Using Any Metric, the U.S. Gamble to Harm Russia by Bombing Nordstream Was a Failure

Eve Ottenberg

 November 1, 2024
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Photograph Source: Bair175 – CC BY-SA 3.0

Years have passed since president Joe Biden allegedly ordered the bombing of the Nordstream 2 pipeline, and the dust has long settled. We can now answer whether the reckless white house gamble to damage Moscow succeeded or not. The answer is definitive: it failed. But did the white house really commit this massive economic, political and climate crime? Well, renowned investigative reporter Seymour Hersh long ago concluded, with lots of insider pizazz, that it did. Much more recently, on September 26, we very nearly got a smoking gun, namely verified reports of the surreptitious presence of U.S. navy warships with their transponders suspiciously OFF, near the crime scene, four or five days before the explosion. These warships operated in the exclusive economic zone of Denmark. The captain of a small Danish port learned of this, but officials silenced him for years. Only recently could he speak out to Danish journalists.

So whom did the explosion harm? Not Russia. Moscow just rerouted its cheap natural gas to the east and has been making money there, hand over fist. Similarly with its sanctioned oil: Moscow sells it to India, which raises the price and sells it to Europe. Russia is now the world’s fourth largest economy measured by purchasing power parity, edging out Japan, and is relatively unscathed by impotent western sanctions. Really, whom did the explosion hurt? Not the U.S., enabled by this convenient catastrophe to sell its outrageously expensive and therefore previously non-competitive liquified natural gas to Europe. But Europe? Ah, that’s another matter. And specifically Germany. Remember Biden threatened on TV to destroy Nordstream 2. His henchwoman Victoria Nuland fulminated thus also. It turns out, these Mafiosi-like threats came to fruition and led to the swift deindustrialization of Europe’s economic powerhouse – Deutschland.

Germany boasted 10,702 corporate insolvencies in the first quarter of 2024, rather an indictment of its Russophobic foreign and economic policy. After all, had Berlin okayed using the one remaining and functioning Nordstream pipeline, cheap Russian gas would have prevented many of those businesses from going bust. But prime minister Olaf  “Liver Brain” Scholz cut off his country’s nose to spite its face: No cheap energy from Moscow, even for the flagship German car corporation Volkswagen, currently mulling up to 30,000 job cuts, when it closes several German plants. The company also ended its longstanding job security arrangements with the country’s unions. And what has caused this manufacturing debacle? Abrupt withdrawal from cheap Russian energy. And other sundry imbecilic sanctions. Europe, with the Teutonic nation leading the way, decided to commit economic suicide.

Germany’s economy shrinks steadily, as RT reported October 14: Its growth for 2024 will likely be minus .2 percent, and this is “the new, miserable German normal.” It’s not a blip, not an aberration, but the way things are gonna be for quite some time. As RT observes, gone are the halcyon, pre-Russia sanction days of the mid-2000s with 24 percent cumulative growth. And things aren’t better elsewhere in the European Union. France is on track for 57,000 to 62,000 corporate insolvencies in 2024. Italy is predicted to suffer a 22 percent increase in such bankruptcies this year, while in Spain thousands of businesses shuttered. Meanwhile thousands of U.K. companies went belly up in 2024, and officials estimate 147 percent insolvencies over pre-pandemic levels.

This is not the rosy picture of a thriving region. It has the whiff of the funeral parlor, especially when these lousy bankruptcy stats combine with a long-term, declining birthrate. Europe depended vitally on cheap Russian energy. In truth, Moscow subsidized European industry and protected it from American economic predation – who knew? Evidently not the Europeans, who apparently in their degraded arrogance just took this sweet deal for granted. Now that they’ve spurned it for their so-called principles (what principles? That they should be allowed to expand a murderous military alliance right onto Russia’s doorstep, without a peep of objection from the kremlin? Or that they should aid Ukro-fascist slaughter of ethnic Russians in the Donbass?), they find their companies closing up shop and many relocating, where? Dum, da, dum, dum: to the United States, thanks to the American Inflation Reduction Act, a deliberate affront to its so-called allies in Europe, designed to steal their businesses. Washington’s vassalization project for Europe is complete, and demonstrating Germany’s abject submission, its president recently awarded Joe “Nordstream Bomber” Biden a medal. I mean, is this the height of masochism or what?

Meanwhile, in other dismal EU news, Moldova’s recent referendum was manipulated October 20 so that it can join this gang of suicidal masochists, aka the EU. The election was a disgrace for democracy; according to political scientist and East European expert Ivan Katchanovski on twitter October 21, many pro-Russian citizens in Transdniestria could not vote, while only two polling stations in Moscow opened for the 400,000 Moldovan citizens living in Russia. That meant maybe as few as 10,000 out of 400,000 Moldovans in Russia could vote. This was a decision of the pro-EU Moldovan government, which, by the way, only won an even 50 percent of Moldovans living in country for its EU membership bid…Welp, that’s it for Moldova, in all likelihood the next Ukraine, self-immolating on a western altar of spurious openness to troublemaking groups like NATO and whatever idiotic fad of the day comes along.

One incident involving the presidential election, tweeted out by Peacemaket October 21, was especially egregious. “A Moldovan citizen arrived in Moldova, went to vote in the country’s presidential election and found that the UK had already voted for him. The incident occurred with a man called Alexander Nikolaevich in the town of Tvarditsa in the Taraclia region of the republic. This is known as election fraud.”

