By Alex Davidson

The UK reportage on the conflict in Ukraine has been exceptionally well-controlled by the British State. Besides being one-sided in its reporting and untruthful, the narrative has been relentlessly repeated, and its descriptive language has been propagandistic. This includes the assertions that the “Russian invasion was unprovoked”; that it was a “full-scale invasion”; and that Russia intended to take over Ukraine and then move on to invade other countries. Anyone who questioned this narrative was described as a “Putin apologist”.

UNPROVOKED?

To argue that the Russian invasion was unprovoked is to ignore the promises made by the West that NATO would not expand eastwards after the defeat of the Soviet Union. NATO in fact has steadily expanded towards Russia’s borders threatening its security. Some former US political and military leaders have pointed this out as crossing Russia’s red-lines but that has been lost amidst the West’s propaganda barrage.

And then there were the Minsk Agreements of 2014-2015 and those under the Normandy Format of 2019, which could have prevented the conflict if these agreements had been implemented by Ukraine. However, Angela Merkel, German Chancellor at the time, one of the signatories to the Minsk Agreements, admitted in December 2022 that the agreements had been “an attempt to give Ukraine time and that Ukraine used it to strengthen its armed forces.” (1) François Hollande, former French President, also one of the signatories has confirmed Merkel’s statement.

The Russians repeatedly warned the West about their breaches of promise from 1991. The Minsk Agreements of 2014-2015 and of 2019 were not enforced on Ukraine by Germany/ France under the sway of the US. Ukraine continued to bombard Donetsk and Luhansk causing some 14,000 civilian deaths. This was the background to Russia launching its military operation. It was not an unprovoked invasion.

FULL-SCALE INVASION?

No serious military analyst would honestly characterise the Russian “Special Military Operation” as a full-scale invasion other than for propaganda purposes. The Russians had less than 200,000 mobilised troops on the border with Ukraine in February 2022. This number was much less than what would have been required to occupy and control a vast country the size of Ukraine with a population of some 40 million and large armed forces, trained by NATO. By comparison it should be recalled that Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union with 3 million troops, 600,000 vehicles, more than 500 tanks and 2000 aircraft. The Nazi invasion moved at lightning speed through Ukraine before reaching the environs of Moscow. That is what one would describe as a full-scale invasion.

Related to this false description of Russian actions is the oft-repeated narrative that Russia was thwarted in its attempt to take Kiev. The Russians never intended to occupy Kiev. Their incursion from the north towards Kiev was a military manoeuvre to tie down Ukrainian forces protecting Kiev so that Russia’s limited aim to secure Donetsk and Luhansk could be successfully achieved.

UKRAINIAN DEMOCRACY?

Victoria Nuland, then US Assistant Secretary of State, attended the 2014 Maidan Uprising in Ukraine supporting the protesters. Prior to that, in December 2013, she said in a speech to the US-Ukraine Foundation that the US had spent about $5 billion on democracy-building programmes in Ukraine since 1991. This would have been better termed regime-change programmes.

A recording of a phone call made on 28th January 2014 between Nuland and US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, was published on YouTube on 4th February 2014. Nuland and Pyatt were discussing who they thought should be in the next Ukranian government. Nuland told Pyatt that Arseniy Yatsenyuk would be the best candidate to become the next Prime Minister of Ukraine. (2) The coup against the Victor Yanukovyich government, orchestrated by the Americans and carried out by Azov and Right Sector and other neo-Nazi formations, brought to power, Nuland’s choice, ArseniyYatsenyuk. He became Prime Minister on 27th February 2014. Nuland was the US lead person guaranteeing a loan of $1 billion and the provision of assistance to the Ukrainian military and border guard in 2014. 

Zelensky won the Presidential election in 2019 with a commitment to end the fighting in eastern Ukraine, make peace with Russia and tackle corruption. (3) However, he soon jettisoned his pledges, didn’t implement the Minsk Agreements and under the control of the US/UK, didn’t make a deal with Russia.

There is considerable evidence that the endemic corruption in Ukraine has continued unabated, indeed increased, with the huge amounts of dollars and military equipment transferred by the West since 2022.    

