It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Days after the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) announced it was launching a target inspection program in the Mediterranean aimed at safety, maintenance, and seafarer welfare issues, the four flags cited by the union are all responding calling the accusations false and untrue, and not representative of the efforts undertaken by the flags. They cite inaccuracies in the union’s statements and the flags’ ongoing efforts to resolve issues and enforce standards.
“The ITF’s campaign does not reflect the reality of the situation regarding PISR,” responds the Palau International Ship Registry (PISR), one of the four cited by the union. The ITF said that it would be targeting up to 1,000 ship inspections for vessels operating in the Mediterranean in the coming eight weeks. They listed Palau along with ships flagged to the Cook Islands, Sierra Leone, and Togo as the targets saying that ships from these flags had over 5,200 deficiencies or detentions issued by European Port State Control enforcement agencies, as listed by the Paris MOU between 2020 and 2022.
“The statistical evidence presented by ITF to justify its unwarranted attack on PISR is wholly inaccurate, misinterpreted, and therefore clearly misleading. The negative picture presented of PISR is misguided, as any objective observer with maritime knowledge will understand,” the flag administrator wrote in its response. They are calling into question the rationale behind the campaign.
PISR reports that in the past three years, only two vessels in its registry were sent for demolition from the Mediterranean. Neither of these vessels they state recorded unsafe shipping issues or abandonment cases.
Further, like all the flag administrators, PISR responds to and takes seriously any case of abandonment reported to the administrator. The flags point out that the financial issues that drive most shipowners to abandon a crew or ship are beyond their control, but they respond to their responsibilities under the Maritime Labor Convention.
“PISR has taken immediate action to address all cases brought to the Flag administration to benefit seafarers’ rights under the MLC,” they write noting as recorded in the International Labour Organization’s official abandonment database, PISR swiftly addressed and officially resolved all abandonment issues.
The flags also refute the broader accusation that the ships operating under these flags account for numerous detentions and deficiencies. PISR says as per the last Paris MoU report, it only had nine detentions out of 162 inspections in the last five years.
“No other flag state has improved its standing within the Paris Memorandum of Understanding (Paris MoU) in the last five years. PISR for consecutive years has been in the top third tier of the Grey List in both Paris MoU and Tokyo MoU.”
The flags report they have been working with the international community with PISR noting that its vetting process, for example, which includes looking into the vessel’s age, ownership, and past performance history, has been audited by international bodies, including the IMO during IMSAS audits.
PISR notes it applies a strict vetting process for vessel acceptance. Similarly, the International Ship Registry of Togo in its response to Tradewinds cited the number of ship registration requests it rejects. They told Tradewinds they turned down 148 vessels last year and since 2020 more than 200 ships have been deregistered.
The flags all responded citing their disappointment in the ITF’s efforts. The union has frequently targeted flags of convenience in its campaigns. The administrators targeted in this latest effort believe it would be more constructive to work with the flags in their efforts to improve the situations for seafarers.
Tuesday, February 15, 2022
FROM THE RIGHT
'False crisis' regarding Russia hurts relations between U.S. and Ukraine, experts say
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that he had not seen the intelligence assessments regarding an invasion, and that the warnings were stoking panic.
The situation in Ukraine is a "false crisis" that has hurt relations between Washington and Kyiv, as the Biden Administration increasingly claims to know the date and method of a Russian incursion against its neighbor, experts told Just the News.
The experts made their comments Monday while appearing on the John Solomon Reports podcast.
"It's a false crisis," said international relations expert Kiron Skinner, who served as an adviser at the State Department under Donald Trump. She made that assessment, she noted, because "there's been a war of attrition going on between Kyiv and Moscow for eight years."
International tension has spiked recently as Russia maintains an estimated 100,000 troops along its border with Ukraine and has issued ominous statements about "the start of a countdown" and claims that Moscow is being "provoked."
The U.S. has repeatedly announced that Moscow plans to stage a "false flag" provocation in order to justify an attack on Ukraine, and has said that the attack is "imminent," and could occur this week. The State Department on Monday shuttered its main embassy in Kyiv, and moved the operations to the western city of Lviv.
The announcements and predictions strike a sour note in government circles in Kyiv, according to Dan Hoffman, a former station chief for the CIA in Moscow.
"The relationship between the United States and Ukraine is strained right now, to say the least, because Russia has got 130,000 troops on the border," Hoffman told Just the News. "President Zelenskyy, rightly so, is questioning, well, where's the intelligence?"
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sunday said that he had not seen the intelligence assessments regarding an invasion, and that the warnings were stoking panic.
"I think there is too much information out there today about a deep full scale war on Russia's part," Zelenskyy said. "There is even talk of appropriate dates. We understand all the risks. We understand that the risks are there. If anyone has any additional information about a 100% chance of an invasion, they should give it to us."
Alternating between English and Ukrainian, Zelenskyy continued: "I have to speak with our people as President, and I say the truth to people, and the truth is that we have different information."
Information regarding an attack comes through intelligence channels, the administration has said. But the information and the subsequent leaks prompt questions from the former station chief, Hoffman.
"The Biden administration's kind of substituting diplomacy for releasing, declassifying intelligence, thinking that by declassifying intelligence they're going to influence Vladimir Putin's behavior," Hoffman said. "I think that's frankly a little bit lazy."
The method falls short, he noted.
"We haven't influenced his behavior at all," Hoffman said. But Putin might be influencing ours.
The administration perhaps thinks "they're doing something by releasing intelligence that, frankly, I think it's possible Vladimir Putin is feeding us anyways."
Putin may not want an invasion, but has been "probing," Skinner said.
Predictions from the West, meanwhile, about an imminent invasion are harmful to Ukraine, that country's president said.
"The best friend of our enemies is panic in our country," Zelenskyy said. "All this information, it only fuels panic. It doesn't help us."
Saturday, August 15, 2020
Facebook’s Preferential Treatment Of US Conservatives Puts Its Fact-Checking Program In Danger Facebook’s employees and fact-checking partners say they are left in the dark about how the company decides what content stays up and what comes down.
Posted on August 13, 2020 Ben Kothe / BuzzFeed News; Getty Images
On May 8, Prager University, a nonprofit conservative media outlet, published a video on Facebook that incorrectly claimed “there is no evidence that CO2 emissions are the dominant factor” in climate change. Within days, Climate Feedback, a nonpartisan network of scientists and a member of Facebook’s global fact-checking partnership, rated the content as false — a designation that was supposed to result in serious consequences.
It was PragerU’s second strike for false content that month, which under Facebook’s own policies should have triggered “repeat offender” penalties including the revocation of advertising privileges and the specter of possible deletion.
But it didn't. As first reported by BuzzFeed News last week, a Facebook employee intervened on PragerU’s behalf and asked for a reexamination of the judgment, citing “partner sensitivity” and the amount of money the organization had spent on ads. Eventually, while the false labels on PragerU’s posts remained, Facebook disappeared the strikes from its internal record and no one — not the public, the fact-checkers, or Facebook’s own employees — was informed of the decision.
Meanwhile, PragerU cashed in on the fact-checks of its climate misinformation. On May 19 — the day after it received its first strike for false content — it launched a fundraiser. “Facebook is using biased 3rd party fact-checkers to flag content and censor conservatives," the organization told its more than 4.2 million followers. "Is Facebook now the arbiter of truth?”
The campaign raised $21,637.
Since at least late 2016, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has defended Facebook by insisting it should not be “an arbiter of truth,” while creating a third-party fact-checking program to fill that role of umpire. But journalists and researchers at the dozens of organizations that make up Facebook’s fact-checking operation say the company is often just that. Some told BuzzFeed News they were surprised to learn their verdicts had been ignored or overruled by Facebook in a closed-door process with little transparency, and warned that this risks undermining the program’s credibility.
“They are the arbiters of the consequences for publishing false or misleading information,” said one fact-checker who asked not to be named for fear of repercussions from Facebook.
“If people want to evade consequences, it’s easy to do it,” they added.
“They are the arbiters of the consequences for publishing false or misleading information.”
Some employees at the social network agreed. Last week, after BuzzFeed News revealed Facebook executives and staff were intervening in fact-check disputes on behalf of right-wing publishers, workers wondered if the company was caving to loud critics and political pressure.
“Mark likes to say how Facebook should not be ‘the arbiter of truth,’” one person wrote in an internal Facebook employee group. “But escalations... that are focused on partners who are ‘sensitive’ sound exactly like us meddling in this area. How do we reconcile this contradiction?”
Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School, said that even though Facebook doesn’t want to be in the business of declaring what is true and false, it still makes a lot of choices in how it structures its policies and fact-checking program that leave it “in the driver seat.”
“There will be a pretty big reckoning around fact-checking,” she said. “People don’t really understand it either and they see it as a panacea for problems on social media platforms.” Do you work at Facebook or another technology company? We'd love to hear from you. Reach out at craig.silverman@buzzfeed.com, ryan.mac@buzzfeed.com, or via one of our tip line channels.
Facebook did not answer a list of specific questions related to the preferential treatment of right-wing pages that had received misinformation strikes. Previously the company had said that while it “defer[s] to third-party fact-checkers on the rating that a piece of content receives” only it is “responsible for how we manage our internal system for repeat offenders.”
"Facebook is the only company to partner with more than 70 fact-checking organizations worldwide to fight the spread of viral misinformation,” Facebook spokesperson Liz Bourgeois said in a statement for this story. “There is no playbook for a program like ours and we’re constantly working to improve it based on feedback from our partners and what we see on our platform.” Jack Gruber / USA TODAY NETWORK
“The Arbiter of Truth”
Four days after the 2016 US presidential election, Zuckerberg posted a mea culpa to Facebook addressing mounting evidence that misinformation spread and amplified on the platform might have influenced its result. In the post, the Facebook CEO — who had previously said misinformation on the social network influencing the election was a "pretty crazy idea" — acknowledged hoaxes and fake news did exist on the social network.