So from this you can conclude that the presidential vote, like the EU referendum one, was not exactly on the up and up. But hey, U.S. officials helped actual Nazis to overthrow the Kiev government back in 2014, so they’re old hands when it comes to such funny-business in this corner of Europe. I don’t know if there was any American involvement in this shady Moldovan election, but U.S. preferences there are no secret. And those preferences, of course, come with ideologically doctrinal anti-Russian blinkers. No dissent allowed. As we also see in Georgia, where the overwhelming late October vote to remain, well, Georgian instead of joining the EU’s kamikaze mission for it to open a second front against Russia may yet lead to a western-backed coup against the legally elected government.

Back in Berlin, one can say that overall, American behavior toward its EU ally has been atrocious. Calling for destroying an ally’s critical infrastructure – Nordstream – then actually bombing it, then cravenly lying about it and expecting its victims to swallow these lies, literally rubbing their faces in this humbug – what are the words for such behavior? Treacherous, wicked, arrogant, violent, feckless, stupid? You pick. But however many you pick, don’t forget stupid. Because Washington needs a healthy European ally. Joe Biden may not have thought so, if thought can be attributed to his actions, but without a healthy Europe, who does the U.S. have? Canada, Japan, South Korea, Israel and Australia. That’s about it. Compare it to the number of countries in or clamoring to join BRICS. And make no mistake, Washington has induced decline in Europe. This, after embarking on its disastrous Ukraine proxy adventure, which has left western defense cupboards nearly bare.

When photos first appeared of the effects of the Nordstream explosion in the sea, Polish minister of foreign affairs, Radek Sikorski tweeted: “Thank you, America.” Thank you for nothing is more like it. Thank you for robbing us, he should have said. And when the history of this disgraceful and disgusting episode comes to be written, it will be noted prominently that this was Washington’s first shot at its closest ally’s head and, ultimately, its own.

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest novel is Booby Prize. She can be reached at her website.

Calls mount for Germany to rethink Russian gas pipeline plan after Navalny poisoning

Issued on: 03/09/2020 - 

A supporter of Alexei Navalny holds up a picture of the Kremlin opponent after he was taken ill with poisoning OLGA MALTSEVA AFP/File

Text by:FRANCE 

A European response that involves the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline is needed against Russia after the poisoning of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny with a Soviet-style Novichok nerve agent, some politicians and diplomats in Germany said on Thursday.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said she expected Moscow to join efforts to clear up what happened and that Germany would consult its NATO allies about how to respond, raising the prospect of new Western sanctions on Russia.

"There must be a European response," Norbert Roettgen, head of Germany's parliamentary foreign affairs committee, told Deutschlandfunk radio on Thursday, when asked whether work on the NordStream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany should stop.

"We must pursue hard politics, we must respond with the only language (Russian President Vladimir) Putin understands - that is gas sales," said Roettgen, a member of Merkel's ruling conservatives.

Navalny is lying in intensive care in a hospital in Berlin after his flight was arranged by activists. A German military laboratory produced "unequivocal evidence" that he had been poisoned with Novichok, the government said on Wednesday.


Moscow has denied involvement in the poisoning of Navalny, a longtime critic of Putin's rule, and the Russian foreign ministry said Germany's assertion was not backed by evidence.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there was no reason to discuss sanctions against Moscow after Merkel said Germany would consult its NATO allies about how to respond to the poisoning.

Wolfgang Ischinger, chairman of the Munich Security Conference and a former ambassador to Washington, backed a joint response from the EU and NATO and said softer gestures, such as the expulsions of diplomats, may not suffice.

"If we want to send a clear message to Moscow with our partners, then economic relations must be on the agenda and that means the NordStream 2 project must not be left out," said Ischinger, adding that a full boycott would not be a good move.

"We can't put up a wall between the West and Russia, that would be a step too far, but there is a middle ground, something between diplomatic gestures and total boycott," said Ischinger.

(FRANCE 24 with REUTERS)

A Pipelineistan fable for our times
Ukraine was supposed to prevent Russia from deepening energy ties with Germany; it didn't work out that way

By PEPE ESCOBAR JUNE 8, 2020


Once upon a time in Pipelineistan, tales of woe were the norm. Shattered dreams littered the chessboard – from IPI vs. TAPI in the AfPak realm to the neck-twisting Nabucco opera in Europe.

In sharp contrast, whenever China entered the picture, successful completion prevailed. Beijing financed a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Xinjiang, finished in 2009, and will profit from two spectacular Power of Siberia deals with Russia.

And then there’s Ukraine. Maidan was a project of the Barack Obama administration, featuring a sterling cast led by POTUS, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John McCain and last but not least, prime Kiev cookie distributor Victoria “F**k the EU” Nuland.

Ukraine was also supposed to prevent Russia from deepening energy ties with Germany, as well as other European destinations.

Well, it did not exactly play like that. Nord Stream was already operational. South Stream was Gazprom’s project to southeast Europe. Relentless pressure by the Obama administration derailed it. Yet that only worked to enable a resurrection: the already completed TurkStream, with gas starting to flow in January 2020.

The battlefield then changed to Nord Stream 2. This time relentless Donald Trump administration pressure did not derail it. On the contrary: it will be completed by the end of 2020.

Richard Grennel, the US ambassador to Germany, branded a “superstar” by President Trump, was furious. True to script, he threatened Nordstream 2 partners – ENGIE, OMV, Royal Dutch Shell, Uniper, and Wintershall – with “new sanctions.”

