists began killing Anglo Texans and banning English, it’s unlikely any blame would fall on Washington if it attempted to resolve the situation by force, as it surely would. So we can dismiss pious moral grandstanding about the “evil” Putin as the boundless hypocrisy it transparently is.

Furthermore, we should note that the rhetoric employed in this mad rush to terminal war is curious and irrational. For example, labeling Putin a “war criminal” actually legitimizes war, since it implies there is some ethical or at least inoffensive way to conduct mass slaughter, which is all that modern warfare is. Transparent attempts to miss this point by labeling massacre “collateral damage” should be dismissed with ridicule.

And it can hardly be repeated too often that the USA is far and away the guiltiest “criminal” where war is concerned, having by far the greatest war industry ever seen in human history headquartered on its soil and forming the heart of its economy (the Defense Industrial Base), which it has used to fight an endless series of wars directly or by proxy throughout the world for the past eighty years. No other contemporary or historical power has achieved anything close to this commitment to mass killing.

So it is absurd to define the situation in Ukraine as a uniquely evil instance of military aggression by Vladimir Putin. In a world of asymmetrical power with no effective world government, technically sophisticated powers always have the upper hand in violent conflicts with their neighbors, which are inevitable. And, of course, they insist on having friendly neighbors, preferably cooperative, though submissive will do.

Hostile neighbors no one accepts. How much of the Americas does the United States permit be part of a hostile military alliance? According to the Monroe Doctrine, not one square inch. How did Washington react to Cuba installing Soviet nuclear missiles 90 miles from Florida in 1962? (Spoiler alert: it nearly blew up the planet.) What did the media do when Rafael Correa jokingly proposed an Ecuadorian military base in Miami to balance Washington’s Mena Air Base in Ecuador? It laughed, though the punchline is far from a joke.

A majority of the world is fed-up with the hypocrisies of unilateral world order under U.S. control, and is not averse to accommodating an emerging China-Russia-India based new world order. Yes, the current war in Ukraine is causing further expansion of NATO (supposedly a good thing), but this, in turn, is devouring resources needed to stave off European economic collapse, while an emerging Russia-China-India alliance accelerates the collapse of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, a U.S. client state, Biden’s phone calls in the early stages of the current war went unanswered while Putin’s were cordially received. Got respect?

Our mind managers warn us of the horrors of forced neutrality via Finlandization, and urge instead that we strive for regime change in Moscow. Strange. Finland is a success story, having achieved balance and stability via social democratic prosperity. On the other hand, U.S.-fostered regime change converts countries into corpse-strewn wastelands on a regular basis. Think Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Trying out this strategy on Russia obviously carries a high risk of nuclear annihilation. What stupendous prize awaits us if we successfully navigate this potentially species-terminating risk? The preservation of “our interests and our values,” as Hillary Clinton so loves to say.

In other words, converting whole cities to radioactive ash is a small price to pay for preserving our favorite abstractions. Got it.

We hear Putin is a strongman, an authoritarian, a totalitarian dictator, though we also hear people are fleeing Russia in droves. Why are they at liberty to do that in a “dictatorship”?

By the way, was Abraham Lincoln also a dictator, he who suspended habeas corpus, jailed journalists, shut down hundreds of newspapers, and locked up thousands of political enemies? And what about Woodrow Wilson, who destroyed unions, imprisoned editors, closed newspapers, and assumed dictatorial control of finance, the press, farms, and commerce and transportation?

Or maybe FDR was a dictator, who imprisoned over 100,000 U.S. citizens without charge and burned more civilians alive in a single night than either atomic bomb killed six months later?

What do we actually mean when we call Putin a dictator? That the media isn’t free? But a major part of Russian, state-owned media has long transmitted pro-Western, anti-Russian content, paid for by Russian taxpayers. Try and find taxpayer-funded, Putin-sympathetic content that reaches mass audiences in the U.S. Good luck.

What about free speech? Well, the Russian people have never had it, and therefore don’t care much about it. Americans have it in theory, but find its political potency nullified in practice by tsunamis of state and corporate propaganda. The most popular use of speech in the contemporary U.S. is not to reveal errors of argument and evidence, but to denounce others for being “idiots.” How free are we then?

Is Putin a nationalist? In recent years state-enterprise CEOs in Russia were seen earning millions of rubles a year while everyone else had to tighten their belts. The Russian central bank bought U.S. Treasury Bonds and supported the U.S. dollar at the expense of the ruble. Where is the nationalism in such policy?

