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Shocking video from 2014: Ukrainian Nazi Azov Battalion crucifies and burns a captured Russian rebel soldier
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There's no way I can bring myself to sign in and watch that. I read some of the comments on there and people sound genuinely disturbed and horrified by what they saw. It sounds like they nailed the poor guy to the cross and burned him while still alive. It's sickens me to think that humanity can allow itself to sink to this level of depravity. Putin spoke out about these Nazis for years and he was ridiculed for it. "Yeah, right" they said "Tell us another one Putin." Apparently 14,000 Russians have been killed in eastern Ukraine since 2014 but no one dares mention that in the mainstream media. Some Australian media cocks, like Andrew Bolt, have even openly called for Putin's assassination. I didn't think people were allowed to do that in a democratic country such as Australia - i.e. call for the murder of a foreign country's leader on a national broadcasting platform.Originally posted by Carlin View PostComment
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US government admits to making shit up about the Russia/Ukraine shitshow:
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In a break with the past, U.S. is using intel to fight an info war with Russia, even when the intel isn't rock solid
“It doesn’t have to be solid intelligence,” one U.S. official said. “It’s more important to get out ahead of them [the Russians], Putin specifically, before they do something."
April 6, 2022, 6:43 PM AEST
By Ken Dilanian, Courtney Kube, Carol E. Lee and Dan De Luce
It was an attention-grabbing assertion that made headlines around the world: U.S. officials said they had indications suggesting Russia might be preparing to use chemical agents in Ukraine.
President Joe Biden later said it publicly. But three U.S. officials told NBC News this week there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine. They said the U.S. released the information to deter Russia from using the banned munitions.
It’s one of a string of examples of the Biden administration’s breaking with recent precedent by deploying declassified intelligence as part of an information war against Russia. The administration has done so even when the intelligence wasn’t rock solid, officials said, to keep Russian President Vladimir Putin off balance. Coordinated by the White House National Security Council, the unprecedented intelligence releases have been so frequent and voluminous, officials said, that intelligence agencies had to devote more staff members to work on the declassification process, scrubbing the information so it wouldn’t betray sources and methods.
Observers of all stripes have called it a bold and so far successful strategy — although not one without risks.
“It’s the most amazing display of intelligence as an instrument of state power that I have seen or that I’ve heard of since the Cuban Missile Crisis,” said Tim Weiner, the author of a 2006 history of the CIA and 2020’s “The Folly and the Glory,” a look at the U.S.-Russia rivalry over decades. “It has certainly blunted and defused the disinformation weaponry of the Kremlin.”
Four days before the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the U.S. publicized spy plane photos to show the Soviet Union had deployed nuclear missiles not far from Florida’s coast. The Biden administration began releasing reams of intelligence about what it said were Putin’s plans and intentions even before the invasion of Ukraine began.
Just this week, national security adviser Jake Sullivan stood at the White House podium and read out what officials said was more declassified intelligence, asserting that Russia’s pullout from areas around Kyiv wasn’t a retreat but a strategic redeployment that signals a significant assault on eastern and southern Ukraine, one that U.S. officials believe could be a protracted and bloody fight.
The idea is to pre-empt and disrupt the Kremlin’s tactics, complicate its military campaign, “undermine Moscow’s propaganda and prevent Russia from defining how the war is perceived in the world,” said a Western government official familiar with the strategy.
Multiple U.S. officials acknowledged that the U.S. has used information as a weapon even when confidence in the accuracy of the information wasn’t high. Sometimes it has used low-confidence intelligence for deterrent effect, as with chemical agents, and other times, as an official put it, the U.S. is just “trying to get inside Putin’s head.”
Some officials believe, however, that trying to get into Putin’s head is a meaningless exercise, because he will do what he wants regardless.
After this story was published, a U.S. official told NBC News that “the U.S. government’s effort to strategically downgrade intelligence to share with allies and the public is underpinned by a rigorous review process by the National Security Council and the Intelligence Community to validate the quality of the information and protect sources and methods.” The official added that “we only approve the release of intelligence if we are confident those two requirements are met.”
‘Spot on’
The biggest success of the U.S. information offensive may have been delaying the invasion itself by weeks or months, which officials believe they did with accurate predictions that Russia intended to attack, based on definitive intelligence. By the time Russia moved its troops in, the West presented a unified front.
Before the invasion, the U.S. asserted that Russia intended to stage a false flag attack against members of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population as a justification for war and that the plans included a video featuring fake corpses. The video never materialized; Russia has consistently claimed it was invading to protect ethnic Russians from “Nazis" in Ukraine.
The U.S. accurately predicted that Putin intended to go through with the attack, even as other Western countries, notably France, argued otherwise. The head of France’s military intelligence agency stepped down last week over the wrong call.
A former U.S. official said administration officials believe the strategy delayed Putin’s invasion from the first week of January to after the Olympics and that the delay bought the U.S. valuable time to get allies on the same page in terms of the level of the Russian threat and how to respond.
CIA Director William Burns, a former ambassador to Russia, told lawmakers at a congressional threats hearing last month that “in all the years I spent as a career diplomat, I saw too many instances in which we lost information wars with the Russians.”
Now, he said, “by being careful about this we have stripped away the pretext that Putin, in particular, often uses.”
“That has been a real benefit, I think, to Ukrainians,” he said.
