How confusion and lies fuel a bloody war of attrition in Ukraine

In a columna Recently, military analyst William Astore wrote: “[Congressman] George Santos is a symptom of a much larger disease: the lack of honor, the lack of shame in America. Honor, truth, integrity, it just doesn't seem to matter, or matter much, in America today… But how do you have a democracy where there is no truth?

Astore went on to compare America's political and military leaders to disgraced Congressman Santos. ” American military leaders they appeared before Congress to testify that the Iraq war was being won,” Astore wrote. “They appeared before Congress to testify that the War in Afghanistan was being won. They spoke of "progress," of changes in the corners, of Iraqi and Afghan forces successfully trained and ready to take over as US forces retreat. they withdrew . It was all a lie. All lies.

Now the United States is at war again, in the Ukraine, and the confusion continues. This war involves Russia, Ukraine, United States and its NATO allies. No party in this conflict has come forward with their own people to honestly explain what they are fighting for, what they really hope to achieve, and how they plan to achieve it. All parties claim to be fighting for noble causes and insist that it is the other party that refuses to negotiate a peaceful resolution. Everyone is manipulating and lying, and the complacent media (from all sides) proclaim their lies.

It is a truism that the first casualty of war is the truth. But rolling over and lying down has real world impacts in a war where hundreds of thousands of real people fight and die, while their homes on both sides of the front lines are reduced to rubble by hundreds of thousands of howitzers .

Yves Smith, editor of Naked Capitalism , explored this insidious link between information warfare and actual warfare in a article titled “What if Russia won the Ukrainian War, but the Western press didn't notice?” He noted that Ukraine's utter reliance on the supply of weapons and money from its Western allies has given a life of its own to a triumphant narrative that Ukraine is defeating Russia and will continue to win victories as long as the West continues to send it more money and increasingly powerful and deadly weapons. .

But the need to continue recreating the illusion that Ukraine is winning by exaggerating limited gains on the battlefield has compelled Ukraine to continue sacrificing his forces in extremely bloody battles, such as his counter-offensive around Kherson and the Russian sieges of Bakhmut and Soledar. Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vershinin, a retired American tank commander, wrote on Harvard's Russia Matters website: "Somehow, Ukraine has no choice but to launch attacks no matter the human and material cost."

No party in this conflict has come forward with their own people to honestly explain what they are fighting for, what they really hope to achieve, and how they plan to achieve it.

Objective analyzes of the war in Ukraine are hard to come by through the thick fog of war propaganda. But we must heed when a number of senior Western military leaders, active and retired, issue urgent calls for diplomacy to reopen peace negotiations and warn that prolonging and escalating the war risks full-scale war between Russia and state States that could become a nuclear war .

General Erich Vad, who was German Chancellor Angela Merkel's top military adviser for seven years, spoke recently with Emma , a German news website. He called the war in Ukraine a "war of attrition" and compared it to World War I and, in particular, to the Battle of Verdun, in which hundreds of thousands of French and German soldiers died with neither side winning. a lot.

Vad did the same question persistent unanswered that the editorial board of the New York Times he did to President Biden last May. What are the real war objectives of the United States and NATO?

“Do you want to achieve a willingness to negotiate with the deliveries of the tanks? Do you want to reconquer Donbas or Crimea? Or do you want to defeat Russia completely? asked General Vad. And he concluded: “There is no realistic definition of the end state. And without an overarching political and strategic concept, arms deliveries are pure militarism. We have a military operational deadlock, which we cannot resolve militarily. By the way, this is also the opinion of the Americans. Chief of Staff Mark Milley. He said that Ukraine's military victory is not to be expected and that negotiations are the only possible way. Anything else is a senseless waste of human life."

Whenever Western officials are embarrassed by these unanswered questions, they are forced to respond, as did biden al Times eight months ago, that they are sending arms to help Ukraine defend itself and put it in a stronger position in the negotiations. table. But what would this “stronger position” look like? As Ukrainian forces advanced on Kherson in November, NATO officials they agreed that the fall of Kherson would give Ukraine the opportunity to reopen negotiations from a position of strength. But when Russia withdrew from Kherson, there were no negotiations and both sides are now planning new offensives.

The US media continue repeating the narrative that Russia will never negotiate in good faith, and have hidden from the public fruitful negotiations that began shortly after the Russian invasion but were quashed by the US and UK. Few outlets reported on the recent revelations by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett about the Russian-Ukrainian ceasefire negotiations in Turkey that he helped mediate in March 2022. Bennett explicitly said that the West “blocked” o “stopped” (according to the translation) the negotiations.

Bennett confirmed what was reported by other sources since April 21, 2022, when the Turkish Foreign Minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, one of the other mediators, told him said to CNN Turk after a meeting of NATO foreign ministers: "There are countries within NATO who want the war to continue...they want Russia to weaken."

