Vladimir Putin
‘Our Injuries Will Heal, but the Georgian Government’s Reputation Will Not’
Levan Khabeishvili arrives late to his interview, delayed by an emergency trip to the dentist after dislodging his new tooth at lunch. In the early hours of May 1, the chairman of United National Movement (UNM), Georgia’s largest opposition party, was savagely beaten by police and security forces for almost half an hour in a sustained attack that saw his nose broken and both cheekbones fractured.
Since then, there have been at least eleven vicious physical assaults against high-profile government critics in the South Caucasian country. Hundreds of others have received anonymous phone calls threatening them and their families, with posters plastered all over the Georgian capital of Tbilisi denouncing almost every prominent opposition politician, journalist, activist and NGO representative as ‘enemies of the people’ – a term with especially totalitarian resonances in the former Soviet space.
The brutal crackdown comes as Georgian oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili’s ruling party, Georgian Dream, charges ahead with its second attempt since last year to pass a draconian bill on ‘foreign influence’ targeting independent media and NGOs. Decried by the country’s historic Western allies as an analogue of measures weaponised by the Putin regime to crush dissent amid war in Ukraine, the move has been widely received as a barefaced attempt to sabotage Georgia’s ongoing bid for European Union membership, contrary as the draft law is to conditions for admission to the bloc.
The head of the largest opposition party in Georgia, the United National Movement, Levan Khabeishvili, recovering from being beaten by the police. Photo: X/Twitter
For several weeks, mass demonstrations have steadily mounted in Tbilisi and other cities across the country, as a public overwhelmingly in support of Euro-Atlantic integration pushes back against their Government’s accelerating authoritarian slide into Moscow’s orbit. “Since the protests began, almost every night the police and security forces have violated all laws – they have used violence without necessity, without any justification,” says UNM chair Khabeishvili. “They believe the more severely they beat us, the more scared we will be. But our injuries will heal, while the Government’s reputation will not.”
As Georgian Dream’s founder and éminence gris, who made his fortune in Moscow during the post-Soviet privatisation frenzy of the 1990s, much has been made of Ivanishvili’s longstanding ties to powerful Russian interests, with multiple Western officials calling for him to face sanctions in the two years since Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
On April 29, the famously camera-shy billionaire spoke at a rally in support of the controversial bill currently making its way through parliament. Addressing the crowds, many of whom were allegedly bussed in and paid to attend, Ivanishvili took aim at the US and the EU for supposedly attempting to “engineer a revolution” in Georgia through their long-standing support for civil society, in comments widely regarded as a wholesale burning of his government’s remaining bridges with the West.
Byline Times has previously reported that Ivanishvili believes he’s already the victim of ‘unofficial’ US sanctions. Sources with access to the oligarch’s inner circle maintain the foreign agents bill likely represents an attempt to protect his assets from scrutiny by domestic watchdogs ahead of transferring his sizable offshore interests into his home country. “Like a kind of Macbeth of the Caucasus, Bidzina Ivanishvili seems driven by fears and a spectre of his own projection. He believes people are out to get him, and he thinks he needs to clamp down now, to secure his power,” says Hans Gutbrod, a professor of public policy at Tbilisi’s Ilia State University. “In Macbeth, the phrasing is ‘poor country [...] where violent sorrow seems a modern ecstasy.’ I hope we’re not headed that way, but it is a real risk.”
There are still several legislative stages before the bill finally passes into law, but its effects are already being severely felt by the measures’ intended targets. Alongside Khabeishvili, other prominent figures assaulted by riot police and security forces at the protests include Aleko Elisashvili, leader of the opposition Citizens party, who suffered a broken rib and a cut to his lip, as well as Ted Jonas, a US national and lawyer who sustained a black eye and major concussion.
But other tactics are being increasingly deployed away from the demonstrations. On May 8, the speaker of the Georgian Parliament Shalva Papuashvili announced the launch of a new police database containing information on “radical opposition” figures and “violent youth groups.” The move was swiftly slammed by NGOs as amounting to a blacklist of critics to harass, coming hot on the heels of the first reports of titushky being deployed across the country.
The term titushky was first used to describe hooligans hired by the Viktor Yanukovych Government to violently suppress dissent during the 2013-2014 Euromaidan protests in Ukraine, though the tactic is reported to have been used extensively by the Russian and Belarusian regimes in the years since. “It’s a standard KGB practice, one that comes when law and order begin to break down, and one whose only purpose is to spread terror among protesters,” says Dima Chikovani, a PR director with Khabeishvili’s UNM party, who was assaulted outside his home just hours after the ‘blacklist’ was announced.
Lasha Ghvinianidze after an attack by titushky. Photo: Lasha Ghvinianidze
Another victim of this sort of attack is Lasha Ghvinianidze, a biker who has organised motorcycle ride-a-longs at many of the recent demonstrations, who was beaten in front of his wife outside a friend’s house on the same night. “I can no longer go along [to the rallies] because if I stand on my feet for more than one or two minutes I begin to feel dizzy,” he explained. “But my heart remains alongside my brothers and sisters out there on the streets.” Others include award-winning teacher Lado Apkhazava, think-tank director Giorgi Klidiashvili, university professor Gia Japaridze, and opposition party officials Giorgi Mumladze, Boris Kurua and Nodar Chachanodze. Rati Bregadze, Georgia’s Justice Minister, has since suggested they might have “beaten themselves up.”
Nor are titushky attacks the only cases of intimidation and harassment to have gathered pace in recent days. At least two UNM politicians, Irakli Edzgveradze and Goga Oniani, claim unknown assailants attempted to break into their houses earlier this week, despite their underage children being home at the time. Hundreds of other people have reported receiving anonymous phone calls threatening violence against them and their families, while thousands of posters have in recent days been put up all over Tbilisi denouncing various leaders of government-critical organisations as ‘foreign agents’, ‘traitors’ and ‘enemies of the people.’