The policy has drawn lavish praise even from some Republicans.
“You were spot on in your intelligence,” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., said at the House’s annual worldwide threats hearing last month, addressing Burns and other intelligence agency leaders. “Your decision to declassify, both the form and the fashion in which you did so, saved lives. Sleep well, and thank you for doing that.”
But the strategy has its dangers. One of them, the Western official said, is that getting something clearly wrong would be extremely damaging to U.S. credibility and play into Moscow’s hands.
Disclosure as a deterrent
As the war has proceeded, the administration has used intelligence to warn of possible Russian actions and draw attention to Russian military failings.
At times, the Biden administration has released information in which it has less confidence or about things that are possible rather than truly likely.
Last week, U.S. officials told reporters they had intelligence suggesting Putin is being misled by his own advisers, who are afraid to tell him the truth.
But when Biden was asked about the disclosure later in the day — after it made headlines around the globe — he was less than definitive.
“That’s an open question. There’s a lot of speculation,” Biden told reporters. “But he seems to be — I’m not saying this with a certainty — he seems to be self-isolating.”
The degree to which Putin is isolated or relying on flawed information can’t be verified, said Paul Pillar, a retired career U.S. intelligence officer. “There’s no way you can prove or disprove that stuff,” he said.
Two U.S. officials said the intelligence about whether Putin’s inner circle was lying to him wasn’t conclusive — based more on analysis than hard evidence. Other officials disputed that, saying the intelligence was very reliable and had been vetted at the highest levels.
In another disclosure, U.S. officials said one reason not to provide Ukraine with MiG fighter jets is that intelligence showed Russia would view the move as escalatory.
That was true, but it was also true of Stinger missiles, which the Biden administration did provide, two U.S. officials said, adding that the administration declassified the MiG information to bolster the argument not to provide them to Ukraine.
Likewise, a charge that Russia had turned to China for potential military help lacked hard evidence, a European official and two U.S. officials said.
The U.S. officials said there are no indications China is considering providing weapons to Russia. The Biden administration put that out as a warning to China not to do so, they said.
The European official described the disclosure as “a public game to prevent any military support from China.”
Game or not, U.S. intelligence officials say it has been successful. Intelligence is rarely definitive, and Biden officials have calculated in some cases that it’s better to pre-empt something that might not happen, rather than stay silent and watch it unfold.
“It doesn’t have to be solid intelligence when we talk about it,” a U.S. official said. “It’s more important to get out ahead of them — Putin specifically — before they do something. It’s preventative. We don’t always want to wait until the intelligence is 100 percent certainty that they are going to do something. We want to get out ahead to stop them.”
The official said there was an extensive discussion about whether to reveal that the Russians had a blacklist of Ukrainian enemies whom they intended to arrest and possibly kill once they seized control. Officials weighed the potential harm of divulging the intelligence. “That was a big decision,” the official said.
But the intelligence appears to have been borne out by witness accounts from towns Russian once occupied and has now left, where political assassinations have been documented.
Leaning forward
Some U.S. officials have advocated a strategy of leaning further forward in declassifying and releasing intelligence for years, as U.S. adversaries became adept at using modern communications platforms to spread propaganda.
In 2020, nine of 11 U.S. military combatant commanders signed a memo urging the U.S. intelligence community to declassify more information to counter disinformation and propaganda from Moscow and Beijing.
The U.S. can bolster support from allies only by “waging the truth in the public domain against America’s 21st century challengers,” the officers wrote. But efforts to compete in the battle of ideas, they added, are hamstrung by overly stringent secrecy practices.
“We request this help to better enable the US, and by extension its allies and partners, to win without fighting, to fight now in so-called gray zones, and to supply ammunition in the ongoing war of narratives,” the four-star generals wrote to the acting director of national intelligence at the time, Joseph Maguire.
“Unfortunately, we continue to miss opportunities to clarify truth, counter distortions, puncture false narratives, and influence events in time to make a difference,” the generals said.
In the past, the U.S. had sat on its hands as Russia waged information war.
In 2014, days before Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, Russia released a recording of an apparent phone conversation between senior U.S. diplomat Victoria Nuland and the ambassador to Ukraine at the time, in which Nuland disparaged the European Union.
The move was part of a wave of disinformation and propaganda from Moscow surrounding the seizure of Crimea. But the Obama administration didn’t react.
That’s because the U.S. had opted out of the great power propaganda wars after the 9/11 attacks, Weiner said.
“So what was the United States’ response to all of this?” Weiner asked. “Crickets, nothing, zip. They had no response.”
The Biden strategy has been different.
Pillar said the Biden administration took a significant risk in predicting Russia would invade Ukraine, a bold move that was vindicated by Putin’s actions.
“That suggests that there are some pretty strong bases for this information,” Pillar said. “Not only did it turn out to be correct ... but evidently it had been presented to the president with enough confidence that he felt confident going out on the limb as far as he did.”
Said Pillar, “Boy, if there wasn’t an invasion, this would have a huge ‘cry wolf’ effect and make our president look pretty bad.”
Доста бе Вегето една, во секоја манџа се мешашComment
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The level of cognitive dissonance required to pen such a shit piece and the even higher level of stupidity required to ignore said dissonance is mind boggling.