Worse: he stressed that Germany “must stop feeding the beast at a time when it does not pay enough to NATO.”

“Feeding the beast” is not exactly subtle code for energy trade with Russia.

Peter Altmaier, German minister of economic affairs and energy, was not impressed. Berlin does not recognize any legality in extra-territorial sanctions.

Grennel, on top of it, is not exactly popular in Berlin. Diplomats popped the champagne when they knew he was going back home to become the head of US national intelligence.

Trump administration sanctions delayed Nordstream 2 for around one year, at best. What really matters is that in this interval Kiev had to sign a gas transit deal with Gazprom. What no one is talking about is that by 2025 no Russian gas will be transiting across Ukraine towards Europe.

So the whole Maidan project was in fact useless.

It’s a running joke in Brussels that the EU never had and will never have a unified energy policy towards Russia. The EU came up with a gas directive to force the ownership of Nord Stream 2 to be separated from the gas flowing through the pipeline. German courts applied their own “nein.”

Nord Stream 2 is a serious matter of national energy security for Germany. And that is enough to trump whatever Brussels may concoct.

And don’t forget Siberia

The moral of this fable is that now two key Pipelineistan nodes – Turk Stream and Nord Stream 2 – are established as umbilical steel cords linking Russia with two NATO allies.

And true to proverbial win-win scripts, now it’s also time for China to look into solidifying its European relations.

Last week, German chancellor Angela Merkel and Chinese premier Li Keqiang had a video conference to discuss Covid-19 and China-EU economic policy.

That was a day after Merkel and President Xi had spoken, when they agreed that the China-EU summit in Leipzig on September 14 would have to be postponed.

This summit should be the climax of the German presidency of the EU, which starts on July 1. That’s when Germany would be able to present a unified policy towards China, uniting in theory the 27 EU members and not only the 17+1 from Central Europe and the Balkans – including 11 EU members – that already have a privileged relationship with Beijing and are on board for the Belt and Road Initiative.

In contrast with the Trump administration, Merkel does privilege a clear, comprehensive trade partnership with China – way beyond a mere photo op summit. Berlin is way more geoeconomically sophisticated than the vague “engagement and exigence” Paris approach.

Merkel as well as Xi are fully aware of the imminent fragmentation of the world economy post-Lockdown. Yet as much as Beijing is ready to abandon the global circulation strategy from which it has handsomely profited for the past two decades, the emphasis is also on refining very close trade relations with Europe.

Ray McGovern has concisely detailed the current state of US-Russia relations. The heart of the whole matter, from Moscow’s point of view, was summarized by Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, an extremely able diplomat:

“We don’t believe the US in its current shape is a counterpart that is reliable, so we have no confidence, no trust whatsoever. So our own calculations and conclusions are less related to what America is doing …. We cherish our close and friendly relations with China. We do regard this as a comprehensive strategic partnership in different areas, and we intend to develop it further.”

It’s all here. Russia-China “comprehensive strategic partnership” steadily advancing. Including “Power of Siberia” Pipelineistan. Plus Pipelineistan linking two key NATO allies. Sanctions? What sanctions?

GEORGE SOROS 

Remarks Delivered at the 2022 World Economic Forum in Davos

Davos, Switzerland, May 24, 2022

  

Since the last Davos meeting the course of history has changed dramatically. 

Russia invaded Ukraine. This has shaken Europe to its core. The European Union was established to prevent such a thing from happening. Even when the fighting stops as it eventually must, the situation will never revert to what it was before. 

The invasion may have been the beginning of the Third World War and our civilization may not survive it. That is the subject I will address this evening.

The invasion of Ukraine didn’t come out of the blue. The world has been increasingly engaged in a struggle between two systems of governance that are diametrically opposed to each other: open society and closed society. Let me define the difference as simply as I can. 

In an open society, the role of the state is to protect the freedom of the individual; in a closed society the role of the individual is to serve the rulers of the state.

Other issues that concern all of humanity – fighting pandemics and climate change, avoiding nuclear war, maintaining global institutions – have had to take a back seat to that struggle. That’s why I say our civilization may not survive. 

I became engaged in what I call political philanthropy in the 1980s. That was a time when a large part of the world was under Communist rule, and I wanted to help people who were outraged and fought against oppression. 

As the Soviet Union disintegrated, I established one foundation after another in rapid succession in what was then the Soviet empire. The effort turned out to be more successful than I expected. 

Those were exciting days. They also coincided with a period of personal financial success that allowed me to increase my annual giving from $3 million in 1984 to more than $300 million three years later. 

After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the tide began to turn against open societies. Repressive regimes are now in the ascendant and open societies are under siege. Today China and Russia present the greatest threat to open society. 

I have pondered long and hard why that should have happened. I found part of the answer in the rapid development of digital technology, especially artificial intelligence.

In theory, AI ought to be politically neutral: it can be used for good or bad. But in practice the effect is asymmetric. AI is particularly good at producing instruments of control that help repressive regimes and endanger open societies. Covid-19 also helped legitimize instruments of control because they are really useful in dealing with the virus. 

The rapid development of AI has gone hand in hand with the rise of social media and tech platforms. These conglomerates have come to dominate the global economy. They are multinational and their reach extends around the world.

These developments have had far-reaching consequences. They have sharpened the conflict between China and the United States. China has turned its tech platforms into national champions. The United States has been more hesitant because it has worried about their effect on the freedom of the individual. 

