US Military Effectively Encouraged Ukraine to Violate Minsk
Digital War Propaganda
Any time I open Microsoft Edge it jumps automatically to a news page. Every day, all day, any time I open this page, some three or so stories on the Ukraine war cry out for my attention, almost always presenting a heavily and darkly anti-Russia and/or anti-Putin theme. Never any pro-Russian stories. The site operates as a propaganda machine. It never fails this fundamental purpose, which is to support the western narrative and the silencing of any narrative that is critical of the western.
These digital platform outlets (my impression is that they are all the same) are more fervently anti-Russian even than the mainstream legacy media, and that is saying something. Their stories have various sources, many of them legacy mainstream media, but our knowledge from previous wars can lead us to assert with a high degree of certainty that the constant generation such stories - loud, repetitive, biased, emotional, often unlikely (how many more times are we going to be told that Putin is dying and/or mad?) - is ultimately engineered with the participation of high level public relations companies working on behalf of one or more western state agencies or “NGOs”, earning them very good money, and backed by strong links to the Incubus (i.e. the US military industrial complex and the White House).
So this week, incredibly, while more sober and independent media are busily tracking the growing problems for Ukraine in the Donbass - Ukraine at its most vulnerable, most dependent on western handouts, a country otherwise bankrupt - western digital platforms and legacy mainstream media have only one stream of messages: Ukraine is winning, Ukraine is heroic and stoic, the Ukrainian war is a great western success, Ukraine is on the right side of history, Ukraine is slow, thoughtful and cunning, Ukraine is in the existential and moral Right, whereas: Russia is losing, Russia is cowardly and grasping, Russia is on the wrong side of history, Russia is impetuous, foolish and wasteful and deprecating of its own soldiers, Russia is is in the existential and moral Wrong.
Perhaps by now paid western propagandists have come to the convenient realization that the masses of western media consumers lack consistent strategies of attentive reading and learning, their attention-spans are incredibly short and fickle, very few are capable of following a logical chain longer than two links and that has shades of grey, and even fewer can remember anything discordant with their carefully brainwashed mainstream worldview for longer than a day. However awful are the mistakes of their propagandists (remember WMD!) and of the politicians, plutocrats and corporate interests who tell the propagandists what and how to propagandize, nobody will remember, nobody will care, nobody will be held accountable.
These are the audiences who bought into the Serbia-is-irreedeemably-evil smear of the Yugoslav wars; the evil Big Bad Bin Laden mythology of 2001; the evil Taliban and the essentially “good” Pakistan that paid them; the evil WMD-wielding Saddam Hussein; the alleged Viagara aggressions of Muamar Gadhadaffi; the evil slayer of modern jihadists in Syria, Bashar Asad; the evil Russian Manchurian US president Donald Trump, and so on and so on in a dreary, never ending, un self-reflective cacophony of PR political and military assault on western consciousness.
Since first drafting this post I have noticed this analysis from Brian Berletic on News Atlas of propaganda in even moderately responsible western analyses of where we are in the war. He notes that these function mainly to tell people from what they want to hear, not to how things actually are:
The Battlefields
In his broadcast for today, January 10, Alexander Mercouris talks of more reports of the likely retreat of Ukraine from Soledar, and that Zelenskiy has made public statements that acknowledge that the situation is very difficult for Ukraine in Soledar. There still are Ukrainian troops in Soledar today although there are signs that their situation is becoming increasingly desperate. Some western media are beginning to recognize that Soledar is falling under Russian control even as they are sure to say that Soledar is of little strategic significance, that this is a rare Russian victory and so on. A pro-Russian website, South Front, said by the US government to be run by Russian intelligence agencies (no way of telling whether the US government is correct - Russia denies it) says that Russia has established control over the village of Bakhmutskoya. Wagner fighters say they do not penetrate such captured territories immediately, but wait for a few days while they establish security around them. They have entered Soledar and are engaged in fighting in the very center of the city. The Ukrainian garrison is surrounded.
Other reports today suggest that Ukrainians are about to evacuate not only Soledar, but also Bakhmut (Mercouris says he can see no evidence of this latter claim; he has higher regard for reports that suggest that the fall of Bakhmut is more likely two weeks away). Western sources suggest that Ukraine is sufferng enormous casualties; many professionals have been replaced new conscripts with minimal training. [All such claims are similar to those that one hears from Ukraine about Russia in western media. This phenomenon is occasionally discussed by Mercouris and others, who find Russian casualty claims are better based in evidence. By the way I have just noticed a report from the Spanish-speaking Liusi Vaya, based in Donetsk, I believe, who also says that Ukraine is withdrawing from Soledar and Bakhmut].
Tanks
To the steady stream of recent western commitments to send more weapons to Ukraine, Mercouris notes that Britain is promising 10 Challenge tanks - 75 ton Airmoths - that will have all the massive maintenance issues that Mercouris has talked about with respect to Bradleys, Madars and the like. 10 will make little to no difference on a battlefield which counts tanks in the hundreds.