The MSM and the government just admitted that everything they have fed the public is complete and utter bullshit.Доста бе Вегето една, во секоја манџа се мешашComment
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14,000 people have died in Donbas since the war begun, Putin claims they are all Russian civilians I believe.I know of two tragic histories in the world- that of Ireland, and that of Macedonia. Both of them have been deprived and tormented.Comment
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George Webb: "Russians say they have US Army General Cloutier (at least Moscow reporters covering FSB HQ think that) from Azovstal attempted e helicopter escape. You decide. It could be a hoax, but this would be so easily disprovable by Cloutier holding a press conference."
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Finland is seriously considering applying for NATO membership. Russia has warned that there will be a response. A high ranking Russian Senator Vladimir Dzhabarov stated that such a course will result in "destruction of their country". In the last 48 hours Finland has been hit with cyber attacks across various government institutions, and Russian aircraft breached well into Finnish airspace during Zelenskyy's address to the parliament.
Finland's NATO application could be imminent
Finland preparing for Russian ‘consequences’ if it joins NATO: top MoD official
Finland Joining NATO Means 'Destruction of Their Country': Russian Lawmaker
Last edited by Carlin; 04-10-2022, 12:48 AM.Comment
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NATO officers from France, Germany, the UK and "neutral" Sweden are stuck at Mariupol after frontline defeat, according to Russian press reports. They are attempting to negotiate an evacuation corridor with the Russian forces.Comment
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'There are Unconfirmed reports today that Russian Forces in the Leningrad Region near the City of Vyborg are beginning to move Heavy Military Equipment including K-300P Bastion Coastal Defense Missile Systems towards the Gulf of Finland and the Finnish Border.'
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Russia warns of nuclear weapons in Baltic if Sweden and Finland join NATO
‘No more talk of any nuclear-free status for the Baltic,’ deputy chair of security council says
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[...] Just recently I came across perhaps the clearest and most reasonable account of what has been going on in Ukraine. Its importance comes due to the fact that its author, Jacques Baud, a retired colonel in the Swiss intelligence service, was variously a highly placed, major participant in NATO training operations in Ukraine. Over the years, he also had extensive dealings with his Russian counterparts. His long essay first appeared (in French) at the respected Centre Français de Recherche sur le Renseignement. A literal translation appeared at The Postil (April 1, 2022). I have gone back to the original French and edited the article down some and rendered it, I hope, in more idiomatic English. I do not think in editing it I have damaged Baud's fascinating account. For in a real sense, what he has done is "to let the cat out of the bag." — Boyd D. Cathay
Incredible article in my opinion.The Military Situation In The Ukraine
by Jacques Baud
March 2022
Part One: The Road To War
For years, from Mali to Afghanistan, I have worked for peace and risked my life for it. It is therefore not a question of justifying war, but of understanding what led us to it.
Let's try to examine the roots of the Ukrainian conflict. It starts with those who for the last eight years have been talking about "separatists" or "independentists" from Donbass. This is a misnomer. The referendums conducted by the two self-proclaimed Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk in May 2014, were not referendums of "independence" (независимость), as some unscrupulous journalists have claimed, but referendums of "self-determination" or "autonomy" (самостоятельность). The qualifier "pro-Russian" suggests that Russia was a party to the conflict, which was not the case, and the term "Russian speakers" would have been more honest. Moreover, these referendums were conducted against the advice of Vladimir Putin.
In fact, these Republics were not seeking to separate from Ukraine, but to have a status of autonomy, guaranteeing them the use of the Russian language as an official language — because the first legislative act of the new government resulting from the American-sponsored overthrow of [the democratically-elected] President Yanukovych, was the abolition, on February 23, 2014, of the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko law of 2012 that made Russian an official language in Ukraine. A bit like if German putschists decided that French and Italian would no longer be official languages in Switzerland.
This decision caused a storm in the Russian-speaking population. The result was fierce repression against the Russian-speaking regions (Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Lugansk and Donetsk) which was carried out beginning in February 2014 and led to a militarization of the situation and some horrific massacres of the Russian population (in Odessa and Mariupol, the most notable).
At this stage, too rigid and engrossed in a doctrinaire approach to operations, the Ukrainian general staff subdued the enemy but without managing to actually prevail. The war waged by the autonomists consisted in highly mobile operations conducted with light means. With a more flexible and less doctrinaire approach, the rebels were able to exploit the inertia of Ukrainian forces to repeatedly "trap" them.
In 2014, when I was at NATO, I was responsible for the fight against the proliferation of small arms, and we were trying to detect Russian arms deliveries to the rebels, to see if Moscow was involved. The information we received then came almost entirely from Polish intelligence services and did not "fit" with the information coming from the OSCE [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe] — and despite rather crude allegations, there were no deliveries of weapons and military equipment from Russia.
The rebels were armed thanks to the defection of Russian-speaking Ukrainian units that went over to the rebel side. As Ukrainian failures continued, tank, artillery and anti-aircraft battalions swelled the ranks of the autonomists. This is what pushed the Ukrainians to commit to the Minsk Agreements.
Comment: That is astonishing. Even we assumed they were getting at least some Russian weapons. After all, Western media harped on about 'the Russian invasion of Ukraine' from Day One of Kiev's 'anti-terror operation' in the Donbass. It just goes to show that, if you really want freedom, you've got to really fight for it, and on your own for the most part...