Is Putin anti-democratic? The annexation of Crimea was overwhelmingly supported by Crimeans (97% vote).

Didn’t Putin back Assad? Yes, because he was the legitimate head of state in Syria, while the alternative was rule by Islamic terrorists supported by the United States and Israel, but no sane person in Syria. Israel wants the dismemberment of Syria in order to keep the occupied Golan Heights forever.

Much demonology is spouted from the simple fact that Putin is the former head of the K.G.B. But Putin is critical of the Bolsheviks and is not himself a Communist. Nevertheless, he considers the demise of the USSR a “world tragedy,” since overnight twenty-five million Russians found themselves foreigners living in fourteen new countries.

Is Putin anti-Israel? Well, Daesh oil flowed to Israel, and Putin said nothing, valuing his relations with then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel, of course, supported Al-Nusra, and they were declared terrorists by the United Nations. But Israel is admirable by definition, because … the Holocaust. Strange, though, that Putin gets no credit for aiding the Holy State.

We are told that no threat to the Russian state exists, so therefore no cause for war in Ukraine exists. But the Russian state and everything else can be blown off the map in a matter of minutes. The fact that the world is wired up to explode in a nuclear holocaust has been an American initiative from the beginning, and its dominant enemy has been (1) the USSR, and (2) Russia. NATO is by definition hostile to Russia, and lost even an ostensible reason for existing in 1991 with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. Why is it still around? Because Russia is still around, and Washington doesn’t like that fact. Its efforts to achieve regime change in Moscow can and may end human civilization, which isn’t likely to improve matters for Ukrainians.

Is Putin an extremist? No. There is nothing radical in him. He has no plans for social re-arrangement. He merely seeks to have Russia respected as an independent, wealthy, and “great” nation, and yes, he wants Russia to be treated as an equal. But he also wants to fit into the world, not rebel against it. These modest ambitions are a threat to US/NATO hegemony and world dominance, which represent the triumph of Western extremism.

Keeping things in perspective, Putin is a Russian patriot. He wants to see Russia be a strong, healthy country where people lead good lives, are happy, and Russia occupies a prominent position internationally. He’s not a chauvinist or reactionary nationalist.

The Orange Revolution was totally unexpected in Russia, which can’t really be said to have a political opposition because there is no one who embodies and represents the views of a Russian majority. Having said that, Putin has been something of the “golden boy” in Russian politics for the past generation. He is good at addressing issues and speaking in clear terms that average people understand. The initial “democracy” of the Yeltsin period has been curtailed, but the middle class has developed rapidly on Putin’s watch.

Yeltsin spoke to the U.S. Congress in 1992, and offered Washington a partnership in which each nation would treat the other as an equal. For thirty years now the U.S. has rejected this. In the year of the U.S./NATO attack on Serbia (1999), Yeltsin protested, “Russia is not Haiti. You can’t treat us like Haiti.” Washington considers Haiti a “shithole” country, as one of America’s more honest presidents memorably put it.

Washington is incapable of giving Russia its due diplomatic respect. According to the reigning “Wolfowitz Doctrine,” the U.S. should dominate the world and not allow any rivals for power to emerge. Russia therefore is and should be treated as a second rate power. This is a non-negotiable position.

Naturally, Putin does not accept this, and never accepted the U.S. view that Russia lost the Cold War. Russia saw the end of the Cold War as an opportunity for them to become part of the international community. At the core of Russian beliefs is that Russia must be a Great Power. The Russian people have never doubted that Russia is a great country. Having their noses rubbed in the Wolfowitz Doctrine year after year is insulting, degrading, and an open invitation to mutual suicide.

The USSR’s forcing its rule onto Eastern Europe was a big mistake, though understandable given two Western invasions in a generation that left much of the country a smoldering ruin. The U.S. ignoring the possibility of Russia “coming back” to international prominence was a big American mistake. Washington continues to think of Russia as at most a regional power whose wants and needs can be ignored. But no nuclear-armed country can be ignored.

At the end of the Cold War the U.S. promised not to expand NATO — not one inch — to the East, a promise it quickly violated.

Now we wait to learn if our three-decade refusal to concede Russia minimal diplomatic respect and cooperation will eventuate in nuclear war.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Michael K. Smith.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Jeremy Morris.