These different attitudes shed new light on the conflict between the two different systems of governance that the US and China represent. 

Xi Jinping’s China, which collects personal data for the surveillance and control of its citizens more aggressively than any other country in history, ought to benefit from these developments. But, as I shall explain later tonight, that is not the case. 

Let me now turn to recent developments, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping met on February 4^th at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics. They issued a long statement announcing that the cooperation between them has “no limits”. Putin informed Xi of a “special military operation” in Ukraine, but it is unclear whether he told Xi that he had a full-scale attack on Ukraine in mind. US and UK military experts certainly told their Chinese counterparts what was in store. Xi approved, but asked Putin to wait until the conclusion of the winter Olympics. 

For his part, Xi resolved to hold the Olympics in spite of the Omicron variant that was just beginning to spread in China. The organizers went to great lengths to create an airtight bubble for the competitors and the Olympics concluded without a hitch.

But Omicron established itself in the community, first in Shanghai, China’s largest city and commercial hub. Now it is spreading to the rest of the country. Yet Xi persists with his Zero Covid policy. That has inflicted great hardships on Shanghai’s population, by forcing them into makeshift quarantine centers instead of allowing them to quarantine themselves at home. This has driven Shanghai to the verge of open rebellion. 

Many people are puzzled by this seemingly irrational approach, but I can give you the explanation: Xi harbors a guilty secret. He never told the Chinese people that they had been inoculated with a vaccine that was designed for the original Wuhan variant and offers very little protection against new variants. 

Xi can’t afford to come clean because he is at a very delicate moment in his career. His second term in office expires in the fall of 2022 and he wants to be appointed to an unprecedented third term, eventually making him ruler for life.

He has carefully choreographed a process that would allow him to fulfill his life’s ambition, and everything must be subordinated to this goal. 

In the meantime, Putin’s so-called “special military operation” didn’t unfold according to plan. He expected his army to be welcomed by the Russian speaking population of Ukraine as liberators. His soldiers carried with them their dress uniforms for a victory parade. But that is not what happened. 

Ukraine put up unexpectedly strong resistance and inflicted severe damage on the invading Russian army. The army was badly equipped and badly led and the soldiers became demoralized. The United States and the European Union rallied to Ukraine’s support and supplied it with armaments. With their help, Ukraine was able to defeat the much larger Russian army in the battle for Kyiv. 

Putin could not afford to accept defeat and changed his plans accordingly. He put General Vladimir Shamanov, well known for his cruelty in the siege of Grozny, in charge and ordered him to produce some success by May 9^th when Victory Day was to be celebrated. 

But Putin had very little to celebrate. Shamanov concentrated his efforts on the port city of Mariupol which used to have 400,000 inhabitants. He reduced it to rubble, as he had done to Grozny but the Ukrainian defenders held out for 82 days and the siege cost the lives of thousands of civilians.

Moreover, the hasty withdrawal from Kyiv revealed the heinous atrocities that Putin’s army had committed on the civilian population in a suburb of Kyiv, Bucha. They are well-documented, and they have outraged those who saw the pictures on television. That did not include the people of Russia who had been kept in the dark about Putin’s “special military operation”.

The invasion of Ukraine has now entered a new phase which is much more challenging for the Ukrainian army. They must fight on open terrain where the numerical superiority of the Russian army is more difficult to overcome. 

The Ukrainians are doing their best, counterattacking and penetrating Russian territory. This has had the added benefit of bringing home to the Russian population what is really going on. 

The US has also done its best to reduce the financial gap between Russia and Ukraine by getting Congress to allocate an unprecedented $40 billion in military and financial aid to Ukraine. I can’t predict the outcome, but Ukraine certainly has a fighting chance. 

Recently, European leaders went even further. They wanted to use the invasion of Ukraine to promote greater European integration, so that what Putin is doing can never happen again. 

Enrico Letta, leader of Partito Democratico, proposed a plan for a partially federated Europe. The federal portion would cover key policy areas. 

In the federal core, no member state would have veto power. In the wider confederation member states could join “coalitions of the willing” or simply retain their veto power. Mario Draghi endorsed Letta’s plan.

Emmanuel Macron, in a significant broadening of his pro-European approach, advocated geographic expansion, and the need for the EU to prepare for it. Not only Ukraine but also Moldova and the Western Balkans should qualify for membership in the European Union. It will take a long time to work out the details, but Europe seems to be moving in the right direction. It has responded to the invasion of Ukraine with greater speed, unity and vigor than ever before in its history. After a hesitant start, Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, also has found a strong pro-European voice. 

But Europe’s dependence on Russian fossil fuels remains excessive, due largely to the mercantilist policies pursued by former Chancellor Angela Merkel. She had made special deals with Russia for the supply of gas and made China Germany’s largest export market. That made Germany the best performing economy in Europe but now there is a heavy price to pay. Germany’s economy needs to be reoriented. And that will take a long time.

Olaf Scholz was elected Chancellor because he promised to continue Merkel’s policies. But events forced him to abandon this promise. That didn’t come easy, because he had to break with the hallowed traditions of the Social Democrats. 

But when it comes to maintaining European unity, Scholz always seems to do the right thing in the end. He abandoned Nordstream 2, committed a 100 billion euros to defense and provided arms to Ukraine, breaking with a long-standing taboo. That is how the Western democracies responded to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

What do the two dictators Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have to show for themselves? They are tied together in an alliance that has no limits. They also have a lot in common. They rule by intimidation, and as a consequence they make mind-boggling mistakes. Putin expected to be welcomed in Ukraine as a liberator; Xi Jinping is sticking to a Zero Covid policy that can’t possibly be sustained. 