But just after signing the Minsk 1 Agreements, the Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko launched a massive "anti-terrorist operation" (ATO/Антитерористична операція) against the Donbass. Poorly advised by NATO officers, the Ukrainians suffered a crushing defeat in Debaltsevo, which forced them to engage in the Minsk 2 Agreements.
It is essential to recall here that Minsk 1 (September 2014) and Minsk 2 (February 2015) Agreements did not provide for the separation or independence of the Republics, but their autonomy within the framework of Ukraine. Those who have read the Agreements (there are very few who actually have) will note that it is written that the status of the Republics was to be negotiated between Kiev and the representatives of the Republics, for an internal solution within Ukraine.
That is why, since 2014, Russia has systematically demanded the implementation of the Minsk Agreements while refusing to be a party to the negotiations, because it was an internal matter of Ukraine. On the other side, the West — led by France — systematically tried to replace Minsk Agreements with the "Normandy format," which put Russians and Ukrainians face-to-face. However, let us remember that there were never any Russian troops in the Donbass before 23-24 February 2022. Moreover, OSCE observers have never observed the slightest trace of Russian units operating in the Donbass before then. For example, the U.S. intelligence map published by the Washington Post on December 3, 2021 does not show Russian troops in the Donbass.
In October 2015, Vasyl Hrytsak, director of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), confessed that only 56 Russian fighters had been observed in the Donbass. This was exactly comparable to the Swiss who went to fight in Bosnia on weekends, in the 1990s, or the French who go to fight in Ukraine today.
The Ukrainian army was then in a deplorable state. In October 2018, after four years of war, the chief Ukrainian military prosecutor, Anatoly Matios, stated that Ukraine had lost 2,700 men in the Donbass: 891 from illnesses, 318 from road accidents, 177 from other accidents, 175 from poisonings (alcohol, drugs), 172 from careless handling of weapons, 101 from breaches of security regulations, 228 from murders and 615 from suicides.
In fact, the Ukrainian army was undermined by the corruption of its cadres and no longer enjoyed the support of the population. According to a British Home Office report, in the March/April 2014 recall of reservists, 70 percent did not show up for the first session, 80 percent for the second, 90 percent for the third, and 95 percent for the fourth. In October/November 2017, 70% of conscripts did not show up for the "Fall 2017" recall campaign. This is not counting suicides and desertions (often over to the autonomists), which reached up to 30 percent of the workforce in the ATO area. Young Ukrainians refused to go and fight in the Donbass and preferred emigration, which also explains, at least partially, the demographic deficit of the country.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense then turned to NATO to help make its armed forces more "attractive." Having already worked on similar projects within the framework of the United Nations, I was asked by NATO to participate in a program to restore the image of the Ukrainian armed forces. But this is a long-term process and the Ukrainians wanted to move quickly.
So, to compensate for the lack of soldiers, the Ukrainian government resorted to paramilitary militias. In 2020, they constituted about 40 percent of the Ukrainian forces and numbered about 102,000 men, according to Reuters. They were armed, financed and trained by the United States, Great Britain, Canada and France. There were more than 19 nationalities.
These militias had been operating in the Donbass since 2014, with Western support. Even if one can argue about the term "Nazi," the fact remains that these militias are violent, convey a nauseating ideology and are virulently anti-Semitic...[and] are composed of fanatical and brutal individuals. The best known of these is the Azov Regiment, whose emblem is reminiscent of the 2nd SS Das Reich Panzer Division, which is revered in the Ukraine for liberating Kharkov from the Soviets in 1943, before carrying out the 1944 Oradour-sur-Glane massacre in France.
The characterization of the Ukrainian paramilitaries as "Nazis" or "neo-Nazis" is considered Russian propaganda. But that's not the view of the Times of Israel, or the West Point Academy's Center for Counterterrorism. In 2014, Newsweek magazine seemed to associate them more with... the Islamic State. Take your pick!
So, the West supported and continued to arm militias that have been guilty of numerous crimes against civilian populations since 2014: rape, torture and massacres...
The integration of these paramilitary forces into the Ukrainian National Guard was not at all accompanied by a "denazification," as some claim.
Among the many examples, that of the Azov Regiment's insignia is instructive:
nazi symbols evolution ukraine
In 2022, very schematically, the Ukrainian armed forces fighting the Russian offensive were organized as:
The Army, subordinated to the Ministry of Defense. It is organized into 3 army corps and composed of maneuver formations (tanks, heavy artillery, missiles, etc.).
The National Guard, which depends on the Ministry of the Interior and is organized into 5 territorial commands.
The National Guard is therefore a territorial defense force that is not part of the Ukrainian army. It includes paramilitary militias, called "volunteer battalions" (добровольчі батальйоні), also known by the evocative name of "reprisal battalions," and composed of infantry. Primarily trained for urban combat, they now defend cities such as Kharkov, Mariupol, Odessa, Kiev, etc.
Part Two: The War
As a former head of analysis of Warsaw Pact forces in the Swiss strategic intelligence service, I observe with sadness — but not astonishment — that our services are no longer able to understand the military situation in Ukraine. The self-proclaimed "experts" who parade on our TV screens tirelessly relay the same information modulated by the claim that Russia — and Vladimir Putin — is irrational. Let's take a step back.
1. The Outbreak Of War
Since November 2021, the Americans have been constantly threatening a Russian invasion of Ukraine. However, the Ukrainians at first did not seem to agree. Why not?