These incidents have proven the source of much hand-wringing among Georgia’s Western allies. Speaking at a press briefing on May 10, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said the US was “deeply troubled” by the reports of harassment and physical violence, adding “the Georgian Government needs to change course.” The EU Delegation in Georgia has released a similar statement, decrying the attacks as “unacceptable” and urging authorities “to ensure that fundamental rights of all citizens are protected.”
But for Marika Mikiashvili, a representative of the liberal pro-Western Droa party, there’s a sense these historic partners may be late in waking up to the true gravity of what is currently unfolding in Georgia. “The Government is seeking to remove any sense of security we might have by pursuing their goal of mass terror,” she says. “Unless Georgian Dream backs down and withdraws the law, then frankly, I just don’t see how there’s any way we can progress to meaningful parliamentary elections in October.”
Inside Job? Ominous New Questions Surround Navalny’s Death
On April 27, the Wall Street Journal published an investigation based on as yet unpublished U.S. intelligence community assessments and anonymous briefings courtesy of “security officials from several European capitals,” which concluded that Vladimir Putin neither orchestrated Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny’s death in prison two months earlier nor desired it to happen.
It was a belated and confounding intervention in a case that, after an initially intense frenzy of mainstream speculation and accusations, quickly went cold before vanishing from mainstream consideration entirely.
While exerting little domestic influence outside atypically liberal enclaves in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other major cities, Navalny was the U.S. and Europe’s most cherished and prominent Putin detractor by some margin for over a decade before his death. His every publicity stunt garnered universal media attention, and the regular publications of his Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) on state official embezzlement and grift in Russia invariably broke the internet. Western human rights awards were routinely forthcoming.
After purportedly being poisoned on an inter-Russian flight by the FSB in August 2020, then recovering in Germany, he made a much-publicized “hero’s return” to Moscow, at which point, he was summarily jailed. Despite giving regular interviews to the Western media from prison and testifying to the rotten conditions in which he was held, Navalny had largely faded from public consciousness by the time news of his death broke on February 16.
Immediately, the entire Western political, media, and pundit sphere was apoplectic. “Make no mistake. Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death!” U.S. President Joe Biden forcefully declared. Meanwhile, Navalny’s widow, Yulia, accused Russian authorities of “hiding his body” as they were “waiting for the traces of yet another of Putin’s novichoks to disappear”:
My husband could not be broken. And that’s exactly why Putin killed him. Shameful, cowardly, not daring to look into his eyes or simply say his name. We will tell you about it soon. We will definitely find out who exactly carried out this crime and how exactly. We will name the names and show the faces.”
Yet, on February 26, Ukrainian military chief Kyrylo Budanov “disappointed” everyone by announcing Navalny, in fact, died as a result of simple health complications – namely, a blood clot. The U.S. intelligence assessments cited by the Wall Street Journal, based on “some classified intelligence and an analysis of public facts,” reportedly draw the same conclusion. Quite why this apparent confirmation took so long to surface isn’t clear, although it delivered a “coup de grâce” to any and all suggestions Navalny was deliberately assassinated.
Since the invasion of Ukraine began, Western spying agencies and officials in Kiev have relentlessly spewed oft-intelligence insulting, illogical black propaganda about the proxy conflict. We must ask ourselves why the same sources that would have us believe Russian forces were at one point fighting with shovels, and Moscow blew up its own Nord Stream 2 pipeline, seek to shut down suggestions Navalny was murdered.
‘Cataclysmic Loss’
Budanov’s declaration decisively shunted Navalny’s demise from international headlines. Such is the pace with which events move these days that it is perhaps forgotten that immediately following February 16, there was a concerted campaign by highly influential Western anti-Russian actors for the EU and U.S. to adopt a “Navalny Act.” Under its auspices, the approximately $300 billion Russian assets frozen by Western financial institutions in the wake of Moscow’s invasion would be seized and given to Ukraine.
At the forefront of this effort was billionaire Bill Browder, an investment manager who reaped untold sums from privatization and asset stripping in Russia during the 1990s and supported Putin’s rise to power before being turfed from the country in 2005 on national security grounds. Since then, he has transformed himself into the Kremlin’s most pugnacious overseas critic and an “anti-corruption” campaigner, despite giving up his U.S. citizenship to evade tax. Speaking to UnHerd on February 20, Browder talked a big game:
Now is the moment…Putin is willing to lose one million men, but to lose $300 billion would be a cataclysmic loss. All world leaders are looking for a way to hit Putin back for this murder. I’ve been working on confiscating these assets for the last two years, and the Navalny murder is the impetus to get it done.”
Browder had good reason to believe this campaign would bear fruit. For almost 15 years, he has traveled the world telling journalists, lawmakers, and human rights organizations a shocking story of corruption, fraud, and murder at the highest levels of the Kremlin. In brief, he claims local officials forcibly seized the Russian division of his company, Hermitage Capital Management, to carry out a massive tax scam, reaping $230 million in the process.
According to Browder’s narrative, he then set his “friend” Sergei Magnitsky, a gifted lawyer, on the case to determine what happened. The diligent sleuth duly uncovered the fraud and alerted authorities but ended up jailed on bogus charges for his courageous whistleblowing. He was then viciously tortured in prison in an attempt to make him retract his testimony before being beaten to death by guards for refusing.
Typically, Browder’s audiences have been highly receptive. Over the years, his story has been immortalized in multiple articles, books, official reports and documentaries, influencing legislation and prosecutions in numerous countries. Every member of the “Five Eyes” global spying network and the EU have been successfully lobbied to adopt a “Magnitsky Act,” which sanctions government officials overseas—particularly in Russia—for purported human rights abuses.