Putin seems to have recognized that he made a terrible mistake when he invaded Ukraine and he is now preparing the ground for negotiating a cease fire. But the cease fire is unattainable because he cannot be trusted. Putin would have to start peace negotiations which he will never do because it would be equivalent to resigning. 

The situation is confusing. A military expert who had been opposed to the invasion was allowed to go on Russian television to inform the public how bad the situation is. Later he swore allegiance to Putin. Interestingly, Xi Jinping continues to support Putin, but no longer without limits. 

This begins to explain why Xi Jinping is bound to fail. Giving Putin permission to launch an unsuccessful attack against Ukraine didn’t serve China’s best interests. China ought to be the senior partner in the alliance with Russia but Xi Jinping’s lack of assertiveness allowed Putin to usurp that position. But Xi’s worst mistake was to double down on his Zero Covid policy. 

The lockdowns had disastrous consequences. They pushed the Chinese economy into a free fall. It started in March, and it will continue to gather momentum until Xi reverses course – which he will never do because he can’t admit a mistake. Coming on top of the real estate crisis the damage will be so great that it will affect the global economy. With the disruption of supply chains, global inflation is liable to turn into global depression.

Yet, the weaker Putin gets the more unpredictable he becomes. The member states of the EU feel the pressure. They realize that Putin may not wait until they develop alternative sources of energy but turn off the taps on gas while it really hurts. 

The RePowerEu program announced last week reflects these fears. Olaf Scholz is particularly anxious because of the special deals that his predecessor Angela Merkel made with Russia. Mario Draghi is more courageous, although Italy’s gas dependency is almost as high as Germany’s. Europe’s cohesion will face a severe test but if it continues to maintain its unity, it could strengthen both Europe’s energy security and leadership on climate.

What about China? Xi Jinping has many enemies. Nobody dares to attack him directly because he has centralized all the instruments of surveillance and repression in his own hands, but it is well known that there is dissention within the Communist Party. It has become so sharp that it has found expression in articles that ordinary people can read.

Contrary to general expectations Xi Jinping may not get his coveted third term because of the mistakes he has made. But even if he does, the Politburo may not give him a free hand to select the members of the next Politburo. That would greatly reduce his power and influence and make it less likely that he will become ruler for life.

While the war rages, the fight against climate change has to take second place. Yet the experts tell us that we have already fallen far behind, and climate change is on the verge of becoming irreversible. That could be the end of our civilization. 

I find this prospect particularly frightening. Most of us accept the idea that we must eventually die but we take it for granted that our civilization will survive. 

Therefore, we must mobilize all our resources to bring the war to an early end. The best and perhaps only way to preserve our civilization is to defeat Putin as soon as possible. That’s the bottom line.

Thank you.

Brussels Begins to Mobilise Its Mass Censorship Regime for Upcoming EU Elections

By Nick Corbishley
April 4, 2024
Source: Naked Capitalism

Mark O' Cúlar - no propaganda. Flickr.

This is the culmination of a process that began at least a decade ago.

One of the most important (albeit least reported) developments of 2023 was the launch of the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which came into full effect in late August and which we covered in the article, The EU’s Mass Censorship Regime Is Almost Fully Operational. Will It Go Global? The goal of the DSA is to combat — i.e., suppress — mis- and disinformation online, not just in Europe but potentially across the world, and is part of a broader trend of Western governments actively pushing to censor information on the Internet as they gradually lose control over key narrative threads.

Here’s how it works: so-called Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) and Search Engines (VLSEs) — those with more than 45 million active monthly users in the EU — are required to censor content hosted on their platforms deemed to be illegal by removing it, blocking it, or providing certain information to the authorities concerned. Platforms are also required to tackle hate speech, dis- or misinformation if it is deemed to have “actual or foreseeable negative effects on civic discourse and electoral processes, and public security” and/or “actual or foreseeable negative effects in relation to gender-based violence, the protection of public health and minors and serious negative consequences to the person’s physical and mental well-being.”

Besides take-downs and outright suspensions, other familiar tools at the disposal of tech platforms include de-monetisation, content demotion, shadow-banning and account visibility filtering. The European Commission has primary, but not exclusive, regulatory responsibility for VLOPs and VLOSEs. The same requirements now also apply to all other online service providers, though responsibility for execution and enforcement lies not with the Commission but national authorities.

Staying Mum

So far, the platforms, including even Elon Musk’s X, appear to be adhering to the EU’s rules on disinformation. If they weren’t, they could face serious economic consequences, including fines of up to 6% of global turnover, as well as the looming threat of warrantless inspections of company premises. The X platform (formerly known as Twitter) may have left the EU’s voluntary code of practice last summer and in December was hit with a probe over disinformation related to Hamas’s October 7 attack, but its actions — or rather lack of actions — since then suggest it is indeed complying with the rules.

As Robert Kogon reports for Brownstone Institute, (granted, not the most popular source of information on NC, but this is another solid, well researched piece by Kogon on a topic virtually no one else is talking about), “while Musk and the Twitter Files are so verbose about alleged ‘US government censorship,’” they “have remained suitably mum about EU censorship demands”:

[I]t is strictly impossible that Twitter has not had and is not continuing to have contact – indeed extensive and regular contact – with EU officials about censoring content and accounts that the European Commission deems “mis-” or “disinformation.” But we have heard absolutely nothing about this in the “Twitter Files.”