“This is an area where I believe we must proceed very carefully though. Identifying the ‘truth’ is complicated,” he wrote. “While some hoaxes can be completely debunked, a greater amount of content, including from mainstream sources, often gets the basic idea right but some details wrong or omitted. … I believe we must be extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves.”
Facebook launched a third-party fact-checking program a month after Zuckerberg’s post, and its CEO’s sentiment has become a common refrain from the social network’s executives. Debates on whether Facebook is a media company that’s responsible for the content on its platform have shifted to whether or not the company should play a role in identifying — and subsequently removing — misinformation.
Now, as the US heads toward another contentious presidential election, Zuckerberg is again rolling out the “arbiter of truth” talking point. "I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn't be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online," he told Fox News in May. “Private companies probably shouldn't be, especially these platform companies, shouldn't be in the position of doing that."
"They’re saying, ‘We don’t want to be the arbiters of truth,’ but they do want to be the arbiter of whether pages are taken down or not."
But internal discussions and documents recently obtained by BuzzFeed News and NBC News revealed that Facebook has been doing just that, deciding whether or not to penalize pages after they’ve received strikes for misinformation and, at times, casting aside judgments made by its fact-checking partners seemingly for fear of political blowback or lost revenue. Unlike fact-checkers, Facebook does not disclose the reasons and evidence it uses to make decisions to remove misinformation strikes or otherwise choose to overrule its fact-checking partners.
“The problem with what they’re doing is they’re saying, ‘We don’t want to be the arbiters of truth,’ but they do want to be the arbiter of whether pages are taken down or not,” said Peter Cunliffe-Jones, the founder of Africa Check, who now serves as an adviser to the International Fact-Checking Network. “And there is no transparency about that decision making process.”
Cunliffe-Jones suggested Facebook take a page from its fact-checkers and publish its rationale for removing misinformation strikes and other reversals, lest it undermines trust in the entire process.
“I do understand that even Facebook can’t provide granular detail on every decision made across millions of decisions, but on the significant ones they can,” he said. “I think it would help to develop trust in the process. And if the process [at Facebook] is not trustworthy, that would expose it.”
The lack of transparency to which Cunliffe-Jones referred has roiled the social network’s own employees. Following BuzzFeed News’ story that revealed preferential treatment for conservative pages and personal interventions from executives including vice president of global public policy Joel Kaplan, an internal message board called “Let’s Fix Facebook (the company),” which has about 10,000 members, exploded in conversation.
“The silence on this is unacceptable. Both the pipeline intervention and the firing,” wrote one employee, referring to the removals of misinformation strikes and the dismissal of an engineer who gathered and revealed evidence of it.
“Can we also use this as an opportunity to be more transparent about fact-checking in general?” asked another employee. “Not just internally but also to our users? How escalations and appeals work, who can do them, who is doing them, aggregated statistics about posts labeled...”
“If someone at Facebook is trying to help us, they’re not doing a very good job.”
The lack of transparency has also upset those being penalized for misinformation rulings, including the executives at PragerU. Craig Strazzeri, PragerU’s chief marketing officer, said his organization appealed the fact-check decisions with Climate Feedback in May but was not aware of any Facebook employees working on their behalf to get the strikes removed.
“If someone at Facebook is trying to help us, they’re not doing a very good job,” Strazzeri said, noting that PragerU’s organic reach was cut following the two false fact-checks. PragerU was still able to run ads during that time period, according to Strazzeri, who noted that the company’s page is once again under scrutiny after two more strikes for misinformation since May.
Emmanuel Vincent, the director of Science Feedback, the not-for-profit organization that runs Climate Feedback, said PragerU only disputed one of its two May verdicts, which it upheld as false. He's concerned that PragerU has found a way to use fact-checks to its advantage.
"Each time they get a strike, they can raise money,” he said. Bloomberg / Getty Images Mark Zuckerberg speaks during a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing in Washington, DC, July 29.
Repeat Offenders
Facebook's level of attention to concerns from American conservatives on its platform is unlike any other constituency in the world, according to the fact-checkers who spoke to BuzzFeed News. Some worry that’s detrimental to international efforts to police the platform for misinformation. Cunliffe-Jones told BuzzFeed News Facebook has failed to act against repeat offender financial scam pages in countries like Kenya.
“It’s been clear from quite early on that there’s a problem with the way that some pages that are repeat offenders seem to keep on operating,” Cunliffe-Jones said. “I’ve noted this from pages that have been repeatedly fact-checked [in Kenya]. With these pages, I don’t think there’s a political game. I think it’s a lack of attention — and that’s also harmful.”
Other international fact-checkers said Facebook’s emphasis on the US election cause it to be less responsive to issues in other parts of the world. One journalist at a fact-checking outlet in a G7 country said Facebook’s lack of local staff causes the company to at times ask its checking partners to help with decisions about how to apply company policy.
“They're not as well-staffed in some of the other markets outside the US. So they actually do lean on the fact-checkers a little bit more about some of the policy things,” said the journalist.
Bourgeois said Facebook values the expertise of local checkers. “We frequently speak to fact-checkers in different regions to understand how misinformation is spreading in their countries and languages. This is not in lieu of relying on the expertise of our own teams, it’s in addition.”
"...there’s not much bandwidth for anything outside the US at the moment at Facebook."
Agence France-Presse has fact-checkers in more than 30 countries, making it Facebook’s biggest partner in the program. Phil Chetwynd, the global news director of AFP, said his organization has not felt pressure from Facebook about its ratings, though anything having to do with the US is given a different level of scrutiny by the company.
“You can feel there’s not much bandwidth for anything outside the US at the moment at Facebook,” he said. “There’s just a tremendous concentration of resources on the US.”
Chetwynd said one of the values of participating in the fact-checking program for organizations like AFP is knowing that repeat offenders face consequences. If Facebook fails to enforce its policies, it reduces the value of fact-checkers. And the lack of transparency around the internal decision-making process for removing misinformation strikes only makes things worse.
“Most fact-checkers have developed a very constructive relationship with Facebook, but this issue around transparency has always been a point of frustration,” he said. “It is something we have voiced to them many times both privately and publicly — we do not get nearly enough precise data on the impact of our fact-checks on the platform. Our feeling is that making this data public would only add to the credibility of our work and the fact-checking program in general.”
The Opinion Exemption
Over the past two months, Facebook and its fact-checking partners have been discussing one of the more contentious issues in their partnership: the so-called opinion exemption. Facebook’s policy is that opinion articles, like statements from political leaders, are exempt from review.
Internal documents obtained by BuzzFeed News show that Facebook employees have cited this policy as justification for removing misinformation strikes from PragerU and pro-Trump activists Diamond and Silk after fact-checkers issued them. A Facebook partner manager for PragerU said the false claims the publication made about the climate crisis should fall under the “opinion loophole.”
On Tuesday, Facebook seemingly closed this loophole explaining in a policy update that if “content is presented as opinion but is based on underlying false information - even if it’s an op-ed or editorial - it's still eligible to be fact-checked.”
"It’s not the best thing for a fact-checker to learn their flag has been removed by Facebook from the media.”
Baybars Örsek, director of the International Fact-Checking Network, said the policy update will help ensure that misinformation can’t be embedded in op-ed pieces. But he noted that Facebook can still decide whether a piece of fact-checked content is opinion or not. The company can remove misinformation strikes without informing a fact-checker of its decision. That lack of transparency is a problem.
“At the end of the day, it’s not the best thing for a fact-checker to learn their flag has been removed by Facebook from the media,” he said.
Other fact-checkers echoed Örsek’s concerns. One said they wished Facebook had to publicly disclose when it removes a misinformation strike. Such an obligation would make it difficult for the company to give preferential treatment to “the partners who pay a lot of money to Facebook, or the partners who could say something and be heard at the very high levels of the company.”
That appeared to be the case with PragerU, which has managed to avoid severe punishment — and monetize it.
PragerU has raised at least $400,000 from Facebook fundraisers protesting alleged censorship on Facebook and YouTube since late 2018, according to a review by BuzzFeed News. On Aug. 5, it launched a fundraiser on Facebook in response to the company’s removal of a PragerU post featuring a now-infamous video initially circulated by Breitbart News of a group of doctors making false and potentially harmful claims about COVID-19.
Craig Silverman is a media editor for BuzzFeed News and is based in Toronto. Ryan Mac is a senior tech reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in San Francisco.
Wednesday, March 27, 2024
Moscow shooting poses awkward questions for Russia's intelligence agencies
Reuters Updated Mon, March 25, 2024
LONDON (Reuters) -Russia's security state has been ruthlessly effective at detaining Vladimir Putin's opponents but was caught off guard by a mass shooting near Moscow, raising questions about its priorities, resources and intelligence gathering.
Charged with hunting down Ukrainian saboteurs inside Russia, with keeping anti-Kremlin activists in check, and with disrupting the operations of hostile foreign intelligence agencies, the FSB, the main successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB, has its hands full.
That, say former U.S. intelligence officials and Western security analysts, helps explain why it may have overlooked other threats, including that posed by Islamist militants, such as ISIS-K, which claimed responsibility for the attack.
“You can’t do everything,” Daniel Hoffman, a former senior CIA operations officer who served as the agency’s Moscow station chief, told Reuters.
“You dial up the pressure on the locals and sometimes you don’t get the intelligence you need on a potential terrorist attack. That’s where they failed.
"It’s possible they’re overextended dealing with the war in Ukraine and dealing with political opposition. This one slipped through the cracks.”
The FSB has said Friday's concert hall attack was "painstakingly" planned and that the gunmen had carefully hidden their weapons.