We have to go back to March 24, 2021. On that day, Volodymyr Zelensky issued a decree for the recapture of the Crimea, and began to deploy his forces to the south of the country. At the same time, several NATO exercises were conducted between the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea, accompanied by a significant increase in reconnaissance flights along the Russian border. Russia then conducted several exercises to test the operational readiness of its troops and to show that it was following the evolution of the situation.
Things calmed down until October-November with the end of the ZAPAD 21 exercises, whose troop movements were interpreted as a reinforcement for an offensive against Ukraine. However, even the Ukrainian authorities refuted the idea of Russian preparations for a war, and Oleksiy Reznikov, Ukrainian Minister of Defense, states that there had been no change on its border since the spring.
In violation of the Minsk Agreements, Ukraine was conducting air operations in Donbass using drones, including at least one strike against a fuel depot in Donetsk in October 2021. The American press noted this, but not the Europeans; and no one condemned these violations.
In February 2022, events came to a head. On February 7, during his visit to Moscow, Emmanuel Macron reaffirmed to Vladimir Putin his commitment to the Minsk Agreements, a commitment he would repeat after his meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky the next day. But on February 11, in Berlin, after nine hours of work, the meeting of political advisors to the leaders of the "Normandy format" ended without any concrete result: the Ukrainians still refused to apply the Minsk Agreements, apparently under pressure from the United States. Vladimir Putin noted that Macron had made empty promises and that the West was not ready to enforce the agreements, the same opposition to a settlement it had exhibited for eight years.
Ukrainian preparations in the contact zone continued. The Russian Parliament became alarmed; and on February 15 it asked Vladimir Putin to recognize the independence of the Republics, which he initially refused to do.
On 17 February, President Joe Biden announced that Russia would attack Ukraine in the next few days. How did he know this? It is a mystery. But since the 16th, the artillery shelling of the population of Donbass had increased dramatically, as the daily reports of the OSCE observers show. Naturally, neither the media, nor the European Union, nor NATO, nor any Western government reacted or intervened. It would be said later that this was Russian disinformation. In fact, it seems that the European Union and some countries have deliberately kept silent about the massacre of the Donbass population, knowing that this would provoke a Russian intervention.
At the same time, there were reports of sabotage in the Donbass. On 18 January, Donbass fighters intercepted saboteurs, who spoke Polish and were equipped with Western equipment and who were seeking to create chemical incidents in Gorlivka. They could have been CIA mercenaries, led or "advised" by Americans and composed of Ukrainian or European fighters, to carry out sabotage actions in the Donbass Republics.
In fact, as early as February 16, Joe Biden knew that the Ukrainians had begun intense shelling the civilian population of Donbass, forcing Vladimir Putin to make a difficult choice: to help Donbass militarily and create an international problem, or to stand by and watch the Russian-speaking people of Donbass being crushed.
If he decided to intervene, Putin could invoke the international obligation of "Responsibility To Protect" (R2P). But he knew that whatever its nature or scale, the intervention would trigger a storm of sanctions. Therefore, whether Russian intervention were limited to the Donbass or went further to put pressure on the West over the status of the Ukraine, the price to pay would be the same. This is what he explained in his speech on February 21. On that day, he agreed to the request of the Duma and recognized the independence of the two Donbass Republics and, at the same time, he signed friendship and assistance treaties with them.
The Ukrainian artillery bombardment of the Donbass population continued, and, on 23 February, the two Republics asked for military assistance from Russia. On 24 February, Vladimir Putin invoked Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which provides for mutual military assistance in the framework of a defensive alliance.
In order to make the Russian intervention seem totally illegal in the eyes of the public, Western powers deliberately hid the fact that the war actually started on February 16. The Ukrainian army was preparing to attack the Donbass as early as 2021, as some Russian and European intelligence services were well aware.
In his speech of February 24, Vladimir Putin stated the two objectives of his operation: "demilitarize" and "denazify" the Ukraine. So, it was not a question of taking over Ukraine, nor even, presumably, of occupying it; and certainly not of destroying it.
From then on, our knowledge of the course of the operation is limited: the Russians have excellent security for their operations (OPSEC) and the details of their planning are not known. But fairly quickly, the course of the operation allows us to understand how the strategic objectives were translated on the operational level.
Demilitarization:
ground destruction of Ukrainian aviation, air defense systems and reconnaissance assets;
neutralization of command and intelligence structures (C3I), as well as the main logistical routes in the depth of the territory;
encirclement of the bulk of the Ukrainian army massed in the southeast of the country.
Denazification:
destruction or neutralization of volunteer battalions operating in the cities of Odessa, Kharkov, and Mariupol, as well as in various facilities in the territory.
2. Demilitarization
The Russian offensive was carried out in a very "classic" manner. Initially — as the Israelis had done in 1967 — with the destruction on the ground of the air force in the very first hours. Then, we witnessed a simultaneous progression along several axes according to the principle of "flowing water": advance everywhere where resistance was weak and leave the cities (very demanding in terms of troops) for later. In the north, the Chernobyl power plant was occupied immediately to prevent acts of sabotage. The images of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers guarding the plant together are of course not shown.