Between August 1, and August 16, Russian authorities raided the homes of at least eight journalists and media workers and detained them in connection with alleged extortion and fraud, according to news reports.  

At least seven journalists and Telegram media workers remained in detention as of Tuesday, August 23. Telegram has become a platform widely used in Russia and Ukraine by independent media outlets to broadcast news as news websites and social media have been subjected to massive blocking since the war began,according to news reports. Pro-Russian operators also use Telegram to distribute propaganda and disinformation.  

“The press freedom situation in Russia has only become more alarming since the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February. Russian authorities are increasingly charging journalists with financial crimes in apparent retaliation for their investigation into business and political issues,” said Carlos Martinez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director, in New York. “The Russian judicial system must not be used to silence critical voices, and authorities must immediately release all the journalists and media workers who remain in custody and drop all charges against them.”

Denis Shaikin

On August 1, a court in the western city of Kursk sentenced Denis Shaikin, the publisher of local newspaper Kursk Week, to two years in prison and a fine of 100,000 rubles (US$1,661) in damages on extortion charges, according to media reports. 

Shaikin was accused of asking for 400,000 rubles (US$6,646) from the director of a local enterprise in exchange for not publishing an article about the takeover of a rival company, those reports said.

In a document published on social media, Shaikin denied the charges and said he would be on a hunger strike “until (his) full exoneration and release.”

CPJ emailed Kursk Weekfor comment and information about his health but did not receive any reply. The case against Shaikin was opened in September 2020, according to media reports.

“This is a standard practice in Russia—if a journalist has had conflicts with a business or enterprise, he is sent to prison on ‘extortion’ charges,” Ekaterina Sergeycheva, chief editor of news outlet Lenizdat, which reported on Shaikin’s case, told CPJ via messaging app.

Vladimir Panfilov and Artem Prokhorov

On August 4, a court in the western city of Oryol ordered the detention of Artem Prokhorov, who runs the local news website Orlets, and Vladimir Panfilov, host of news program “Resume,” which Panfilov created and produced on YouTube, until September 29 and October 1, respectively, on charges of extortion, according to media reports.

If found guilty, they face up to seven years in prison, according to the Russian criminal code.

Authorities accused the journalists of extorting 100,000 rubles (US$1,661) from a local businessman in exchange for not publishing allegedly compromising information about him, according to those reports. Panfilov and Prokhorov both denied the charges and appealed their arrest, those reports said.

CPJ is investigating to determine whether Prokhorov’s and Panfilov’s charges are linked to their journalistic work. CPJ emailed Orlets, but did not receive any reply.

Vladislav Malushenko, Yevgeny Moskvin, and Aleksei Slobodenyuk

Also on August 4, the Basmanny court in Moscow ordered the detention until September 25, of Vladislav Malushenko, Yevgeny Moskvin, and Aleksei Slobodenyuk, media workers who run the Telegram channel Scanner on charges of large-scale fraud, according to multiple media reports. If found guilty, they face up to six years in prison, according to the Russian criminal code.

Authorities accused the trio of extorting money from Rostec, a state-owned defense conglomerate, in exchange for not publishing negative data about it, those reports said.

According to reports, Malushenko works for the Federal News Agency and Moskvin and Slobodenyuk work for the Narodnye Novosti publishing house, both workplaces reportedly linked to Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin.

The Scanner channel, which has about 178,000 subscribers and claims to “monitor corrupt government officials,” published allegations about corruption at jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, and the channel “is used to discredit those who disagree with the government,” according to investigative outlet Agentstvo.

Aleksandra Bayazitova

On August 8, police detained Aleksandra Bayazitova, a freelance journalist with pro-government news site Life. Bayazitova also runs the Telegram channel Adskiye Babki, which has about 37,000 subscribers and reports on economic and corruption issues, on extortion charges, and seized her equipment, according to multiple media reports. On August 10, the Kuzminsky court in Moscow ordered her detained until October 7. Bayazitova has diabetes and received medication while jailed, those reports said. If found guilty, she faces up to 15 years in jail, according to the criminal code.

Authorities claimed that Bayazitova extorted money from Promsvyazbank, a state-owned Russian bank, in exchange for not publishing negative information about it, those reports said.

During her trial, Bayazitova denied the charges, and claimed she was prosecuted for publishing evidence that Promsvyazbank executives were involved in embezzlement and stole federal money allocated to Russia’s defense industry, which she said led to Russia’s current “bad situation in Ukraine.”