NORD STREAM

The US had long held the aim of stopping Russian gas getting to Europe and replacing it with American liquefied natural gas. They had the support of countries in Eastern Europe, notably Ukraine and Poland, who campaigned within the EU to stop Nord Stream 2. In an interview with ABC News on 7th February 2022, US President Biden said, “If Russia invades Ukraine…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” The reporter then asked, “But how will you do that, exactly, since the project is in German control?” Biden answered, “I promise you; we will be able to do that.” On 26th September 2022 the Nord Stream pipeline was blown up.

In the immediate aftermath of the pipeline bombing using the argument that the sabotage could only have been done by a state actor, Russia was repeatedly cited as a likely culprit, spurred on by calculated leaks from the White House. However, blaming Russia flew in the face of all logic. Why would the Russians blow up their own pipeline worth billions of dollars? Even the New York Times, noting the apparent mystery of “why, if Russia bombed its own pipelines, it would begin the expensive work of repairing them.”

The various contorted arguments that the Russians were to blame eventually gave way to another explanation with the discovery of the yacht, Andromeda, said to have been implicated. The West refused to allow Russia to be part of the investigations and now all has gone quiet.

On 3rd April 2023 the Washington Post reported, under the headline, “Don’t talk about Nord Stream” that “For all the intrigue around who bombed the pipeline, some Western officials are not so eager to find out.” The report went on, “At gatherings of European and NATO policymakers, officials have settled into a rhythm, said one senior European diplomat: Don’t talk about Nord Stream…Leaders see little benefit from digging too deeply and finding an uncomfortable answer, the diplomat said, echoing sentiments of several peers in other countries who said they would rather not have to deal with the possibility that Ukraine or allies were involved.…officials said they were loath to share suspicions that could accidentally anger a friendly government that might have had a hand in bombing Nord Stream.” At a United States Congressional hearing in early 2023, Nuland stated, “I am gratified, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now…a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”

US investigative journalist Seymour Hersch has made the claim that US Navy divers planted explosives on the pipelines during NATO exercises held in June 2022 before remotely activating the bombs, with the assistance of Norway, three months later on 26th September 2022. (4) The US has described the claim as “completely and utterly false.” Hersh was proved to be correct about the My Lai massacre in Vietnam decades ago and the Abu Ghraib prison tortures in Iraq more recently. Both of which were denied by the US at the time. Hersh’s account of the sabotage of Nord Stream is the most credible to date.

Hersh, in referring to Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT), wrote about how the West deals with its covert operations: “the first thing you look at is how to take care of the open-source people, make them think what happened isn’t happening.” (5) Alicia Kearns, Conservative MP, who chairs the UK parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a debate on Ukraine: “On information operations, we have done an incredible job. The UK has led on this internationally, exposing the reality of what is happening on the ground and the false flags. I pay tribute to Bellingcat and the Centre for Information Resilience, which have done incredible work.” (6) 

CENTRE FOR INFORMATION RESILIENCE 

The UK government has given at least £2.7m to the OSINT London-based Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) since January 2021. Around 40% of this has been provided since 24th February 2022, when Russian forces entered Ukraine. (7)

On 18th December 2022 CIR tweeted: “Like our other #OSINT projects, it’s more than just plotting developments on a map: at its heart, our work is about justice and accountability. We knew that the Kremlin would try everything to distort the information environment. Our resolve to stop them remains.”

CIR was founded by two Foreign Office veterans, Ross Burley and Adam Rutland. When he worked for the Foreign Office Burley served in London, Washington and Tel Aviv, and “designed, implemented, and led several of the UK Government’s counter disinformation programmes” from 2017-20.  Burley still works for the UK government’s cross-government Stabilisation Unit “as a Civilian Deployable Expert in strategic communications.” The government deploys such civilian experts to “support UK government activities in fragile and conflict-affected states, and to multilateral missions.” (8) In May 2022 Burley spoke in the session, “Under Fire: Russia’s invasion and the global information space” at a conference hosted by NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence in Riga, Latvia. (9) At the same conference another session was held under the title, “Formulating a rules-based order for the digital age: Big Tech in the Spotlight”. Speakers at this session included, David Agranovich, Director, Global Threat Disruption at Meta (Facebook) and Dr Yoel Roth, Senior Director, Safety and Integrity, Twitter. David Agranovich coordinates disruption of influence operations, cyber-espionage, and adversarial networks across Meta. Prior to joining Facebook, Agranovich served as Director for Intelligence at the National Security Council (NSC) in the White House. Dr Roth is the Senior Director of Safety & Integrity at Twitter. At university his research included how the choices of developers, designers, and policymakers can systematically push certain types of identities and communities to the digital margins. (my emphasis)

