The war in Ukraine and global disinformation

MIGUEL MOLLEDA

International journalism should be warned about what happened with the Iraq war in 2004. The lies and manipulation of the news by the United States and its "coalition of volunteers", including Spain, reached levels unknown since the Vietnam war in the 60s of the last century. I myself suffered in the Spanish public state radio, in which I was specialized in international information, the continuous censorship by the "torquemadas" on duty, who had me prostrated in a corner of the newsroom, after returning from New York and having covered post 11/XNUMX, where I witnessed the great lie that was being prepared to embark on a war against a country that had nothing to do with the Islamic terrorists in New York and Washington. Discovered the great fallacy that has cost so many thousands of innocent victims, the big and small manipulators, from the New York Times or the BBC, to the Spanish public radio, never paid the consequences of their irresponsibility for the misrepresentation of the news that brought us to a criminal war. Even worse, true heroes of information, such as the Australian journalist, Julian Assange, who at the head of WikiLeaks uncovered the interventionist miseries of the great Western powers, suffer, for such citizen service, a prison sentence in the United Kingdom, with the risk of be extradited to the United States, where, without a doubt, he would end up perishing between four walls.

BACK TO THE OLD WAYS

In the early hours of February 24, 2022, the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, announced to the nation and to the whole world what he called a "special military operation" in Ukraine, the armed invasion of the neighboring country to protect the Russophone population from the eastern Ukraine, threatened for 8 years by its own Ukrainian army that bombarded it incessantly after the coup, orchestrated by the United States. A coup that violently expelled the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, from power and led to the massacre in Odessa in May 2014 of the Russophile Ukrainian population, opposed to the Maidan riot, annihilated and burned alive by Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups armed by Washington.

Following the Russian reaction, a myriad of journalists from all over the world descended on kyiv to report on the developments of a new war in Europe. A new war?, which had lasted almost a decade, but which the large international corporate media, public and private, had intentionally ignored until then. The narrative of all these big media coincided, point by point, with the arguments of the United States government, NATO, and the warmongering executives of the European Union, all of them turned against Moscow, making Russia exclusively guilty of the war in Ukraine and trying to bring the Eastern European power to the status of an international pariah.

The chronology of the events regarding the causes of a conflict that had not started on February 24 with the Russian invasion has been hidden. Nor has the concatenation of events since the disappearance of the USSR in the 90s been taken into account, nor has the progressive enlargement of the Atlantic Alliance, ignoring and cornering Russia, increasingly threatened from its former broken off territories (failing to comply with Washington the unwritten promise that NATO would not expand to the east, after Moscow allowed the unification of Germany). Not even the closest causes and consequences of the frustrated Minsk Peace Accords, which would have prevented war, have been considered. All of this has been intentionally ignored by the governments in Washington and in Europe in Brussels.

All this background, prior to the arrival of Russian troops in Ukraine, has also been dismissed by the mainstream media when it is absolutely essential to properly contextualize the reasons for the conflict. A war ignored for years when it was the Russian-speaking population of Donbas (14.000 dead and three million refugees) who fell under the bombs. But that as of February 24 it became omnipresent, for an uninformed public opinion, due to the mere fact that the Russian forces were at the gates of kyiv. The episodes that have taken place on the battlefield since then have been the object of the crudest information manipulation, such as the alleged Russian massacres in Bucha, on the outskirts of kyiv, the Anglo-Saxon advisers to the Ukrainians staging a media drama already rehearsed by NATO and the OSCE in the war in Kosovo. The same dramatization has been carried out in the town of Izium, coinciding with the Russian withdrawal this summer from a part of southern Ukraine.

THE ANNOUNCED GEOPOLITICAL CONFLICT

Few previous wars have been so clearly announced by politicians, diplomats and leading international analysts as Russia's armed intervention in Ukraine. Surprisingly, many strategic thinkers warned, for years, of the outcome if NATO and the United States followed the same aggressive path of eastward expansion and provocation of Moscow. Warnings made by George Kennan, Jack F. Matlock, William Perry, Noam Chomsky, Stephen Cohen, Vladimir Pozner, Jeffrey Sachs, Bill Burns, Malcolm Fraser, Paul Kesting, Paul Gates, Roderic Lyne, Pat Buchanam, Tim Marshall, George Beebe, Ted Galen Carpenter, Frank Blackaby, John Pilger, Shiping Tang, Olekiy Arestovych, Henry Kissinger or even the current Pope Francis, among others.

Frank Blackbaby, former director of the Swedish peace research institute SIPRI, wrote in 1996 that whoever ruled in Moscow, Russia would react politically and militarily to NATO expansion and plunge Europe into Cold War II.

Renowned University of Chicago Professor of Political Science John Mearsheimer predicted in 2015 exactly what is happening in Ukraine due to the provocative expansion of NATO led by the United States, after inspiring the 2014 coup in kyiv and the war of the Ukrainian army against Donbas: “The West is leading Ukraine on a path that will ultimately lead to its destruction. And what we are actually doing (the US, NATO and the European Union), is to encourage that result”. Stephen Cohen, another respected longtime analyst and expert on Russian studies, warned in 2014, “If we bring NATO forces to the borders with Russia…what we are doing is militarizing the situation and Russia is not going to back down, it is for her an existential question. Former US Secretary of Defense Bob Gates in his memoirs written in 2015 said: “This rapid expansion of NATO (to Eastern Europe) is a mistake…Trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into the Atlantic Alliance is a mistake. exaggeration, and especially it is a monumental provocation. And Pope Francis recently noted that "NATO may have provoked the Russian invasion of Ukraine." Even famous former USSR dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn claimed in 2006 that NATO enlargement was "an effort to encircle Russia and destroy its sovereignty... Russia will never give up our unity with the Russian population of Ukraine."

GLOBAL MEDIA OR THE VOICE OF HIS MASTER

Despite this background and context of Russia's military intervention in Ukraine, never before have the major Western media, public and private, carried out and are carrying out such a campaign of manipulation and misinformation, with pathological social consequences. At the same time, big tech corporations and the governments of the European Union and the US have imposed censorship on Russian media, and on social networks they own when reporting in favor of Russia. The globalization of information is being the globalization of lies. And to such an extent that this risky and dangerous strategic step taken by the United States against Russia in Europe is having dramatic economic, social and energy consequences for the European civilian population.

Europe has never been so misinformed by its own media as it is now because of the war that the United States has unleashed against Russia in the territory of Ukraine. A conflict of unpredictable geostrategic consequences in a multipolar world, despite Washington. And that can lead, with the consent of its political and economic elites, to the absolute destitution of broad layers of European society. The drift of the corporate media, which are rudely failing in the sacred mission of credibly reporting what is happening, will also be responsible for dragging European society into intellectual and informative indigence.

Miguel Molleda He is a journalist and has developed his entire career in Spanish public radio. Specialist in international information, he has been a special envoy to different war conflicts, as well as a correspondent in Jerusalem