Why? The answer is: because EU censorship really is government censorship, i.e. censorship that Twitter is required to carry out on pain of sanction. This is the difference between the EU censorship and what Elon Musk himself has denounced as “US government censorship.” The latter has amounted to nudges and requests, but was never obligatory and could never be obligatory, thanks to the First Amendment and the fact that there has never been any enforcement mechanism. Any law creating such an enforcement mechanism would be obviously unconstitutional. Hence, Twitter could always simply say no…

Far from any sign of defiance of the Code and the DSA, what we get from Elon Musk is repeated pledges of fealty: like the below tweet that he posted after meeting with EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton in January. (For an earlier such pledge in the form of a joint video message with Breton, see here.)

Now, the European Commission has its sights set on the EU’s parliamentary elections, to be held in June. “Integrity of election[s] is one of my top priorities for DSA enforcement, as we are entering a period of elections in Europe,” Breton the Enforcer told Politico last September.

Elections in Slovakia in September were supposed to offer a dummy run, but the results were underwhelming, at least as far as the Commission was concerned. The left-wing populist and social conservative party, Direction–Social Democracy (Smer-SD), led by former Prime Minister Robert Fico, took the largest number of votes and was able to form a coalition government with like-minded parties. Fico had promised to cut all aid to Ukraine, which he says is governed by neo-Nazis, as well as block its ascension to NATO.

The Commission is determined to up its game, however. Last week, it published a set of guidelines for Big Tech firms to help Brussels “secure” the upcoming elections from foreign interference and other threats. The guidelines recommend “mitigation measures and best practices to be undertaken by Very Large Online Platforms and Search Engines before, during, and after electoral events,” and are explained as necessary in order to prevent things like fake news, turnout suppression, cyber threats and attacks, and, of course, Russia’s malign influence on European public opinion, particularly regarding Ukraine.

“In the European Union we speak about the Kremlin, which is very successful in creating narratives which can influence the voting preferences of the people,” said EU Vice-President for Values and Transparency, Věra Jourová, in a recent interview with the Atlantic Council, a neocon think tank that knows a thing or two about disinformation having played a leading role in the ProporNot fiasco that baselessly outed hundreds of alternative news websites as Russian propagandists including this one. “And lying, just lies… Disinformation in order to influence elections in a way that the people in Europe will stop to support (sic) Ukraine.”

List of Demands

Here is, word for word, the full list of the EU’s demands for the platforms, interspersed with a few observations and speculations of my own (italicised and in brackets). The platforms are instructed to:

“Reinforce their internal processes, including by setting up internal teams with adequate resources, using available analysis and information on local context-specific risks and on the use of their services by users to search and obtain information before, during and after elections, to improve their mitigation measures.”

(This may sound eerily familiar to the US government’s censorship efforts revealed by the Twitter files, but there is a key difference: the processes in the US were largely covert and informal, with nothing in the way of legal consequences in the case of non-compliance. By contrast, the EU’s DSA ensures that the processes are not just overt and legally authorised, they are backed up with the very real threat of substantial economic sanctions).

“Implement elections-specific risk mitigation measures tailored to each individual electoral period and local context. Among the mitigation measures included in the guidelines, Very Large Online Platforms and Search Engines should promote official information on electoral processes, implement media literacy initiatives, and adapt their recommender systems to empower users and reduce the monetisation and virality of content that threatens the integrity of electoral processes. Moreover, political advertising should be clearly labelled as such, in anticipation of the new regulation on the transparency and targeting of political advertising.”

(The first sentence serves as a reminder that these processes will be applied not only to EU elections. As the Commission’s announcement on X makes clear, it also plans to “protect the integrity” of 17 national or local elections across Europe this year. What about elections in other regions of the world? For example, the US’ general election in November, on which so much rests, including quite possibly the future of NATO. Clearly, the European Commission and the national governments of many EU member states have a vested interest in trying to prevent another Trump triumph).

“Adopt specific mitigation measures linked to generative AI: Very Large Online Platforms and Search Engines whose services could be used to create and/or disseminate generative AI content should assess and mitigate specific risks linked to AI, for example by clearly labelling content generated by AI (such as deepfakes), adapting their terms and conditions accordingly and enforcing them adequately.”

(The EU has just passed its AI Act, one of whose ostensible purposes is to tackle the threat posed by AI-generated videos and other recordings. As high-quality deep fakes are becoming harder to desire, this is a growing challenge. For the moment, the Commission is relying on the DSA to address these risks for the upcoming EU elections).

“Cooperate with EU level and national authorities, independent experts, and civil society organisations to foster an efficient exchange of information before, during and after the election and facilitate the use of adequate mitigation measures, including in the areas of Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI), disinformation and cybersecurity.”

(As readers no doubt appreciate, this level of collusion between government and big tech platforms — the ultimate public-private partnership — aimed at controlling the message throughout an election period, is exceedingly dangerous. Even the EFF, which has praised many aspects of the DSA, warns that “Issues with government involvement in content moderation are pervasive and whilst trusted flaggers are not new, the DSA’s system could have a significant negative impact on the rights of users, in particular that of privacy and free speech.”)

“Adopt specific measures, including an incident response mechanism, during an electoral period to reduce the impact of incidents that could have a significant effect on the election outcome or turnout.”