‘Navalny Act’
In reality, Browder’s entire Magnitsky fable is a tangled web of lies, fabrications, distortions, exaggerations, and libel. From the very moment he started spinning this deceptive yarn, sufficient open-source, public-domain evidence was available to disprove its every aspect comprehensively. Yet, it took a decade for mainstream journalists to conduct serious due diligence on his assertions. In November 2019, leading German news outlet Der Spiegel published a comprehensive demolition job, savagely indicting Browder’s integrity in the process.
In the publication’s words, Brodwer “has a talent for selling a set of facts so it supports his own version of events.” Magnitsky was, in fact, neither a lawyer nor a whistleblower. He was a crooked accountant who had long-abetted Browder’s fraudulent financial dealings in Russia and was justly imprisoned for these activities. This was confirmed by a damning ruling in August of that year by the European Court of Human Rights in a case brought by Browder and Magnitsky’s family.
While the ECHR ordered Moscow to pay Magnitsky’s relatives $37,500 due to a failure to protect his life and health, having identified shortcomings in the medical treatment he was provided in prison, no mention of murder or even unlawful killing was made in the judgment. Conversely, the court rejected suggestions his arrest and subsequent detention were “manifestly ill-founded” or that “authorities had…acted with bad faith or deception:”
The Court reiterated the general principles on arbitrary detention…It found no such elements in this case. The decision to arrest him had only been made after investigators learned he’d previously applied for a UK visa, booked tickets to Kiev, and hadn’t been residing at his registered address. Furthermore, the evidence against him, including witness testimony, had been enough to satisfy an objective observer that he might have committed the offense in question.”
Der Spiegel’s investigation contained a striking passage, the obvious import of which was bizarrely ignored by the outlet. In it, Zoya Svetova, a Moscow-based human-rights activist who investigated Magnitsky’s death in 2009, said:
What sense would it make to murder him? Magnitsky did not reveal any secret. They wanted testimonies against Browder. That was the motivation. He should have accused Browder of not paying taxes. Magnitsky was a hostage. He himself was of no interest to them. They wanted Browder.”
Anti-Russia campaigner Bill Browder speaking to the media outside the Old Bailey in London, December 19, 2018. Mr Perepilichnyy, 44, Dominic Lipinski | PA Wire
In other words, it was Browder who benefited from Magnitsky’s death, not Russian authorities, which raises the grave prospect that it was the “anti-corruption” campaigner himself who was, one way or another, responsible for his accountant’s tragic passing. Such a reading is amply reinforced by the sworn deposition of Russian opposition activist Oleg Lurie in a failed legal case brought by U.S. authorities against Russian-owned company Prevezon, based on Browder’s bogus claim the firm’s owners were beneficiaries of the $230 million fraud.
Lurie was concurrently incarcerated in the same prison as Magnitsky, and the pair crossed paths twice. The first time, the accountant was in a “happy mood,” boasting of how he was held in a “big special block” for “white crime inmates,” where cells had “plasma TV sets, refrigerators, kettles” and illegally installed telephones. The reason for his buoyancy, Magnitsky explained to Lurie, was that his Western employers would “save him…they would take him out of there” in a matter of days.
As Browder et al. wished for Magnitsky to “keep silence about their actions” and his own crime to be “not serious,” he seemed assured that freedom was impending. Lurie warned him that “his attorneys and people who claim to be standing behind him are lying to him,” but the accountant was unconvinced. Fast-forward a few weeks, and they met again. Magnitsky was “a completely different person at that time…a tangle of nerves,” Lurie testified.
Magnitsky revealed that the “Western people who stood behind him deceived him…they demanded him to sign various documents” completely unrelated to his case, which would’ve implicated him in numerous serious crimes he didn’t commit. As a result, “he had a feeling that he would never get out.” Navalny, like Magnitsky, wasn’t leaving prison anytime soon and almost certainly knew too much. Did his Western backers similarly consider it necessary to silence him?
At the very least, it is supremely puzzling that the Ukrainian government effectively torpedoed the “Navalny Act.” After all, Kiev has, since the start of the proxy conflict, implored Western leaders to hand Russia’s frozen assets to them in service of the country’s reconstruction and the purchase of ever-more weapons and ammunition. The Act would’ve delivered on those demands. There was no clear need at all for Budanov to electively sabotage the narrative of Navalny as a Kremlin murder victim.
‘British Spy’
There are also sinister echoes in the sudden mainstream “reverse ferret” on Navalny’s untimely demise with the similarly mysterious and abrupt November 2019 passing of James Lemesurier, longtime British mercenary and military intelligence operative. Immediately following his fatal fall from the window of his lavish Istanbul apartment, Western sources rushed to convict Russia without evidence, claiming his death may have been – or was likely – a targeted assassination. The most prominent was Mark Urban, veteran BBC “defence” editor.
Within hours of Lemesurier’s lethal crash landing, Urban took to Twitter, urging Turkish authorities to “conduct a thorough investigation” and “ascertain whether there was state involvement.” His misgivings were in part perked by an “extensive black propaganda campaign by Russian and Assad media and their acolytes” in the months prior. In other words, critical, independent reporting raises grave questions about whether Lemesurier’s “White Helmets” were the crusading humanitarian group universally portrayed in the mainstream or something far darker.
More substantively, “a former colleague” – whether of Lemesurier or Urban isn’t clear – told the BBC journeyman, “I know the flat well, [and] it’s not possible to ‘fall’ from that balcony.” They strongly suspected foul play as a result. Seismic stuff, although curiously, these posts were quickly deleted due to Urban allegedly receiving “new information.” The nature of this “information” and who supplied it has never been revealed. But immediately after that, the same sources that hitherto cried murder began labeling Lemesurier’s death an unambiguous suicide.