The idea that Russia is trying to take over Kiev, the capital, to eliminate Zelensky, comes typically from the West. But Vladimir Putin never intended to shoot or topple Zelensky. Instead, Russia seeks to keep him in power by pushing him to negotiate, by surrounding Kiev. The Russians want to obtain the neutrality of Ukraine.
Many Western commentators were surprised that the Russians continued to seek a negotiated solution while conducting military operations. The explanation lies in the Russian strategic outlook since the Soviet era. For the West, war begins when politics ends. However, the Russian approach follows a Clausewitzian inspiration: war is the continuity of politics and one can move fluidly from one to the other, even during combat. This allows one to create pressure on the adversary and push him to negotiate.
From an operational point of view, the Russian offensive was an example of previous military action and planning: in six days, the Russians seized a territory as large as the United Kingdom, with a speed of advance greater than what the Wehrmacht had achieved in 1940.
The bulk of the Ukrainian army was deployed in the south of the country in preparation for a major operation against the Donbass. This is why Russian forces were able to encircle it from the beginning of March in the "cauldron" between Slavyansk, Kramatorsk and Severodonetsk, with a thrust from the East through Kharkov and another from the South from Crimea. Troops from the Donetsk (DPR) and Lugansk (LPR) Republics are complementing the Russian forces with a push from the East.
At this stage, Russian forces are slowly tightening the noose, but are no longer under any time pressure or schedule. Their demilitarization goal is all but achieved and the remaining Ukrainian forces no longer have an operational and strategic command structure.
The "slowdown" that our "experts" attribute to poor logistics is only the consequence of having achieved their objectives. Russia does not want to engage in an occupation of the entire Ukrainian territory. In fact, it appears that Russia is trying to limit its advance to the linguistic border of the country.
Our media speak of indiscriminate bombardments against the civilian population, especially in Kharkov, and horrific images are widely broadcast. However, Gonzalo Lira, a Latin American correspondent who lives there, presents us with a calm city on March 10 and March 11. It is true that it is a large city and we do not see everything — but this seems to indicate that we are not in the total war that we are served continuously on our TV screens. As for the Donbass Republics, they have "liberated" their own territories and are fighting in the city of Mariupol.
3. Denazification
In cities like Kharkov, Mariupol and Odessa, the Ukrainian defense is provided by the paramilitary militias. They know that the objective of "denazification" is aimed primarily at them. For an attacker in an urbanized area, civilians are a problem. This is why Russia is seeking to create humanitarian corridors to empty cities of civilians and leave only the militias, to fight them more easily.
Conversely, these militias seek to keep civilians in the cities from evacuating in order to dissuade the Russian army from fighting there. This is why they are reluctant to implement these corridors and do everything to ensure that Russian efforts are unsuccessful — they use the civilian population as "human shields." Videos showing civilians trying to leave Mariupol and beaten up by fighters of the Azov regiment are of course carefully censored by the Western media.
On Facebook, the Azov group was considered in the same category as the Islamic State [ISIS] and subject to the platform's "policy on dangerous individuals and organizations." It was therefore forbidden to glorify its activities, and "posts" that were favorable to it were systematically banned. But on February 24, Facebook changed its policy and allowed posts favorable to the militia. In the same spirit, in March, the platform authorized, in the former Eastern countries, calls for the murder of Russian soldiers and leaders. So much for the values that inspire our leaders.
Our media propagate a romantic image of popular resistance by the Ukrainian people. It is this image that led the European Union to finance the distribution of arms to the civilian population. In my capacity as head of peacekeeping at the UN, I worked on the issue of civilian protection. We found that violence against civilians occurred in very specific contexts. In particular, when weapons are abundant and there are no command structures.
These command structures are the essence of armies: their function is to channel the use of force towards an objective. By arming citizens in a haphazard manner, as is currently the case, the EU is turning them into combatants, with the consequential effect of making them potential targets. Moreover, without command, without operational goals, the distribution of arms leads inevitably to settling of scores, banditry and actions that are more deadly than effective. War becomes a matter of emotions. Force becomes violence. This is what happened in Tawarga (Libya) from 11 to 13 August 2011, where 30,000 black Africans were massacred with weapons parachuted (illegally) by France. By the way, the British Royal Institute for Strategic Studies (RUSI) does not see any added value in these arms deliveries.
Moreover, by delivering arms to a country at war, one exposes oneself to being considered a belligerent. The Russian strikes of March 13, 2022, against the Mykolayev air base follow Russian warnings that arms shipments would be treated as hostile targets.
The EU is repeating the disastrous experience of the Third Reich in the final hours of the Battle of Berlin. War must be left to the military and when one side has lost, it must be admitted. And if there is to be resistance, it must be led and structured. But we are doing exactly the opposite — we are pushing citizens to go and fight, and at the same time, Facebook authorizes calls for the murder of Russian soldiers and leaders. So much for the values that inspire us.
Some intelligence services see this irresponsible decision as a way to use the Ukrainian population as cannon fodder to fight Vladimir Putin's Russia. It would have been better to engage in negotiations and thus obtain guarantees for the civilian population than to add fuel to the fire. It is easy to be combative with the blood of others.
4. The Maternity Hospital At Mariupol
It is important to understand beforehand that it is not the Ukrainian army that is defending Mariupol, but the Azov militia, composed of foreign mercenaries.