(On the same day, the Kuzminsky court ordered Inna Churilova and Olga Arkharova, two administrators of non-media business Telegram channels, detained until Oct. 7 on extortion charges, those reports said.)

Lev Speransky

On August 16, police in Moscow detained Lev Speransky, an investigative journalist with privately-owned daily newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets and brought him for questioning at the Interior Ministry’s Main Directorate for the Moscow region, according to his outlet, which published a video of the journalist and multiple media reports. He was released later in the evening, according to news reports.

Moskovsky Komsomolets reported that Speransky did not show up for work on that day and could not be reached by phone. In a video published by Moskovsky Komsomolets, Speransky’s wife Maria said that a group of about six people entered their apartment and only two of them showed police credentials.

In the video posted by his outlet and filmed before he was taken for questioning, Speransky said that the police searched his home, forcibly seized his computer and telephone, and “put physical and psychological pressure on him.”

Speransky said in the video that he was detained in relation to a defamation and extortion case opened in 2018 that he had no connection with.

Authorities made Speransky a witness in this case, those reports said. In the video, Speransky states he believes his detention to be linked to his journalistic activity. In another video published by the Telegram channel Baza, Speransky said he was “currently working on stories that might not please some people.”

CPJ contacted Speransky via messaging app but did not receive any reply.

Media reported that investigators questioned him exclusively about his links to anonymous Telegram channel VChK-OGPU, which has more than 438,000 subscribers and regularly reports on the Russian security services, according to CPJ’s review of the channel. Speransky denied any connection to that channel, those reports said. 

Speransky has reported on multiple high-profile cases, such as the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal and the 2019 Federal Security Service (FSB) headquarters shooting in Moscow, his outlet and media reported.

“Is there a practice of prosecuting journalists under the guise of extortion cases? Certainly, yes,” Aleksei Obukhov, editor of the independent news outlet SOTA, told CPJ via messaging app. “Nevertheless, the ‘extortion’ charge is applied less frequently than blatantly political articles and is related not to repressions against society as a whole, but, rather, to personal conflicts of specific government and business representatives with certain journalists,” he added.

CPJ emailed the Russian Interior Ministry for comment but did not receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Daniel Warner.

Since power equals force times speed… Thus, a smaller man who can swing faster may hit as hard or as far as the heavier man who swings slowly.
— Bruce Lee, The Tao of Jeet Kune Do

Vladimir Putin has won one of the amazing strategic military victories in history.

The Ukrainians had an army of over 300,000, led by 50,000 to 100,000 fascist fanatics, with hi-tech weapons provided by NATO and with training by the best American, British and Canadian military advisors. They were confident that they could blitz what was left of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) and finish their campaign of ethnic cleansing.

But the lightning attack they planned for this Spring was not to happen.

The Russians struck first — fielding a must smaller force, perhaps just 100,000 strong, punching through Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) defenses and cutting them off from support — kettling them in Eastern Ukraine where they were vulnerable to artillery and airstrikes. Bruce Lee would have been proud.

Fencing Without A Sword

Lee described Jeet Kune Do as “fencing without a sword”, hence his characteristic stance and use of distance, quite unlike the Wing Chun he learned from Yip Man. Feint, thrust, riposte — these are basics — which in Jeet are done almost simultaneously.

These are also what Putin did — feint, thrust, and riposte. Like Lee, he is a learner.

By contrast, Americans rely on brute force, usually in gangs — umm… “alliances”.

The tactics of the NATO gang inevitably involves “shock and awe”, indiscriminate bombing with B52s, the use of uranium munitions, — with the attempt to preserve the lives of one’s own soldiers at expense of women and children in the communities under attack. For every combatant killed about 9 or 10 women and children die.

Indiscriminate bombing with B52s flatten infrastructure and deprive people of the necessities of life. The use of uranium munitions poisons the environment leading to massive increases in cancer later. The result is both social and environmental disaster. “Shock and awe” is “scorched earth” rebranded Hollywood style. Check out the video game.

But shock and awe is usually preceded by or accompanies by economic warfare that end up condemning millions to death through starvation and disease. Think: Iraq. Think: Afghanistan.

Putin’s Psychology

Way back when, before Joe Biden and his corrupt son Hunter, had probably ever heard of Kiev, Putin had planned to retire in favor of Medvedev. He never really wanted to be a politician. Then Medvedev showed his colors as an Atlanticist, by not opposing the Libya War of 2011. Putin changed his mind. He was, according to all reports, genuinely shocked at the manner of Gaddafi’s death , sodomized with a bayonet. He had done a lot for Russia but if he left the country in the hands of the Atlanticists, it was as doomed as Libya.