To say the least, Urban is extremely well-connected in the Western military, security, and intelligence sphere and highly adept at withholding salient facts from public view. In July 2018, he revealed he’d serendipitously spent much of the previous year interviewing Sergei Skripal, who, along with his daughter, was purportedly poisoned in the British city of Salisbury three months earlier. In the intervening time, Urban fronted multiple BBC Newsnight reports about the incident without ever mentioning his personal relationship with the GRU defector.
For Urban – coincidentally once part of the same British Army tank regiment as Pablo Miller, Skripal’s MI6 recruiter, handler, and Salisbury neighbor – to delete his incendiary tweets surely required a high-level intervention. At that time, as now, blaming Russia or Putin for anything and everything – including quite literally the weather – was a thoroughly safe option in the West, without any consequences attached. We are thus left to ponder how and why a long-serving, spook-adjacent British state ‘journalist’ was compelled to retract these charges.
Evidently, though, Urban’s sources – the “former colleague” who clearly said too much aside – were keen that Lemesurier’s end not be perceived or investigated as murder by anyone. Turkish media reports in the aftermath may provide a rationale for this. One article revealed James and his wife, Emma Winberg, a self-professed MI6 operative, “fought violently” outside an Istanbul restaurant just before his deadly plunge. Another suggested Lemesurier – a “British spy” – was “likely running away from someone before his death.”
Fast forward to today, and again, interested parties are eager to dismiss suggestions a high-profile Western asset’s death was the result of foul play. In Navalny’s case, as with Lemesurier, those shadowy elements – the Ukrainian government and the CIA being just two publicly confirmed so far – had every reason to accuse Moscow of murder. Yet, they not only didn’t but instead went to great lengths to remove any insinuation of deliberate killing from the equation. Make of that what you will.
Feature photo | Illustration by MintPress News
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist and MintPress News contributor exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. His work has previously appeared in The Cradle, Declassified UK, and Grayzone. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg.
The post Inside Job? Ominous New Questions Surround Navalny’s Death appeared first on MintPress News.
‘The Joe Biden Impeachment Hearing Says Everything About Republicans and Nothing About the President’
When former US President Donald Trump was impeached, for the first time, the cry from the (far) right was that this was all an act of political theatre. This, of course, was not true, but it may be that Republicans in Congress have come to believe their own lies and see impeachment as simply a political tool to tarnish an opponent. What they have overlooked is that like any other kind of trial against an accused person, getting to conviction requires evidence. The testimony of Lev Parnas at the impeachment hearing related to President Joe Biden on Wednesday brutally exposed the fact that the Republicans leading this charge have absolutely no evidence of any wrongdoing by either Biden or his son Hunter.
That the bombshell testimony from Parnas has exposed the GOP scam is all the more ironic for the fact that he, a former associate of disgraced former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, had been on the side of those who were responsible for fabricating the whole story in the first place.
The concocted tale revolves around an energy company in Ukraine called Burisma. In short, Hunter Biden had served on its Board while his father was the Vice President and point man for the Obama White House. Ukraine was already at war at that time after Russia created the hot war in the Donbas as well as illegally seizing Crimea in 2014. Biden’s remit related to those hostilities.
The allegations against the Bidens were that they had each received a $5 million bribe from Burisma, and got the then Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, fired for sniffing around Burisma too closely. The big problem here is that not a single part of that story is true. The bigger problem is that, according to Parnas, Fox News host Sean Hannity and several members of Congress were engaged in “knowingly” pushing disinformation from Russia.
It is with alarming regularity that the acts of the Republican Party and the Russian state align. The Russians have several motivations behind their troublemaking. Most glaringly, it would be thrilled by a Trump presidency because another tenure in the White House will certainly lead to chaos in the United States at a time when Russia is involved in a full-scale war against Ukraine. A war that saw 31 missiles fired at the capital city of Kyiv just the night before last. Another reason is that this story deepens the belief that Ukraine is a thoroughly corrupt country, one of the chief issues put forward by those who argue against the provision of further military aid.
The story of Burisma first entered the American body politic in 2020, as I wrote for Byline Times back then it was an attempt to distract from the facts of what Trump was then being impeached for. This is a disinformation tactic called ‘whataboutism’, there’s an allegation from one side, and so the other side screams “what about….?” Whataboutism is one of the standard tools of Russian dis- and misinformation operations, frequently employed by their armies of online trolls and useful idiots, and now the GOP.
The impeachment of Trump and the attempt to find grounds for the impeachment of President Biden could not be more different. The former was based on the “prefect phone call” between the Presidents of the US and Ukraine, in which Trump threatened to withhold a military aid package unless President Volodymyr Zelensky did him “a favour” by announcing an investigation into his political rival. The latter was based on Russian lies readily taken up and believed to be fact by large numbers of people in the US, both in and out of political circles.
As an outsider, and as a person directly affected by Russia’s war against Ukraine, it is astonishing that there are so many American minds polluted by Russian propaganda. Some are genuinely duped, others are engaging in and embracing it for reasons of political expediency. Whatever the reason behind it, toeing the Russian line is something that would have horrified the old school of the Republican Party, who realised full well the danger that Russia, and the Soviet Union before it, represented.
Trump was impeached because he attempted to use a package of weapons destined for an ally at war with an adversary as a tool of leverage for his personal political benefit. As Parnas testified, he was instructed by the personal lawyer to Trump, Giuliani, to deliver a message that “unless Zelensky announced an investigation into the Bidens by Monday, that there would be no cooperation, no aid to Ukraine from the United States.” This was a President who not only believed that manipulating the assets of the nation for his personal benefit was perfectly fine, but who also, being unable to deny the charge because there were witnesses to this crime, insisted instead that the call was “perfect”.