US Prepared Ukraine for this War from 2014-2015
This claim is made by Lt. General Beerman, a very senior US military source, in a recent interview in the Financial Times. The interview is mainly about US preparations for war in the Pacific region against China but he also talks about Ukraine. He asks why “we” have been so successful (sic!) in Ukraine: because for the past few years and despite the absence of suitable authorizations from the Obama Administration the US military it was on the spot actively preparing for war through training, pre-positioning of supplies (weapons probably?), identification of sites from which they could support and sustain operations.
Mercouris asks what has this support actually achieved? It has prolonged the resumption of this war, Ukraine has suffered massively and its looks as though Ukraine will soon lose the entirety of the Donbass. Beerman does not even mention the Minsk agreeements. Yet through its involvement the US military must have effectively encouraged Ukraine to violate the Minsk agreements by giving them unreasonable hope that with US backing they would not have to. The US presence in effect provided Ukraine and the entire collective west a route map to disaster. US military activity in these years provides one of the reasons, but only one, for the Russian special military operation in February 2022. When the Russians, in the run up to the war, were bitterly complaining that Ukraine was ignoring its obligations under the Minsk accords, the west was pumping Ukraine with weapons. Russian statements from that time were actually true. Beerman says that the US strategy is exactly the same in the Pacifiic - the US calls it “setting the theatre.” Instead of learning from what is actually likely to be a total failure in Ukraine, the US is plunging ahead with the same strategy in the Pacific.
Morally Dismembering the West
Putin’s National Security Adviser, Nikolai Patrushev, has given a long interview to a well-established Russian publication. He says that in the west, politics as conventionally understood has broken down and that power is now exercised by a conglomerate of giant corporations that basically rule the State. The US state is just a shell for huge corporations who try to dominate the world. Even Presidents are mere extras who can easily be shut up - as some have, by assassination or other means. More and more US citizens conclude that there is no difference between the major political parties (who between them, in other words, function as components of the ‘shell’).
This viewpoint of course one might have been heard back in the Soviet period, and is perhaps appropriate for the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the Soviet Union, albeit voiced by a very senior Russian source. [I would however add that there is either a great deal more substance or a great deal less than might seem to be the case with this speech and with Putin’s recent discourses on civilization. Should we be realists and simply admire clever discursive reframing of western and asian history in a way that is designed to reverse the standard “west is good” vs. “Russia/Asia is evil” tropes that have brainwashed western consumers for hundreds of years, reframing that is designed to boost Russian morale, justify Russian security strategies, and even win friends in an otherwise “Cancel Russia” -obsessed western popular culture?
If so, then we are admiring what are essentially populist strategies deployed from positions of enormous State power and advantage with the framework of fairly advanced capitalism. Or is it possible that without promising a return to Communism, which Putin has vehmently disavowed, Russian leaders are indeed searching for a new ideology that has real substance (the best ideologies thrive on substance) in the form of widely held religious values; widely held historical, national, military and other identity values; and a concern to redress economic and class inequalities (a concern which plays into, partly incorpoates and validates) Russia’s incomparably important experiment with and experience of communism?]
Patrushev notes that the US and its allies are sliding into a debt hole: US public debt is $31 trillion, and Britain’s is at $2.4 trillion, highest since World War 2, and now exceeding 100% of gross domestic product. The world record for ratio of debt (2.6 times) to GDP is held by Japan which has a debt of $10 trillion.
Only countries that consider themselves masters of the world are not going to repay these debts.
The west came to prosperity and domination through conquest. That is how corporations behave today, prefering to increase their capital by pumping resources from other countries. They use their system of indoctrination of the masses to impose on the population of the planet the idea of certain rules that they themselves came up with and which do not comply with international law.
This viewpoint is punchier than the view expressed in recent speeches by Putin but is not that different. Patrushev says that Russia has no place in a system like the one represented by the west. Big corporations are unnerved by the divergent ideological positions represented by Russia. Russia seeks a reasonable balance of material and spiritual. The west has sought to dismember Russia, and has created sophisticated mechanisms to achieve this goal. Russia is not at war with Ukraine, because Russia cannot hate ordinary Ukrainian people, from whom Russia is inseparable. There are many migrants from Ukraine throughout Russia. The US pullout from Afghanistan has functioned as precurser to its war against Russia by means of its support for the Kiev regime.
Brazil
[A quick note about the situation in Brazil. Mercouris in his broadcast of yesterday and in discussion on The Duran has sounded fairly relaxed on the issue of the recent riots in Brasilia, which he does not think amounted to an attempted insurrection while expressing the hope that Lula will not make the situation worse through reprisals. I think this somewhat complacent tone needs to be set against this view, below, from Tomas Castanheira on the World Socialist Web Site, who cites very different evidence, which includes the high level political, military and police personalities associated with the event, one that points to a grave fascist destabilization of Latin America’s largest nation.