“Assess the effectiveness of the measures throughpost-election reviews. Very Large Online Platforms and Search Engines should publish a non-confidential version of such post-election review documents, providing opportunity for public feedback on the risk mitigation measures put in place.”

(This last point feels as though it is intended to give this vast entreprise a veneer of respectability through the use of expressions such as “non-confidential” and “public feedback,” presenting the illusion that these processes will all be happening out in the open and with the direct involvement of the public, which couldn’t be further from the truth).

Not everything about the DSA is bad, however. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), for example, has praised many aspects of the regulation, including the protections it provides on user rights to privacy by prohibiting platforms from undertaking targeted advertising based on sensitive user information, such as sexual orientation or ethnicity. “More broadly, the DSA increases the transparency about the ads users see on their feeds as platforms must place a clear label on every ad, with information about the buyer of the ad and other details.” It also “reins in the powers of Big Tech” by forcing them to “comply with far-reaching obligations and responsibly tackle systemic risks and abuse on their platform.”

But the EFF says it also “gives way too much power to government agencies to flag and remove potentially illegal content and to uncover data about anonymous speakers”:

Democracies are in many ways like the internet. In both cases, it may take a thousand cuts to demolish their foundation, yet each cut contributes significantly to their erosion. One such cut exists in the Digital Services Act (DSA) in the form of drastic and overbroad government enforcement powers.

A Long Time Coming

The DSA is the culmination of a process that began at least a decade ago. Following the 2014 Maidan Square uprising, the US, NATO and the EU began attacking those who denounced it for what it was> a coup d’état. It was not long before the EU’s vast bureaucratic superstate was wheeled into place for a new propaganda war with Moscow.

At the start of 2015, Anne Applebaum (wife of the Polish ex-Minister for Defence, Radosław Sikorski, who famously thanked the US for the sabotage of the Nordstream pipelines), set up a unit within the Washington Center for European Policy Analysis called the Information Warfare Initiative. Its founding mission was to counter Russian information in Central and Eastern Europe.

Months later, the European Council tasked the EU’s then chief diplomat, Federica Mogherini, with preparing a plan of “strategic communication” to denounce the Russian disinformation campaigns relating to Ukraine. The end result was the establishment of the EEAS Strategic Communication Division, whose functions include “leading the work on addressing foreign disinformation, information manipulation and interference” as well as “analys[ing] the information environment in order to enable EU foreign policy implementation and protect its values and interests.” That was in April 2015.

After 2016, the EU took its fight against disinformation to a whole new level following the triumph of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. In June 2018, the Commission launched its Code of Practice on Disinformation, which was “voluntarily” signed by all of the major online social media platforms and search engines. In June 2022, almost exactly four years later, the Digital Services Act became law. Just over a year after that, on August 25, 2023, the deadline by which all VLOPs and VLSEs had to begin fully complying with the DSA passed. On that date, the EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation lost its voluntary nature.

According to Jourová, Brussels is only interested in helping to establish the “facts”, not censoring people’s “opinions”:

But who gets to decide what actually constitutes mis- or disinformation for the EU’s roughly 450 million citizens (as well as arguably untold millions of citizens far beyond Europe’s borders)?

The European Commission.

That’s right, the EU’s scandal-tarnished, power-hungry executive branch whose top jobs, including that of its current president, Ursula von der Leyen, will be indirectly determined by the upcoming EU elections. It is the 705 Members of the European Parliament chosen by EU citizens this June who will ultimately have the final say on who fills the Commission’s roles.

The performance of the current Commission and Parliament is hardly what you would describe as vote-winning. The current Commission President Von der Leyen is under investigation on multiple fronts, including by the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, for her refusal to disclose the content of her whatsapp conversation with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla during pre-negotiations for up to 1.8 billion Pfizer-BioNtech COVID-19 vaccines. It was one of the biggest procurement contracts in EU history. VdL has also faced accusations of conflicts of interest over her husband’s role as scientific director at US biotech company Orgenesis, which received hundreds of millions of euros of EU subsidies on two separate occasions.

Von der Leyen now wants the Commission to take a central role coordinating EU weapons procurement. She even cited her office’s success in procuring COVID-19 vaccines as a model to follow. Her Commission has also provided unbridled support to Israel while the IDF commits genocidal war against the people of Gaza. It has sabotaged the EU’s economic future through its endless backfiring sanctions on Russia while consistently putting US interests first. As economic conditions have deteriorated, the response from both the EU Commission and many member governments is almost always the same, as Conor Gallagher reported recently:

More wage suppressions, more market-friendly reforms, more social spending cuts, and more privatization. It was only a few months ago that the New York-based private equity firm KKR, which includes former CIA director David Petraeus as a partner, reached a controversial agreement to buy the fixed-line network of Telecom Italia. Now the Italian daily La Repubblica is declaring that “Italy Is For Sale,” in which it describes plans for 20 billion euros worth of privatizations, including more of the state rail company Ferrovie dello Stato, Poste Italiane, Monte dei Paschi bank and energy giant Eni. The plan is reportedly necessitated by the country’s tax cuts. The roughly 100 billion euros Rome has burned through in order to address the energy crisis surely hasn’t helped either. And this was happening with the suspension of the EU debt brake.

Acceleration of a Long-Term Trend

In a recent op-ed in Berliner Zeitung, a retired German judge described the DSA as a “trojan horse that presents a façade of respecting democratic principles@ while doing the exact opposite. He concludes that the EU’s mass censorship regime poses an “existential threat” to freedom of speech and the freedom of press, which are the corner stones of any genuine liberal democracy.:

The EU Commission sets the standard by which disinformation is judged. However, this means that politically unsavoury opinions, even scientifically argued positions, can be deleted, and not only that: if it is classified as unlawful, there are social consequences.