Objective analyzes of the war in Ukraine are hard to come by through the thick fog of war propaganda.

Advisers to Prime Minister Zelenskyy they provided the details of Boris Johnson's visit to kyiv on April 9 that were published in Ukraine Pravda on May 5. They said Johnson delivered two messages. The first was that Putin and Russia "should be pressured, not negotiated." Second, that even if Ukraine completed a deal with Russia, the "collective West," whom Johnson claimed to represent, would not participate in it.

Western corporate media have generally only pondered this version of those early negotiations to cast doubt on the story or smear anyone repeating it as a Putin apologist, despite multi-source confirmation by Ukrainian officials, Turkish diplomats and now former Israeli prime minister.

The propaganda framework that the Western establishment media and politicians use to explain the war in Ukraine to their own audiences is a classic “white hats vs. black hats” narrative, with Russia’s blame for the invasion doubling as proof. of the innocence and rectitude of the West. The growing mountain of evidence that the United States and its allies share responsibility for many aspects of this crisis is being swept under the proverbial rug, which looks more and more like the dibujo de The Little Prince of a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant.

Western media and officials were even more ridiculous when they tried to blame russia for blowing up their own pipelines, the Nord Stream submarine pipelines that channeled Russian gas to Germany. According to NATO, the explosions that released half a million tons of methane into the atmosphere were "deliberate, reckless and irresponsible acts of sabotage." He The Washington Post , in what could be considered bad journalistic practice, quoted to an anonymous “senior European environmental official” who said: “No one on the European side of the ocean thinks this is anything other than Russian sabotage.”

It was necessary for the former investigative reporter from the New York Times, Seymour Hersh, break the silence. He published, in a blog post on his own Substack, the spectacular account of a whistleblower about how US Navy divers teamed up with the Norwegian navy to plant the explosives under cover of a NATO naval exercise, and how they were detonated by a sophisticated buoy signal dropped by a Norwegian surveillance plane. According to Hersh, President Biden took an active role in the plan and modified it to include the use of the marker buoy so that he could personally dictate the precise moment of the operation, three months after the explosives were placed.

As expected, the White House discarded Hersh's report as "completely and completely false fiction," but never offered any reasonable explanation for this historic act of environmental terrorism.

President Eisenhower he famously said that only an “alert and well-informed citizenry” can “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or not, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

So what is an alert and well-informed American citizen to know about the role our government has played in fomenting the crisis in Ukraine, a role that the corporate media has swept under the rug? That is one of the main questions we have tried to answer in our book War in Ukraine: Making sense of a meaningless conflict . Answers include:

• United States broke its promises not to expand NATO to Eastern Europe. In 1997, before Americans had even heard of Vladimir Putin, 50 former senators, military retirees, diplomats, and academics they wrote to President Clinton to oppose NATO expansion, calling it a political mistake of "historic proportions." The elderly statesman George Kennan condemned as “the beginning of a new cold war”.
• NATO provoked Russia with its promise opened to Ukraine in 2008 that it would become a member of NATO. William Burns, then US ambassador to Moscow and now CIA director, warned in a memo from the State Department: "Ukraine's entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin)."
• States The United States backed a coup. in Ukraine in 2014 that installed a government that only half recognized as legitimate by its population, leading to the disintegration of Ukraine and a civil war that killed to 14.000 people.
• the peace agreement of Minsk II of 2015 achieved a stable ceasefire line and reductions constant casualties, but Ukraine did not grant autonomy to Donetsk and Luhansk as agreed. Angela Merkel and Francois Holland they now admit that Western leaders only supported Minsk II to buy time for NATO to arm and train the Ukrainian army to retake Donbas by force.
• During the week before the invasion, OSCE monitors in Donbas documented a massive escalation of explosions around the ceasefire line. Most of the 4.093 explosions within four days they occurred in rebel-held territory, indicating that Ukrainian government forces were firing. US and UK officials claimed these were attacks by " false flag “, as if the Donetsk and Luhansk forces were bombing themselves, just as they later suggested that Russia blew up its own gas pipelines.
• After the invasion, instead of supporting Ukraine's efforts to achieve peace, the United States and the United Kingdom blocked or stopped them in their tracks. Boris Johnson of the UK said they saw an opportunity to "press" to Russia and wanted to get the most out of it, and US Defense Secretary Austin said his goal was to "weaken" to Russia.

What would an alert and well-informed citizenry think of all this? We would clearly condemn Russia for invading the Ukraine. But then what? Surely we would also demand that America's political and military leaders tell us the truth about this horrible war and our country's role in it, and we would demand that the media convey the truth to the public. An “alert and well-informed citizenry” would then surely demand that our government stop fueling this war and instead support immediate peace negotiations.