Putin on Monday said that radical Islamists were the ones who had carried out the attack, but said that Russia still wanted to understand who had ordered it and said there were many questions for Ukraine to answer. Ukraine denies any involvement.
When asked on Monday if the assault represented an intelligence service failure, the Kremlin said that Russia's standoff with the West meant intelligence-sharing was not happening in the way it used to.
"Unfortunately, our world shows that no city, no country can be completely immune from the threat of terrorism," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. Russia's intelligence services worked tirelessly to defend the country, he added.
Still, Friday's shooting, in which at least 139 people were killed and 180 injured, has undermined one of Putin's longstanding pledges to the Russian people: to ensure stability and security.
It has also shaken some residents of the Russian capital who have largely been insulated from the violence of the Ukraine war despite occasional drone strikes.
Putin, a former KGB officer who won another six years in power earlier this month, has weathered similar crises before and there is no visible threat to his grip on power now.
His response, judging from his previous behaviour and a statement on Saturday, will be to meet force with greater force.
Four of 11 men detained in connection with the attack have been charged with terrorism and appeared in court after being interrogated: one apparently with his ear missing and one in a wheelchair amid calls from some lawmakers for the death penalty to be re-introduced. Peskov declined to answer a journalist's question about whether they had been tortured.
MISSED WARNINGS?
Whether the men were tasked by Islamic State as the militant group and the West asserts, or whether there may have been some kind of Ukrainian connection as Putin has hinted - and Kyiv has flatly denied - there were warning signs which do not appear to have been heeded.
Security analysts said the manner in which the attack and escape were carried out was evidence of extensive reconnaissance of the venue beforehand and Russian media published CCTV footage of one of the gunmen visiting at an earlier date.
On March 7, the U.S. embassy in Moscow issued a security alert to Americans, telling them it was "monitoring reports that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow, to include concerts".
On March 19, three days before the killing spree, Putin delivered a speech to FSB chiefs in which he dismissed what he said were "provocative" Western warnings about a terrorist act.
"All these actions resemble outright blackmail and the intention to intimidate and destabilise our society," said Putin.
Nina Krushcheva, a professor of international affairs at The New School in New York, said the FSB appeared to have had Islamic State on its radar.
But she said Putin's view that Russia was locked in an existential struggle with a U.S-led West would have made it difficult for Moscow to take at face value a security warning from the United States.
"There's a lot of mistrust. It's not like America isn't involved in misinformation," she said.
"In Putin's world, where it is an existential battle between Russia and the West that wants to undermine Russia and demolish it, of course he wouldn't believe it because how does he know from his own KGB background that America is not creating its own false flag (operation)."
A false flag operation is an act committed with the intent of disguising the source of responsibility to pin blame on another party. ISLAMIC STATE
John Sipher, who served a stint in Russia during his career in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, said he believed the FSB may have dropped the ball because it was too busy focusing on political and other threats to Putin and his government.
“The (security services) are more about protecting the Kremlin than they are about protecting the people,” said Sipher, who predicted that Putin would now use the attack to justify some new action or against the West and Ukraine.
Another warning came on March 2 in southern Russia when FSB special forces killed six gunmen whom they identified as members of Islamic State.
Three of the men were on a federal wanted list and the militants had killed three policemen the previous year. The FSB found a weapons stash.
On March 7, the FSB said it had prevented an attack on a synagogue in Moscow that had been plotted by an Islamic State cell and that the attackers had been killed in a shootout.
Riccardo Valle, a researcher on jihadist movements, said the March 2 incident should have set off warning lights.
"I think the fact the security forces discovered that there is a network of Islamic State in Russia, and a strong one capable of acquiring weapons and putting up strong resistance against special forces - this should have raised the alarm in Moscow security agencies," Valle said in a phone interview.
"Maybe it did but they were not able to prevent the attack in time," said Valle, director of research at the Islamabad-based research and news platform The Khorasan Diary.
He said it was also clear from previous statements and attacks by ISIS-K, including on the Russian embassy in Kabul in 2022, that the group had Russia in its sights.
(Editing by Alison Williams)
Russia blames Kyiv, West over Moscow gun attack
AFP Tue, March 26, 2024
Russia on Tuesday sought to shift blame for the Moscow concert hall attack onto Ukraine and its Western backers, despite the Islamic State group claiming responsibility for the massacre of at least 139 people.
The Kremlin's security services have been scrambling to explain how gunmen on Friday managed to carry out the worst attack in Russia in over two decades.
President Vladimir Putin has acknowledged that "radical Islamists" conducted the bloody assault, but suggested they were linked to Ukraine, two years into the Kremlin's offensive on the country.
The head of Russia's FSB security agency Alexander Bortnikov said Tuesday that while those who had "ordered" the attack had not been identified, the assailants were heading to Ukraine and would have been "greeted as heroes".
"We believe the action was prepared both by the radical Islamists themselves and, of course, facilitated by Western special services, and Ukraine's special services themselves have a direct connection to this," Bortnikov was cited as saying by Russian news agencies.
Ukraine has fiercely rejected any accusations from Moscow that it was tied to the assault, with a top aide to President Volodymyr Zelensky saying the Kremlin was looking to cover up the "incompetence" of its intelligence agencies.
- Belarus undermines Kremlin narrative -
Russia's closest international ally, Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko, appeared to undermine the Kremlin's main narrative -- saying that the attackers tried to enter his country first before heading to Ukraine.
"There was no way they could enter Belarus. They saw that. That's why they turned away and went to the section of the Ukrainian-Russian border," he said.
The Kremlin has expressed confidence in the country's powerful security agencies, despite questions swirling over how they failed to thwart the massacre after public and private warnings from the United States.
Islamic State jihadists have said several times since Friday that they were responsible, and IS-affiliated media channels have published graphic videos of the gunmen inside the venue.
French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday said Paris had information that the jihadists were responsible and warned Russia against exploiting the attack to blame Ukraine.
The concert hall massacre was a major blow for Putin just over a week after he claimed a new term after one-sided elections the Kremlin billed as an endorsement of his military operation against Ukraine.
Putin on Monday said for the first time that "radical Islamists" were behind last week's attack, but sought to tie it to Kyiv.
Without providing any evidence, Putin connected the attack at Crocus City Hall to a series of incursions into Russian territory by pro-Ukrainian sabotage groups, and said they were all part of efforts to "sow panic in our society". - Eighth suspect remanded -
A court in Moscow meanwhile on Tuesday remanded an eighth suspect in custody over the attack at the Moscow concert hall.
Moscow earlier announced it had detained 11 people in connection with the attack, which saw camouflaged gunmen storm into Crocus City Hall, open fire on concert-goers and set the building ablaze.
The court's press service said the latest suspect to be remanded was a man originally from the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan.
Officials said he was ordered to be held in detention until at least May 22, without detailing the exact accusations against him.
Four men charged on Sunday with carrying out the attack are citizens of Tajikistan, also in mainly Muslim Central Asia.
Three more suspects -- reportedly from the same family and including at least one Russian citizen -- were charged on terror-related offences on Monday.
A Turkish official said two of the Tajik suspects had travelled "freely between Russia and Turkey" ahead of the attack.
The two had both spent time in Turkey shortly before the attack and entered Russia together on the same flight from Istanbul, the official said.
All of those held in custody have been charged with terrorism and face up to life in prison.
The Kremlin has so far pushed back at suggestions the death penalty will be re-introduced after the attack. Much of Putin's inner circle thinks Ukraine had nothing to do with the Moscow terror attack, badly undermining him, report says
Mia Jankowicz Wed, March 27, 2024
Putin's inner circle isn't buying his claim that Kyiv is connected to the Moscow terror attack, Bloomberg reported.
Putin continues to say that Ukraine had a role in the attack, which was claimed by ISIS-K.
He thinks that pushing the theory is beneficial for galvanizing support for his war, per Bloomberg.
Many Kremlin insiders disagree with President Vladimir Putin's claims that Ukraine may be connected to last Friday's terror attack in Moscow, Bloomberg reported.
While Putin and some of his followers continue to publicly push the idea of Ukraine's role in the attack, behind the scenes few people in Moscow's top business and political circles support the theory, insiders told the outlet.
Ukraine has denied any connection to the attack, and no credible evidence has emerged for its involvement.
On Friday, armed attackers stormed the Crocus City Hall in Moscow, opening fire and killing at least 137 people during a rock concert. ISIS-K, a terror group based in Afghanistan, claimed responsibility.
Addressing the nation the day after the attack, Putin said that Ukraine had provided the attackers with an escape route at its border.
Making no mention of ISIS-K, he said: "They tried to hide and moved towards Ukraine, where according to preliminary data, a window was prepared for them on the Ukrainian side to cross the state border," NPR reported.
On Monday, Putin switched to blaming ISIS-K for the attack, but continued to allude to a Ukrainian connection.
"The United States, through various channels, is trying to convince its satellites and other countries of the world that, according to their intelligence data, there is supposedly no Kyiv trace in the Moscow terrorist attack," he said, according to CNBC.
But Putin's narrative was undermined even by Belarusian President Alexandr Lukashenko, a close ally, who said that the suspects had first tried to go to his country.
"There was no chance they could enter Belarus," he said, according to the state-run Belarusian Telegraph Agency. "So they took a turn and headed to the Ukraine-Russia border."
According to Bloomberg, Putin has been confronted with his inner circle's doubts.
Citing a person with knowledge of the situation, the outlet reported that Putin was in a meeting where officials agreed that Ukraine had no connection to the attack.
Even so, Putin was committed to the idea that it would help mobilize support for the war there, the person reportedly said.
Putin loyalists have continued to advance the theory without presenting any evidence.
Alexander Bortnikov, director of Russia's FSB security service, said on television that he believed Islamist radicals were aided by Western special services, and that "the special services of Ukraine are directly related to this," Reuters reported.