The Internet is full of psychologizing about Putin. He is supposedly a narcissist, a psychopath, and various other things, totally lacking in empathy due to early childhood adversity, living in a single apartment with two other families. What is not mentioned is that those two other families — both Jewish — and his Jewish mother gave him a lot of love, and people throughout his life stepped in to mentor and help him. Putin has a lot to give back, or “pay forward”.

“He took us to a very famous museum in St. Petersburg,” Rourke said of meeting Putin. “And then later he took me to a children’s cancer hospital. And we went in there and visited the really, really sick, little, tiny, tiny kids. I looked over at him and I saw him and, nobody’s going to want to hear this, but I saw a man with empathy and who was really moved by what these children are going through.“

Contrast that with Hillary Clinton cackling like the Wicked Witch which she is about Gaddafi’s death — or Obama boasting about how good he was at killing by drone — 90% women and children of course.

OK but CNN will tell you that Putin is a psychopath. Madeline Albright, who didn’t blink an eye at murdering half a million children describes him as “reptilian”.

If this is a psychpath, we need more like him.

The Tao of Russian Strategy

In Jeet Kune Do, unlike Wing Chun, distance and positioning are very important. This is because Jeet is both offensive and defensive, whereas Wing chun emphasizes close-in defense in confined quarters.

As with Musashi Miyamoto, Bruce Lee always emphasized pre-knowledge of what an opponent may do, to attack pre-emptively — which, of course, what Putin did.

In 2014, however, the situation was murky to say the least.

“When you know yourself and your opponent, you will win every time. When you know yourself but not your opponent, you will win one and lose one.”
— Sun Tzu, “III. Attack by Stratagem” in The Art of War

Putin knew that he did not know.

He who knows not, knows not, he knows not, he is a fool shun him.
He who knows not and he knows not, he is simple teach him.
He who knows and knows not that he knows, he is asleep, awaken him.
He who knows and knows that he knows, he is wise, follow him.
― Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune

I would add this: He who knows he knows not, knows to know.

Russia had to learn. I had to know.

Certainly, Russia was not strong enough in 2014 to take on the Ukraine AND NATO — not without using tactical nukes. But what were the West’s real intentions? Could they be persuaded to adopt a different path? Putin couldn’t know.

But he soon found out.

Failure to implement the Minsk accords, the MH117 and Skripal false flags, CIA sponsored chemical false flag attacks in Syria and the like — and especially sanctions on both Russia and China — showed him that this new version of “the Great Game” was no game at all. More like the Hunger Games.

If you grow up on the streets, as Putin did, you learn to avoid gangs and fights — except when there is no choice — but to be vigilant and plan countermeasures in advance. So Putin continued to develop military technologies, notably hypersonic missiles, the kalibr missile and supersonic torpedoes that gave Russia the edge.

Subduing the whale

It is clear that in 2022, the Ukrainians thought they could rely on the support of NATO, if not NATO intervention, as they had after the CIA coup in 2014. As fascists, they saw Russia’s consistent efforts to resolve the issues diplomatically as weakness.

War was coming one way or the other. And, as both Bruce Lee and Musashi Miyamoto would advise, it is best to attack first in such a case.

The Russians had done what it could to resolve the crisis diplomatically despite the Ukrainian fascists occupying more than half of Eastern Ukraine and killing about 15,000 people, mostly civilians. But now it was going to full-on ethnic cleansing, with maximum loss of life— aka genocide.

Russian intelligence gave prior warning of the Ukraine’s nuclear intentions as well as the existence of biolabs possibly developing pathogens tuned to specific DNA sets, which could, in theory, result in bioweapons targeting certain ethnic groups. The punitive sanctions against both Russia and China amounting to economic war and increasing bellicosity signified that the US wanted to takeover where Hitler and Japan had left off, the domination of Eurasia, even without slave camps and mass murder.

By this time, Putin had reformed and developed the Russian military, explored new tactics and weapons in Syria, and re-imagined the FSB as something that KGB people in his day could only dream about and that the CIA might aspire to, if it could move beyond bias confirmation.

American Advantages as Disadvantages

Ah…, but what about the US’s huge array of hi-tech weapons?