Had the Republicans followed the evidence at that first impeachment (or for that matter at the second one) the inescapable conclusion would have been that Trump was guilty as charged and ruling such, the world would not be facing the theoretical possibility of this man, a convicted fraudster and rapist, reassuming the role of the most powerful man in the world.
The evidence in the hearings trying to establish grounds to impeach President Biden is just not there on the other hand. Again, according to Parnas, “I found precisely zero evidence of the Bidens corruption in Ukraine. No credible source has ever provided proof of criminal activity, not the FBI, the CIA, or the NSA. No respected Ukrainian official has ever said that the Bidens did anything criminal in Ukraine.” And “the only information ever pushed on the Bidens on Ukraine has come from one source and one source only, Russia and Russian agents.”
There was no $5 million bribe. Shokin, the Prosecutor General, was not fired because he was getting too close to finding wrongdoing in his investigation of Burisma, because he was not in fact investigating Burisma. Shokin was fired because he was acorrupt man who would look the other way for the right price. His belated dismissal was greeted with applause by Ambassadors to Ukraine from a great number of countries when it happened.
As for the underlying (Russian/GOP) message that Ukraine is a fundamentally corrupt country and therefore undeserving of US aid, the clear Russian goal is to leave Ukraine defenceless so that they can prosecute their war even more ruthlessly. But the fact is that a decade ago millions of brave Ukrainians across the country decided to stand up to the corrupt rule of the Yanukovych regime, and much has changed since then in terms of anti-corruption developments in the country.
At the insistence of civil society, under the watchful eye of allies such as the United States and the European Union, a great number of anti-corruption programs have been successfully implemented. Ukraine, as a nation that fights corruption, has created a new national police force from scratch and developed an award-winning app through which pretty much all government services are delivered, efficiently and transparently. In fact, just one month before the beginning of the big war, as it is called here, I wrote for Byline Times that it is precisely because Ukraine is a model for fighting corruption (and a democracy) that war was inevitably coming.
New School Community Statement on Navalny’s Assassination and in Support of Ukraine
The cowardly assassination of Alexei Navalny in Putin's Russia shocks the world. His tragic self-sacrifice, defying logic as he exchanged safety for arrest and murder, symbolizes a solitary hero's stand against state power. ...
Brutality and Hope: Two Years of Russia’s Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine
It was before dawn, the phone rang. “It’s started”, the voice on the other end of the line said. As my brain turned itself on from the state of slumber it was enjoying just moments before, I realised the noises I could hear were explosions from rockets and missiles. That was 24 February 2022.
Sometime shortly before that date, I was talking with a newspaper reporter writing about the anticipated hostilities. “What if Putin just takes the Russian-speaking parts of the country?” was his opening question. I refrained from asking why someone with such limited knowledge of Ukraine was writing about Ukraine.
However, even today, after two years of fighting against the Russian invasion, the mindset that there are 'two Ukraines’ – and one of them is in, one way or another, Russian – is still prevalent.
Matthew Parish recently wrote from Odesa in The Times that something had been explained to him that he "had not realised: most Russian speakers in Ukraine are not Russians. They are Ukrainians from times or places where Russian was the boss language”.
A recent survey of the EU found that 37% of respondents believed that the war in Ukraine would end with some kind of negotiated settlement. Is the myth of the two mindsets to blame?
Ukraine is not Russia. If two years of outright war has taught us anything, it is that one undeniable truth.
For two full years, Ukrainians have fought, and many have died, for the independence and sovereignty of their country. In the areas that Russia has occupied any signs of Ukrainian identity are erased. A recent interview with a Russian-appointed quisling in southern Ukraine spelled out in black and white that anyone rejecting the notion that they were suddenly now Russian had been met with three options: forced 're-education’, expulsion from the place that had been their home, or death.
In the Kharkiv region alone, 25 places of torture were discovered after it was liberated. Not only do the Russian occupation forces believe that they are entitled to rape whomever they want as spoils of war, they cruelly enjoy doing so. There can be no compromise with such evil.
While the fight to end this war is bloody, there is no doubt in the minds of the vast majority of the Ukrainian population that the end to it is singularly defined as the total defeat of Russia – anything less cannot be contemplated by Ukrainians. Nor should it be considered for a single second by anyone elsewhere in the world either.
Ukrainians are exhausted. They are physically and emotionally exhausted. The country's supplies of ammunition and artillery shells are exhausted. But the fight goes on – because it must.
But not all of the news from Ukraine is grim.
While commentators, and especially detractors, like to point out that not much has changed in terms of territorial control in the past year, there are other more important developments that are crucial factors on the path towards victory – in the skies and at sea.
With its very different mentalities, Russia and Ukraine have very different approaches to how war is fought.
For Vladimir Putin, with his indifference to the value of human life, sending tens of thousands of men to their death to eventually take the ruins of a small point on the map is something it counts as a “victory”. For Ukraine, the realisation last year that assaults against entrenched defensive forces and structures would result in huge losses of men and material is what forced a rethink on the counteroffensive. Ukraine fights a much more intelligent war.
In the week leading up to the second anniversary of the full invasion, Ukraine shot down seven Russian military jets. This was made possible by a combination of factors, the existence of Patriot missile systems, and the lack of Russian eyes in the sky. Last month, Ukraine destroyed a Russian A-50 long range radar detection aircraft and an Il-22 control centre plane. Without those aircraft the Russian air force is less able to see incoming threats to its fighter jets. The balance of air superiority will further be shifted in the coming months when the promised F-16s arrive. Alongside the F-16s there is talk of further aircraft coming to Ukraine from Sweden, France, and Turkey.