Asked whether ISIS or Ukraine was responsible, Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of Russia's security council, said it was Ukraine, adding later that there were "many" indications of Kyiv's involvement, per Reuters.
Andrei Soldatov, an expert on the FSB and Russian intelligence, told Bloomberg that Russia's security services "know this was Islamic State, but after Putin's remarks they have no choice but to follow orders and prove that there was Ukrainian or Western involvement."
Wednesday, May 18, 2022
Tucker Carlson Tries, and Fails, to Distance Himself From Buffalo Shooter’s Manifesto
Ryan Bort Tue, May 17, 2022 Tucker-Carlson - Credit: (Photo by Janos Kummer/Getty Images)
Tucker Carlson has long promoted the idea of the “great replacement,” a racist conspiracy theory holding that white people are being systematically replaced by immigrants. The theory was present throughout the 180-page manifesto of the teenager who killed 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket on Saturday, leading to renewed scrutiny of the mega-popular Fox News host. Carlson addressed that scrutiny on Monday night, essentially arguing that anyone espousing white supremacist views should be able to do so without fear of criticism.
“Because a mentally ill teenager murdered strangers, you cannot be allowed to express your political views out loud,” he said. “That’s what they’re telling you. That’s what they’ve wanted to tell you for a long time, but Saturday’s massacre gives them a pretext and a justification.”
There isn’t any significant contingent of people responding to the Buffalo shooting by saying Carlson or anyone else shouldn’t be able to express their views. Carlson is merely mad that his critics are expressing their views, which is that Carlson is a racist, and that the work he’s done to mainstream the “great replacement” theory and the fact that the shooter’s manifesto is filled with it may not be totally coincidental. Go ahead and have a look at some of the uncanny similarities between what the shooter wrote and what Carlson has pushed on his show:
Carlson understandably had a difficult time distancing himself from the ideologies that inspired the shooter, so he instead focused on how the manifesto was “rambling” and “disjointed” and “paranoid.” He bashed the media for blaming “Trumpism” for the massacre, before circling back to the ludicrous idea that criticizing a popular cable news host for pushing unvarnished white supremacy to millions of Americans amounts to wanting to “suspend the First Amendment.”
Carlson wants everyone to be aware that the shooter’s manifesto contains ideas far more deranged than anything he’s uttered on his show. This is certainly true, but its operating principle is the white supremacist “great replacement” theory, which Carlson has helped lift out of the fringes and into the political mainstream. It clearly and catastrophically took hold in the shooter’s mind, which Carlson described on Monday as “diseased and disorganized.” The question he should probably be asking, and that Americans are plenty justified in asking themselves, is why the views of one of the influential figure in conservative media are so closely aligned with those of a mentally ill teenager who felt slaughtering 10 people at a supermarket was a righteous act.
State Senator Who Backs White Nationalism Suggests Buffalo Shooting Was False Flag
Josephine Harvey Mon, May 16, 2022,
A Republican state lawmaker with ties to white nationalists suggested the racially motivated mass shooting at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket was staged by government agents.
“Fed boy summer has started in Buffalo,” Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogerswrote on Telegram. The first-term lawmaker has built a national profile among far-right extremists with incendiary rhetoric, diehard support for former President Donald Trump and an embrace of white nationalism.
Authorities said an 18-year-old white gunman traveled several hours on Saturday to a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, where he opened fire outside at a supermarket. Thirteen people were shot; 10 died. Most were Black.
The accused killer left a manifesto riddled with racist views and references to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory that white Americans are being replaced by people of color, according to The New York Times.
“Great replacement” rhetoric has been found in the online writings of several mass shooters, including the 2019 El Paso, Texas, gunman who killed 23 people at a Walmart, and the New Zealand shooter who massacred 51 people at two Christchurch mosques.
“We Americans who love this country are being replaced by people who do not love this country,” Rogers tweeted in July. “I will not back down from this statement. Communists & our enemies are using mass immigration, education, big tech, big corporations & other strategies to accomplish this.”
In March, she drew bipartisan condemnation and was censured by the Arizona Senate over her violent rhetoric. In February, she spoke at the white nationalist America First Political Action Conference in Florida. During her address, she praised Nick Fuentes, a prominent white supremacist and Holocaust denier, as a “patriot.”
Nikki Haley’s feigning of staggering ignorance about the cause of the US civil war unintentionally revealed her quandary in the Republican party. It was not a gaffe. Though it was a stumble, it was not a mistake, but a message she has delivered for years and that has served her well until now. Her carefully crafted and closely memorized garble was a deracinated version of an old lie, which she had used before to attempt to mollify hostile camps in order to skid by. Some in the past praised her evasive formula as governor of South Carolina as her finest moment. It lifted her star. Yet one simple question instantly produced panicky rapid eye movements that are the telltale sign of a person desperately cornered, followed by an unstoppable stream of blather that she hoped would make it all evaporate into a meaningless ether but instead this time slid her into an abyss. Her performance, the most memorable of her entire career, was so devastating that even Ron DeSantis, the paragon of political aphasia, in the most cogent remark of his campaign, indeed his life, commented: “Yikes.” Nikki Haley turned Ron DeSantis woke.
“What was the cause of the United States civil war?” a man asked Haley at a campaign town hall in North Conway, New Hampshire. She reacted as if she were being physically threatened. Haley immediately turned her back to the questioner, breathed fast and heavy into the microphone, and walked quickly away. When she swiveled to face the crowd, she did not speak at first. Gaining her composure, she replied with an accusatory edge: “Well, don’t come with an easy question.”
Of course, the answer is an easy one for any eighth grader. But for Haley it went to the molten core of the history and politics of South Carolina, where she had been governor, to the southern strategy that realigned the Republican party, and to its hard crystallization in Trump’s party. She retreated as if struck, not because she didn’t know the obvious answer, but because she knows that it is more fraught than it has been in decades.
“I think the cause of the civil war was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do,” Haley began haltingly. Then she stopped.
“What do you think the cause of the civil war was?” she asked her questioner. He replied that he was not running for president and wished to hear her thoughts. “I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are,” Haley continued, and continued, and continued. “And I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people. Government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life. They don’t need to tell you what you can and can’t do. They don’t need to be a part of your life.”
She looked to her questioner in the hope that her flood of verbosity had overwhelmed him. “In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you answer that question without mentioning the word ‘slavery’,” he said. She shot back with her own question, as if in a spat: “What do you want me to say about slavery?” She wanted the townsman to answer for her. “You’ve answered my question, thank you,” he said. With that, he had won his point. Haley shifted again, and said: “Next question.”
Haley’s whole possibility of success in her contest with Trump depends upon winning New Hampshire, and within that open primary, unlike the closed primaries that follow it, she is relying on drawing independent voters. Her recoil from the question about the civil war was an ingrained instinct. She keeps trying to pass the southern test.
If Haley appears unfamiliar with the history of New Hampshire’s contribution to the preservation of democracy and emancipation, she is certainly well acquainted with South Carolina’s attempt at its destruction
Her language in New Hampshire was the same as the rhetoric she honed in South Carolina. The Wall Street Journal editorially praised her in 2010 for an interview she gave to a neo-Confederate group, the Palmetto Patriots. “‘You had one side of the Civil War that was fighting for tradition, and I think you had another side of the Civil War that was fighting for change,’ she said. She did not use the word ‘slavery’ but hinted at it, saying that ‘everyone is supposed to be free.’” The Journal noted approvingly: “She pledged to retain a political compromise that gave the Confederate flag a place of prominence in front of the State House, a position that puts her within the mainstream among GOP leaders in the state.”
Haley’s answer was an attempt to repeat her balancing act in the birthplace of secession, offering ‘lost cause lite’. Her rationale was a muffled echo of that of Confederate leaders justifying secession. Jefferson Davis, in his speech resigning from the Senate on 9 January 1861, before assuming the Confederate presidency, appealed to “the principles upon which our Government was founded”, and his “high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights we inherited”. Alexander Stephens, the Confederate vice-president and framer of the Confederate constitution, in his speech of 21 March 1861 proclaiming slavery as its “cornerstone”, stated that it “secures all our ancient rights, franchises, and liberties”. The Confederates consistently described opposition to their insurrection as “coercion”, to which Lincoln gave one of his many answers on 18 April 1864: “The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one.”
It may not have occurred to Haley that there are no Confederate monuments in New Hampshire. There are nearly 100 in the state to the Union cause. One-tenth of the population of New Hampshire at the time served in the Union army: 32,750 men, of whom nearly 5,000 died, 130 in Confederate prisons. The fifth New Hampshire volunteer infantry had the highest casualty rate of any Union regiment. About 900 soldiers from New Hampshire fought at Gettysburg, suffering 368 casualties, many of whom are buried at the cemetery there, where Lincoln delivered his address explaining their sacrifice for a “government of, by and for the people”. The monument to the fifth New Hampshire is one of five monuments to Granite state units at the Gettysburg battlefield.
If Haley appears unfamiliar with the history of New Hampshire’s contribution to the preservation of democracy and emancipation, she is certainly well acquainted with South Carolina’s attempt at its destruction, and the history that both preceded and followed it, which has been apparent in her efforts to soften and cover it up.
Surely, when she entered her office as governor in the state capitol of South Carolina in Columbia, Haley recognized the larger-than-life brass statue of John C Calhoun, ideologue of the master class and leader of nullification, who declared slavery to be a “positive good”, standing in the middle of the rotunda. The Confederate battle flag that flew above the capitol was raised by an act of the legislature in 1961 as a protest of defiance against civil rights and waved there when she was elected governor.
On 17 June, 2015, Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist and neo-Nazi, murdered nine Black members of the Bible study group of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church, intending to ignite a race war. In the aftermath, after a contentious debate in the legislature, the Confederate flag was removed from the capitol. Haley favored its lowering. In 2020, another John C Calhoun statue, which had stood on a pedestal 115ft above central Charleston for 120 years, was removed.