The CIR’s seven-person advisory board includes Cindy Otis, who spent ten years as a CIA analyst; Toomas Hendrik Ilves, a former Estonian foreign minister who led the country’s NATO accession process; Mo Hussein, a former chief press officer at 10 Downing Street and media adviser in the Ministry of Defence; and Elisabeth Braw, a fellow at the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute.

BELLINGCAT

“Taking on the Kremlin from his couch … Eliot Higgins and Bellingcat are fighting Vladimir Putin and his ilk, using little more than computers and smartphones” – Foreign Policy. (10) Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, was a senior fellow in the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab (DFR Lab) from 2016-2019. The UK government has given the DFR Lab £6.7 million since 2018. In 2015 Higgins co-authored the book, Hiding in Plain Sight: Putin’s war in Ukraine, published by the Atlantic Council. The Atlantic Council is NATO’s unofficial Thinktank. It receives funding from the US Department of Defense, arms manufacturers, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. Facebook, Goldman Sachs and the UK Foreign Office each contribute more than $1million. 

NATO STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS

The NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence was founded in January 2014 by Estonia, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and the UK. The Centre’s May 2022 seminar introduction explained that “today NATO acts in three dimensions of operations: the physical, cyber, and cognitive aspects”, and outlined how the workshop would centre on the cyber and cognitive realms, focusing especially on “the role the media can and should play as a gatekeeper that frames conversations and interprets narratives.” (my emphasis).

Mark Laity, Director, Communications Division, NATO Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, wrote: “It is no exaggeration to say that at the height of their crisis it was groups like the Ukraine Crisis Media Centre and StopFake that brilliantly carried the main burden of Ukraine’s communication effort…But we, with all our resources, have hugely benefitted from the independent efforts of groups like Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council as well as individual experts. Not only did they bring expertise they also brought credibility. Whether deserved or not, we live in an age of distrust of institutions, and they are more trusted than we are.” (11)Interview, Die Zeit, December 2022.

(1) Arseniy Yatsenyuk created the Open Ukraine Foundation and the Kyiv Security Forum in 2007. In 2014 the Open Ukraine Foundation partnered with the NATO Information and Documentation Centre, US Department of State, the US National Endowment for Democracy and Chatham House. On 1st December 2022 the Open Ukraine Foundation held the annual Kyiv Security Forum. Participants included US Under-Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland; President of the European Council 2014-2018, Donald Tusk; and the Ambassadors of the G7 countries.

(2) In October 2021, the Pandora Papers revealed that Zelensky, his chief aide, and the head of the Security Service of Ukraine Ivan Bakanov operated a network of offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus and Belize.

(3) Hersh, Seymour, How America Took Out the Nord Steam Pipeline, Substack, 8/2/23.

(4) OSINT is defined in US Public Law 109-163 as cited by the US Director of National intelligence, as intelligence “produced from publicly available information that is collected, exploited, and disseminated in a timely manner to an appropriate audience for the purpose of addressing a particular intelligence requirement.”

(5) UK House of Commons Debate, 2/3/22.

(6) McEvoy, John and Curtis, Mark, UK Foreign Office Gives Millions to Counter-Disinformation Groups, 4/4/23, Declassified UK.

(7) gov.uk/government/organisations/stabilisation-unit/about

(8) https://rigastratcomdialogue.org/speakers/view/ross-burley

(9) https://www.bellingcat.com/book/

(10) https://www.jwc.nato.int/images/stories/threeswords/NATO_STRATCOM_2018.pdf

 

Eliot Higgins,a founder of Bellingcat with Alina Polyakova Assistant Director of The Atlantic Council 2015 photo by Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung

Normandy format talks in Minsk 2015. Western bad faith in negotiations. Photo by The Russian Presidential press and information office