In its March 7, 2022 summary of the situation, the Russian UN mission in New York stated that "Residents report that Ukrainian armed forces expelled staff from the Mariupol city birth hospital No. 1 and set up a firing post inside the facility." On March 8, the independent Russian media Lenta.ru, published the testimony of civilians from Mariupol who told that the maternity hospital was taken over by the militia of the Azov regiment, and who drove out the civilian occupants by threatening them with their weapons. They confirmed the statements of the Russian ambassador a few hours earlier.
The hospital in Mariupol occupies a dominant position, perfectly suited for the installation of anti-tank weapons and for observation. On 9 March, Russian forces struck the building. According to CNN, 17 people were wounded, but the images do not show any casualties in the building and there is no evidence that the victims mentioned are related to this strike. There is talk of children, but in reality, there is nothing. This does not prevent the leaders of the EU from seeing this as a war crime. And this allows Zelensky to call for a no-fly zone over Ukraine.
In reality, we do not know exactly what happened. But the sequence of events tends to confirm that Russian forces struck a position of the Azov regiment and that the maternity ward was then free of civilians.
The problem is that the paramilitary militias that defend the cities are encouraged by the international community not to respect the rules of war. It seems that the Ukrainians have replayed the scenario of the Kuwait City maternity hospital in 1990, which was totally staged by the firm Hill & Knowlton for $10.7 million in order to convince the United Nations Security Council to intervene in Iraq for Operation Desert Shield/Storm.
Western politicians have accepted civilian strikes in the Donbass for eight years without adopting any sanctions against the Ukrainian government. We have long since entered a dynamic where Western politicians have agreed to sacrifice international law towards their goal of weakening Russia.
Part Three: Conclusions
As an ex-intelligence professional, the first thing that strikes me is the total absence of Western intelligence services in accurately representing the situation over the past year. In fact, it seems that throughout the Western world intelligence services have been overwhelmed by the politicians. The problem is that it is the politicians who decide — the best intelligence service in the world is useless if the decision-maker does not listen. This is what has happened during this crisis.
That said, while a few intelligence services had a very accurate and rational picture of the situation, others clearly had the same picture as that propagated by our media. The problem is that, from experience, I have found them to be extremely bad at the analytical level — doctrinaire, they lack the intellectual and political independence necessary to assess a situation with military "quality."
Second, it seems that in some European countries, politicians have deliberately responded ideologically to the situation. That is why this crisis has been irrational from the beginning. It should be noted that all the documents that were presented to the public during this crisis were presented by politicians based on commercial sources.
Comment: The intelligence services have been subject to a process of 'negative selection', whereby ideology becomes valued over objectivity, and pathological types, once they reach a certain threshold within state organs, then select for others of like mind to be placed in positions of power throughout the body politic. Democracy thus becomes pathocracy and it begins to self-destruct.
Some Western politicians obviously wanted there to be a conflict. In the United States, the attack scenarios presented by Anthony Blinken to the UN Security Council were only the product of the imagination of a Tiger Team working for him — he did exactly as Donald Rumsfeld did in 2002, who "bypassed" the CIA and other intelligence services that were much less assertive about Iraqi chemical weapons.
The dramatic developments we are witnessing today have causes that we knew about but refused to see:
on the strategic level, the expansion of NATO (which we have not dealt with here);
on the political level, the Western refusal to implement the Minsk Agreements;
and operationally, the continuous and repeated attacks on the civilian population of the Donbass over the past years and the dramatic increase in late February 2022.
In other words, we can naturally deplore and condemn the Russian attack. But WE (that is: the United States, France and the European Union in the lead) have created the conditions for a conflict to break out. We show compassion for the Ukrainian people and the two million refugees. That is fine. But if we had had a modicum of compassion for the same number of refugees from the Ukrainian populations of Donbass massacred by their own government and who sought refuge in Russia for eight years, none of this would probably have happened.
Whether the term "genocide" applies to the abuses suffered by the people of Donbass is an open question. The term is generally reserved for cases of greater magnitude (Holocaust, etc.). But the definition given by the Genocide Convention is probably broad enough to apply to this case.
Clearly, this conflict has led us into hysteria. Sanctions seem to have become the preferred tool of our foreign policies. If we had insisted that Ukraine abide by the Minsk Agreements, which we had negotiated and endorsed, none of this would have happened. Vladimir Putin's condemnation is also ours. There is no point in whining afterwards — we should have acted earlier. However, neither Emmanuel Macron (as guarantor and member of the UN Security Council), nor Olaf Scholz, nor Volodymyr Zelensky have respected their commitments. In the end, the real defeat is that of those who have no voice.
The European Union was unable to promote the implementation of the Minsk agreements — on the contrary, it did not react when Ukraine was bombing its own population in the Donbass. Had it done so, Vladimir Putin would not have needed to react. Absent from the diplomatic phase, the EU distinguished itself by fueling the conflict. On February 27, the Ukrainian government agreed to enter into negotiations with Russia. But a few hours later, the European Union voted a budget of 450 million euros to supply arms to the Ukraine, adding fuel to the fire. From then on, the Ukrainians felt that they did not need to reach an agreement. The resistance of the Azov militia in Mariupol even led to a boost of 500 million euros for weapons.