Perhaps the battle that is of most significance has been shaping up over many months. It is the battle for control of the Black Sea. And Russia is very clearly losing it. The reason why this is so significant is because the Black Sea surrounds Crimea. Crimea is where the war began. And Crimea is where the war will end.
When Putin annexed Crimea a decade ago he did so for several reasons. What was decidedly not a feature among those reasons was that the local population asked him to or that they were under some kind of threat. Those are fabrications.
Putin took Crimea because the Kremlin-controlled media had just spent three months obsessing over the Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine – and a distraction from the victorious people power outcome of those events was required. He also did so because of the military significance of the Black Sea base for future wars (which always feature heavily in Putin’s thinking). However, he failed to plan for how Russia would maintain a peninsula that it was not physically connected to.
In order to temporarily maintain the occupation of Crimea, a bridge was (illegally) built over the Kerch Strait. The Kerch Bridge was not going to be enough in the long-term due to the fact that it is literally, as well as figuratively, built on shaky foundations. Hence the primary objective of the phase of war that began two years ago: the capture of land physically connecting Russia to occupied Crimea, regardless of the wishes of those who lived on the lands that would make up that land bridge.
What is to come is a continuation of Ukrainian operations to blind the Russians on the Black Sea and in Crimea, and strikes on Russian military assets there, such as naval bases and airfields. Those military assets will be gradually diminished until they are completely destroyed, and Russia’s occupation of Crimea will hopefully end.
And with it the rule of Vladimir Putin.
Tucker Carlson Interview: Putin Reveals Inferiority Complex as He Blames Boris Johnson for Continued War
Tucker Carlson’s two-hour interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin proved to be a storm in a teacup. The Russian leader used the conversation with the former Fox News host to repeat his well-known empty phrases, and yet again justify his decision to invade Ukraine. But why did the controversial American TV shock jock give Putin an outlet for his propaganda points?
Among the Russian President's rambling and fact-free talking points was the extraordinary allegation that former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson sabotaged a potential peace deal discussed in Istanbul in the early stages of the latest invasion.
Ever since Carlson arrived in Moscow on 1 February, and was spotted attending the Bolshoi Theater in the capital, Russian media have started hailing the American conservative pundit as a celebrity. Carlson was on the front page of Evening Moscow, the newspaper handed out for free to commuters every day on the Moscow Metro, while Russian pro-Kremlin media and Telegram channels reportedly mentioned the US journalist approximately 2,050 times over the past week.
All that, as well as Putin’s decision to speak with Carlson, clearly shows that many Russians – including the ruling elite – still have an inferiority complex in regard to the West. Although pro-Kremlin propaganda will almost certainly attempt to portray “the biggest interview of 2024” as Putin’s “brilliant victory over the West”, in reality, his reliance on endorsement by a US TV shock jock represents a serious weakness.
That, however, is unlikely to have an impact on the outcome of the upcoming Russian presidential election, scheduled for March 15-17. As Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in August 2023, the Russian presidential poll “is not really democracy, it is costly bureaucracy”, which means that the interview was broadcast mainly for the Western audience. But how effective was this kind of propaganda?
While Tucker Carlson undoubtedly has a serious influence on conservative Americans, his interview with Putin will not force the United States’ policy makers to change their approach regarding Russia, at least as long as Joe Biden is in office. But even if Donald Trump wins the election in November, that does not necessarily mean that Washington will fundamentally change its geopolitical course and stop supporting Ukraine, which is what many in the Kremlin reportedly hope for.
Thus, Carlson yet again echoed Moscow’s ambitions, without posing any challenging questions to Putin. He allowed the Russian leader to spend almost half an hour talking about Russian history, and about the history of Russian-Ukrainian relations. Putin essentially repeated what he wrote in his 2021 article ”On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians“, claiming that significant parts of modern Ukraine are “historic Russian lands”.
But when asked why he did not invade “historic Russian lands” when he came to power more than 20 years ago, Putin started talking about the history of the Soviet Union, and blamed his predecessor Boris Yeltsin for the collapse of the USSR. He then once again admitted that he wanted Russia to join NATO in 1999 and 2000, but the former US President Bill Clinton reportedly told him that “it was not possible”. Thus, from Putin’s perspective, Russia has the right to join NATO, but if Ukraine seeks to become a member of the US-dominated alliance, it represents a “threat for the Russian national security”.
For Putin, Ukrainian national identity is also quite “problematic”, which is why he still aims to “de-Nazify” the country. Although Carlson did not bring the heat to the Russian leader, he did ask some very specific and practical questions that Putin refused to directly answer. Instead, he used his old mantras of his Western partners “deceiving him” and “leading him by the nose”.
It was a rhetoric for his domestic audience, as Putin seems to enjoy playing the role of a naïve charlatan who constantly “gets fooled” by his Western and Ukrainian partners. Since everything about Putin is a publicity stunt, he is likely deliberately portraying himself as a “good but naïve” leader, given that significant parts of the Russian audience still buy such a narrative.
Putin also blamed the former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson for “sabotaging” the 2022 negotiations between Ukraine and Russia in Istanbul to end the war in its early stages. But according to Putin’s ally Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators in Istanbul sought to agree on the “lease” of Crimea, while Oleksiy Arestovych, the former advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said that, from Kyiv’s perspective, the negotiations were so successful that the Ukrainian delegation “opened the champagne bottle”.
Could it be that Boris Johnson actually prevented Russia from signing a de facto capitulation in Istanbul?
For Putin, however, it is Western leaders, rather than he himself, who are responsible for the war continuing. He also blames them for the Euromaidan of 2014, which resulted in the overthrow of allegedly pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Putin told Tucker that the “CIA orchestrated a coup d'etat in Kyiv”. He, however, refused to mention his role in that process, and how he, at the request of the United States, effectively betrayed Yanukovych, pressuring him not to use force against Western-backed protesters.