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
— Bruce Lee, The Tao of Jeet Kune Do

Putin focused Russia’s efforts on developing just a few, really effective kicks (as it were). The Kalibr missile system, hypersonic weapons, the S500 and advanced S200 systems. UAVs. The old SU27 family became the advanced SU30 and SU34 systems. Most of these weapons were tested in Syria. The focus was on practicality.

“Do not collect weapons or practice with weapons beyond what is useful.”
— Miyamoto Musashi, precept of the Dokkodo

While in Russia, weapons companies serve the State, in the US the State serves the weapons companies — so enormous amounts of money go to developing ever more expensive and technologically complex weapons systems such as the F35, the most expensive fighter program in history that is in most respects is already obsolete. Aircraft carriers cost billions of dollars and are, like Japan’s Yamamoto battleship, just large, vulnerable, and now indefensible targets.

Yes, the US is the whale. And Putin therefore is Musashi.

And how much of American weapons tech works?

The Americans have recently claimed that Russia suffers a 60% misfire rate. But where do they get these numbers — the Russians obviously don’t say!

Those statistics come from the Ukrainians who use obsolete Soviet missiles, which indeed frequently blow up, and from the American Tomahawk missiles, not to mention from the US’s many failed attempts at hypersonic weapons.

With sanctions, Russia doesn’t have the money to waste and it puts the needs of its people first.

The US puts the needs of the Military Industrial Complex first — by beggaring healthcare, education and infrastructure.

Feint, Thrust, Riposte

Putin was able to leverage good intelligence of his enemies’ intentions with highly trained mobile forces that could be literally everywhere from Donbass in the south to Chernobyl in the north.

Aware that the genocidal lunatic fringe running the Ukraine cared nothing about the country’s people, only their own ethnic kin — having already made the Ukraine one of the world’s greatest economic disasters and prompting an huge exodus of economic refugees — Putin immediately secured nuclear facilities and biolabs to prevent the “neo-Nazi” lunatic fanatic fringe running from creating dirty bombs or releasing pathogens.

The war was really won in the first week.

Of course, Russia lost men and about 200 tanks that first week but saved lives in subsequent weeks. Since that devastating first punch, Russia has lost very few tanks, moving more slowly, using laser detectors, UAVS, satellite imagery and human intelligence to prevent sneak attacks. The UAF has not been able to mount a single successful counterattack and the government will likely soon abandon Kiev.

The Russians are not afraid to take casualties — they are fighting an existential war and every Russian has a relative who died in the Great Patriotic War. Putin, therefore, has enormous support, except among the Atlanticists, the elitist carpetbaggers left over from the Yeltsin kleptocracy.

Americans haven’t fought an existential war — since the Civil War. They don’t like casualties, even the paltry 55,000 or so that ended the Vietnam War. For them, war is a video game.

Let us remember that the US has not won a war against a more or less equal opponent since the Pacific War. In fact, it has lost almost every war since against less capable opponents — notably Vietnam and Afghanistan.

They will lose this one too.

Note:

For the record, I have studied judo, jiu jitsu, karate, shorinji (Japanese Shaolin), and aikido, with some knowledge of ninjutsu. Not that I am good at any of them — but I know something of the zen and tao principles that apply. Putin studied combat Sambo when he was young to deal with bullies. Combat Sambo (as distinct from Sport Sambo) is similar to jiu jutsu — from which judo evolved, and it is, in some respects, similar to Lee’s Jeet. Putin went on to study judo, which is not really useful for combat but whose training inculcates oriental world views. More recently, Putin became interested in Kung Fu and took an exhausting trip to the Shaolin Monastery, with which he has maintained ties ever since, with both his daughters trained in Shaolin. Shaolin is also a “way”, as all Chinese martial arts are and reflects the teachings of Taoist masters.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Julian Macfarlane.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Chrissy Stroop.

“Russian authorities’ sentencing of four student journalists to two years each of correctional labor is deeply disturbing, and shows that authorities will truly stop at nothing to stifle independent reporting,” said CPJ Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator Gulnoza Said. “Authorities must allow the former DOXA editors to live and work freely, and must stop harassing and censoring members of the press.”

On Tuesday, April 12, the Dorogomilovsky District Court in Moscow sentenced Armen Aramyan, Vladimir Metelkin, Alla Gutnikova, and Natalia Tyshkevich, all former editors at DOXA, to two years each of correctional labor for allegedly involving minors in illegal protests, according to multiple media reports. The court also banned them administering any websites for three years, those reports said.