Since the controversy over the Confederate flag, Haley has defended neo-Confederates who see it as a symbol of their “heritage” while trying to separate it from Dylann Roof. “For many people in our state, the flag stands for traditions that are noble – traditions of history, of heritage and of ancestry,” she stated as governor. “The hate-filled murderer who massacred our brothers and sisters in Charleston has a sick and twisted view of the flag. In no way does he reflect the people in our state who respect and, in many ways, revere it. At the same time, for many others in South Carolina, the flag is a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past. As a state, we can survive, as we have done, while still being home to both of those viewpoints. We do not need to declare a winner and loser.”
The unexpected incident showed Haley to be slight, frightened and cowardly. Her deeper problem is that she is a slave to her party
In a Washington Post op-ed, she wrote that the flag was “a symbol of slavery, discrimination, and hate for many people”. But, she added: “Today’s outrage culture insists that everyone who holds a view that’s different from our own is not just mistaken. They must be evil and shunned. That’s wrong. I know too many good people in South Carolina who think differently about the flag but who are not the least bit racist. The tragedy of all of this is that it makes compromise far less possible.” In New Hampshire, she gave a blander argument, forgetting the false equivalence between those against slavery and those for “heritage”.
***
Lee Atwater, the most adept Republican political consultant to emerge from the south in his generation, did not try to parse his self-justifications. He was also a voracious reader of books on the civil war, especially James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom. Atwater, of course, knew the cause was slavery. In the mid-1980s, when I was a reporter for the Washington Post, I had long discussions with him on the civil war. He was the one who gave me a tour of the capitol in Columbia and showed me the Calhoun statue.
Atwater began as a protege of Strom Thurmond, who invented the modern southern strategy. In 1948, Thurmond, then governor of South Carolina, ran for president as a segregationist on the Dixiecrat party ticket. Elected to the Senate, he switched parties to become a Republican. His support for Richard Nixon in winning the Republican nomination at the convention in 1968 was crucial. Thurmond brought in Atwater to run his 1976 re-election campaign, beginning Atwater’s ascent. In 1984, working for the Reagan re-election campaign, when I first met him, he drew a chart in my reporter’s notebook to diagram the populist-establishment dichotomy along party lines.
Race was always the seam that Atwater mined. In 1988, as the campaign director for George HW Bush, he was behind the exploitation of Willie Horton, a Black man convicted of murder in Massachusetts, who on a weekend furlough program raped a white woman. The program had been instituted under a Republican governor, but Horton had been released while the governor Michael Dukakis, Bush’s Democratic opponent, had been in office. Atwater publicly promised to “strip the bark off the little bastard” and “make Willie Horton his running mate”.
Atwater explained in 1991 the evolution of race as a political weapon in the southern strategy. “Y’all don’t quote me on this,” he said. “You start out in 1954 by saying: ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’ So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back burner.”
That same year, Atwater died of brain cancer, but not before, seeking redemption, he issued a deathbed apology to Dukakis for his “naked cruelty”.
Haley came on the South Carolina scene post-Thurmond and post-Atwater, certainly aware of those who had turned the state Republican in the southern strategy. Her lowering of the Confederate flag has been her chief credential of moderation. Then Trump came down the escalator. Atwater was the partner in the consulting firm with Roger Stone, Trump’s adviser, who unlike Atwater never has had any use for apologies.
Posed a question about the civil war, Haley tried to repeat her old balancing act, but she lost her equilibrium. Even if she had not been stunned and was instead fluent, she could not bridge the gap in the party of Trump with ‘lost cause lite’. Scrambling belatedly to say the questioner was “a Democratic plant” and that the civil war was about slavery after all did not solve her problem. Trump has now dispensed with the code words and symbols of the southern strategy. He has gone to a darker place, railing about “vermin” and “poisoning of the blood”.
The unexpected incident showed Haley to be slight, frightened and cowardly. Her deeper problem is that she is a slave to her party.
China and QAnon embrace Russian disinformation justifying war in Ukraine
Sébastian SEIBT
AFP/RFI/FRANCE24 Russia convened a special UN Security Council meeting on Friday to discuss what the Kremlin said were "secret" research laboratories the US allegedly has in Ukraine to develop biological weapons. The Russian allegations are rooted in an unlikely conspiracy theory that has been promoted by both China and the pro-Trump conspiracy movement QAnon.
As Russia's attack on Ukraine enters a third week, Russia's deputy ambassador to the UN, Dmitri Polianski, convened the Security Council on Friday to raise the issue of the "biological activities” of the US military in Ukraine.
Polianski accused Washington of developing biological weapons in research laboratories throughout the country. Earlier this week, Russia's defense ministry said there was a network of US-funded biolaboratories in Ukraine working on establishing a mechanism "for the covert transmission of deadly pathogens" and conducting experiments with bat coronavirus samples. Russia claimed this was being done under the auspices of the US Department of Defense and was part of a US biological weapons programme.
On unregulated social media platforms – including Telegram and 8chan – this conspiracy theory has become incredibly popular, racking up hundreds of thousands of hits each day.
This is not the first time since the beginning of the war in Ukraine that Moscow has put this far-fetched theory on the table. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in early March that he had proof that "the Pentagon has developed pathogens in two military laboratories in Ukraine".
Russia’s permanent UN representative, Vasily Nebenzya, described the alleged biological weapons plot in detail on Friday, warning that bats, birds and even insects could soon be spreading “dangerous pathogens” across Europe.
Washington, Kyiv as well as the United Nations have denied the existence of biological weapons laboratories in the country.
Britain’s ambassador to the UN, Barbara Woodward, said Russia had used the Security Council to utter "a series of wild, completely baseless and irresponsible conspiracy theories".
As early as January, the US Department of Defense felt it necessary to post a video on YouTube in response to a flood of rumours about alleged US military experiments in "secret" laboratories on the border between Russia and Ukraine.
The US has openly admitted to having helped establish dozens of research laboratories in former Soviet bloc countries. The facilities, which were intended to help destroy the remnants of the USSR's nuclear and chemical arsenal, are currently being used to monitor the emergence of new epidemics.
But there is nothing “secret” about the facilities, which appear on public lists giving their locations. They are also 100 percent run by the governments of the countries in which they are located. The United States only partly finances the equipment.
Nevertheless, the conspiracy theory continues to gain traction and is finding new adherents outside of Russian borders.
A useful conspiracy for China
China called on the US last month to be open, transparent and responsible in reporting its overseas military biological activities. Beijing also stressed the importance of being able to visit with "complete transparency" the scientific facilities in Ukraine "where the United States is conducting its research for military purposes". Since then, major Chinese media such as the Global Times have not missed an opportunity to offer a platform to Russian officials who promote the conspiracy theory.
Yevgeniy Golovchenko, a specialist in Russian disinformation campaigns at the University of Copenhagen, is not surprised by China encouraging these rumours about secret US biolabs in Ukraine. "We should not forget that there have already been heated exchanges between Beijing and Washington about secret laboratories during the Covid-19 pandemic," he told FRANCE 24, referring to the controversy surrounding the origin of the Sars-Cov-2 virus. While some Western conspiracy theorists believe it was manufactured in a laboratory in Wuhan, China has accused the US army of being behind its emergence.
For Beijing, this new conspiracy theory has arrived at the right time. It allows China to show support for its ally Vladimir Putin without committing too openly to the invasion of Ukraine, explained Golovchenko.
At the same time, the Russian rhetoric is in line with Chinese propaganda about the coronavirus. Beijing hopes to demonstrate that if Washington is able to develop biological weapons secretly under the Russians' nose, why wouldn't the United States have developed a dangerous virus in another of their "secret labs"?
But the Russian disinformation theory has also found supporters in the heart of the United States. Followers of QAnon, a conspiracy theory that alleges Trump is saving the United States from a satanic group of paedophiles, were among the first to justify the invasion of Ukraine as a Russian attempt to destroy dangerous military laboratories.
People close to Trump, such as former strategist Steve Bannon and Republican Senator Marco Rubio, have officially asked the White House for explanations about the activity in these Ukrainian laboratories.
From the Colorado potato beetle to AIDS
For decades, Moscow has consistently accused Washington of secretly developing biological weapons. This has been a common thread of Russian propaganda since the beginning of the Cold War in 1949, explained Milton Leitenberg, an American expert on weapons of mass destruction, in a 2021 study on the history of the subject. Moscow suggested in 1950 that the United States was sending Colorado potato beetles that had been infected with a new virus to poison potato crops in East Germany.
Russia has been particularly effective in promoting the idea that the US weaponises viruses for use against its enemies. Golovchenko noted that a particularly effective disinformation campaign along these lines ran from 1985 to the end of the 2000s, when the Kremlin claimed that Washington “was the source of the AIDS virus and was using it to target African and African-American populations".
The AIDS conspiracy theory appeared in "2,000 newspapers across 25 countries” since 1985, noted Leitenberg. In his study he pointed out that well-known personalities from the African-American community publicly expressed varying levels of support for this conspiracy theory, including "Will Smith, Bill Cosby and Spike Lee".
Muddying the waters ahead of an attack?
This latest biological-weapons conspiracy theory allows Moscow to characterise the United States as the real enemy in the war. For the Russian government, it is a way of justifying the invasion to a domestic population that considers Ukraine to be friendly to Russia.
"This theory presents Ukraine as simply the territory on which Russia is fighting to put an end to dangerous American activities," said Golovchenko.
The Biden administration fears that the frequent repetition of the bioweapons claims might be an indication that Moscow is planning to use such weapons itself and wants to muddy the waters beforehand. The next step could be for Moscow to mount a “false flag” operation in Ukraine.
Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, called the Russian accusations “preposterous” in a tweet last Wednesday and said the United States “does not develop or possess such weapons anywhere”.
“Now that Russia has made these false claims, and China has seemingly endorsed this propaganda, we should all be on the lookout for Russia to possibly use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine, or to create a false flag operation using them,” she wrote on Twitter on March 9, adding: “It’s a clear pattern.”
While it is impossible to know what the Kremlin has in mind, such a move would makes sense from a propaganda perspective, said Golovchenko.
"For the time being, the Russian government continues to claim that this is only a limited military operation in Ukraine and it is forbidden to talk about the ‘war’ in Russia. But the longer the fighting goes on, the harder it will be for the authorities to maintain this line,” Golovchenko observed.
“They will have to find a justification to switch to full-scale war.”
This article was translated from the original in French.
Monday, February 21, 2022
Putin Orders Troops to Ukraine After Shocking Declaration
Barbie Latza Nadeau, Allison Quinn, Noor Ibrahim Mon, February 21, 2022 SERGEY BOBOK
Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered Russian “peacekeeping” troops to the pro-Kremlin regions of Luhansk and Donetsk after unilaterally declaring that the two chunks of Eastern Ukraine should be considered independent states.
The dramatic escalation, which many fear could lead to all-out war, followed an address to his nation on Monday, in which the Russian president formally announced “the immediate recognition” of the pro-Kremlin regions of Luhansk and Donetsk—which stretch over 6,500 miles—as independent of Ukraine.
In a decree released shortly after his speech, the president ordered Russia's defense ministry to “ensure ….. implementation by the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation of functions to maintain peace on the territory of the Donetsk People’s Republic.”
Before his formal recognition of the break-away states, Putin had spent the better part of his address lambasting Ukraine, NATO, and the U.S. for failing to address “security threats” raised by the Kremlin in recent months. He baselessly accused Ukrainian forces of perpetuating “genocide” and blamed Kyiv for any future “continuation of bloodshed” in those regions.
“If Ukraine was to join NATO it would serve as a direct threat to the security of Russia,” the Russian leader said. He undermined Ukraine as a country that has “never had a tradition of genuine statehood,” accused the U.S. of “blackmailing” Russia with threats of sanctions, and warned of Western efforts “to try to convince us over and over again that NATO is a peace-loving and purely defensive alliance,” adding, “we know the real value of such words.”
Though Putin did not directly address growing fears that Russia is planning to invade Ukraine, he appeared to be laying the groundwork for war by characterizing a potential Russian military offensive as an act of self-defense. Moscow “has every right to take retaliatory measures to ensure its own security,” he said. That is exactly what we will do.”
The move follows a spectacularly bizarre meeting by Russia’s Security Council, where Putin appeared like a mob boss testing his underlings, as officials, one after another, spoke out in favor of recognizing the self-proclaimed republics.
It was another grotesque spectacle on a day when the drum beats of war grew deafening. The aggressive and totally unjustified territorial claim followed a series of apparent false-flag operations where the Russians tried to blame Ukrainian forces for a number of attacks.
The Russian military claimed that five so-called “saboteurs” were assassinated early Monday after crossing into Russia from Ukraine.
The report mirrors almost exactly what the Biden administration warned could be “false flags” or trigger points that Russia will respond to as a pretext to launch its invasion.
“As a result of clashes, five people who violated the Russian border from a group of saboteurs were killed,” the Russian military said in a statement, according to Reuters. No Russians died in the alleged border infraction. Russia also said Ukraine had destroyed a border outpost used by the FSB (Federal Security Service) in early morning shelling.
Russia has also claimed in recent days that Ukrainian forces are staging attacks on Luhansk and Donetsk.
Ukraine has denied any such incursion or attacks took place. The Minister of Foreign affairs, Dmytro Kuleba, took to Twitter Monday to dismiss the claims with big red ‘X’s denying an attack on Donetsk or Luhansk, or that it sent saboteurs over the Russian border, or that it shelled Russian territory or border crossings.
After the latest round of supposed Ukrainian aggression, the leaders of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics published video appeals pleading with Putin to recognize their independence, as they claimed Ukrainian forces were preparing to attack.
Despite a flurry of last-minute attempts at diplomacy—including talk of a summit between presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin—all hell seems soon to break loose in Ukraine.
Monday, Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan warned that Russia’s imminent attack on Ukraine will be “extremely violent” and that it could begin literally at any moment.
“We believe that any military operation of this size, scope and magnitude of what we believe the Russians are planning will be extremely violent,” he told NBC Today show on a frenzied circuit of morning TV on President’s Day. “It will cost the lives of Ukrainians and Russians, civilians and military personnel alike.”
He told the network that new intelligence garnered in recent days suggest “an even greater form of brutality because this will not simply be some conventional war between two armies.” He went on to say Russia will target the Ukrainian people “to repress them, to crush them, to harm them.”
He then appeared on ABC Good Morning America, telling them that “all signs look like President Putin and the Russians are proceeding with a plan to execute a major military invasion of Ukraine.” That plan was bolstered over the weekend with Russian military hardware painted with an ominous white “Z” lettering rolling toward strategic points along the Ukrainian frontier. “We have seen just in the last 24 hours further moves of Russian units to the border with no other good explanation other than they’re getting in position to attack.”
Over the weekend, French President Emmanuel Macron invited Biden and Putin to a summit, which Biden signaled he would attend on the condition that Russian not invade Ukraine, but the Kremlin called reports of any such meeting “premature.”
As Sullivan reiterated that any attack on Ukraine would be met with the “full force of American and Allied might,” unsubstantiated news reports of ceasefire infractions along the border continue unabated. Video posted on Twitter showed a fuel station burning on the front line in Eastern Ukraine as civilians fled against a backdrop of gunfire. The European Union, which will feel the impact of an eventual war first-hand, approved an emergency package with $1.36 billion to support Ukraine through loans, according to a statement by the European Union Council released Monday. “It intends to provide swift support in a situation of acute crisis and to strengthen Ukraine’s resilience.”
Russia orders troops into eastern Ukraine
Nabih Bulos Mon, February 21, 2022 A temporary refugee shelter in Taganrog, Russia, on Monday. (Associated Press)
In an almost-hourlong address that alternated between furious anti-Western rhetoric and the excoriation of Ukraine as a puppet nation, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday recognized two Ukrainian breakaway republics as independent, a move certain to further incite animosities with the West and escalate fears of an invasion that could ignite fighting reminiscent of World War II and redraw the map of Eastern Europe.
Putin's speech to the Russian people drew swift rebuke and condemnation from Washington and across European capitals. President Biden and the European Union announced economic sanctions aimed at cutting trade and business with the breakaway enclaves. By day's end, with Moscow ordering troops into the republics, it appeared diplomacy was failing and the region was veering inexorably toward war.
Sitting back in his chair behind a wooden desk equipped with a bank of telephones and a computer, Putin began a speech that detailed Ukraine’s origins and its territorial evolution across history. He said, in essence, Ukraine was a Bolshevik-constructed amalgam created entirely by Russia. "Ukraine was never a true nation," he said.
In his telling, Ukraine had now become a Western puppet, a corruption-riddled government that has delivered only "bankruptcy in a country that produced rockets and space technology" back when the country was one of the Soviet Union's republics. The blame, he said, lay with Western organizations and governments that had effectively plundered the country's resources and left the state with no power. "There's just no independent Ukrainian state," he said.
Putin also touched on Ukraine’s geopolitical importance and was adamant that if Ukraine was ever granted NATO membership it would be a "direct threat" to Russia. He recited with growing fury — as if a speech out of the Cold War — the list of countries that had joined NATO and were now close enough to Russia's border to present a danger. He dismissed assurances that Ukraine’s membership was a far-away prospect, if it happened at all.
“OK, not tomorrow, but what about after tomorrow?” he said.
“What does that change for the change for the historical prospects? Nothing.”
For those reasons, he said, "I consider it necessary to make a long overdue decision: to immediately recognize the independence and sovereignty of the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic," Putin said, using the official name of the two Russian-created enclaves. He asked Russia's Federal Assembly to support the decision, and ratify the treaties "of friendship" and — critically — "mutual assistance" with both republics.
"And from those who seized and hold power in Kyiv, we demand an immediate cessation of hostilities," he said. "Otherwise, all responsibility for the possible continuation of the bloodshed will be fully and wholly on the conscience of the regime ruling on the territory of Ukraine."
Putin watched as separatist leaders Denis Pushilin and Leonid Pasechnik signed the decree. Putin then — with a slight smirk — scribbled his signature on the papers.
Waves of reproach and outrage came quickly, especially among European leaders for whom Putin’s words invoked the ghosts of some of the continent’s most bloody episodes, from World War II to the Balkans wars of barely a single generation ago.
And U.S. officials, who have for weeks been predicting such actions of conquest from Putin, announced they were imposing new sanctions designed to inflict pain on anyone attempting to do business with the enclaves — although it was unclear how many American businesspeople are investing in the region. The sanctions are more limited than measures the U.S. and Europe have been threatening if Putin invaded Ukraine.
While Biden administration officials huddled in consultations, the president spent more than a half-hour on the telephone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the White House said, reassuring him of U.S. support. Zelensky confirmed the call and said he and Biden discussed "the events of the last hours" and that he'd also taken a call from British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
"Putin’s address tonight, together with the military forces around Ukraine, represents the most outrageous rejection of the rules based order for European peace we’ve seen since WWII," Henry Bolton, a British international security expert and former politician, said on Twitter. "He’s threatened Ukraine’s right to exist and may well fabricate the excuse for a full invasion."
In Washington, where the cause of Ukrainian sovereignty has attracted rare bipartisan support, a group of lawmakers who attended last week's critical Munich security conference vowed unity and resolve in opposing "Russian aggression."