Tucker Carlson, on the other hand, seems to know very little about those events, or about Russian-Ukrainian relations in general. Still, he gave Putin a chance to reach a potentially sympathetic audience in the United States.
“You have issues on your border, issues with migration, issues with national debt at $33 trillion. You have nothing better to do than fight in Ukraine?”, Putin said during the interview.
It was a message to Donald Trump supporters and American isolationists, as certain factions within the Russian elite hope that, if such a political option comes to power in the United States, Washington will stop funding Ukraine and allow Putin to achieve his goals in the Eastern European country. That is why the interview might have been mutually beneficial for both Putin and Carlson.
Dozens of journalists are currently imprisoned in Russia for their work, and they are unlikely to be released anytime soon. Putin, however, hinted that he might free Evan Gershkovich, a 32-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter who has been jailed for almost a year on espionage charges. But if he releases the American citizen Gershkovich as a “goodwill gesture”, without swapping him for any Russian spies being imprisoned in the West, he will yet again demonstrate a serious weakness that his propaganda will portray as another “geopolitical victory”.
Although many Western news outlets had requested to interview Putin, the Kremlin chose Tucker Carlson because his position, according to Peskov, “contrasts with that of the traditional Anglo-Saxon media”. It is not a secret that Putin, who does not seem capable of answering unpleasant questions, avoids debating not only with most Western reporters, but also with Russian journalists who do not agree with the official Kremlin narrative.
One thing is for sure – what Putin avoids to mention in his bureaucrat-style interviews is always more important than what he emphasizes. That is why he will remain the king of empty rhetoric, and rather boring speeches.
Why Is Boris Johnson Endorsing a Second Trump Presidency in the Name of Ukraine?
In his lucrative column for the Daily Mail, Boris Johnson backed the return of Donald Trump to the White House, primarily because he expects the former US President to be the man to stand up to Vladimir Putin by enabling a Ukrainian victory in the war Russia has been waging against it. “My thoughts, of course, go first to Ukraine,” Johnson wrote.
The former Prime Minister observed that it was under the Trump Administration that Ukraine received Javelin anti-tank weapons that proved to be invaluable in fending off the Russian attack on Ukraine’s capital city, Kyiv. This is partially true. Ukraine did get those weapons but not because of Trump, who actually attempted to withhold this congressionally-mandated military assistance package.
Ukraine had already been fighting against the Russian invasion of its eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk since 2014, by the time President Trump attempted to coerce Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into doing him political favours before sending the weapons. That resulted in Trump's first impeachment.
But it was not the first time Trump wanted to hobble military support to help Ukraine thwart President Putin’s violent aims. In July 2016, when Trump was formally designated the Republican Party’s candidate for the presidential election that year, language that had called for the United States to provide “lethal weapons” to Ukraine was deleted. The Trump campaign was being managed by Paul Manafort, who tried to use his involvement to “get whole” on a debt owed to a major Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska.
Manafort was also involved in another aspect of the Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential Election – one that culminated in an infamous meeting at New York's Trump Tower with a delegation of Russians. The meeting came about after a series of email exchanges between Donald Trump Junior and a music promoter working for the pop star son of another Russian oligarch, Aras Agalarov. The ties between the Trump and Agalarov families go back some years, with their most prominent interaction happening when Trump took his Miss Universe pageant on the road to Moscow.
When the representative from the Agalarov family reached out to Donald Trump Jr on 3 June 2016, the contact was very deliberately worded. The email explicitly stated that what was being offered was “very high level and sensitive... part of Russia and its Government’s support for Mr Trump”. The appropriate reaction would have been to contact the FBI, but Trump Junior replied: “I love it!”
On 7 June 2016, another email stated that there was a “Russian Government attorney who is flying over from Moscow” for the subsequent meeting attended by Manafort alongside Trump Junior and Jared Kushner.
While in office, Trump flew to Helsinki for a summit with Putin. The two men sat behind closed doors for a period of time, after which Trump ordered the translator to destroy her notes. The press conference did not go well. A leading Russian expert in Trump’s administration, Fiona Hill, described it as “mortifying”, with Trump publicly taking Putin’s words over those of his own security agencies.
These examples are evidence enough that Donald Trump has not stood up to Vladimir Putin. That he will not stand up to Putin if he returns to the White House. It is not unlikely that the Russian President has kompromat on Trump, which means the businessman cannot stand up to Putin.
Though Trump claims that the multiple court cases he faces are a political witch-hunt, they are nothing of the sort. One current legal proceeding against him is determining the degree of damages to be awarded for defamation and sexual assault. In another case, Trump and his children are accused of a series of financial crimes spanning decades.
Then there are the multiple cases that are linked to the events of the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. The most significant legal battle here is whether having incited insurrection, Trump is banned from holding office again in line with the Constitution.
So why did Boris Johnson feel the need to endorse Trump on the basis of Ukraine?
Both men share one characteristic: they are both liars. Perhaps Johnson's endorsement is, as usual, in his own self-serving interests. Because it is certainly not in the interests of the United States, Ukraine or the world.
Russia’s Goals in Ukraine: Debunking the ‘Special Military Operation’
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As the new year begins and Ukraine has endured almost two years of full-scale aggression from Russia, it’s a good time to look at what, according to Russian sources, the purpose of the “special military operation” actually is.
A common line repeated by key Russian figures is that the this "operation" will continue “until all of the stated goals have been met”. This line has been uttered by everyone from Vladimir Putin himself, to his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vasily Nebenzya, and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
Usually, these proclamations are absent of any clarity on what those goals are – presumably so they can be changed at the whim of Putin, should he one day decide that they have been achieved and he has 'won’ something.