Individuals sentenced to correctional labor are not imprisoned, but must pay the state treasury a portion of their wages during the time of their sentence; if unemployed, they must work at jobs assigned by the Federal Penitentiary Service, according to Russian law.

CPJ was unable to immediately determine whether the journalists intended to appeal their sentence.

Police detained the journalists in April 2021 over their coverage of authorities’ responses to political protests in support of opposition leader Alexei Navalny; Aramyan, Metelkin, and Gutnikova were held under house arrest until the court’s verdict, according to CPJ research and those reports.

Tyshkevich was held under house arrest until April 2, 2022, when she was transferred to administrative arrest for 15 days after a court found her guilty of displaying prohibited symbols related to Ukraine in 2017.

Students founded DOXA in 2017, and it became popular for its reporting on sexual harassment at Russian universities, according to reports. Authorities blocked the outlet’s website and social media accounts in late February over its reporting on Russia’s war on Ukraine, news reports said.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

On April 1, at a hearing at Dorogomilovsky district court in the capital Moscow, the state prosecutor requested two years of correctional labor for the former DOXA editors for allegedly involving minors in rallies, according to news reports. The editors–Armen Aramyan, Vladimir Metelkin, Alla Gutnikova, and Natalia Tyshkevich–were charged in April 2021 under Article 151.2 of the criminal code in connection with a January 2021 video asking authorities to stop intimidating students during political protests, and were placed under home detention, according to CPJ research and news reports.

The verdict in the case is scheduled for April 12, according to DOXA.

After the April 1 hearing, police arrested Tyshkevich, and a court the next day sentenced her to 15 days in prison for allegedly displaying prohibited symbols in 2017, according to DOXA.

Separately on April 1, the Russian Ministry of Justice recognized five more Russian journalists as so-called media foreign agents, according to media reports. On April 5, journalists Yevgeny Kiselyov and Matvei Ganapolsky were the first to be included on the Ministry of Justice’s list of “individuals labeled as foreign agents” for allegedly engaging in political activities funded by Ukraine, according to news reports. 

“Russia continuously resorts to using the arbitrary foreign agent law or fabricated cases to silence dissenting voices in the country,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, from New York. “Russian authorities must stop their persecution of the student media outlet DOXA and immediately repeal the arbitrary law on foreign agents.”

Tyshkevich was detained after the April 1 DOXA hearing and held overnight at Tverskaya police station in Moscow, according to the outlet. Her last words at the hearing included the word “war” to refer to the military clashes in Ukraine, instead of  “special operation,” the government-approved term for the conflict, according to reports.

On April 2, Tyshkevich was sentenced to 15 days of administrative arrest under part 1 of Article 20.3 of the administrative code for “displaying prohibited symbols” in a 2017 social media post containing a Ukrainian trident, which police called a symbol of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, according to the outlet and media reports. According to Tyshkevich’s lawyer, who was quoted in the DOXA report, the statute of limitations on this case expired in 2018.

On March 27, Russian state media regulator Roskomnadzor blocked DOXA’s page on the Russian social network VKontakte, according to reports.

The five journalists designated as “media-foreign agents” are former Dozhd TV (also known as TV Rain) journalist Maria Borzunova, Mediazona journalist Alla Konstantinova, The Bell founder Elizaveta Osetinskaya, The Bell editor-in-chief Irina Malkova, and Murad Muradov, a journalist for Kavkazsky Uzel (Caucasian Knot) in Dagestan.

Individuals on the list must regularly submit detailed reports of their activities and expenses, and the status must be listed whenever they produce content or are mentioned in news articles, according to the law. Non-compliance could lead to a two-year prison sentence.

Kiselyov and Ganapolsky, who were the first to be added to the list of “individuals labeled as foreign agents,” are two well-known journalists who left Russia in 2008 and 2014, respectively, and now work as journalists in Ukraine, according to a Reuters report. 

The ministry created the registry at the end of 2020, but it remained empty until now, according to reports. The list registers individuals who receive money from abroad, engage in “political activities,” or “collect information in the field of military and technical activities of Russia,” according to the same reports, and requires they indicate their status when contacting state agencies, according to the Media Rights Center, a Russian non-governmental organization. Non-compliance can lead to a five-year prison sentence.

CPJ emailed Roskomnadzor’s press service and the Russian Ministry of Justice but did not receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

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