Tag: russia

When Western Media Saw Ukraine’s Neo-Nazis

Emmanuel Macron said in a speech Wednesday it’s a lie that Russia is fighting Nazis in Ukraine. But in 2014, the BBC, the NYT, the Daily Telegraph and CNN — not just CN — reported on the Nazi threat.

Throughout the Ukraine crisis, the U.S. State Department and mainstream media have downplayed the role of neo-Nazis in the U.S.-backed Kiev regime, an inconvenient truth that is surfacing again as right-wing storm troopers fly neo-Nazi banners as they attack in the east, Robert Parry reports.

The New York Times reported almost in passing on Sunday (Aug. 10) that the Ukrainian government’s offensive against ethnic Russian rebels in the east has unleashed far-right paramilitary militias that have even raised a neo-Nazi banner over the conquered town of Marinka, just west of the rebel stronghold of Donetsk.

That might seem like a big story a U.S.-backed military operation, which has inflicted thousands of mostly civilian casualties, is being spearheaded by neo-Nazis. But the consistent pattern of the mainstream U.S. news media has been since the start of the Ukraine crisis to white-out the role of Ukraine’s brown-shirts.

Only occasionally is the word “neo-Nazi” mentioned and usually in the context of dismissing this inconvenient truth as “Russian propaganda.” Yet the reality has been that neo-Nazis played a key role in the violent overthrow of elected President Viktor Yanukovych last February as well as in the subsequent coup regime holding power in Kiev and now in the eastern offensive.

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Ukraine Is A Sacrificial Pawn On The Imperial Chessboard

The war is not going well for Kyiv, and it would be unreasonable to expect that to change. As a vastly superior military force overwhelms the US client state, reality is in the process of crashing down hard in the face of western liberals who bought into the war propaganda that the brave, sexy comedian was leading an upset victory to kick Putin’s ass out of Ukraine.

Zelensky is now raging at NATO powers for refusing to intervene militarily against Russia, apparently having previously been given the impression that the US-centralized empire might risk its very existence defending its dear friends the Ukrainians from an invasion.

“Unfortunately, today there is a complete impression that it is time to give a funeral repast for something else: security guarantees and promises, determination of alliances, values that seem to be dead for someone,” Zelensky said Friday.

“All the people who will die starting from this day will also die because of you,” Ukraine’s president added. “Because of your weakness, because of your disunity.”

It must be hard, the process of learning that you were never actually a valued partner in western civilization’s fight for freedom and democracy. That you were always just one more sacrificial pawn on the imperial chessboard.

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White House Says It’s Working With Poland To Get Jets To Ukraine – Warsaw Responds: “Fake News”

Ukraine’s President Zelensky has been urging the United States and NATO countries that his military desperately needs more fighter jets to take on the Russian invasion force, on Friday telling US lawmakers in a Zoom call “close the skies or give us planes” – according to a Congressional leader present for the address.

Apparently the Biden administration is busy working on just that, also at a moment Congress is still prepping a whopping $10 billion military and humanitarian aide package for Ukraine. The new aircraft deal would involve transferring Russian-made warplanes to Kiev from neighboring Poland, according to a new report in FT. 

To expedite the deal – given the battlefield situation and Ukraine’s ability to defend itself depends largely on the speediness of getting sufficient arms – Washington would quickly replace Warsaw’s MiG-29 jets with F-16 fighters.

However, a White House official was quoted in the FT report as admitting the deal could be held up by “a number of challenging practical questions, including how the planes could actually be transferred from Poland to Ukraine.”

Further there’s the question of recent threat’s by Vladimir Putin himself against any country seeking to pour more weapons into the hands of the Ukrainian forces. Putin days ago issued a veiled threat of war against any country supplying weapons that are use to kill Russian soldiers, saying those outside nations would “bear the responsibility”. 

A White House spokesperson had confirmed to FT that “We are also working on the capabilities we could provide to backfill Poland if it decided to transfer planes to Ukraine.” And previously Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the US is “very actively” looking at resupplying Poland if it can quickly transfer its own Russian-made aircraft to Ukraine. 

“We are looking actively now at the question of airplanes that Poland may provide to Ukraine and looking at how we might be able to backfill should Poland decide to supply those planes,” Blinken said in Moldova, while on a trip that highlighted the growing refugee crisis from the war.

Crucially, there was this statement from an unnamed Polish official given to FT: “I can’t speak to a timeline but I can just say we’re looking at it very, very actively.” The official said further, “Poland is not in a state of war with Russia, but it is not an impartial country, because it supports Ukraine as the victim of aggression. It considers, however, that all military matters must be a decision of Nato as a whole.”

On Saturday, perhaps nervous about coming into Russia’s crosshairs amid the flurry of reporting, Poland’s government batted down the reports as “fake news” – saying there’s been no transfer of its aircraft to Ukraine nor does it intend to…

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Tears for Ukraine, Sanctions for Russia, Yawns for Yemen, Arms for Saudis: The West’s Grotesque Double Standard

“We’re brutally bombed every day. So why doesn’t the Western world care like it does about Ukraine?!!… Is it because we don’t have blonde hair and blue eyes like Ukrainians?”  Ahmed Tamri, a Yemeni father of four, asked with furrowed brows about the outpouring of international support and media coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the lack of such a reaction to the war in Yemen.

Over the weekend, a member of Tamri’s family was killed and nine relatives injured when their family home was targeted in a Saudi-led Coalition airstrike in the remote al-Saqf area in Hajjah Governorate. Tamri claims that al-Saqf has been subjected to a brutal Saudi bombing campaign for the past seven years – more so, he says, than all of Ukraine has endured since it was invaded by Russia.

Despite the horrific bombing campaign against Yemeni civilians, Saudi Arabia’s human rights violations and war crimes have garnered nowhere near the level of coverage and sympathy that the mainstream Western media has rightfully given to Ukraine. “They shed tears for the Ukrainians, and ignore our tragedies… What hypocrisy and racism!” Tamri told MintPress News.

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Big Tech eagerly blocks virtually all content from Russia while completely refusing to address Chinese propaganda

Many of the major tech giants, including Google, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and even Netflix, are cutting off Russian content entirely in response to the Ukraine invasion.

China, meanwhile, is still allowed to spread as much propaganda as it wants via social media, despite the fact that it contributed to the creation of the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19).

Big Tech is basically colluding to censor all things Russia from their various platforms, and only allow a pro-Ukraine narrative.

The Russian news networks RT and Sputnik, for instance, can no longer share any content on the aforementioned platforms after European Union officials pressured the Silicon Valley giants into obeying and supporting the narrative.

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