But the two main goals of the war have been stated as the “demilitarisation” and “deNazification” of Ukraine. Both of those goals are problematic. To say the least.
'Demilitarisation’ Decoded
In Russian propaganda, to create a casus belli for the invasion, Ukraine presented a threat to Russia. In that light, the invasion was necessary for the security of Russia. That proposition, though, is absurd.
While it is true, as I argued in Byline Times a month before the full-scale war began, that as a model of a former Soviet state that has a genuine democracy and is also working to root out corrupt practices, Ukraine presents a threat to the corrupt and authoritarian Putin regime, but not to Russia as a country.
Ukraine was never going to invade Russia. The build-up to this phase of the war involved the stationing of 200,000 Russian troops on Ukraine’s borders and in the parts of Ukraine occupied since 2014. A Ukrainian invasion of Russia against that standing army would have been unthinkable. But, on top of that, why would Ukraine want to occupy any part of Russia and then shoulder the burden of maintaining that territory?
The former Home Secretary showed no interest in urgent threats to the UK as the National Security Strategy Committee reveals that Vladimir Putin made attempts to interfere with the last General Election
David Hencke
The logic behind the call for Ukraine to be demilitarised is simple – to leave Ukraine defenceless and at the mercy of Russia. Left without a military, Ukraine would be rapidly gobbled up by Russia.
Not only will Ukraine not unilaterally disarm, as it is fully entitled under international law to defend itself, but the first stated goal of Putin’s invasion is being openly rejected by Ukraine’s allies.
In fact, since February 2022, Ukraine’s military capabilities have been enhanced time and time again by allies (not to the degree that Ukraine would like) with the provision of HIMARS rocket systems, Patriot Air Defence Systems, Leopard tanks and Bradly Infantry fighting vehicles, and more. In the very near future, Ukraine’s air forces will be strengthened by the long-awaited arrival of F-16 fighter jets.
So, Putin is getting the exact opposite of what he demands.
'DeNazification’ Explained
There are a host of reasons why Russia continues to insist that Ukraine is infested with Nazism. But the fact is that Ukraine does not have an extremism problem.
While Russia itself supports every proto-fascist movement in Europe and beyond, Ukrainian voters simply do not embrace any political party with hard-right ideology.
The roots of these claims go back at least to 2013, when Ukraine's 'Revolution of Dignity’ began. According to Russian propaganda that was designed to denigrate that movement, Ukraine’s capital had been taken over by dangerous and violent extremists. In reality, that revolution, which I observed, was the work of ordinary men and women, young and old, who were sick of the corruption of President Viktor Yanukovych, which itself was largely a creation of the Kremlin.
During the attempted justification for the Russian invasion of Crimea, this narrative of Ukrainian Nazism was also very prominent. A campaign of outdoor advertising appeared all over the Russian-occupied peninsula depicting the “choice” that residents faced with Crimea sporting the Russian tricolour or being covered in barbed wire, with a Nazi Swastika in the centre of the image.
There are two main purposes for this depiction of Ukrainians as Nazis.
The first is that it is intended to invoke in the Russian people the sense of pride that they feel for their victory over Nazi Germany in 1945. There is a deeply-held belief that this victory belonged to Russia and so repeating this trope invokes memories of past glories. That belief is based on decades of conditioning that overlooks the fact that, in the period from 1939 to 1941, Hitler and Stalin were allies. It also overlooks the fact that it was not Russia that fought against the Nazi invasion but the Soviet Union. And don’t expect any Russian to acknowledge that fact that other allies contributed to the eventual defeat of Nazism.
The other main goal of this narrative is to dehumanise the people of Ukraine, making it easier for Russian armed forces to kill Ukrainians. Many Russian war crimes committed over the past 22 months can be simply distilled to that. They torture and execute, not only prisoners of war but civilians too, because they do not see Ukrainians as human – they are Nazis, thus any brutality towards them is fully justified.
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Why a 'Special Military Operation’?
Though it is now common to hear Russians calling this conflict what it is, a war, at the outset it was actually illegal in Russia to call it that – with the Kremlin instructing everyone to refer instead to a “Special Military Operation” for a number of reasons.
Most likely Putin had fooled himself into believing his own propaganda about the greatness of Russia’s military might, and the notion that many in Ukraine would welcome their Russian 'brothers’, and that the capture of the Ukrainian state would be swift. All three of those notions lie in ruins.
The Russian military is not, in fact, great. Ironically one of the reasons why Russia's army turned out to be weaker on the battlefield than it looked on paper is the very corruption that is the hallmark of Putin’s two-and-a-half decades of rule.
Ukrainians did not welcome the invading Russians for a combination of reasons. One is that the people of Ukraine have very different values. While Russians will go to the polls in a few months to go through the motions of giving Putin a new 'democratic’ mandate, the result will be fixed. In late November 2004, a rigged election was the catalyst for what became the 'Orange Revolution’, denying Viktor Yanukovych his first attempt at assuming the office of president. Ukrainians take their democracy seriously; Russians will meekly accept that Putin has won another six years.
No war was declared because Putin believed – alongside many in the Western press – that Kyiv would fall within 72 hours of the attack beginning. On 24 February 2022, helicopters flew Russian special forces into Kyiv with the aim of securing the airstrip of the Antonov Company, home to the largest cargo plane ever to fly. The capture of that strategic facility, located just miles from the centre of Kyiv, would have facilitated the airborne influx of more and more Russian forces that would have been ordered to reach the capital and overthrow the legitimate Government. They failed.
There have been many phases to this war, but Ukraine’s counteroffensive has shown success right since that takeover of the Antonov airfield was thwarted.