One inevitable result is that citizens begin self-censoring to align their messages on the platforms with what is currently acceptable within the corridors of power…. The cornerstone of any free society — the perpetual exchange of intellectual and political ideas, even with opposing opinions — will therefore crumble.

This is all happening at the same time that both the Commission and some EU national governments are pushing the bloc toward direct conflict with Russia while calling for the establishment of an EU-wide war economy, all to be paid for no doubt by the EU’s hard-strapped citizens and businesses. All the while, Brussels is fast erecting its digital control system, first through the introduction of a bloc-wide digital identity program — which, like the digital vaccine passport system that preceded it, is being marketed as a purely voluntary scheme — followed some time later by a central bank digital currency.

The escalating war in Ukraine serves as a timely pretext for a brutal clampdown on basic democratic freedoms. But the EU would have probably reached this destination anyway, sooner or later. As a political project, the EU is fundamentally anti-democratic while its myriad failings have served as a convenient scapegoat to blame whenever national governments answerable to people have had to take unpopular decisions.

What Europe is now living through is an acceleration of a long-term trend, though this time the EU’s anti-democratic nature could have repercussions far beyond its own borders. Each crisis of this century has created a new opportunity for the Commission to tighten its grip while Europe itself grows weaker and weaker. As the veteran British journalist Peter Obourne once put it, “By a hideous paradox the European Union, set up as a way of avoiding a return to fascism in the post-war epoch, has since mutated into a way of avoiding democracy itself.”

NORDSTREAM BOMBING

Opinion - A German court may have just shattered one of the Biden era’s biggest lies

Jonathan Turley,

FOX NEWS  opinion contributor

Sat, November 29, 2025






It is often said that “the first casualty when war comes is truth.” A criminal warrant just issued in Germany shows that war continues to claim its victims. However, this warrant could prove to be as great an indictment not just of the government of Volodymyr Zelensky, but also of former President Joe Biden.

This week, a German court issued an arrest warrant for Ukrainian Serhii Kuznietsov, which may finally confirm what was long suspected: that Ukraine was responsible for the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines in the waters near Denmark and Sweden.

The Biden administration may have been given prior warning. It was allegedly told years ago by a Ukrainian whistleblower that a six-person team of Ukrainian special forces was planning to rent a boat, dive to the sea floor and blow up the Nord Stream project. The operation was reportedly led by Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces.

Nevertheless, after the attack, the Biden administration and many in the media fueled speculation that Russia had destroyed its own pipeline, despite evidence and logic to the contrary. It was another convenient claim of a Russian false-flag operation that allowed the Biden administration to ignore the possibility that Ukraine had not only engaged in environmental crimes but had also knowingly lied to its allies.

For years, some of us have questioned the official account from the Biden administration about the available evidence of those responsible.

The suggestion of a Russian attack on a Russian pipeline never seemed logical. However, the administration was funneling billions in support for Ukraine, funding that has now exceeds an estimated $180 billion. Having Ukraine sabotage pipelines to our allies would hardly be opportune when many were questioning the costs to U.S. citizens.

The Biden administration was not alone in running interference for Ukraine, as Zelensky denied responsibility despite mounting evidence to the contrary. When another alleged Ukrainian saboteur was found in Poland, a Polish court blocked the extradition to Germany and ordered his release. The reason? The judge did base the decision on Ukrainian denials. Instead, he declared that the act had been committed in the name of a just war. (Poland remains the frontline against Russian aggression in Europe).

An Italian court did not engage in such rationalization. It ordered the extradition of Kuznietsov, believed to be a key figure in the conspiracy. The attack involved leasing a yacht in the German port of Rostock, using forged IDs and a screen of intermediaries. Kuznietsov insists that he was an army captain serving in Ukraine at the time.

If the investigators are correct, it was not just the Ukrainian government that was lying to us. Biden was also presumably informed by the intelligence agencies of this evidence. Yet Biden kept suggesting anyway that the Russians were covering up the truth. He told the public, “The Russians are pumping out disinformation and lies. We will work with our allies to get to the bottom [of) precisely what happened] Just don’t listen to what Putin’s saying. What he’s saying we know is not true.”

Ironically, even if we were told about this evidence, the public might still have supported the commitment to Ukraine. After all, Ukraine is the victim of a horrendous invasion that has involved repeated charges of war crimes against the Russian forces. However, the public has a legitimate expectation that a country that is receiving billions in support will not engage in environmental attacks on our allies. These pipelines were in the economic zone of two NATO countries.

As the Germans work to find the truth, the question is whether the American public will ever be given transparency on our own government’s complicity or knowledge. The public was asked to pump billions into a war while the administration allegedly covered up an attack by Ukraine on a Western pipeline — and then may have misled the public.

The public also has a right to know if the CIA was told in advance that this attack was coming and either gave tacit approval or said nothing to our allies.

While Johnson is often quoted on his 1929 line about truth in war, the line following was equally poignant: “this mode of propaganda whereby … people become war hungry in their patriotism and are lied into a desire to fight. We have seen it in the past; it will happen again in the future.”

It may have happened in the U.S., and truth was not the only casualty. The American people were treated as chumps who could not handle the truth.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of the best-selling book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”