"No matter what happens in the coming days, we must assure that the dictator Putin and his corrupt oligarchs pay a devastating price for their decisions,” the group said in a statement.
The independence declaration could have massive consequences: The separatists claim all the Donbas region as territory for their republics. But they control only part of it. If they intend to take the full territory with Russian help, it would lead to full-on clashes between Ukrainian and Russian troops, setting the stage for an escalation sure to embroil Western nations.
Putin's announcement came after a meeting with his security council, which urged him to demand independence for the republics. The meeting followed Russia’s assertion that Ukrainian army units had breached its border Monday, another in a series of claims the West fears will provide Russia with a supposed justification for an invasion of its neighbor.
Putin's new strategy would mean the end of the Minsk agreements, the much-reviled accords — signed after Russia-backed separatist forces surrounded several thousand Ukrainian soldiers — that have maintained a threadbare cease-fire in the Donbas since 2015. But more immediately, it could also provide the cover for Moscow to begin its blitz into Ukraine.
Russia’s forces seem poised to strike for just such a moment. Some 150,000 troops and a large-scale arsenal of Russia's top land, air and sea materiel is now assembled on Ukraine’s borders. Moscow has repeatedly denied it has plans for an invasion but has warned that Western failure to engage with its security demands, including a pledge never to allow Ukraine to join NATO, would trigger a “military-technical response." The Kremlin has not elaborated on what that would mean.
Frenzied shuttle diplomacy — chiefly from French President Emmanuel Macron, engaging in as diplomatic broker with President Biden and Putin — has failed to stop what appears to be an inevitable path to war.
The Russian leader has previously accused the Ukrainian government of pursuing "genocide" in Donetsk and Luhansk, the vast majority of whose populations are ethnic Russians. The U.S. and NATO have accused Moscow of planning so-called false flag operations in the area to justify an all-out invasion of Ukraine.
On Monday, Russia’s military said it killed five saboteurs crossing into its territory from Ukraine and destroyed two Ukrainian army combat vehicles. But the Ukrainian military dismissed those claims, which were reported by Russian state news agencies, as “completely fake.”
Since 2014, fighting between Kyiv's forces and the Russia-backed secessionists in Donetsk and Luhansk, which make up Ukraine's Donbas region, has killed more than 14,000 people. A cease-fire has been breached multiply by both sides. In recent weeks, as Russian troops massed near Ukraine's borders, Russian-aligned media and digital actors have churned out constant stories of Ukrainian atrocities against ethnic Russians as part of a disinformation campaign to paint the government in Kyiv as a cabal of violent far-right nationalists.
White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan said on NBC's “Today” show Monday that a Russian invasion of Ukraine would be "extremely violent" and appeared to be days, if not hours, away. The Biden administration has insisted for several days that a Russian assault was imminent.
"This will not simply be some conventional war between two armies. It will be a war waged by Russia on the Ukrainian people to repress them, to crush them, to harm them," Sullivan said. "We believe the world must mobilize to counter this kind of Russian aggression should those tanks roll across the border."
Sullivan said Biden remained open to a summit with Putin — which Macron has tried to broker — but downplayed the likelihood that one would occur. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken is scheduled to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Thursday — as long as there has been no invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. says.
"Every indication we see on the ground right now in, terms of the disposition of Russian forces, is that they are in fact getting prepared for a major attack on Ukraine," Sullivan said. "We will go the extra mile on diplomacy, but we are also prepared with our allies and partners to respond decisively if Russia attacks."
The Russian army’s Southern Military District — which operates in areas neighboring Ukraine — said Monday that troops and border guards had prevented an incursion of what it called a “sabotage and reconnaissance group” coming in from Ukraine into Russian territory.
"Five violators of the Russian Federation's border from a sabotage and reconnaissance group were eliminated in an armed clash," said a statement from the army, according to the Russian news agency Interfax. The statement said the incursion occurred around 6 a.m. near Mityakinskaya, a Russian border village about 22 miles east of the city of Luhansk.
During the clash, a pair of Ukrainian army vehicles entered Russian territory but were destroyed by Russian military units using anti-tank systems, the statement said, adding: "No Russian Armed Forces and Federal Security Service members have been hurt."
A spokesman for the Ukrainian military's Joint Forces Operation rejected the Russian allegations, saying that “all information about a possible incursion by a reconnaissance group is false. We haven’t done any assault operations. It’s completely fake.”
In Moscow, the deputy chairman of the security council, Dmitry Medvedev, told Putin that if Russia went ahead and recognized Donetsk and Luhansk as independent republics, it would face "unprecedented pressure" internationally but that there was no choice. He said Russia's previous recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia had been a lesson to the West that Russia could not be ignored, according to a translation of Medvedev's comments by the Al Jazeera news channel.
Putin said the use of Ukraine "as an instrument of confrontation with our country poses a serious, very big threat to us." Moscow's priority, he said, was "not confrontation, but security."
Times staff writers Erin B. Logan, Jennifer Haberkorn, Eli Stokols and Tracy Wilkinson in Washington and Henry Chu in London contributed to this report.
Putin's Baseless Claims of Genocide Hint at More Than War
Max Fisher Sun, February 20, 2022 A protester throws a Molotov cocktail at riot police near Independence Square in Kiev, Ukraine, Feb. 20, 2014. (Sergey Ponomarev/The New York Times)
Moscow, in another escalation toward a possible invasion of Ukraine, is issuing a growing drumbeat of accusations, all without evidence, that center on a single word. “What is happening in the Donbas today is genocide,” President Vladimir Putin of Russia said Tuesday, referring to Ukraine’s east. Senior Russian officials and state media have since echoed Putin’s use of “genocide.” Russian diplomats circulated a document to the United Nations Security Council accusing Ukraine of “exterminating the civilian population” in its east.
On Friday, Russia-backed separatists, who control parts of Ukraine’s east, claimed that Ukraine’s military was about to attack, and ordered women and children to evacuate. Extensive coverage on Russian state media portrayed Russian minorities as fleeing a tyrannical Ukrainian military, and President Joe Biden called such incidents ploys fabricated as pretext for a Russian invasion.
The Kremlin has long asserted that Ukraine’s government persecutes ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking citizens. The charge, backed by lurid and false tales of anti-Russian violence, served as justification in 2014 for Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its invasion of eastern Ukraine.
The recent resurgence of such language, now voiced directly by Putin, indicates what analysts and Western governments say may again be a prelude to invasion.
But invocations of genocide represent more than just a superficial casus belli. They reflect Moscow’s sincere belief that, in a world dominated by a hostile West, it is the rightful protector of Russian populations throughout the former Soviet republics.
In that worldview, any break from Moscow’s influence within its sphere constitutes an attack on the Russian people as a whole — particularly in Ukraine, which Putin considers effectively Russian.
Claims of genocide, then, are a way to assert Russia’s sovereignty throughout an ethnic Russian empire that extends well beyond its formal borders — and a right to control that empire with force. Clashes of Civilizations
“There’s a long history of use and abuse of genocide rhetoric in post-Soviet countries,” said Matthew Kupfer, an analyst based in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, who has studied Moscow’s use of such claims.
Since the Soviet Union fell, and with it the ideological basis of its constituent states, those countries have reorganized their identities around the memory of World War II.
Genocide, as a symbol of the Nazis, became shorthand for anything deemed “absolute evil,” Kupfer said, making opposition to that evil a national imperative.
In the turmoil of 1990s Russia, nationalist writers like Sergei Glazyev won large audiences by calling Western policies an “economic genocide” against the Russian race.
And when relations between Moscow and some of its former satellites broke down in the mid-2000s, charges of genocide became the language of confrontation.
Pro-democracy uprisings in several former Soviet republics installed new governments, which championed their newly dominant non-Russian majorities.
Ukraine’s leaders, for instance, moved to elevate the Ukrainian language’s official status starting in 2004 and to label a devastating famine in the 1930s as a deliberate Soviet campaign of genocide.
Some Russian nationalists returned the charge, accusing those new governments of plotting to marginalize or even exterminate the Russian minorities within their borders.
As Russian nationalists rose in influence — in 2012, Putin appointed Glazyev as a senior adviser on regional matters — a view took hold in Moscow that any threat to its influence over former Soviet republics imperiled the Russian race as a whole.
In 2014, Ukrainians again revolted, initially over their president’s decision to reject a trade deal with the European Union, in favor of one with Russia.
The protests snowballed into demands to turn away from Russia and embrace a fully separate Ukrainian identity, which confirmed Moscow’s worst fears of a threat to Russian influence. Kremlin allies again leveled accusations of genocide, at first mostly as a generic expression of condemnation.
This became more than rhetorical as Moscow exploited Ukraine’s demographic divisions, in which Russian speakers were, at first, wary of Kyiv’s moves toward Europe.
Russia invaded the mostly Russian region of Crimea and backed militants in Ukraine’s mostly Russophone east, presenting itself as protecting populations to which it held a special responsibility.
Sectarian division served Moscow’s agenda, which meant that so did the specter of Ukrainian atrocities against the Russian minority.
State media saturated Russian homes with false stories, including ones about mass graves filled with Russian minority civilians and a 3-year-old boy crucified by Ukrainian forces that had retaken a separatist-held town. Russian citizens’ support for Moscow’s incursions surged.
The Russian World
Putin, seizing on Moscow’s successes acting as protector of Russians in Ukraine, began energetically championing what he termed the “Russian world.” In his telling, it is a sphere of influence rooted in ethnicity — an ethnicity that faces continuing threats of genocide.
This new mission solves several problems for Putin. It presents Russia’s interventions in neighboring states, typically to weaken unfriendly governments or prop up friendly ones, as defensive.