In Ukraine, with the blessing of the Western countries, those who are in favor of a negotiation have been eliminated. This is the case of Denis Kireyev, one of the Ukrainian negotiators, assassinated on March 5 by the Ukrainian secret service (SBU) because he was too favorable to Russia and was considered a traitor. The same fate befell Dmitry Demyanenko, former deputy head of the SBU's main directorate for Kiev and its region, who was assassinated on March 10 because he was too favorable to an agreement with Russia — he was shot by the Mirotvorets ("Peacemaker") militia. This militia is associated with the Mirotvorets website, which lists the "enemies of Ukraine," with their personal data, addresses and telephone numbers, so that they can be harassed or even eliminated; a practice that is punishable in many countries, but not in the Ukraine. The UN and some European countries have demanded the closure of this site — but that demand was refused by the Rada [Ukrainian parliament].
In the end, the price will be high, but Vladimir Putin will likely achieve the goals he set for himself. We have pushed him into the arms of China. His ties with Beijing have solidified. China is emerging as a mediator in the conflict. The Americans have to ask Venezuela and Iran for oil to get out of the energy impasse they have put themselves in — and the United States has to piteously backtrack on the sanctions imposed on its enemies.
Western ministers who seek to collapse the Russian economy and make the Russian people suffer, or even call for the assassination of Putin, show (even if they have partially reversed the form of their words, but not the substance!) that our leaders are no better than those we hate — sanctioning Russian athletes in the Para-Olympic Games or Russian artists has nothing to do with fighting Putin.
What makes the conflict in Ukraine more blameworthy than our wars in Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya? What sanctions have we adopted against those who deliberately lied to the international community in order to wage unjust, unjustified and murderous wars? Have we adopted a single sanction against the countries, companies or politicians who are supplying weapons to the conflict in Yemen, considered to be the "worst humanitarian disaster in the world?"
To ask the question is to answer it... and the answer is not pretty.
About the author
Jacques Baud is a former colonel of the General Staff, ex-member of the Swiss strategic intelligence, specialist on Eastern countries. He was trained in the American and British intelligence services. He has served as Policy Chief for United Nations Peace Operations. As a UN expert on rule of law and security institutions, he designed and led the first multidimensional UN intelligence unit in the Sudan. He has worked for the African Union and was for 5 years responsible for the fight, at NATO, against the proliferation of small arms. He was involved in discussions with the highest Russian military and intelligence officials just after the fall of the USSR. Within NATO, he followed the 2014 Ukrainian crisis and later participated in programs to assist the Ukraine. He is the author of several books on intelligence, war and terrorism, in particular Le Détournement published by SIGEST, Gouverner par les fake news, L'affaire Navalny. His latest book is Poutine, maître du jeu? published by Max Milo.
This article appears through the gracious courtesy of Centre Français de Recherche sur le Renseignement, Paris.
To see the West NOT back the Minsk agreements and IMPOSE even more onerous agreements in Macedonia highlights how little fucks they give about the sovereignty of a nation.Risto the Great
MACEDONIA:ANHEDONIA
"Holding my breath for the revolution."
Hey, I wrote a bestseller. Check it out: www.ren-shen.comComment
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The sovereignty of a nation... your statement alludes to a fact of much greater import, one that strikes at the very heart of the illusion.Originally posted by Risto the Great View PostДоста бе Вегето една, во секоја манџа се мешашComment
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NEW - China has signed a "security pact" with Solomon Islands, according to Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin.
The Solomon Islands have a right to align themselves with whoever they please, or so 'we' said about Ukraine. We'll have to see how western powers respond, I'm sure it won't be one bit ironic.
U.S. team is off to Solomon Islands amid concern over draft security pact with China
Last edited by Carlin; 04-19-2022, 07:09 AM.Comment
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I’ve been avoiding the MSM’s account of the conflict in Ukraine and instead I have been trying to get info from a few different twitter feeds and YouTube channels...one twitter feed is called ‘Russians with Attitude’...they tweeted that the Azov command that is holed-up at the Azovstal steelworks is refusing the Russian offer of surrender and instead demands an evacuation by US or NATO member countries by helicopter to a third country and to keep their weapons, reminiscent of the shit-show in Aracinovo 2001 when NATO offered safe passage to the shiptar terrorists.
I wonder how the Russian’s will treat that little request...I’m tipping quite differently to the humiliation the Macedonian’s endured.Last edited by Phoenix; 04-21-2022, 09:50 AM.Comment
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A Ukrainian client offered his perspective as follows (edited to remove name):
If we equate the ethnic Russians in Ukraine to the ethnic Albanians in Macedonia, we can understand the above perspective. The difference is that Macedonians weren't killing the Albanian minority. And, of course, the West believes more opportunity lies in a "greater Albania" and therefore supports the "persecuted" minority in Macedonia.[WIFE]'s brother is relatively safe. They escaped Kharkiv with another 2 families and currently live in a small house near Poltava. They don't have sewage in the house so not the best living conditions but there no air raids... We are helping them and another family of our friends financially. Ukraine doesn't allow men from 18 to 60 to leave the country and the women in their group decided to stay with their men. [WIFE] is volunteering in Ukrainian community centre helping refugees to learn English.
We are hoping that with the world's help Ukraine will prevail. It is heartbreaking to see how many lives lost, all this rape, murder, violence and looting against civilians. There is special place for putin and his cronies in hell.
Risto the Great
MACEDONIA:ANHEDONIA
"Holding my breath for the revolution."
Hey, I wrote a bestseller. Check it out: www.ren-shen.comComment
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