It tells Russian citizens, who have suffered under eight years of Western-led sanctions in retaliation for Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine, that they are sacrificing for a heroic struggle akin to World War II. It gives them a great empire to once more feel pride in.
And, maybe most important, it provides an ideological justification for a government, otherwise associated with corruption, that offers citizens fewer rights or opportunities.
As Moscow’s challenges have grown, so have its claims of a great struggle to protect the Russian race, often centered on Ukraine.
In 2015, as Russia’s economy cratered, Putin criticized Ukraine’s efforts to isolate Russia-backed separatists: “It smells of genocide,” he said. His government pledged to investigate the “genocide of the Russian-speaking population” in Ukraine.
And, in 2018, amid diplomatic crises that left Russia internationally isolated, a Kremlin-allied lawmaker accused Ukraine of seeking “a genocide against Russian people in the Donbas” while Russia’s foreign minister warned of “genocide through sanctions.”
The claims were hardly bluster alone. Many coincided with a military escalation in Ukraine, either by Russian armed forces or pro-Moscow separatists.
But each round also revealed a Kremlin growing steadily more paranoid and confrontational as its sphere of influence has come under greater pressure from crisis in Belarus, an uprising in Kazakhstan and an increasingly hard-line stance toward Moscow in Ukraine.
An Uncertain Escalation
In December, with Russia’s military beginning to build up on Ukraine’s borders, Putin repeated a familiar justification, saying the situation in Ukraine’s east “looks like genocide.”
“Claims of ‘genocide’ of Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine have been a constant background hum on Russian state propaganda channels” ever since, said Alexey Kovalev, a Russian journalist who heads a fact-checking organization.
But, unlike in 2014, Kovalev has written, Russians do not appear to be responding. There has been little of the past groundswell of outrage or sympathy.
Russian views of Ukraine, once fiercely hostile, are 45% favorable and 43% negative, a recent poll found. Although Russians widely backed the 2014 invasions of Ukraine, they express little enthusiasm for another.
“People are kind of burned out from Ukraine being on TV all the time,” Kupfer said. Although state media has pushed some tales similar to those in 2014, it has done so more sparingly.
“It may simply be that they recognize war will not be popular with the public,” Kupfer added of the Kremlin.
Tellingly, Russian claims of genocide during this crisis have often been aimed abroad, rather than at home, and come from figures with diplomatic weight.
In a Facebook post Thursday, Russia’s ambassador to the United States cited long-debunked “atrocities” in Ukraine to accuse the United States of abetting “a policy to force the Russian-speaking population out of their current places of residence.”
Thomas de Waal, a Russia expert for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, called such high-level comments “worrying” and said they indicated an “official rhetorical escalation.”
As with so many of Russia’s recent provocations, de Waal said, it is difficult to say whether such statements are intended to telegraph, or merely feint at, a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In either case, the escalation may reflect the national mission increasingly central to Putin’s Russia: a strong, defiant protector of Russians abroad who will never be safe without it.
In two ominous signs that Vladimir Putin may be readying an invasion of Ukraine, the Russian president on Friday signed a decree calling Russian military reservists to active training, while pro-Kremlin leaders in two breakaway “Russian-occupied” territories in eastern Ukraine ordered mobilization of men ages 18 to 55 to fight against their fellow Ukrainians.
Ukraine’s Donbas region, which holds the two Russian-controlled territories — Donetsk and Luhansk — has been the site of intensified shelling as well as gas line explosions and a car bombing on Friday. Women, children and the elderly in the area have been ordered to evacuate to Russia. Kremlin-backed separatist leaders in Donbas dubiously assert that the Ukrainian army is to blame for the open hostilities, while the U.S. believes they are so-called false flag operations committed by the separatists themselves that Russia may use to justify actively invading Ukraine’s East.
Former Russian Deputy Minister of Energy Vladimir Milov, now an opposition politician living in Lithuania, views eastern Ukraine as key to Putin’s strategy.
“I believe Putin’s ultimate aim, or one of his ultimate aims, is to formally put the Russian flag in the occupied territories of Donbas,” he told Yahoo News. “It would be a relatively low-cost exercise that would be presented as another geopolitical victory.”
Unlike many other analysts, however, Milov thinks Putin may not venture further than Donbas. “To occupy a large part of Ukrainian territory, including major cities like Kyiv, Putin would need 300,000 to 400,000 full-scale combat-ready troops,” he said. “Russia does not have that amount.”
Ian Bond, a former British diplomat in Russia and current foreign policy director of the think tank Centre for European Reform, told Yahoo News that if Putin’s goal is to seize Donetsk and Luhansk, it “would significantly damage Ukraine’s economy because they’ve got a lot of heavy industry there.” But given Russia’s influence over the region already, limiting an invasion to those areas of Donbas would be “a bit of a consolation prize,” Bond said, that might not “justify the impact on the Russian economy that Western sanctions might have.”
Map of Ukraine, including Russian-controlled areas of the Donbas region. (Yahoo News)
Further ratcheting up tensions, on Saturday Russia’s military conducted drills for its strategic nuclear arsenal across various parts of Russia and in the Black Sea. Meanwhile, shelling continued in Donbas, where several members of Ukrainian President Volodymry Zelensky’s party, including the minister of the interior, were forced to take cover in shelters, according to Ukrainian media.
Like the pro-Russian separatists, Putin has baselessly accused Ukrainians in Donbas of committing genocide in the eastern part of the country. Military analyst Gustav Gressel of the European Council on Foreign Relations said Putin will likely try to use that as a pretext for invading the region.
“I’d keep a close eye on that front,” Gressel told Yahoo News. “My guess is the Russians will try to provoke an escalation.”
Brussels-based analyst Roland Freudenstein, vice president of the think tank GLOBSEC, has been observing with increasing concern Ukraine’s divided Donbas region, site of a Moscow-backed proxy war that’s killed 14,000 over eight years, as a possible site of a Russian invasion. Freudenstein points to indicators such as the vote last Tuesday in the Duma, the Russian Parliament, calling upon Putin to recognize Donetsk and Luhansk as independent from Ukraine as well as the “increase in genocide propaganda by the Russians saying that Ukrainian military is attacking Russian-speaking civilians in Donbas.”
But with the world waiting to see what Putin will do next, some analysts believe Russia may not be content to limit its military strike to Donbas.
While stressing that he’s “not a military man,” Bond said he was looking at the possibility of an attack on Kyiv. Russia might also “make amphibious landings along the Black Sea coast near Odessa,” he added, thereby “effectively cutting off Ukraine from the sea.” Cities along the Black Sea, where over 30 Russian warships have been conducting military exercises over the past week, are seen as vulnerable by other analysts as well.
Civilians from Donetsk and Lugansk, located in Donbas region, at a camp after their evacuation to Rostov, Russia, Feb. 19, 2022. (Fedor Larin/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Andrii Klymenko, a defense analyst with Ukraine’s Black Sea Institute of Strategic Studies, told Yahoo News via a translator, that he also views Odessa as a potential target. He sees it as a possible site of a false flag operation “that would distract attention” from what he sees as the likely first moves of a Putin offensive: declaring independence for the Donetsk and Luhansk occupied areas, and securing more territory, with the help of amphibious troops, in Donbas and the Sea of Azov, including perhaps the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, which is crucial to Ukrainian maritime trade.
Robert, a European military and cybersecurity expert focused on Russia, who requested that his real name not be used for this article, also sees the Black Sea as a high-risk zone. “This idea of tanks rolling through Ukraine to me is a bit like movies of the Second World War,” he told Yahoo News. “Things could look very differently now — with an attack coming from the Black Sea trying to take Mariupol.”
Like others, including Bond and Gressel, Robert sees Kharkiv, a northeastern Ukrainian city of 1.4 million sitting 22 miles from the Russian border, as another potential site of invasion. If Russia took the city that is a center of industry, science and technology, “it would be a severe blow to Ukraine,” he said. Like Gressel, he suspects that Russian infiltrators are planning to stir up anti-Ukrainian protests or false flag operations there, giving Russia a reason to invade.
On the other hand, notes Centre for European Reform’s Ian Bond, Putin might use diplomatic pressure from France and Germany, who helped engineer the controversial ceasefire agreement called the Minsk Protocol, which Ukraine and Russia interpret differently, to try to whip Ukrainians into a frenzy, when all reports are they are calm and ready to fight Russia.
“If I’m Putin, I want to get people panicking and thinking there’s no point in fighting because they’re just going to get steamrolled.” Putin, he said, “could use the next few next days to ramp up diplomatic pressure, and get the French and Germans telling Zelenksy, ‘You’re not going to get any help from NATO, you need to fulfill the Minsk Agreements the way Russia wants them fulfilled.’”
“I’m sure,” Bond added, “Putin would rather achieve his objectives without having to go to war. But to do that, he’d have to increase the level of threat to the point where the opposition surrenders without having to fight.”
A member of the Donetsk People's Militia stationed in the rural town of Staromikhailovka, west of Donetsk. (Valentin Sprinchak\TASS via Getty Images)
Former NATO analyst Edward Hunter Christie, now senior fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, thinks that the West should skip the talk about diplomacy at this stage. “Western nations should probably start to impose sanctions already,” he told Yahoo News.
Zelensky agrees. “We don't need your sanctions after the bombardment will happen and after our country will be fired at or after we will have no borders, or after we will have no economy,” the Ukrainian president told CNN on Saturday. “Why would we need those sanctions then?”
Waiting around for Putin to reveal his next move only plays into Russia’s hands, Christie said.
“It's much better to make clear to the Russian Federation that we don’t believe anything they say, we don’t want to do business with them, we will cancel many projects, we will not start new commercial projects with them, we will deliberately reduce economic exchanges with them as much as possible. And we should minimize diplomatic exchanges with them,” Christie said. “Engaging in diplomatic discussions with Russia is a waste of time.”
